The Bit Man

I often complain I never write anything, but that’s not true. I write emails and instant messages all day, every day. Some of my favorite turns of the phrase and most insightful analysis have been contained in brief missives I’ve tossed off in the minutes between projects at work. It’s when I sit down to deliberately compose something that I get fouled up and stuck.

What’s up with that? As much as I don’t want to admit it, I believe I’m a short-attention-span creature of the ‘80s TV generation. I think in sound bites, movie clips and song lyrics. Gotta break myself out of that….

Try

Just a quickie tonight. The urge to write is strong, but I must sleep soon. I’m flying to Cleveland tomorrow afternoon, and before that I have many Important Tasks to finish at work. Not getting enough rest before flying means the immune system is weakened, and as we all know air travel nowadays primarily involves being sealed in a metal tube with a hundred vectors for god-knows-what sorts of germs and viruses.

The reality is there simply are not enough hours in the day to accommodate “want to” and “need to.” This evening, for example, I wanted to play my guitar for a while, write something serious about Bernard Madoff and greed and fire off a couple of long-overdue emails to friends. However, I needed to do some dishes, pack, shave and, as I mentioned, sleep.

I dream of writing successful books–novels and nonfiction. I dream of running an insurgent campaign for mayor of Chicago, and winning. I dream of becoming a good enough guitar player to be able to spontaneously pick up and play should I find myself in an Amstel Light ad.

I believe now that I’ll get around to all of it. Eventually.

In the meantime, you know that feeling when you’re listening to music and suddenly you hear the words; I mean really hear them? I had that experience recently listening to Suzanna Choffel, a talented singer/songwriter from Austin, Texas.

(Aside: Choffel and her band were playing at The Belmont in Austin the first night I was in town last April for CNU XVI. It’s not often you see a xylophone as part of a band, I thought when I walked in. I listened to a couple of songs and was hooked. I asked the bartender downstairs who was playing. He said the regular Tuesday night band wasn’t there, and he didn’t know who was filling in. As it turned out, nobody working at the Belmont that night could tell us who the band was. It took me until Saturday to learn it was Suzanna Choffel, and it was the sound guy working the Afrofreque show at Lambert’s BBQ who finally told me who I’d seen.)

Anyway, “The Challenge”, one of the songs on Choffel’s album “Shudders & Rings”, contains these lyrics:

I don't want to finish anything I started; that's the problem with me
I just want it to be finished as soon as I begin it; I just want it to be.

Everybody wants to know what my goals are; where I'm going and how far
But goals are for suckers; me I've got dreams.

I heard her sing that and I thought, she gets it. Later, on “Try,” she sings:

What do we have against our dreams
That we don’t try in every way to make them real?
It’s like we’re all on automatic
We don’t want anything new to fear.

Beneath, I am so bold
An overlooked dream I just can’t afford.
I have to look it in the eye … and try.
I have to look it in the eye … try, try … I try … try … try

This world is huge, but it can feel so small
When you put yourself between four walls.
And all I want to do is go, but instead I just stay here.
Comfort always lends a hand to fear.

Goodbye can be so hard to say and hear.
What do we have against ourselves
That we don’t want to take each chance that comes our way.
We just sit here in our fear, thinking someday … someday.

Then I knew she got it. She’s dreaming and at the same time afraid of her dreams. I’m so there. But what’s cool is she’s singing about it on her album. Dream realized, baby. So what’s the message? The way I hear it, we know what’s holding us back and we are not alone. Overcoming inertia requires work. The challenge is out there, for all of us. The first step toward meeting it, is to try. Stop making excuses and succumbing to “shouldn’t” and “can’t.” Shove “need to” in its place once in a while and indulge the creative “want to.” You may lose that hour of sleep you were hoping for. But out of that loss may come some small thing you’re proud of. Another step forward.

Mackenzie

Mackenzie: In the world November 1994 – January 31, 2009 … and forever in our hearts.

“A cat has absolute emotional honesty: human beings, for one reason or another, may hide their feelings, but a cat does not.” - Ernest Hemingway

“No amount of time can erase the memory of a good cat, and no amount of masking tape can ever totally remove his fur from your couch.” - Leo Dworken

Yesterday we made the decision to put down our pet cat of 14-plus years, Mackenzie. She had been sick for months, unable to keep food down. She had lost a couple of pounds just since Thanksgiving. She was not well, she was uncomfortable. We could have taken measures to prolong her life, but they would not have been in her best interest, they would have been in service to our selfish refusal to let her go.

Kim and I spent the day yesterday recovering from the agonizing hour-and-a-half at the veterinarian’s office. After discussing her condition with the vet, we made what we felt was the right decision for Mackenzie. After we told the staff, someone came and taped two paper towels over the window in the door to the small room where we sat with Mackenzie. The vet administered a strong sedative while she lay in her cage, curled in a corner on her favorite green blanket. A while later, the vet moved Mackenzie and the blanket onto a metal table and lay her on her side. At about 12:20 p.m., the vet injected into a vein in Mackenzie’s back leg a pink fluid that was essentially an overdose of anesthesia. She monitored the cat’s heart rate with a stethoscope, and at 12:27 pronounced that Mackenzie had passed.

The one eye we could see was still open, but all the mischievousness and curiosity we’d loved and at times feared had faded. That was it. Fourteen years slipped out of our grasp.

I think “numb” pretty well describes how we spent the day. Today I have been more reflective. I am empty, drained of energy and also fluids from crying. This post is part of my grieving.

“I love cats because I enjoy my home; and little by little, they become its visible soul.” - Jean Cocteau

People who read this who have also lost loved ones–people, I mean–might say “it was just a cat.” And she was. But since November of 1994, not a day has passed when Mackenzie wasn’t a part of our lives.

There are so many stories – little moments of joy that are now bittersweet, that in fact make me cry as I sit here thinking about them. For 14 years and some change, Mackenzie filled our lives with little foam balls, and tail chasing, and her hoarse meow, and purring warmth, and sleeping in the laundry basket, and sun naps, and drinking out of dripping faucets, and jumping into any empty box or crawling into any empty bag, and rolling in catnip, and sleeping in a lump under the covers, and wandering around with whatever mischief she’d been into stuck to her whiskers or her nose, and warm weather flopping, and obsessive burying and re-burying of poop in the cat box. She slept in our suitcases before trips and welcomed us home by ignoring us as long as she could. She shed black hair all over everything and ruined two pieces of furniture and a rug with her clawing.

The hard thing for me, I think, is letting go of the constant notion of her. Wherever I was, or we were, Mackenzie was home, waiting. Although she rejected the overtures of strangers, she was above judging me or Kim. She held no grudges. She took pleasure in the simple things, and if one of us had a warm lap or a free hand for petting any earlier slights would be forgiven. In that respect, she shared our better human qualities. I could come upon her ripping up the back of the couch and I’d yell at her and chase her off. Fifteen minutes later she would be on my lap, purring searching my face with half-open eyes and making me feel grateful she had forgiven me my scolding. What was the couch, anyway? Just a thing. But here in my lap was love and life.

We would put something small and shiny on a table and somehow from the floor Mackenzie would know it. Presently she would be on the next highest object near the table—a chair for instance—or on her back legs and this furry black paw would creep over the edge of the table, searching for whatever it was she knew was there. If one of us didn’t stop her, or move the thing, it would soon be on the floor getting batted around and chased until ultimately coming to rest in some inaccessible place, under a radiator or the couch.

We’d give her foam golf balls to play with. Upon receiving one, she could spend the better part of an hour chasing it around. From another room we could hear her growling and then she’d come around the corner with the ball in her mouth, and it would look like a yellow or pink or blue or green clown nose on this giant black cat. After a while, the ball would also end up under a couch or in some forgotten corner. Just as often they ended up in her food bowl, for safe keeping. Once when Kim was living in New York and Mackenzie and I were still in Oak Park, Kim unpacked in New York and found one of the balls in her shoe. A little going away present from the cat.

Normally what would happen, though, is that the balls would disappear for a while and Mackenzie would forget about them, having turned her attention to a new catnip bag, or the never-ending obsession with the tip of her tail. One of us would vacuum and find a dusty, saliva-stained ball. We’d toss it out in the middle of the room or down the hall. If Mackenzie was awake, she’d pounce on it immediately and begin playing with it as if she’d never seen it before. If she was asleep, the ball would sit wherever it came to rest until several hours later when she would find it. Then, suddenly, there would be the scrambling scratching of cat claws on the wood floors as attacked the ball anew.

“There are few things in life more heartwarming than to be welcomed by a cat.” - Tay Hohoff

Mackenzie offered three sorts of welcome: The stretching, yawning, “your return has interrupted my nap” greeting; the alert, sitting by the door, head slightly cocked with an “I wasn’t doing anything, honest, and I especially was NOT just on the table” look; and the pacing, meowing, “It’s about freakin’ time you got back, my food bowl is empty” greeting.

On occasion, and especially in the winter, Mackenzie couldn’t be bothered to leave whatever warm spot she had discovered to offer a greeting at all. But that was rare.

For such a small animal, Mackenzie was massive. Early on – following the advice of some veterinarian or another – we insisted on feeding Mackenzie only twice a day. She would get a cup of kibble in the morning and another cup in the evening. This was probably because, although when she was a kitten she was unusually small and actually kind of sickly, she developed a big bone structure – long and tall – and she seemed determined to spend her adolescent years acquiring a girth to match. Our feeding schedule was designed to hold her weight gain in check. She wore us down, though, by waking us every morning at six or so. This was not such a big deal on weekdays but on Saturdays and Sundays the grind of meowing, attacking our feet in bed, incessantly batting these sleigh bells we had hanging from a closet doorknob and other obnoxious behavior eventually got to be too much. To preserve our own sanity we began keeping food in the bowl all the time. Predictably she gained weight. She grew to about 15 pounds, but no more. I used to joke that she had reached critical mass and was quite happy there.

Mackenzie was a strangely loyal cat. Some cats let anyone pet them, but Mackenzie was positively stand-offish, even with close friends and family. When we had guests she would often disappear for hours, occasionally making an appearance to grab a couple of bites of food or use the litter box, but she wouldn’t hang around looking for attention. Then, when everyone had left she would reappear.

She could be very persuasive. Mackenzie was especially likely to seek one of our laps if we were working at the computer or reading at a table. She insisted on positioning herself in the lap, exactly between us and whatever we were doing. If we tried to ignore her, she had this impossibly cute habit of gently touching us with one paw until we looked at her. Once she locked our gaze with that slightly cocked head, we had no choice but accommodate her.

These are my memories of Mackenzie. Was she “just a cat?” Sure. But she was a pet, and a part of my life for a long time. As I review the past 14-odd years, she was always there, in the background and sometimes front and center. These are the things I want to remember, not the last months when she was sick, or yesterday as she lay there on her blanket on the veterinarian’s table and we stroked her as the life slipped out of her and her once bright green eyes faded.

Prolonging her life would have only served us. She was decidedly uncomfortable, and occasionally in obvious pain. It was her time. Mackenzie’s unnatural calmness as we waited for the vet to come into the room indicated to me and to Kim that she understood on some level what was happening, and that she accepted it. The pain of yesterday’s loss, which persists today, will be difficult to leave behind. Images like the ones I’ve included in this post help – Mackenzie in happier, healthier times.

Is it possible to be filled with emptiness? The concept itself is backwards. But today a beloved pet is gone, and I feel like the part of my life that she occupied has been sucked out. I have lost other friends and loved ones, and other pets, so I know that eventually this aching emptiness created by Mackenzie’s physical absence will be filled with the memories. But that process is agonizing.

So if you’ll excuse me, I’m going to go and simply be sad for a while. Goodbye, Mackenzie. We love you and we miss you.

G-Rod’s defense ... uh, strategy?

In my 15-plus years as a reporter I have never fully understood the thought process that leads to “no comment” reactions from people, companies or organizations in the news. I’ve always maintained that when a reporter calls or visits someone, it’s usually for one of three reasons:

1. To ask about something unpleasant pertaining to the subject.
2. To ask about something pleasant pertaining to the subject.
3. To ask a third party about something pleasant or unpleasant about a subject.

In each case I think that 99 percent of the time it makes more sense to speak to the press than not to speak to the press. I have always thought that and I always will. However, if I was advising Rod Blagojevich on his public relations strategy, I’d tell him to shut the [bleep] up and defend himself in his impeachment trial this week before the Illinois Senate. Instead G-Rod has his priorities inverted. He’s skipping the senate trial because he doesn’t like the rules and taking his case to the court of public opinion.

G-Rod is appearing on at least three national news shows Monday [Jan. 26] in New York. The problem in this case is obvious to anyone with a rudimentary grasp of politics: public opinion, especially national public opinion, holds no sway in an impeachment trial in Illinois.

Earlier, Blago’s defense attorney, Ed Genson, said he would not defend the governor before the senate, claiming the proceedings were fixed. (Genson subsequently resigned as G-Rod’s defense attorney for the criminal proceeding, as well, saying his client was ignoring legal advice.) And so it seems G-Rod has managed to resign without resigning. His boycott of the senate proceedings this week effectively seals his political fate. With 40 votes, he will be convicted by that body and forced out of office. According to an article in the Chicago Tribune on Sunday [Jan. 25], the senate may also vote to bar G-Rod from running for public office in Illinois permanently. Call it insurance against future electoral amnesia.

So he will be kicked out of office, but also will have technically kept his promise to fight, fight, fight until his last breath, or whatever. It’s just the kind of crazy weasel move we’ve come to expect from Gov. Hair. He won’t resign, but in allowing himself to be removed he’ll discredit the process and claim to be the victim of a tax-hike conspiracy.

At this point, G-Rod doesn’t seem to care what happens to him in the senate. The strategy now is pure scorched earth: create as much collateral damage as possible when his once bright political star burns out, collapses and goes supernova. On Friday he made the case that he was a victim of a Democratic scheme to kick him out of office and raise taxes. Which may be the case, but why not go to Springfield and make the case before the senate? The cameras and microphones will be there, and at least he’d look like he was honestly trying to save the job he claims to love, the job he claims he’s fighting for.

The Tribune’s John Kass had a good take on G-Rod’s strategy in Sunday’s paper. But it’s apparent from the Genson fiasco that G-Rod has stopped listening to just about all advice, save that coming from the voices in his head. To extend the “cowboy” metaphor G-Rod has adopted, the guy appears to be galloping backward in the saddle right off the edge of a cliff. Apparently he’s hoping to land on some of his enemies at the bottom.

In almost every media appearance since his arrest, G-Rod has promised that “when the truth comes out” he’ll be vindicated, or that he looks forward to “telling the truth.” It’s time to stop telling the press that he’s going to tell the truth and just tell the truth. A good place to start would be the senate trial. He can testify on his own behalf and should take the opportunity to do so. Forget the morning shows, forget Larry King. He’s accused of betraying the trust of Illinoisans.

Come out from behind the microphones, G-Rod, and explain yourself. If you can. Otherwise shut the [bleep] up.

¡Obamanos!

I didn’t have much time today to truly indulge in the inauguration of Barack Obama as the 44th president of the United States. I watched with some of my coworkers on a flat screen TV in the break room at our office as Obama took the oath of office and delivered his inaugural address. But I couldn’t really soak it in until I got home and turned on the TV to catch just a tiny slice of the exhaustive recap of the day’s events and coverage of the evening’s inaugural parties.

As it approaches midnight, I can say it was a good day. It left me feeling uplifted and hopeful, despite all the lousy economic and foreign conflict news. We’ve turned a page, not only on the awful, illegal and corrupt Bush administration, but on an entire ugly chapter in our nation’s history. A black man was sworn in as president today. Even last year at this time, I couldn’t have imagined we’d be able to say such a thing so soon. Obama’s ascension to the presidency makes me proud. I voted for him, putting aside some initial reservations that had nothing to do with the color of his skin. For me his race wasn’t even a consideration, and I think that’s true for many other people as well. In this case the non-factor was as important as all the other factors in making history.

As I watched Obama’s speech, my impression was that he wasn’t speaking to the millions massed on the mall in front of him, or even the hundreds of millions watching on TV. He was speaking to history. Watching the dissections of the speech tonight, I think I was half-right. Unlike a lot of people I know, I’ve never been blown away by Obama’s oratory. He can deliver a good speech, for sure, but I think a certain amount of the praise being directed his way is rooted in the reality that the most recent president was a functional illiterate who understood even less about grammar and sentence construction than he did about warfare and foreign policy.

We have, in a sense, been crawling through a rhetorical desert these past eight years. Obama is offering us a glass of water, but to us that glass looks like a swimming pool.

I felt today’s speech meandered, hitting a lot of themes and using a lot of code dressed up in rhetorical flourish. Reflecting further over a bottle of Lagunitas Brewing Brown Shugga and the tones of the Dixie Chicks and Muddy Waters, it occurs to me that hitting a lot of themes and using code and flashy imagery is what inaugural addresses are historically about. With some notable exceptions they are speeches to history, not to people.

Reading through the speech again, I think many of the words were right. It was a better mix of plain speaking and lofty ideas than I remember as I stood there next to the reception desk. The speech itself wasn’t great. What made it great, and what will make it great for generations, was the man delivering it, and the circumstances surrounding its delivery. Watching Obama take the oath of office, and the reaction of the flag-waving millions, did bring a lump to my throat. That’s history, bubba, a real “where-were-you-when?” moment – the second in three months involving the same guy. I was moved.

I did snort-laugh when Obama thanked George W. Bush for his “service to our nation.” A few of my colleagues turned around, but I didn’t care. Thanking Bush for his service is like thanking Bernard Madoff for being a careful steward of your finances, or Jeffrey Dahmer for watching the kids. Some might say that latter comparison is too harsh for a man who, after all, did spend eight years of his life as president, and who appears to have aged much more than those eight years. Regardless, Bush’s era came to an appropriate close, amid two wars—one illegal, a crumbling constitution, the worst financial and economic crises since the Great Depression and everywhere the destructive signs of unchecked greed and hubris that started before Bush took office but that he and his ilk fostered. Obama got his digs in, though. His subtlety will be debated, but among my friends the appropriateness of his comments will not.

“… we reject as false the choice between our safety and our ideals. Our Founding Fathers, faced with perils we can scarcely imagine, drafted a charter to assure the rule of law and the rights of man, a charter expanded by the blood of generations. Those ideals still light the world, and we will not give them up for expedience's sake. And so to all other peoples and governments who are watching today, from the grandest capitals to the small village where my father was born: Know that America is a friend of each nation and every man, woman and child who seeks a future of peace and dignity, and that we are ready to lead once more.

“Recall that earlier generations faced down fascism and communism not just with missiles and tanks, but with sturdy alliances and enduring convictions. They understood that our power alone cannot protect us, nor does it entitle us to do as we please. Instead, they knew that our power grows through its prudent use; our security emanates from the justness of our cause, the force of our example, the tempering qualities of humility and restraint.

“We are the keepers of this legacy. Guided by these principles once more, we can meet those new threats that demand even greater effort -- even greater cooperation and understanding between nations.”

The camera cut to Bush at one point, and I’m pretty sure he was wincing. I saw on the news that when Bush landed in Texas, before Obama had even finished walking the parade route from the Capitol to the White House, he proclaimed his return to the Lone Star State and vowed never again to leave. Too bad for Texas, but the rest of America hopes he keeps that promise.

Tomorrow Obama will wake up and confront the ugly mess before him. Generally I believe he grasps the difficulties ahead. Sometimes, though, I wonder. Take this line from the inaugural speech: “Our journey has never been one of shortcuts or settling for less. It has not been the path for the fainthearted—for those who prefer leisure over work, or seek only the pleasures of riches and fame.”

Um, sure it has. Shortcuts and settling for less—that’s why we have the schlocky suburban wastelands polluting our urban fringes, that’s why we prefer to lay down ribbons of asphalt in service to the ubiquitous automobile rather than laying down rail lines or planning more bus routes and it’s why greedmongers and wing-tip hustlers like Bernie Madoff have dominated the headlines of late. There are more of them to come, not all of them outright criminals like Madoff, but all of them accountable for serving themselves above anyone else. I predict many more of them will choose suicide instead of facing up to what they’ve done. That’s how these people are—when things are going well they are the masters of the universe. When fortunes turn they are revealed to have no character and no guts. Fuck them … the trouble being of course that they’ve already fucked us.

At any rate, I was writing about Obama and the inauguration. For one day, anyway, I felt hope and change were possible, and embodied in one man. I thought, maybe we can begin to undo the damage of the past eight years. Obama can never live up to the expectations the world has put on him. In that respect he is doomed to fail before he even starts. But I think if he goes down, Obama will go down swinging, and in the end that may be his most inspirational act. It may be the thing that drives the rest of us on.

I know this: With all due respect to Natalie Maines and the Dixie Chicks, tonight I am proud to say the President of the United States is from Illinois.

The Motorcyclist in Winter

They say only motorcyclists know why dogs stick their heads out of car windows. Now that the cold and snow of winter have descended upon the Great Lakes, that sensation of the wind buffeting my face and roaring past my ears seems miles away in any direction. All I’m left with is the memory of the throbbing engine shaking my body and spitting out its fat staccato notes to reverberate off whatever’s nearby—concrete medians, cars, trees, glass storefronts.

The bike sits alone in the garage now, narrow black wires leading from the battery and engine to a small black box, which in turn is plugged into an outlet via a 25-foot orange extension cord. A green light on the box indicates the battery is fully charged. A little red light in the shape of a tiny key blinks regularly, like a heartbeat monitor, from the darkness of the speedometer, the only other sign that the bike is still alive. Looking at the bike there in that condition is like watching a lion stare silently out of its cage in a northern zoo; both the bike and the lion are confined and neither is happy about it, but only the lion has a chance to express its displeasure, or possibly change the situation. The bike, and its rider, must wait.

The rider, though, carries memories of better times. This is my first winter as a motorcycle owner and rider. I knew the cold was coming, and with it ice, snow and road salt dust. I not-so-secretly hoped for the odd 40-degree, dry weekend here and there during the winter. It wouldn’t take much, I thought, to justify a quick afternoon ride if the conditions were right: no snow piled up and melting along the streets, no icy patches, no cold rain and no salt dust coating the pavement. So far that combination of factors has proved elusive. Now another round of snow and single-digit temperatures is forecast. It might be March before bike and rider leave the garage together.

I was not prepared for the symptoms of riding withdrawal. They include red eyes from obsessive internet searching during business hours for videos of people riding their motorcycles, itchy legs, reflexive twitching of the right hand and repetitive squeezing of the left hand, exhaustion due to sleep deprivation caused by late-night monitoring of motorcycle chat rooms, hoarseness from screaming at the TV during the weather segment and hypothermia from long hours spent in the unheated garage staring at the bike.

Twice I have sat bolt-upright in the dark silence before dawn, awakened by a nightmare of rolling the bike out and discovering flat spots on the tires because I didn’t move it often enough during the winter. This, even though I’ve moved it several times since my last ride in November.

The motorcycle rider in winter is not a healthy or sane person. The daily disappointment of scanning seven- and 10-day weather forecasts, searching for some glimpse of riding weather in the future, and seeing nothing, takes a toll. As I have become more agitated, some of my senses have become heightened. The sound of snowfall keeps me up at night now. Also, I have found myself lowering my standards. Forty degrees as an acceptable minimum riding temperature slipped to 35, then to 30. Now I think with a long-sleeve Under Armor shirt, a wool sweater, a winter parka, long underwear, two pairs of wool socks, heated gloves, a neck cover and a full-face helmet, I could probably last an hour or so in 25-degree weather. And if I didn’t make it, what the hell? I’d die having scratched the itch one last time. They’d find me on the shoulder of a curvy road somewhere, kickstand down, lying beside the bike, a smile frozen on my blue face.

Ah, bizarre fantasies tonight. What came over me, imagining a thing like that? I would never get off the bike for chrissake.

A [Bleeping] White Christmas

Merry Christmas from the shivering, snow-weary, frozen heart of America.

Complaining about the snow and cold in Chicago this year doesn’t carry the usual cachet. It seems everyone is frozen. My parents have 16 inches of snow outside their home in Portland, Ore., which diminishes the amount of carping I can do about the foot outside here. I do have a situation that I bet they don’t, however. My car’s tires are frozen to the ground. When I parked on the street a couple of days ago it was wet and slushy. Then the temperature plunged to zero and everything that was slush became solid ice. The car is frozen in place. And the defroster fan has stopped working.

But inside it’s warm and cozy, and I can sit and reflect on the year gone by. There were more ups than downs, and higher highs than the lowest lows. That’s a change from recent years. Everyone I worked with at HedgeWorld got laid off, leaving just me and an uncertain future. However some good things have come out of that upheaval. It jarred me out of a kind of professional trance and motivated me to branch out. I’ve been doing more writing.

A good friend, Aaron, who also lost his job earlier this year, and I are considering writing a book about journalism in the 21st Century. I’d started thinking about that after we got news of the HedgeWorld layoffs. He’d been thinking about it too, and our ideas seem to mesh.

A book that Aaron suggested I read, Betsy Lerner’s “The Forest for the Trees” has me thinking not only about the journalism book, but about a novel.

I’ve also been having some stimulating e-conversations with my old college journalism teacher, Rick Seifert, about online community journalism. So, professionally there are a lot of interesting possibilities in the coming year, and for the first time in many years I find myself looking at genuinely interesting and realistic goals.

Personally it’s been another challenging year in many ways, but it’s ending on a very positive note. I feel it’s been a year of moving forward on many fronts, rather than treading water or regressing.

I’ve spent much of the day relaxing, exchanging Christmas greetings with friends and loved ones, considering my overall good fortune and trying not to think about the creeping entropy I see all around. It’s been happening for months but over the past couple of days I seem to have become particularly attuned to it. Part of a gutter fell off the other day, yielding to the weight of the snow and ice that filled it. There’s the aforementioned frozen car and the problem with the defrost fan. My sinuses are bone dry with the cold and I feel like I’m getting a cold all the time. I feel like I can hear cavities growing in my head and that any day all my teeth are going to fall out. And beyond the physical, I am slowly filling with dread about the likelihood of social and economic disorder in the New Year.

No matter what economic corner you peer around, there is chaos and fear. Politically our best hope for “change” has been brought low, at least for now, by pervasive corruption and the blind greed of a megalomaniacal state governor. Indeed it seems many of our critical systems—especially political, financial and commercial—have been exposed as either questionable or outright frauds and their leaders as a parade of hacks and traveling medicine salesmen.

But that’s not very Christmas-y, is it? And maybe it’s not as bad as all that, anyway. I just need to adjust my thinking. For instance, that’s not ice coated slush-snow out there, it’s a soft white blanket, tucking us in for the winter. Rod Blagojevich isn’t corrupt, just a misunderstood entrepreneur.

There, I feel better. Don’t you?

Seriously, though, Merry Christmas and happy holidays.