Pockets full of sand

It’s Cinco de Mayo, so I by rights should have something appropriate for the occasion. But Gordon Lightfoot died earlier this week at age 84. And Lightfoot was my North Star.

Way, way back, my BFF and I went to see him at a tiny club in Huntington Beach, Calif. I probably shouldn’t have been let in, because I was under age, but not only did I have some kind of too-cool-for-school coffee drink, I had enough chutzpah to go backstage (not that it was much of a backstage at that place) and take a photo with my Nikon S2 rangefinder:

A lot of years later, I went with another friend to the Universal Amphitheatre to hear him again. This time he was backed up by a band, singers and the whole megillah, and he had a bit of the air of someone who'd already been rode pretty hard and put away wet. He went through some rough patches, but eventually came through.

Even if you’ve never heard Lightfoot, you’ve heard his songs. Seriously—if you don’t know “Early Morning Rain”, you haven’t been alive at any time in the past 50 years.

(I know this will sound antediluvian to Millennials, but when I rode my bicycle from Paris to Santiago de Compostela, I had no iPod, no smartphone, not even a Walkman. I sang to myself, and I well recall blaring out “Now the liquor tasted gooood and the women all were faaaast” as I pedaled through a Spanish village, much to the visible surprise of the residents.)

And so, let’s hear the man himself singing “Early Mornin’ Rain”. Vaya con Dios, Gordon.

 

 

  

Left behind

Oddities don’t typically appear on the stretch of the W&OD Trail that I walk, but in the past couple of months someone with a puckish sense of humor and a very strong back has changed that up.

First, there was the wheelbarrow.

More recently, this:

Back in the day (50 years ago) it was considered a centerpiece of cheap-chic décor to have a wooden predecessor of this in one’s $95/month apartment. But I’ll be blowed if I know what anyone not laying industrial cable would do with this.

 

Do the hustle

Okay, this is painted on the elevator doors on every floor of the parking structure at the building where Megalithic Software Company leases four floors.

I just wonder.

 

 

Omnivore

I tossed some birdseed out on the patio last Saturday for the ground feeders (bits of peanuts, pistachios, almonds, millet, sunflower kernels and pumpkin seeds), then went upstairs to fold laundry. When I came back down, this is what I saw:

Yes, a fox hoovering up the birdseed. And with his long snout, he looks rather like an anteater snarfling up an entire colony.

 

 

Gratitude Monday: silver lining

About two years and 16 re-orgs ago, I was moved into a group called Customer Success Operations, reporting to a woman I’ll call Natasha The focus is completely tactical and she is definitely in her element; she’s all about the detail and she does not have long-range vision.

I won’t go into the tall weeds of the goals of Customer Success overall, except to note that there’s only one: renewals. Natasha is nose-down in those weeds operationally, though—process, tools, procedures. What I do—product management, right now focused on customer feedback—does not directly advance the retention of customers, so it’s deemed as no value to the org and to Natasha.

This is why I got the chop.

(As an aside, it’s interesting that all the various stakeholders of customer feedback gush about how great the information I report is, but no one is willing to fund it; i.e., allocate  a staff slot to it. It’s  been my observation that people will pay for what they value. Therefore I conclude that people in my company do not value what I’m doing. Therefore I am without value. Which is to say, worthless.)

Let me give you a few facts about Natasha as a manager. She holds weekly one-on-one meetings with her direct reports. I have not had one with her since last August.

She has never had a discussion with me about my career goals. This is because to think “career” implies that you might want at some point to be doing something except serving her team needs. The one time I brought up needing time to meet with a mentor on a weekly basis, she became palpably upset. “Is this something the program requires or just something you’ve set for yourself?”

One day last June, the pain in my knee was so bad, I IMed her about it, saying I was clocking out. Her response was, “Oh, hope you feel better for sure.” Never a follow-up inquiry.

When I logged sick days for my surgery in January, I noted them as being for surgery and recovery. She approved them; never inquired about the reason.

At one of the weekly “team” meetings, she and the two other direct reports were chatting enthusiastically about her being on PTO the next few days. After some minutes of this, she finally said, “Oh, [Bas Bleu], you may not know that I’m going to Cuba.”

Well, no, I wouldn’t—that might be the kind of thing that would come up in a one-to-one, which we have not had since August.

When I got the fixed-term offer in September, I had one exchange (via chat) with her, before going to the VP of Customer Success, her manager. Since that time, she has not once reached out to me to ask how I’m doing or how she might help.

Until last week, when she IMed me to say that the acquisition transition IT team informed her that I can’t participate in a particular program because my contract ends in May. And here’s exactly what she said:

“can we sync up today or tomorrow, I know you’ve been chatting with [VP]

“but would love to hear about what’s happening with the job search

“I’ll send an invite”

Six fucking months and now she’d love to hear about my job search. I was deeply concerned that I would not be able to keep a civil tongue in my head for that conversation. However, it’s not like my family didn’t put the dys in functional, so in the end I just kept silent except to answer her questions.

The call lasted 18 minutes, about half of it spent with her using the internal jobs site to conduct searches so she could give me pointers on how to search. “Try using quotation marks.” That’s her idea of managerial support.

She sent a blizzard of links to jobs she’d found that had only ancillary relevance to my skills because she has never once asked about my skills in the two years I’ve reported to her. My computer audibly pings every time I get an IM, so I had to just leave the house for a while until she got sidetracked in the tall weeds.

Well, you may be wondering what this narrative might have to do with gratitude. So, here it is:

Whatever happens, three weeks from now I will not be reporting to Natasha, and I am deeply grateful for that.

 

 

Outcry and birth cry

I’m closing out National Poetry Month with Nobel Laureate Seámus Heaney. His linguistic mastery included lyrical translations from Irish, Latin and Greek. For today, I’ve chosen “The Cure at Troy”, which is Heaney’s take on Sophocles’ Philoctetes.

All you need to know about Philoctetes is that he was one of the approximately 72 squillion suitors for Helen, and thus honor-bound to help Menelaus retrieve her from Troy. He was stranded on the island of Lemnos on the way (different versions give different reasons, but all seem to involve some kind of suppurating wound whose putrescence offended the Greeks). After many years of siege, the Greeks were told they wouldn’t win the war until they possessed the weapons of Heracles, which were…on Lemnos. As you might imagine, Philoctetes (reduced to a solitary animal-like existence in the intervening time) wasn’t exactly overjoyed at the prospect of handing over the sacred weapons to the very men who’d abandoned him (he was particularly pissed off at Odysseus), but Heracles appeared and told him to give up the artifacts and his wound would be healed by Asclepius, and he would become a great hero, a key driver of winning the war. (Some versions have him killing Paris, the little toerag who started the whole thing; others put him in the actual Trojan Horse. Either way he was instrumental in driving a stake through it.)

So there are a lot of symbolic moving parts to this one—the festering wound that won’t heal and leads to the debasement of a warrior; only by a series of redemptive decisions is he given a permanent cure, which leads to the end of a long, exhausting war.

Heaney wrote his version in 1990 as a tribute to Nelson Mandela, and an indictment of apartheid. (Its relevance to the situation in Northern Ireland is also obvious.) Note that—like Mandela—Heaney urges the reader to move beyond revenge, to the “further shore” with “cures and healing wells.” I believe these are thoughts we should keep before us in these times.

“The Cure at Troy”

Human beings suffer,
They torture one another,
They get hurt and get hard,
No poem or play or song
Can fully right a wrong
Inflicted and endured.

The innocent in gaols
Beat on their bars together.
A hunger-striker’s father
Stands in the graveyard dumb.
The police widow in veils
Faints at the funeral home.

History says, don’t hope
On this side of the grave.
But then, once in a lifetime
The longed-for tidal wave
Of justice can rise up,
And hope and history rhyme.

So hope for a great sea-change
On the far side of revenge.
Believe that further shore
Is reachable from here.
Believe in miracle
And cures and healing wells.

Call miracle self-healing:
The utter, self-revealing
Double-take of feeling.
If there’s fire on the mountain
Or lightning and storm
And a god speaks from the sky

That means someone is hearing
The outcry and the birth-cry
Of new life at its term.

 

Rights decay

We’ve got another all-round player for today’s National Poetry Month entry. Gilbert Keith Chesterton trained at the Slade School to be an illustrator, but found his real gift in words—as a journalist, novelist, playwright, essayist and poet. He converted to Roman Catholicism in 1923, age 48, and was renowned for his theological writings. (C.S. Lewis attributed his own conversion to Christianity to Chesterton’s The Everlasting Man.)

Most people know him best for his Father Brown series of detective stories (published between 1910 and 1935)—which bear no resemblance whatsoever to the appallingly bad BBC television series currently blotting the PBS landscape. (Seriously—plots, dialogue, acting—every aspect of this thing is utterly cringeworthy. It’s a testament to the sad fact that people will do anything for a regular paycheck.)

I first ran into Chesterton, though, in high school, when I was doing a paper on the Anglo-Irish hostility. Unusually, for an Englishman, he had great sympathy for the Irish, and he deplored British policy towards them. Somewhere I found this excerpt from his “The White Horse”:

The great Gaels of Ireland are the men that God made mad,    

For all their wars are merry, and all their songs are sad.

He lived long enough—to 1936—to see and deplore the rise of fascism, as well.

In 1922 he published a collection of poetry that included “For a War Memorial”. The 20s was perhaps the a acme of post-WWI activities with respect to honoring the war dead. (It was also the time when the British government did its best to cram the survivors back into the poverty and servitude they’d emerged from in 1914 to defend imperial policies. But that’s another discussion.) Memorials listing the names of the fallen were built in just about every school and every town and village in Britain, which are still there today. Of course, they didn’t realize they’d have to add more names from the 1939-1945 war to the plaques.

Chesterton suggests here a more truthful, if less palatable, inscription for such constructions.

“For a War Memorial”

(SUGGESTED INSCRIPTION PROBABLY NOT SUGGESTED BY THE COMMITTEE)

The hucksters haggle in the mart
The cars and carts go by;
Senates and schools go droning on;
For dead things cannot die.

A storm stooped on the place of tombs
With bolts to blast and rive;
But these be names of many men
The lightning found alive.

If usurers rule and rights decay
And visions view once more
Great Carthage like a golden shell
Gape hollow on the shore,

Still to the last of crumbling time
Upon this stone be read
How many men of England died
To prove they were not dead.

There's so much in this poem that applies to both Britain and America today. Sadly.

Say a prayer

Given recent (and you can define the time period however you like) events, Nina’ Simone’s “Mississippi Goddam” pretty much sums up my mood, National Poetry Month or not. So, here you go.

We sing sin

If you’ve not yet met Pulitzer Prize winning poet Gwendolyn Brooks, I’m honored to make the introduction. Brooks reminds me a little of Dorothy Parker inasmuch as she packs tremendous wallop in such a few words. It’s like she distills her experience down to the barest essence, and then sets you alight with it.

Of course, you can also liken her to Maya Angelou. Look at Angelou’s “Phenomenal Woman” (including her reading it), and then get to know Brooks’ “Weaponed Woman”. They’re kin, don’t you think?

“Weaponed Woman”

Well, life has been a baffled vehicle
And baffling. But she fights, and
Has fought, according to her lights and
The lenience of her whirling-place.

She fights with semi-folded arms,
Her strong bag, and the stiff
Frost of her face (that challenges “When” and “If.”)
And altogether she does Rather Well.
I believe that all girls should aspire to do Rather Well.

But the poem of hers I love most is “We Real Cool”. This is what I mean when I say she delivers nothing but the purest distillation of the lives, aspirations and predictable future for the pool players. And then she sets a match to it.

“We Real Cool”

The Pool Players.
Seven at the golden shovel.

We real cool. We
Left school. We

Lurk late. We
Strike straight. We

Sing sin. We
Thin gin. We 

Jazz June. We
Die soon.

 

Perpetually awaiting

You know who speaks to me during this particular time? The Beat poets. And particularly Lawrence Ferlinghetti, who, at his death two years ago at 101 was still a fixture of the San Francisco cultural scene.

Okay, Ferlinghetti didn't think of himself as a Beat; he preferred philosophical anarchist. And at his core he was anti-totalitarian, which is a recommendation at any time, but particularly now.

For National Poetry Month, we’re having “I Am Waiting”. It’s long, but it goes so fast.

“I Am Waiting”

I am waiting for my case to come up   

and I am waiting

for a rebirth of wonder

and I am waiting for someone

to really discover America

and wail

and I am waiting   

for the discovery

of a new symbolic western frontier   

and I am waiting   

for the American Eagle

to really spread its wings

and straighten up and fly right

and I am waiting

for the Age of Anxiety

to drop dead

and I am waiting

for the war to be fought

which will make the world safe

for anarchy

and I am waiting

for the final withering away

of all governments

and I am perpetually awaiting

a rebirth of wonder

I am waiting for the Second Coming   

and I am waiting

for a religious revival

to sweep thru the state of Arizona   

and I am waiting

for the Grapes of Wrath to be stored   

and I am waiting

for them to prove

that God is really American

and I am waiting

to see God on television

piped onto church altars

if only they can find   

the right channel   

to tune in on

and I am waiting

for the Last Supper to be served again

with a strange new appetizer

and I am perpetually awaiting

a rebirth of wonder

I am waiting for my number to be called

and I am waiting

for the Salvation Army to take over

and I am waiting

for the meek to be blessed

and inherit the earth   

without taxes

and I am waiting

for forests and animals

to reclaim the earth as theirs

and I am waiting

for a way to be devised

to destroy all nationalisms

without killing anybody

and I am waiting

for linnets and planets to fall like rain

and I am waiting for lovers and weepers

to lie down together again

in a new rebirth of wonder

I am waiting for the Great Divide to be crossed   

and I am anxiously waiting

for the secret of eternal life to be discovered   

by an obscure general practitioner

and I am waiting

for the storms of life

to be over

and I am waiting

to set sail for happiness

and I am waiting

for a reconstructed Mayflower

to reach America

with its picture story and tv rights

sold in advance to the natives

and I am waiting

for the lost music to sound again

in the Lost Continent

in a new rebirth of wonder

I am waiting for the day

that maketh all things clear

and I am awaiting retribution

for what America did   

to Tom Sawyer   

and I am waiting

for Alice in Wonderland

to retransmit to me

her total dream of innocence

and I am waiting

for Childe Roland to come

to the final darkest tower

and I am waiting   

for Aphrodite

to grow live arms

at a final disarmament conference

in a new rebirth of wonder

I am waiting

to get some intimations

of immortality

by recollecting my early childhood

and I am waiting

for the green mornings to come again   

youth’s dumb green fields come back again

and I am waiting

for some strains of unpremeditated art

to shake my typewriter

and I am waiting to write

the great indelible poem

and I am waiting

for the last long careless rapture

and I am perpetually waiting

for the fleeing lovers on the Grecian Urn   

to catch each other up at last

and embrace

and I am awaiting   

perpetually and forever

a renaissance of wonder