Middle-Age Cranky

Celebrating A Cranky Anniversary

2010-04-26T08:49:00.000-07:00

On its one-year anniversary, Middle-Age Cranky is moving to Wordpress, where it will be easier for readers to leave comments. Join me here.

Cycling

2010-04-19T06:49:00.000-07:00

Yesterday I rode my bicycle to the library.

In the abstract, it sounds silly for a man in his 50s to be riding a bicycle. But in the moment, I am astounded by how much I love it.

Part of it is just plain old common sense. It isn't far to the library, but that's a smidgen less gasoline used, and I hadn't done any other exercising over the weekend. But there's something more than that.

Mine is not a fancy bicycle. It's got 15 speeds, five more than the last bicycle I had, but I really only use the middle five. It takes me back. I was very independent for a seven-year-old. My working parents would let me cycle to the swim club, a couple of miles away. (I wonder if parents let their kids ride their bicycle that far anymore.) I used to ride my bicycle to the nearest Baskin-Robbins, when a single scoop cone cost 12 cents. That Baskin-Robbins is still there, but of course, the cones are more expensive now.

I remember my friend Jim Scott and I used to take a circuitous route up into the same hills, just to find ourselves at the top of a long and winding road. Sometimes we'd have to walk our bikes for part of the trip, but oh, that wonderful feeling of navigating those rolling curves on the way down. The downhill made the uphill all worth it.

These days, I sometimes cycle up to a nearby county park to go hiking, and it's a bit of a climb to get there. But oh, baby, that ride back down. The breeze, the ability to stop pedaling and be motionless, almost to be flying through the air, like a dream but wide awake.

There aren’t too many ways to feel like a kid again, but being on a bicycle sure is one of them.

Why I Love Facebook

2010-04-12T07:08:00.000-07:00

According to the latest statistics, one-fifth of Facebook users are Baby Boomers. Although our ranks on Facebook aren't growing as fast as they were a couple of years ago, especially compared to younger people, we're still a major presence there. We need to be. It's the only place we can keep track of everyone. It provides pictures along with names, which e-mail doesn't. Let's face it, it’s the best memory aid known to Boomers.

I love it for that and for other reasons. As the following exchange of messages shows, even the most innocent posting spreads out into cyberspace like a rock in a pond and blossoms into advice, insight, and — best of all — serendipity.

Saturday
4:54 pm
Howard Baldwin
I am sitting here trying to get the string to my sweatshirt hood back through its holes. Shouldn't there be a machine for this?

4:55 pm
Shelley Ewer
There is. It's called: fingers!

4:56 pm
Howard Baldwin
Oh, the warranty expired on those YEARS ago. Part of the problem that Gus is here helping me. He is torn between wanting to be in my lap and playing with the string itself.

5:00 pm
Shelley Ewer
Hire someone to do the tedious work. Why should you be bothered?

5:04 pm
Eva Langfeldt
Attach a safety pin to one end of the string, which will give you something to grab onto as you thread it through.

5:37 pm
Robin Snyder
What Eva said - use as big a safety pin as you can find. Or give up, and entertain the cat. :)

6:06 pm
Clark Buehler
I actually had to do this several times over the last several years and the answer is the safety pin but not necessarily the largest one. It depends on the design of the clothing you are trying to restore. Trust me on this one, some patience required.

6:16 pm
Halsey Royden
Try your knitting needles!

6:24 pm
Megan Diehm Gebhardt
You could pay me to do it! You know, there are experts for everything....

6:27 pm
Eva Langfeldt
Ixnay on the knitting needles . . .

6:33 pm
Mary Schaefer Mercogliano
This must be an ancient sweatshirt - can't buy them any more because of strangulation concerns - you should see the recalls the CPSC puts out on an almost daily basis recalling hooded sweatshirts with drawstrings. Savor your antique :)

6:35 pm
Martie Muldoon
Wait ... I know Howard, and I know Eva. How do Howard and Eva know each other????

7:23 pm
Eva Langfeldt
Wait, Martie . . . how do you know Howard? He and I have worked together frequently (albeit usually remotely) over the years, both of us being editorial freelancers in the high-tech field.

7:28 pm
Edwin Watkins
Tie one end of the string to a cat, put the hoody on the cat, gently place one paw of the kitty in the opening of the string portal, then light the cat on fire.

8:09 pm
Paula Pierce Crockett
Let Gus have the string and buy yourself a new sweatshirt!

8:21 pm
Martie Muldoon
Eva, Howard and I went to school together. Howard, Eva and I have played together in symphony and theater.

9:27 pm
Howard Baldwin
You're all hilarious, especially those of you who suggested Gus help out. Because serendipity rules the world, I found a foot-long twist tie on the kitchen table (I still don't know where it came from) and pushed that through ... with patience. Problem solved. I will try not to strangle myself.

Sunday
1:45 pm
Amy Helen Johnson
Hey, I like the sound of that for a New Year's Resolution, Howard -- try not to strangle myself. I'm certain I shall be more successful at that than eating less sugar and exercising more.

8:50 pm
Virginia Shea
Eva, I didn't know you knew Howard! Small world!

Sensors Gone Wild

2010-04-05T07:51:00.000-07:00

I drove a rental vehicle in Seattle recently that gave me a horrifying vision of the future. It was a six-passenger van manufactured by Chevrolet, chosen so that we could drive around with both my friend Andrew and his kids without having to take two cars.

It was sufficiently huge that once the kids were strapped in, they couldn't close the sliding doors with enough force to close them securely. This would prompt a message on the dashboard: RIGHT REAR PASSENGER DOOR AJAR. This would in turn force Andrew to get out and slide the door shut again. But his doing so would trigger even more frantic error messages: PASSENGER SEAT BELT UNFASTENED and PASSENGER DOOR AJAR. (Yes, they were in capital letters; I'm surprised there weren't exclamation points involved.)

Andrew and I immediately began imagining an over-networked world where sensors cause havoc instead of promoting safety. "Can you imagine some poor guy trying to get his pregnant wife to the hospital?" Andrew asked. "The car wouldn't start if she couldn’t get the seat belt around her midsection, and then you'd start getting all sorts of error messages: SEAT BELT NOT FASTENED. PASSENGER SCREAMS DETECTED. PASSENGER SEAT DAMPNESS DETECTED."

As a technology writer, I started realizing that all sorts of other nightmare scenarios were possible. At times, do-gooders have suggested that cars should have kill switches, so that the engines can't be started in any of a number of situations: an alcohol sensor indicates the driver is too intoxicated, or the seatbelt sensor indicates one or more of them is not fastened.

So what if car sensors networked with online banking systems? You'd try to start the car and start getting messages indicating you weren't going anywhere: PROPERTY TAX BILL NOT YET PAID; TRAVEL ON LOCAL ROADS NOT ALLOWED. GAS TANK ONE-QUARTER FULL, NO FILL-UPS ALLOWED UNTIL GAS CREDIT CARD BILL PAID.

These belittling warnings, of course, would not just be flashed on the dashboard; undoubtedly someone will figure out how to have that same annoying woman who sighs "calculating route" and "when possible, make a legal U-turn" on your GPS when you've gone in the wrong direction deliver them as well. An added "benefit": the volume would increase depending on how late your payments were.

With Webcams are already standard equipment on many computers, they'll probably migrate into cars before too long. I can only imagine algorithms that analyze how people are dressed, taking into account colors, patterns, and skin tones. Parents could have the car announce to their teen-agers: YOU'RE NOT GOING OUT DRESSED LIKE THAT. The algorithms, of course, could be reconfigured using a Web site based on the appropriate season. Heck, I'm thinking women would order this to make sure their husbands couldn't go out wearing striped shirts and plaid pants.

Hmmm. I may have stumbled on to something that will get people using mass transit.

Living With the Gray

2010-03-29T07:28:00.000-07:00

One of my readers has suggested that I write more about controversial issues. This reader is not in my target demographic, and so may be less than captivated by my nostalgic Baby Boomer musings.

However, being controversial at my age is not as easy as it sounds. When you get older, things turn gray. I'm not talking about hair. I simply mean that once you've lived through multiple decades, crises, and presidents, life's political issues don't seem so black and white anymore. For example:

War. History vilifies English prime minister Neville Chamberlain for appeasing the Nazis in 1938; the Germans then overran Europe. Sometimes I think we suffered through the Vietnam War because politicians didn't want to see that same sequence of events — then referred to as the domino theory — replayed in Southeast Asia. It didn't happen, but we spent 50,000 lives and untold billions figuring it out.

We're purportedly in the Middle East today to keep it from being taken over by Islamic fascists, and yet, some of our allies there are as bad as the people we're fighting. World War I sowed the seeds for World War II; are we sowing the seeds for World War III in the Middle East today?

Pre-marital Sex. Once upon a time, pre-marital sex was bad. It brought unplanned pregnancies (the term "unwed mother" predated "single parent"). It spread sexually transmitted diseases. But society's disdain for it, like so many things, was hypocritical. Before marriage, boys were supposed to sow their wild oats and girls were supposed to be virgins. This is mathematically impossible.

Today, of course, there is no such thing as pre-marital sex. It's just sex. To my moderate mind, it helps couples see if they can reach the deepest levels of intimacy before they commit to a lifetime together. The alternative is to wait, discover you've chosen badly, and then divorce. But the same people who are against pre-marital sex seem to also be against divorce. This is emotionally impossible.

At the same time, it strikes me as unfair and even sexist that when young men and young women engaging in premarital sex create an unintentional offspring, it's the women who end up being the single parent. I believe the vagaries of the human spirit require some societal flexibility, but I worry about a world populated by only children who don't have the advantage of two parents who can trade off when one gets tired, not to mention the social graces they learn by having to share with siblings.

Politics. This is my grayest area of all. Rebelling against New Deal-Democrat parents, I registered as a Republican after my 18th birthday. But I went contrary to the tenet "if you're not a liberal by the time you’re twenty, you have no heart, and if you're not a conservative by the time you’re forty, you have no brain." I have become more, but not completely, liberal. Like a lot of people I know, I've left the Republican party but still can’t bear to join the Democrats.

I've come to realize that not everyone has had the advantages I had growing up, and the government in its vastness should offer some assistance to people who are trying to better themselves. But I also believe that you can't fund everything forever. We seem to have devolved into government by attention-deficit disorder, wholly reactive and short-sighted as opposed to focusing on how to make the country better and stronger for the next generation. Congress uses the future like a credit card that never comes due, so it can take credit today.

But the bigger problem is that while I'm mired in gray, much of the rest of the country is mired in black-and-white thinking. The result: an increasing polarization of the country, an increasing demonization of opponents (casting a racial slur at John Lewis makes as much sense as calling George Washington a traitor to King George III). One side seems to spend precious little time even acknowledging that there may be another side. It twists the perspective on almost any situation to fit its own. I sit here discouraged because I feel like we've lost a sense of accommodation, of compromise, of working together for a common goal.

Maybe this is my generation, the me generation, writ large: we want what we want and to hell with your opinion. I find myself yearning for less extremism and more centrism, in essence a wider understanding that in a complex world, there is no black and white. There is only gray and we have to get used to living in it.

With A Little Help from Friends

2010-03-22T07:40:00.000-07:00

The funny thing about pop culture is the way we amalgamate pieces of it into our lives. When I was a teenager, my best friend and I would ask each other "Do you feel lucky?" years after Dirty Harry was released. To this day, I don't have to be standing knee-deep in galactic garbage to intone, "I have a bad feeling about this, Han Solo."

Furthermore, it's something we never outgrow. Even before the series ended, my wife and I had started incorporating bits and pieces of Friends into our lives. That's not surprising — not only was it was a funny, popular show for ten years, but it was one of the first TV shows to have all ten seasons available on DVD. (Some of us are still waiting for the complete Perry Mason and The Mary Tyler Moore Show.) And of course, its reruns are as ubiquitous as I Love Lucy once was.

That's why I frequently ask cattily, "Did I say that out loud?" like Chandler, and my wife echoes Jack Geller by insisting, "I’m just saying." Occasionally, we'll quote Phoebe by shrieking, "This is madness … MADNESS!"

But the best thing we've extracted from Friends — and the one most germane to the theme of this blog — actually comes from a minor character: Mr. Heckles, the downstairs neighbor. Mr. Heckles was the neighborhood curmudgeon; even his name connoted someone bothersome. Played with hangdog perfection by character actor Larry Hankin (pictured), he had, among other traits, a bizarre attraction to animals. He claimed that the cat that belonged to Rachel's paramour Paolo was actually his, and he dressed Ross' capuchin monkey Marcel in outlandish outfits.

But mostly Mr. Heckles complained about the noise that came not only from Monica and Rachel's apartment, but from all the friends in general. When he died of a heart attack, leaving all his belongings to "the noisy girls upstairs," they discovered that Mr. Heckles kept a meticulous journal, nicely embossed with the words My Big Book of Grievances.

In this journal, he recorded all of his aggravations. "Italian guy [Joey] comes home late; excessive noise." "Italian guy’s gay roommate [Chandler] brings dry cleaning home; excessive noise."

This is the pop-culture concept we have taken into our hearts.

Mr. Heckles' book is the perfect antidote to the aggravations of life. When someone cuts me off in traffic, my wife says gently, "Put it in the Big Book." When a checkout line isn't moving fast enough, or when dinner doesn't look anything like the picture that accompanies the recipe, we simply look at each other and chime, "Big Book!"

It is the perfect release, a realization that most aggravations in life are not only transitory, but insignificant. And the mental image of recording something in an imaginary book has the exact opposite effect of actually writing it down on a piece of paper — instead of remembering it forever, it vanishes almost immediately. Instead of remembering the slight, we simply remember the Big Book.

That’s what Friends is for.

Slinking Through Time

2010-03-15T07:42:00.000-07:00

Why is it that when you're a kid, everything close seems far away, but when you become an adult, everything far away seems close?

When I was a kid, World War II seemed very far away, even though my father and most of my friends' fathers had fought in it. Cars with fins seemed positively ancient, mostly because there had been a profound shift in design principles in 1961, when seemingly every single car manufactured in Detroit got lower and shorter.

I remember watching Some Like It Hot (1959) on television as a child, a movie that took place in 1929. I was horrified by the wanton destruction in the opening scene of what I considered to be antique automobiles. I realize now that they were only 30 years old at the time. When I see cars from 1980 today, they don’t strike me as valuable antiques; they look like candidates for wanton destruction.

But now I can watch movies from the 80s and not consider them dated at all. Movies from the 30s and 40s, not so much. I think it's because I lived through that era; having experienced it, it does not seem distant (that doesn’t explain the thing about the fins, though, because my father owned a 1960 Chrysler Imperial that had two of the most massive fins Detroit ever devised).

This is why I feel perfectly comfortable hearing Beatles tunes coming out of in-store music systems. It only strikes me as odd when I look at the people behind the counter and realize that the music is frequently older than they are. Did in-store music systems play Big Band music from World War II thirty years ago? Will they be playing Eminem and Larry Platt in thirty years?

In trying to understand this phenomenon, I ran across an entry in the online Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy called The Experience and Perception of Time. To be honest, it gave me a headache trying to understand it. I really just wanted an answer to the question I stated at the top of this entry, but I found myself knee-deep in concepts such as A-theory and B-theory and even the Special Theory of Relativity. Heavens to murgatroid.

Since I couldn't grasp those philosophical theories, I've developed my own theory: the AM and PM theory. Anything that came After Me (AM) is familiar and comfortable, and remains so even as I age. My temporal perspective just keeps expanding like an infinite Slinky, and I keep gathering memories that seem like they happened yesterday. Everything what was Previous to Me (PM) just might as well be sitting at the wrong end of a telescope, perhaps close but still appearing distant. I think this is a much simpler theory to grasp.

And they call Baby Boomers self-centered.

When The Brass Ring Slips From Your Fingers

2010-03-08T07:18:00.000-08:00

Leading up to the Academy Awards ceremony last night, Turner Classic Movies has been screening its traditional 31 Days of Oscar festival. During this time, it broadcasts a flurry of wonderful films that either won or were nominated for Oscars.

Which always makes me wonder ... whatever happened to some of those actors?

This is not idle curiosity. Earlier this year, I wrote of my lingering yearning for fame and fortune (When Should Boomers Euthanize Their Dreams?), and I have long been fascinated by what happens to people who strive so mightily for the spotlight, only to have it turned off long before they would have flipped the switch themselves. I remember reading once in People that Donna Douglas (Elly Mae on The Beverly Hillbillies) went into real estate. She seemed happy with the decision.

There almost seems to be a palpable pattern. Take an actor like Michael Paré, who made big splashes with Eddie and the Cruisers (1983), Streets of Fire (1984), and The Philadelphia Experiment (1984). Shoot, he doesn't even come up under "popular searches" when you look for him in the Internet Movie Database; Michael Park and Michael Pate do (who?). After those three movies came a short-lived TV series (Houston Knights), supporting roles, and either TV movies or movies with straight-to-video titles (Ninja Cheerleaders, BloodRayne II: Deliverance).

It’s not just actors. Whatever happened to Robert James Waller, whose novel Bridges of Madison County created such a splash? And the legions of one-hit wonders in the music industry? Do they constantly yearn for those early days of promise? Do they wallow in the inflection points of the lives and careers and wonder what would have happened if they'd done just one thing differently?

What happens when they run into people who remember their glory days? What’s that conversation like? I always remember the classic exchange in Sunset Boulevard, when William Holden says to Gloria Swanson, "I know you. You're Norma Desmond. You used to be big." Gloria Swanson replies imperiously, "I am big. It's the pictures that got small." Of course, Norma Desmond was completely crazy.

I'm sure some of these people live shockingly middle-class lives. But what if instead of a suburban home, they live in a two-bedroom apartment in a seedy neighborhood, the money gone and the spotlight's filament long ago fizzled? How do they feel then? Grateful for the moment they had? Jealous of those whose careers seem to thrive even with the occasional bomb (come on, Harrison Ford — Hollywood Homicide?). Scheming for a chance at a comeback?

For people like this, I believe there is great comfort in the words of actress and singer Bette Midler, whose career has certainly had its ups and downs. She started out her movie career with a big hit (The Rose) and she followed it up with a stinker (Jinxed). Back in 1987, she explained her feelings about fame to a San Francisco Chronicle reporter: "Sometimes you win, and sometimes you lose, and if you're not prepared to lose, then you shouldn't be playing the game. It's absolutely inevitable that it's going to go away once you get it, so you shouldn't invest so much emotion in it that it's going to crush you when [that time] finally comes. You have to be more devil-may-care, more cavalier. You have to have fun."

The Rich Are Different Than You And Me — Sometimes They’re Stupider

2010-03-01T07:07:00.000-08:00

Silicon Valley is currently reeling from the loss of five people in two small-plane crashes just a few days apart. Three engineers from electric car manufacturer Tesla died when their plane apparently lost power in the fog and clipped an electrical transmission tower. A biotech lawyer and his fiancée died when their plane went down just one-eighth of a mile from their destination.

I have never — never — understood the rich's fascination for certain toys. Take golf courses — all that grass, all the water to keep it green, and all those fences to keep other people out. Take sailboats — they cost a fortune to buy and berth, and you spend more time maintaining them than actually being out on the water.

Let me make clear that I'm no populist, communist, or socialist. I'd like to be wealthy myself. I like flying first class. I like staying in hotels that overlook the Grand Canal in Venice. I like six-way adjustable leather seats.

But this fascination with small planes baffles me the most. I was in New York City the night of July 16, 1999, when John F. Kennedy Jr. (pictured), his wife Carolyn, and her sister Lauren took off in a small plane piloted by Kennedy headed for Martha's Vineyard for a wedding. They never made it. Some trivial matter delayed them, and they ended up flying at night, for which Kennedy, a licensed pilot for less than two years, was apparently both untrained and incapable.

Before I left the following morning, I thought about asking the taxi driver to take me down to Kennedy's apartment building in Tribeca to see the flowers piling up outside, but that seemed a waste of time. We went, instead, straight to Kennedy airport (irony strikes again).

When it got dark, Kennedy could have just gotten on a commercial flight to Martha’s Vineyard, or taken one the following morning. Would that have been so terrible? The Tesla engineers were flying from Palo Alto to Hawthorne, in southern California. Had they flown commercially, they would have had the choice of not one, but two airports: LAX and Long Beach. You can't tell me that, even with security lines, it takes longer to fly to southern California on a Southwest Airlines 737 than it does in a Cessna.

As for the biotech lawyer, okay, he was headed to Groveland, which is out near Yosemite National Park, far from any commercial airports. Still, I don't see the attraction of taking your life and that of your loved ones into your own hands. Wouldn’t the litany of celebrities who’ve died in small plane crashes — Jim Croce, Buddy Holly, Patsy Cline, Cory Lidle, Paul Wellstone, Aaliyah, Payne Stewart, Otis Redding, and Will Rogers, among others — be a deterrent? Life seems to be dangerous enough as it is without coming up with new ways to tempt fate.

Or is tempting fate what made them rich in the first place?

Lullaby and Good Night

2010-02-22T07:22:00.000-08:00

When I wrote a few months ago about my affection for Gene Barry and Burke’s Law, my friend Ed wrote that he had the same fond affection for What's My Line. He said he used to fall asleep listening to it as his parents watched it downstairs.

I can well understand his affection because I do that now — fall asleep listening to old television shows. I used to take Excedrin PM to help me sleep, but it eventually stopped having much effect. Sometimes when I can't sleep, I just pop in an old TV show DVD. I have no memories of being sung to sleep, or being read to, but when I hear the familiar shows, the familiar cadences, sometimes even the familiar lines, they're just like a lullaby.

I suppose that if most people wanted something hauntingly familiar to lull them to sleep, they'd turn on classic music. I prefer a different kind of classic. The characters' soothing voices, whether Perry Mason's gruff bluffs or Lt. Columbo's humble grumbles, imbue a sense of comfort and safety as I get swept off into the darkness. It's as soothing as a mother singing a lullaby — except, in this case, my mother is played by either Mary Richards or Ethel Mertz.

I wish I'd known I was always going to be able to hear these voices. I am embarrassed at the times when I cut short outdoor adventures and even dates to get home in time to see a Twilight Zone rerun on Saturday afternoon. Today the entire collection sits on my shelf, including episodes that were never released into syndication, along with the entire collection of I Love Lucy, Columbo, M*A*S*H, Friends, among others.

Of course, it doesn't have to be a television DVD. It’s equally easy to pop a classic like An American in Paris or The Wizard of Oz in and have Gene Kelly or Ray Bolger serenade me. Slipping off to sleep is like slipping surreptitiously back to post-war Paris or the Emerald City.

There's nothing like having a little time machine in the bedroom, one that lets me wander back to adolescence, childhood, and beyond.

Expectations, Interrupted

2010-02-15T06:41:00.000-08:00

One facet of middle age that I've grown to appreciate is the smooth flow of the days, and even the prosaic milestones that punctuate them. The Sunday paper, a favorite weekly television show, putting out the garbage cans, winding the chime clock. The word routine is too negative; it's more of a rhythm that, if you're lucky, comes into your life and evolves into a comfortable sweater or pair of shoes.

The scramble of ambition that permeates our younger lives has slowed; we've settled into a fulfilling career or we've found that mythical "last job." It may not be perfect, but we've splashed in enough frog ponds for us to know that it'll suffice for a while. Life has the languidness of tropical sunshine.

In this rhythmic life, the only interruptions are usually those we plan ourselves — vacations, parties, new cars, sometimes even buying a new house if we're really motivated for change.

But there are the interruptions that are thrust upon us, the ones that remind us that languidness never lasts for long.

When I got home last Thursday night from a local high-tech conference, my wife greeted me not with hello but with an anguished sob informing me that her father had found her stepmother dead in their hot tub.

That's not a break in routine; it's a fracture.

The news was all the more astounding because, not five days before, Annelies had sat across the table from me at my father's 90th birthday party, engaging, bubbly, spirited, inquisitive as always. She could have a conversation with anyone about anything; she listened carefully as one niece talked about her excitement at working at the National Institutes of Health, her first job out of school; she engaged another niece's boyfriend in a discussion of European capital cities.

If you step back and looked at the rhythm of Annelies' 77 years, there was comfort to be found there. For someone who saw the Nazis march into her native Czechoslovakia as a little girl, it’s not so bad to pass away in a hot tub high on a hill overlooking Monterey Bay. Sitting in that warm water was a rhythm she'd cultivated over the last 20 years, as long as she and my father-in-law lived there. On that one day, though, according to the coroner's report, she stood up too quickly, passed out, and drowned. The initial shock is palpable, even as insight flows in around it.

But Annelies’ passing — as sudden and sad as she was happy — has reminded me that even as you luxuriate in the soft flowing rhythms you've created, you still never know how the day will end.

Summer, 1972

2010-02-08T06:00:00.000-08:00

Two weeks ago I wrote about my inability to stop writing fiction, even after many failed attempts to sell anything.

Because my id keeps the creative impulse alive, and my superego tells me I'll never sell anything, I decided that I would write something that I wanted, not something I thought would sell. I'm finally tackling a story that I've wanted to tell for years.

In the summer of 1972, I took a student tour around the United States via Greyhound bus (it cost $900; today’s student cost more and last a week). There were 35 of us, mostly from Palo Alto; we were astonishingly homogenous — white, middle-class, mostly strait-laced, even though it was a time when the rules of what constituted "good morals" were being re-written.

Perhaps everyone thinks the summer they were 16 is grist for the Great American Novel, but I (or my id) would argue strongly for 1972. It was the fuzzy transition between the Sexy 60s and the Subdued 70s. It looked like the war in Vietnam was ending, but a cloud was hovering in the form of corruption, inflation, and the oncoming era of limitations. The people we called Jesus Freaks were the beginning of the fundamentalist movement (I dated one). The way women saw themselves was shifting like a loose tectonic plate. Engineers here in Silicon Valley were inventing the microprocessors that would power the computers that would change the way we lived.

It was a wonderful summer that affected me deeply. It brought me a best friend, who introduced me to my wife. It gave me an interest in travel, which blossomed into my first career as a travel writer. It showed me how different the rest of the United States was from California, an education in itself.

Surprisingly, creating the atmosphere of 1972 has been simple. While I have been religiously dragging around ephemera and memorabilia from 1972, the irony is that researching the elements of the past is remarkably easy, thanks to the web. One baseball almanac site lists the score of every single baseball game that summer. eBay posts auctions of postcards from our destinations the way they were. The brochures from the Civil War battlefields we visited are online, refreshing my memory on why the heck we were visiting them.

And, like any novelist, I get to (or my id gets to) tell the story differently, with a little more sex, a little less stupidity, and a little more insight into the angst many of us must have been harboring.

Best of all, I get to plunge headlong into a time of promise and pleasure. We told ourselves we were living lives of "divine decadence" (a phrase we stole from Cabaret), even though it was all pretty tame in retrospect. But after that summer, there were colleges to apply to, jobs to compete for, gas lines to sit in, rising prices to worry about. Life was never the same after that summer, and I was too young to know that life was never the same after every summer.

Economies of Scale: Sweet Music or Sour Notes?

2010-02-01T07:24:00.001-08:00

A couple of news stories in the last two weeks vividly contrasted the chasm between the questions the government is trying to answer and the questions the government should be asking.

The first story relates to President Obama proposing legislation to Congress that would keep banks from becoming "too big to fail." I can partially see the logic in this. The FDIC guarantees consumers' deposits; the failure of a large bank would bankrupt this program. Before regional banks were approved in the 1980s and interstate banking approved in 1995, this wasn't an issue.

But on the other side, what if this trend doesn't stop with banks? What if Congress decides that an airline shouldn't be too big to fail, because it has too many employees that would be out of work, or its loss would limit competition at certain airports?

The second story relates to an article in Parade about cities and counties considering consolidation in order to make municipal services — police, fire, garbage, utilities, animal control — more efficient. It identified Buffalo, Natchez, and Pittsburgh as cities pondering the possibility.

The trend is nothing new. The city and county of San Francisco have been coterminous since 1850; the city and county of Philadelphia since 1854. New York City's boroughs used to be separate cities until a vote in 1898 consolidated them. The logic was the same in 1898 as it is today: achieving economies of scale and thus lowering administrative costs.

This is why entities, whether they’re in the public or private sector, merge. It's not a question of cheap money or bad management; it's a question of economies of scale. I admit to seeing this through the prism of technology: the costs of developing or deploying efficient software and hardware are lower when you spread them over a greater number of employees, branches, or offices. If you write software to manage your automatic-teller network, is it more efficient to write it for 100 branches, or for 1,000 branches? Ask Bill Gates, who made his fortune off of writing something once and selling it a gazillion times. (In this regard, economies of scale relate more to white-collar than blue-collar work.)

As much as I respect President Obama, I think that worrying about entities becoming too big to fail is exactly the wrong tack. If government is to become more efficient, we should start thinking not about too big or too small, but the right size to begin with.

This was hammered home to me by an opinion column commentator Tom Brokaw wrote for the New York Times last year, in which he asked why the Dakotas needed 17 educational institutions:

In my native Great Plains, North and South Dakota have a combined population of just under 1.5 million people, and in each state the rural areas are being depopulated at a rapid rate. Yet between them the two Dakotas support 17 colleges and universities. They are a carry-over from the early 20th century when travel was more difficult and farm families wanted their children close by during harvest season.

I know this is heresy, but couldn't the two states get a bigger bang for their higher education buck if they consolidated their smaller institutions into, say, the Dakota Territory College System, with satellite campuses but a common administration and shared standards?

In California, we have the University of California (10 campuses); the California State University (23 campuses); and California Community Colleges (110 campuses within 72 districts). That may not seem like a lot for a state the size of California, but within a 15-minute drive north or south, I can choose from three community colleges. Is that financially prudent?

This is the 21st century. We have a global economy. We have created technology that makes economies of scale scale even larger that ever before. We should stop living with 20th century (or worse, 19th century) perspectives and start thinking creatively about how we can be more efficient, how we can adapt quickly to the way the world is changing.

Cities that are considering consolidation shouldn't be anomalies — they should be the norm. Yet because of political will (or more likely, lack of it), no one wants to consolidate the fiefdoms that they've built. Worse, the government is telling us that big is bad.

That's not true. Big badly run — whether in the public sector or the private sector — is bad. The Titanic didn’t sink because of its size; it sank because of its design and how it was run. Big run well could be the best use of our increasingly limited financial resources.

When Should Boomers Euthanize Their Dreams?

2010-01-25T10:36:00.000-08:00

What did you want to be when you grew up? Such an American question, imbued with the ideals of choice and determination and freedom.

And how'd that work out for you? Did your dreams come true? If not, when did you euthanize them? More important, what made you decide to kill them?

I was talking to a high-school classmate of mine a few months ago about this. Dan and I had acted together in high school plays; he was frequently the lead and I was always a supporting character. He had gone to UCLA and pursued an acting career, one that never really went anywhere. Now that there’s DVD technology, he says wryly, you can pause Steven Spielberg's 1941 and find him as an extra in the crowds.

But eventually, he told me, he realized he wasn't getting where he wanted to be. "I had to say, you know what, I gave it that shot, and now it’s time to grow up. Time to move on."

I'm trying to make that same decision about writing fiction, but I'm not having much luck. I find myself staring into a chasm of fruitlessness, and yet I can't stop myself from edging across this rickety, dilapidated rope bridge. I used to say that I'd give up my fiction writing when I turned 50. It didn't happen. I don't understand why I still cling to a shred of raggedy hemp.

I had my chances. I wrote a screenplay after college that I managed to get into Universal Studios, thanks to a national film essay award I won. I got a partial story credit on a Remington Steele episode, but only because I was dating Stephanie Zimbalist's best friend at the time. This is why I can say in all truthfulness that I slept my way into Hollywood. If you want to see the episode, called "Steele in the Chips," it’s on Disc 7 of Season 3, available through Netflix. (Be sure to listen to the commentary, especially when executive producer Michael Gleason asks Stephanie who I am, and she replies, "Some guy — I forget." I'm thinking of using that for my epitaph.) I had an agent once that half-heartedly sent a novel around New York, but it was just after 9/11 and I don’t think anyone was paying attention.

What I'm facing, I fear, is a classic clash between my id and superego. My pleasure-prone id still lusts after fame and fortune, the fantasy of celebrity and philanthropy.

My rational superego insists the dream is not necessary to my life. My wife would live with me in a mobile home if it came to that. The friends I had before Remington Steele are the same friends I have now; our camaraderie was not based on my being successful in Hollywood. The cats are completely indifferent, as long as there's Fresh Catch in the pantry.

My id hones in, scud-like, on the stories of elderly authors like Helen Hooven Santmyer, who published And The Ladies of the Club at 88. My superego responds to stories like these by noting that family or other connections usually escorted them through the publisher's door.

My id believes I am still young, still a potential prodigy, with stories to tell. My superego deems the whole idea ridiculous, and doubly so in light of the fact that I have friends and colleagues who have gotten agents, and have sold novels, and who have even seen them made into movies, without any significant impact on their lives.

But still I am drawn back to the keyboard and characters I want to know better. I hear my superego asking, why spend the time? But this particular dream refuses to slip away.

The compromise sits clearly within semantics. On one side of the chasm is writing; on the other side, getting published. Unlike my friend Dan, I don’t need a stage and an audience. My fiction writing may never amount to anything, and that's okay. We play the piano, knowing that we'll never be concert pianists. We swim, knowing that we’ll never compete in the Olympics. We exercise, knowing that we will never get our 32-inch waists back. I make up stories, knowing they may never live anywhere else except my heart.

Addressing An Aggravating Issue

2010-01-18T06:30:00.000-08:00

If I were boss of the world, my first order would be for all high-tech CEOs to have to drive themselves to a randomly chosen office on one of their own campuses. Then they'd see just how difficult it is for outsiders to find where the heck they’re going.

If you've ever been to Silicon Valley, you know that it's the land of expansive campuses of tilt-up buildings, so-called because they're low buildings, usually two to three stories, the walls of which were lifted up into place, not unlike an Amish barn raising (though with mechanical assistance).

Because the valley was originally farmland, valley real estate tends to be spread out, separated only by parking lots. As the industry has consolidated, you have more and more employees clustered into clusters of buildings — most of which have addresses that are either marginally visible, non-existent, or just plain obtuse.

I visited one high-tech company (which, like the others, shall remain nameless, since I am a contractor to many of them) last month using the address on its Web site. What its Web site failed to include was the directional designation of the street.

Now, there are two problems here. First — I'm embarrassed to admit — I had traveled this particular street thousands of times and had never noticed a) that it had a directional designation and b) that at what thoroughfare it switched from one to the other. When a street is a mile from your house, you don't look at those things. Also, I was fairly confident that I knew the general area where this company's offices were — except I was wrong. They had been there at one time, of course, but had moved; as I'm fond of saying, don’t tell me what’s there now — tell me what was there 20 years ago, and I'll find it.

Second, directional designations present a special challenge in Silicon Valley because of the way the peninsula curves between San Jose and San Francisco. The direction you frequently think is north is actually west. Even though I grew up here, I'm still surprised to see the sun set where it does.

Okay, so last month's lost-in-the-valley was on me. But this month, I headed out to another company, looking for the number I was given by my contact there. When the buildings on the street shifted to residences, and the number of digits dropped by one, I knew I had crossed over into the next town. I pulled over, punched the address into my GPS (which, believe me, is no guarantee of finding anything), and headed back. The GPS cheerily told me that I was approaching my destination on the right, and then said, "You have arrived."

The only problem: the location at which I had arrived was not leased by the company I was looking for. Suspecting that I was at least close, I turned into the next driveway — which had a completely different street address from the one I was looking for — and discovered that while the buildings were numbered, none of them had their actual street address on them. I called my contact (thank goodness for cell phones), and he said he'd come get me.

This is not a random occurrence. I've been to Silicon Valley buildings that do have clearly labeled address numbers, but they were set back far enough from the road that the numbers weren't visible until you'd already arrived. I’ve been to buildings where the address numbers are like bas-relief ornamentation that's impossible to see unless you’re standing underneath it or know to look up at the corner of the sixth floor.

And to be fair, I shouldn't vilify Silicon Valley alone. I once visited a company north of New York City that purposefully, as a security measure, had absolutely no signage identifying itself. A defense contractor? No, it was online service Prodigy, which gives you some idea of the high regard in which its executives held themselves. Incidentally, this was the company that was vilified for pioneering online advertising, and while it died a sad, lonely death, the Web looks today what Prodigy looked like 20 years ago. Irony sucks.

There is another challenge here in the valley. The original cities grew from their original downtowns into farmland until their boundaries met and melded: there are streets that run from one side of the valley to the other, but may have two or three names along the way, a vestige of the old days. Of course, municipal leaders could improve this, but they choose not to. It means actually collaborating with counterparts in other cities and possibly looking weak because if the street is changed from what it was in city A to what it is in city B. This means the businesses on the street in city A have to change their advertising, their stationery, and so on, and that gets the business owners angry at the municipal leaders — who, if they can be voted out of office, avoid that sort of outcome like the plague.

So if we can't control the names of the streets, that means it's doubly important for companies to make it easier to find their damn offices.

Are Boomers’ Bad Habits Spreading To Their Parents?

2010-01-11T07:52:00.000-08:00

Boomers are stereotypically self-indulgent, but now there's the possibility that they've spread the attitude to their parents. If so, it proves the adage: insanity is hereditary — you get it from your kids.

The New York Times published a story on Friday entitled Seeing Old Age as a Never-Ending Adventure. Talk about maddening. It was about seniors — people in their 80s and 90s — continuing to engage in adventurous pursuits. One of the sources was a man who engaged in wing-walking at 89.

The story's anecdotal lead told the story of an Ocala, Fla., woman who, at age 90, went hiking in South Africa. At some point during the three-week trip last August, she sprained her ankle, and because no one had thought to bring crutches along, she had to cut her trip short.

What the story doesn't mention is what "cutting the trip short" entailed, and what effect it had on the itinerary, the guides, and the other participants. I have some limited experience with this, one that was not pleasant. We took a cruise through Tahiti for my 50th birthday, and one of the optional shore excursions was a jungle walk on Raiatea. It was blatantly advertised as a strenuous hike, involving the use of ropes to climb up dirt slopes.

There was a very sweet man on the cruise named Henry (see photo), who, though well into his 80s, thought this would be a fun excursion. He lasted no more than about a third of the way through the journey, when he became short of breath and realized his folly at coming with us.

So what then? My spouse, an internist, was reluctant to leave him alone on what could barely be described as a trail. But there was only one guide; for him escort Henry back to town would mean essentially cancelling the trip. Henry insisted he would be okay, but my spouse wasn't confident of that. So what happened? She stayed with Henry, and missed a spectacular hike through the jungle that ended at a swimming hole at the base of a picturesque waterfall.

Back on the ship, our inquiries as to why a man of Henry's advanced age had been allowed to sign up for this excursion were met with shrugs and apathy. Nor was there any offer of a refund for my wife.

I don't want to sound ageist, for a variety of reasons. First, I realize that everyone is different. Back in the days when I was a travel writer, I spent a week in Morocco on a familiarization tour with a group of travel agents. One of them was 77, and after a day’s activities, she would jump into a cab with a couple of other agents and visit other hotels in the city to jot down notes.

Second, I know that there's only a narrow sliver of years from the time you have the discretionary income to travel adventurously to the time you stop collecting frequent flyer miles entirely.

Third, and most important, I know that I'm going to be making this decision myself someday. I only hope that I have the common sense to recognize my limitations. My own father, who will be 90 next month, went to Venice and Dubrovnik a couple of years ago with one of his granddaughters. I tried to explain to him, having just been there myself, that Venice is the quintessential walking city. But you can't just hail a cab to take you back to your hotel if you get tired. You can hail a gondola, of course, provided your hotel is actually on a canal and that you have converted most of your retirement fund into euros. To my father’s credit, he swore off European travel after that trip.

I'm all for staying active, but have some consideration for your fellow travelers. That certainly is not the case with the woman from Florida who sprained her ankle. She's going back to South Africa this year to complete the journey. Sheesh.

Crankcase for 2009

2010-01-05T13:15:00.000-08:00

Crankcases are short notes relating to aggravations and other humorous observations.

Crankcase: Security Check

I was flying out of San Jose airport a few weeks ago and noticed that the TSA had actually done something sensible with the security lines. One was marked "frequent travelers" and the other "infrequent travelers and families." This was apparently an effort to simplify the process for everyone. Now all they need is a third line for people who are too cheap to check luggage and try to pass off two suitcases as carry-on bags.

Crankcase: Oh, Sweet Mystery of Technology

If global business relies on technology, I often wonder how the whole system doesn't come crashing down around someone's ears. This week my laptop's Internet connection -- which uses Sprint's wireless broadband, the easiest and most reliable technology I've ever owned -- started getting sluggish.

Yesterday, it started timing out on everything -- Web pages, e-mail, even my online banking. I visited my local Sprint store, where a helpful technician swapped wireless cards with me. My card worked fine in his machine; his groaned in mine.

Geek Squad, which was two doors down in the same mall, wanted $200 and two days to diagnose the problem. If I was going to do that, I needed to get files off the computer and retrieve the power adapter first.

Before I went home, I stopped at Starbucks to use the Wi-Fi connection to at least download my e-mail, which, strangely enough, worked fine, as did my Web connections. As an occasional optimist, I then tried to open the broadband connection again. It worked like a charm.

So disabling one network connection and enabling a different network connection cleared out whatever cache was bogging down my work. But if problems pop up unbidden, and get solved by seemingly random solutions, how does anything get fixed except by accident?

Crankcase: Here’s a Free Idea For You

I saw a guy about my vintage at the gym the other day. I noticed him because he was wearing a terrific T-shirt – it read "Old Age – It’s Better Than Death." I asked him if it was part of a series, and he said he didn’t know because his "smart-ass kids" had gotten it for him.

If it’s not part of a series, I think the manufacturer is missing a big, big opportunity. I was thinking of new versions even before I left the gym.

“Amputation – It’s Better Than Gangrene.”

“Foreclosure – It’s Better Than Negative Equity.”

“Herpes – It’s Better Than No Sex At All.”

Crankcase: Giving A Finger to the Feds

I firmly believe our health care system is broken and in need of fixing. At the same time, though, I'm not convinced the federal government should be in the business of health care. Logically, it should, but I’m not convinced it has the collective intelligence to ensure that the situation will improve under its purview.

I make this decision after hearing about a request my wife — a primary care physician working for the Department of Veterans affairs — received regarding a patient. The request came from the Department of Defense, wanting to know why this patient could not be deployed back to Iraq. The man is 50 years old, has back problems, and displays symptoms of post-traumatic stress disorder.

As if that weren’t enough though, there’s this one other little condition the man has to deal with. Bear in mind that a perquisite for being deployed — no matter where in the U.S. Army — you must be able to shoot a gun. This particular patient had his right index finger amputated after an accident during his first tour of duty in Iraq. But the Department of Defense still wants my wife to explain why he shouldn’t be deployed.

These are not the people I want in charge of my health care.

Crankcase: They Can’t All Be Funny

I was interviewing a vice-president of IBM last week and started off by asking her to talk about what her responsibilities encompassed. She rattled off a litany of wide-ranging activities. As I frequently do when hearing such a mind-boggling list, I jokingly said, "So what do you do in the afternoons?"

When her response was complete silence, I said, "I guess I should stop saying that because people don't get the joke." She replied, "Oh, I got it. I just didn't think it was funny."

Crankcase: Stoned Wallabies

In the July 4th Earthweek column, columnist Steve Newman quotes a Tasmanian official complaining of wallabies (marsupials similar to kangaroos) who have been invading Tasmanian poppy fields and getting high on the flowers being grown for medicinal purposes. Clearly, this is the derivation of the term "hophead."

Time For A Different Kind of Holiday

2010-01-04T11:24:00.000-08:00

We have just come off the traditional season of gratitude and sharing, starting with Thanksgiving and wrapping up with Christmas.

I say, enough of this frivolity and joy. It's time to commemorate crankiness. If we can have a month of Advent, why can't we have a day of just Vent?

Scheduling it sometime in January would be appropriate, as the credit card bills from the holidays come in and the weather is still dark and stormy. January 29th would be perfect. It's within the appropriate wintry season, but more important, it's the day H.L. Mencken died in 1956. Mencken was the crusading newspaper editor who said it was the media's job to comfort the afflicted and afflict the comfortable. But he was also a well-known crank who defined cynic as someone who, when they smelled flowers, looked around for a coffin.

A potential back-up date would be February 12th, birthday of Alice Roosevelt Longworth. She was the Washington hostess known for saying, "If you can’t say anything nice, come sit next to me."

Commemorating a Day of Vent might be problematic, however. On most holidays, people take the day off. On this one, though, customer-service call centers would have to double their staff. When people take the day off, they like to go out and eat, but restaurants would probably be closed. None of their staff would want to work on a Day of Vent, because dealing with customers the other 364 days of the year is bad enough.

On the other hand, unlike other traditional holidays, it would be a perfect day for families not to get together. Venting about the accumulated slings and arrows of the preceding quarter-century would make for a truly depressing day.

It would also be an appropriate day for Disney to release a sequel to Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs. The story of Crabby, Grouchy, Surly, Sulky, Mopey, and Whiny (Grumpy, or course, would be retained from the original) could turn into an annual holiday classic, the flip side of It’s A Wonderful Life. Of course, I’m not sure of an appropriate title: Slush Gray and the Seven Dwarfs sounds like a porno movie; Seven Angry Men and Return of the Maleficent Seven sound like sequels to different movies entirely.

If anybody's going to work overtime on a Day of Vent, it should be the psychologists, psychiatrists, and licensed clinical social workers (LCSWs). They would have to schedule special extended hours. The good thing about a Day of Vent is that it could have therapeutic value all around. After all, what some people need is a good listening to.

Questions I’m Having Trouble Answering

2009-12-28T06:17:00.000-08:00

Another year older does not necessarily mean another year wiser. I still find myself tripping over unanswered — and sometimes unanswerable — questions.

● Why is there a dial tone when one person hangs up the phone on television? In real life, there's silence.

● Why did Sarah Palin call her autobiography Going Rogue? Did she somehow think when McCain’s campaign handlers said that, they were complimenting her?

● Why is the person who's waddling along in the slow lane almost guaranteed to take your exit?

● Why does Peyton Manning have more of a southern accent than his brother Eli?

● Why does my cat Bandit jump on me to wake me up in the morning and then stand in my path when I get up to get his breakfast?

● Why don't my fingernails and toenails grow at the same rate?

● What is it that Linda Hunt's character really does on NCIS: Los Angeles? She’s supposed to be the operations manager, but she spends an awful lot of time worrying about the agents getting blood on the clothes they wear. Is she really the wardrobe mistress?

● Why don't the number of leftover holiday cards ever match the number of leftover envelopes (even taking into account there’s usually an extra envelope)?

● Why does most improvisational jazz sound to me like eight-year-olds doing their best to damage musical instruments?

● If the hijacking in Air Force One was in response to the capture of a Russian general three weeks earlier, then how did the terrorists identify a renegade Secret Service agent so quickly?

● Whatever happened to Hootie and the Blowfish?

● When and why did champagne stopped being served in wide, shallow glasses and start being served in tall, narrow ones?

● How is that Maureen O’Hara, who played Natalie Wood’s mother in Miracle on 34th Street, has outlived her by so many years?

● Why does the Santa Ana Freeway go to San Diego and the San Diego Freeway end near Santa Ana?

● Why are there no more sanitariums? And whatever happened to oxygen tents?

● Given that their vehicles are remarkably similar except for cosmetic details, why does Ford Motor Company even need a Mercury division?

● Why isn't there more of a backlash against the swill Starbucks calls its Pike Place Roast?

● Why is someone stingy called a Scrooge when at the end of A Christmas Carol, he's undergone a thorough transformation? Shouldn't calling someone a Scrooge be a compliment?

Oh, well — on to another year in which the questions will undoubtedly outnumber the answers.

Caution: Caution Ahead

2009-12-21T07:44:00.001-08:00

If you’re looking for holiday cheer, you've come to the wrong place. As I watch the wrangling in Washington over health care, my despair over the state of politics in America deepens. Even though reform seems to be progressing, it's not clear who this reform helps, except the insurance companies.

I concur with Thomas Jefferson that the government that governs least, governs best. But there are problems so big that only government can logically tackle them; with this one, uninsured people are going bankrupt because of the cost of medical care. With premiums increasing, insured people don't have it so good either.

Admittedly, this is a complicated issue, because it involves three major industries: the medical profession, the insurance companies, and the legal profession. As the spouse of a doctor, I know that one of the big contributors to medical costs is malpractice premiums, but Congress doesn't seem to want to address that particular part of the triad (in part because most of them are lawyers).

Politicians have demurred about solving this problem previously, saying that gridlock prevents it. But now that the Senate, the House of Representatives, and the White House are all run by Democrats, they no longer have that excuse. So what's the hold-up?

It's not just health care. Back in 1973, the U.S. economy was thrown into recession and turmoil by an OPEC oil boycott. Today, 36 years later, we are no less dependent on Middle East oil than we were then. In my mind, we should have started investing in high-speed inter-city and intra-city mass transit years ago, because it gives us the biggest bang for the buck when it comes to solving multiple problems:

But our representatives — and I use the term loosely — are seemingly incapable of thinking big. I wrote to one of my senators, liberal Democrat Barbara Boxer, a while ago about this, and ended my letter saying that a mass-transit program was as important to us now as the interstate highway system was in the 1950s. I got a note back saying, "Thank you for your letter about the interstate highway system." (I also have an idea for mini-maglev vehicles, if any venture capitalists out there are interested.)

So what are politicians focusing on? I can't speak for others, but I know that my congresswoman, Democrat Anna Eshoo, has decided that the most important issue facing the United States today is ... wait for it ... the fact that television commercials are too loud. In the face of deficits, health care, war, and unemployment, she has decided that the most important use of her time is making sure that the volume of commercials does not exceed that of the associated telecast.

I'm not smart enough to understand why this idiocy is happening. I have my theories. In California, and perhaps in other parts of the country, I fear we have gerrymandered our way to congressional districts that are safe — that is, so highly populated with citizens on the right and the left that representatives have little opposition and thus little fear of being thrown out of office. You'd think that would make them more adventurous, not less, but even so, they don’t seem to want to do anything that will be seen as pioneering.

And what of our president, who seems to have grown excessively cautious, even though he came into office with a stunning mandate? (I knew he wasn't going to be a shining liberal; I went to college with Punahou grads, and none of them were liberals.) He was such an inspirational candidate, promising change we could believe in. It may be the holidays, but I’m having trouble believing.

All I see are the same problems bounced from congressional term to congressional term, with no one tackling real solutions. All the while, politicians, even after they're out of office, take advantage of terrific health care and pension plans that their constituents no longer have access to.

I never used to worry about this problem. When you're young, there always seems to be plenty of time to fix issues. When you're young, politicians are older, and presumably wiser. But things are different now. For the first time in my life, the president of the United States is younger than I am. The problems are obvious, the solutions perhaps less so, but doing nothing is not an option. If politicians are so powerful, why are they so cautious?

Friday Nights at 8:30, 1963

2009-12-14T08:00:00.000-08:00

It was with great sadness last Friday that I heard the news that Gene Barry had died. To most people, Gene Barry was a middling television actor and probably not widely remembered. But he meant a lot to me, and it took his passing for me to figure out exactly what that was.

His career had many high points. He starred in the original The War of the Worlds in 1953. He was the first murderer Peter Falk outsmarted in the original TV movie featuring Lt. Columbo, Prescription: Murder. He originated the role of Georges, the nightclub owner in La Cage Aux Folles, on Broadway. And he had the distinction of having three hit television series in three different decades: Bat Masterson in the 50s, Burke’s Law in the 60s, and The Name of the Game, which ended its three-year run in 1971.

The middle one was the one that endeared Barry to me. I was eight years old when it premiered on September 20, 1963, and watching it became a Friday night ritual that required very specific refreshments: a big bottle of root beer and a Sugar Daddy every single week (no wonder I had so many cavities as a child). A lot of shows at that time had to have a gimmick — The Addams Family was macabre and Bewitched had magic — but Burke’s Law had more than its share.

Ostensibly, it was about the Los Angeles Police Department’s chief of detectives, a man who just happened to be a millionaire. Amos Burke lived in a big house in what was presumably Beverly Hills. He had a Rolls-Royce equipped with mobile phone and driven by a Filipino chauffeur named Henry. Burke was a highly eligible bachelor, and in fact, the opening of the show followed a set pattern — first, the discovery of the body, and then Burke being interrupted in the middle of a date with a beautiful woman.

When the DVDs of the first season were finally released last year, my wife squinted at some of the episodes from under furrowed brow and said, "Of course you liked it — beautiful girls, fancy cars, big house — it's every eight-year-old boy's fantasy."

Was I really that shallow? Reflecting about it this weekend, I realized there was more to it. The show also had a wonderful wit, with frequent in-jokes. When Buster Keaton appeared, his character had laryngitis, so just as in silent-movie days, his voice was never heard (except for one off-screen line). When a murder occurred in the re-creation of an Old West town, Burke did a double-take at a headstone that read, "He Called Bat Masterson A Liar."

But for his first big hit, producer Aaron Spelling added another gimmick: every suspect was played by a Hollywood name. For a television junkie like me, this was delightful, even though I had only a vague concept of the greatness parading before me in the form of silent film stars such as Keaton, Gloria Swanson, and ZaSu Pitts, not to mention contemporary celebrities such as Broderick Crawford, Annette Funicello, Paul Lynde, Jim Backus, Zsa Zsa and Eva Gabor, and Don Rickles.

It must have been a great deal of fun, because the show frequently riffed on Los Angeles as the land of fruits and nuts. At least one — and sometimes all — the suspects were usually wildly eccentric. One episode included Telly Savalas as a Muslim fakir who sleeps on a bed of nails, Wally Cox as "the world’s only living vampire," and Gloria Swanson as a proponent of free love who believes she's the reincarnation of the goddess Venus (remember, this was before hippies).

I realize now that what resonated with me about the show were not the toys Burke had, but the laissez-faire attitude Burke exhibited toward these people. And why not? Burke was every bit as eccentric as the suspects he interrogated. Why else would a millionaire become a civil servant?

What a great lesson for a socially awkward eight-year-old — that no matter how out-of-step you felt, you lived in a place called California where you could be offbeat and even somewhat outrageous without regard for the judgment of others.

Thanks, Gene Barry, for playing such a debonair eccentric so well.

A Better Name: The Useless Tax

2009-12-07T07:21:00.000-08:00

Apparently the California state legislature is indulging in some gold-seeking fantasy — call it Treasure of the Sierra Nevada — that untold millions of dollars being siphoned out of state coffers from scofflaw business owners like me and the out-of-state companies I patronize. The cry has gone up: There's gold in them thar tills.

As you may know, the state of California seems to be in a perpetual level of fiscal purgatory when it comes to its state budget. The state government has either issued IOUs or shut down or both several times in the last few years when it ran out of money. The reasons for this are up for debate, ranging from the long-term effects of Proposition 13 hacking property taxes (for both residential and commercial real estate) to the short-term thinking of politicians who never met a spending proposal they didn't like.

In this latest development, I received a letter from the California State Board of Equalization the other day. These are the folks to whom California residents pay their taxes. It informed me that, as a business owner in California (as a freelancer, I am essentially a sole proprietor), I was required to pay a "use tax" on all merchandise purchased via online or mail-order methods that I use for my business. It's essentially a sales tax levied even though the purchase was not made in California. Consider this scenario: if you go down to the mall and buy a DVD, you're charged sales tax, which goes to the state. If you order it through Amazon.com, you avoid the sales tax. The state government is beginning to get cranky about missing out on that money.

Interestingly, this is not a new tax. It's just being newly enforced because of California’s budget difficulties. Don’t get me started on politicians who enact laws they can't enforce.

Here's a happy thought for the future: the law doesn't just apply to businesses. Consumers purchasing items by mail order or online are supposed to pay taxes on such merchandise as well. Although the whole idea of taxing online sales raises the hackles in Silicon Valley, I'm reasonably confident the government will be targeting consumers next.

But the SBOE is starting with businesses. The letter I received asked me to register my intent to pay the use tax for the tax years 2006, 2007, and 2008 ("asked" is probably too mild a word). As a good citizen who likes driving on roads and having water pumped to my house, I did so.

Then I went up into the attic where my tax records are stored to tally up all the items I'd purchased for my business in the last three years so that I could make restitution to the state I love so dearly.

I found three items: laptop batteries, a digital phone recorder, and an engineering technology book I'd gotten from Amazon.com.

Upon checking the receipts, I discovered that the company that sold me the batteries was based in Anaheim, so they'd already charged me California sales tax. The company that sold me the recorder was based in New Jersey, but because I was in California, it, too, had already collected the appropriate sales tax.

That leaves the engineering technology book, which cost $64.95. The tax rate in my county at the time of the purchase was 8.25%, meaning that the SBOE has embarked on this massive effort to recoup dollars and has managed to extract from this sole proprietor the grand total of … $5.36.

Of course, there may also be a penalty.

Tribute to an Imprisoned Lawyer

2009-11-30T08:11:00.000-08:00

This past Thanksgiving weekend was a pro football fan's dream — three games on Thursday, three on Sunday, and one yet to come tonight. That's seven times to hear the national anthem, and to be reminded of a lawyer who went on a mission of mercy one September afternoon and ended up imprisoned himself. The connection may not seem obvious; in fact, it's a little aggravating to me that the story has been forgotten so easily.

Just as now, it was a time of war. The lawyer was attempting to secure the release of a physician who had been captured by the enemy and being held on a ship anchored in the harbor. It was a different kind of war than the kind we wage today, I think. The captain of the ship invited the lawyer to stay for dinner — not to be hospitable, perhaps, but probably because the lawyer and his entourage, by virtue of boarding the ship, had become privy to its position and that of other enemy ships.

The lawyer and his entourage could not have known that a battle was about to begin, and the commander of the vessel was not about to let him go to warn his countrymen. After a pleasant meal, the lawyer was sent below decks as the battle began. I often think of him sitting there, under guard, helpless, having done no more than his lawyerly duties and thereby being caught up in the tide of battle.

He sat and watched his beloved city under siege, listening to the thunder of the guns and seeing the smoke rise and fog the air over a massive fort on the shore. At one point, the smoke cleared for a moment, and amid the flashes of cannon fire, he saw something that inspired him: the American flag, still waving undisturbed above the stone walls of the fort.

The lawyer's name, of course, was Francis Scott Key, and it was the night of September 13, 1814. He sat in the HMS Tonnant, not far from Fort McHenry, throughout the Battle of Baltimore, and later wrote the words of the "Star Spangled Banner" based on what he saw from his shipboard prison that night.

I don't tear up for lawyers too often, but whenever I hear the national anthem — as I did so many times this weekend — I remember a man who put himself in harm's way, his night of imprisonment, and the inspiration he took from it.

Battle of the Bulge

2009-11-23T07:10:00.000-08:00

Middle age, it has been said, is the time when you stop growing up and start growing out.

I can attest to this. It is a cruel trick of nature that just about the time you can afford to eat anything that appears on a menu, your metabolism turns your body into a packrat. "Sure," I can hear it saying, "eat whatever you want. We'll store it over here … forever."

Personally, I am multiply cursed in this regard. For one thing, I love to cook. Even as other sins come up on the schedule less frequently, eating is always convenient and fulfilling.

For another thing, I'm married to someone who bears more than a passing resemblance to Katharine Hepburn — tall, thin, and opinionated. Her metabolism has not turned her body into a packrat; her metabolism has daily garage sales. She can eat a pound of See's candy and show no ill effects. It is, to say the least, highly aggravating.

To top it all off, she's also a physician, so her conversation is dotted with technical phrases like "pre-diabetic" and "body mass index," as well as less-technical phrases like "heart attack."

I am tired of hearing her use phrases like this. She thinks that just because she's a doctor and I'm married to her, I'm supposed to heed her advice. Of course, one time I didn't listen to her, and I almost died. She has never let me forget this incident, no matter how many times I remind her that I'm not dead.

Her advice to me regarding losing weight: keep my caloric intake down to 1,500 calories per day. This is roughly the equivalent of asking Congress to limit the federal deficit. You think it sounds doable, but some things are just way too tempting.

Speaking of the government, its guidelines really don't help much. Have you ever really looked at the Nutrition Facts box on the food you eat (the one above is for Cheerios)? Here's a tip — don’t look at the calories alone. Look at the serving size. Once a friend of mine took a measuring cup and showed her husband a serving size of Grape-Nuts. He sneered accurately, "That’s not a serving. That’s the dust from the bottom of the box."

And take ice cream. If you go to the Web site The Calorie Counter, it lists the serving size of ice cream as one-half cup. Hey, without too much effort, I can get a half-cup of ice cream in one spoonful. My favorite, however, is its nutrition listing for rich chocolate ice cream. It calculates this as having all of 26 calories. The serving size is the key: it's one cubic inch.

Suffice to say, 1,500 calories a day is a mirage. It is, however, a mirage that keeps me going. I tracked my calorie intake for a month and found, with some effort, that I can hit the 1,600-1,700 range. Exercising helps. I have lost twelve pounds while occasionally having pizza and beef so I do not feel deprived (there was even some Halloween candy in there). I am now wearing pants I have not been able to fit in for years.

The only thing I haven't figured out is how to keep my wife from thinking I’m following her advice.

Wonderful Life, Wonderful Wizard: Accidental Classics

2009-11-16T07:47:00.000-08:00

In an unusual convergence recently, the San Francisco Chronicle film critic, Mick LaSalle, wrote about the 70th anniversary DVD edition of The Wizard of Oz (taken from the L. Frank Baum book, The Wonderful Wizard of Oz). A smaller squib in the same section noted that It's A Wonderful Life was about to be released in a Blu-Ray version.

Most people think of these as unadulterated classics from the moment they were released, but that couldn't be further from the truth. Even as my sentimental side cries every time Mr. Gower slaps young George's ear hard enough to make it bleed, my crankier, more cynical side reminds me that it was sheer repetition that put these in the pantheon. Does this mean that if you force-feed the American public something, sheer repetition erases the initial mediocre reaction and it becomes beloved. Or -- and this is my sentimental side speaking -- does it mean that sometimes, we miss the beauty in some art the first time around?

As LaSalle notes, the original box office receipts of The Wizard of Oz were disappointing; it was its annual showing on television, starting in 1956, that gave it a gloss that it's never lost. And that happened by accident. As Aljean Harmetz notes in The Making of the Wizard of Oz (Knopf, 1977), CBS offered MGM $1 million for the television rights to Gone With The Wind. MGM, still confident that the Civil War epic could make money in the theatres (which it did), turned CBS down. As an afterthought (Harmetz's word), CBS offered $225,000 for the broadcast rights to The Wizard of Oz. MGM granted them, along with an option for annual re-showings.

The same kind of accidental chain of events affected Frank Capra's It’s a Wonderful Life. As Capra recounts in his autobiography, The Name Above The Title, the movie was soundly panned upon its release. Whether this negative reaction triggered a disdain for the movie or not, whoever owned the copyright on the film let it lapse. It’s A Wonderful Life entered the public domain, which allowed independent television stations to show it free of charge at will. It was repetition that led to re-discovery.

Now, don't get me wrong. I love both of these movies, for exactly these reasons. When I watch the Wizard DVD today, I'm always surprised when it doesn't cut to a commercial after Bert Lahr runs out of the wizard's throne room, because that was the way I was used to seeing it. One of the first times I saw Wonderful Life was one Christmas Eve with my parents, my sister, and her fiancée; it was a pleasant moment in an adolescence not known for them.

I'm willing to admit I'm being too cynical about this. No matter how CBS originally got Oz, its ratings were high. And Life became so popular that it began to be shown in theatres on Christmas Eve. I will never forget the year I went with a fraternity brother and his sister; she sat between us with a box of tissues and dispensed them to him and me at appropriate intervals.

Maybe classics aren't made, but borne by the public to that status. Casablanca wasn’t supposed to be anything more than a run-of-the-mill Warner Bros. World War II movie, but Allied Forces had just invaded Morocco when the studio was about to release it. The city of Casablanca was in the headlines, and that fomented interest. (If you read Round Up The Usual Suspects, the making-of book Aljean Harmetz (again) wrote about Casablanca, you'll see how accidental a success it really was.)

This makes me wonder if there other "classics" that have been made but not yet re-discovered by a new generation with a different perspective. Are there so-called bombs that fell by the wayside, waiting to be resurrected by repeated showings on fifteen movie channels and 24-hour cable? I hate to think I'm missing something wonderful out there.

Little Boy Lost

2009-11-09T07:20:00.001-08:00

The high school I attended in the early 1970s, Palo Alto's Gunn High School, is experiencing an increasingly unnerving suicide cluster, with four students having stepped in front of local commuter railroad trains and at least twice as many more reported to have made the attempt.

The news is disconcerting in its own right, but it is also disturbing because it brings up memories of one of the school’s first suicides — one of my classmates who, on a summer day in 1970, just a few weeks before entering high school, leapt from the Golden Gate Bridge.

Admittedly, Gunn was never an easy place to go to school. U.S. News & World Reports ranked it No. 74 on its list of top 100 high schools in the country this year. Among its students are both the offspring of the Stanford faculty and those who live in a tony neighboring town named Los Altos Hills. By law, its residential lots can be no smaller than one acre. In 1970, it was where the rich kids lived. Today, it's where the richer kids live.

If, like me, you didn't think you were as smart as the smart kids, or as rich as the rich kids, and weren't athletic, Gunn was not the happiest place on earth. But none of this applied to my classmate David. His father was a Stanford professor, and David had also been on our junior high school's football team, which had gone undefeated the previous season.

I did not know David well, so last week, I pinged several people who had gone to elementary school with him, hoping to get a sense of what happened. I also called his younger brother, Doug, who is now a psychologist living near Zurich. I discovered that, even though almost forty years has past, David's memory stays with each of us in different ways. Lisa still has the valentine David gave her in third grade. Peter can't look at the Golden Gate Bridge without a chill going down his spine.

They reminded me of what had transpired that August day. David had gone to San Francisco with Steve, another classmate, and suggested they walk across the Golden Gate Bridge. Before they had gotten all the way across, David announced he was going to jump. Before Steve could even process that David wasn't joking — his first reaction — he was gone. "Most of us were really angry that David had done that to Steve," Lisa remembered.

At home, Doug said, David had left two letters in the dictionary, one next to death and one under m for Mary, a girl who'd recently broken up with him and whose family had moved away. The first note expressed his utter hopelessness at the state of the world. He had apparently internalized the turmoil of the '60s — the war in Vietnam, the assassinations, the urban riots — and convinced himself that the world would never be better. Doug also said told me something I'd never heard before: the year before, their grandfather had been diagnosed with cancer and committed suicide. "He was a rancher who knew that you shoot a lame horse. David admired that courage," Doug said. Whether it was unrequited love or societal disillusion doesn’t matter now; David chose what Ann Landers aptly called a permanent solution to a temporary situation.

When I heard the news, I was surprised and bewildered, just as the community is surprised and bewildered today. Even though I distinctly felt apart from the rich and the smart, I still thought of us as being lucky to be living in Palo Alto. I didn't feel academic pressure, as today's kids probably do (one of my teachers labeled me a "blithe spirit" who needed to knuckle down). While Lisa never felt it — and her father was one of Stanford's most famous professors at the time — Doug noted that his parents insisted on high standards.

All of us all labored under expectations, though, whether from our parents, our classmates, or ourselves. Still, I understand how a confluence of loss and discouragement can be overwhelming, especially to a 14-year-old. It is only with age that I've realized this simple fact: things change. Life rarely turns out the way we think it will, and sometimes it leads us in wholly unexpected directions.

I never thought I'd actually get accepted at Stanford myself. Even as a child of Silicon Valley, I never thought I'd understand computers. So I really never thought I would have a successful career writing about business and technology. My expectations — thankfully — turned all wrong. I wish David — and the teens on the tracks — had given their expectations the chance to do the same.

The saddest irony: the only thing that hasn't changed after all this time is David. He is vividly etched in all our memories, just the way he was on that sad summer day, forever lost but forever remembered.

Whatever Happened To Halloween?

2009-11-02T07:49:00.000-08:00

Another Halloween come and gone. One of the fondest memories I have of trick-or-treating as a child was the news that someone was passing out real caramel apples — an amazing concept to a child (and even more amazing to an adult who's tried making them). I don't even remember if there were any left by the time I got there — just the pleasure of the journey was enough to seal it in my memory book.

To try and bestow that same kind of wow! factor today, I splurged and bought full-sized candy bars — 60 of them, in fact. None of these fun-sized midgets for me. As I write this, there are 18 left. And I would say that teen-agers, not children, represented half of those who came to our haunted doorstep (see photo).

We don't live in some out of the way place, either. It's a housing development, the kind of neighborhood that would have been teeming with children in the old days (heck, the family that owned the house before we did had eight kids).

As I wrote recently in Funny How Things Turn Out, this house and neighborhood are eerily similar to the one I grew up in. Even better for trick-or-treating, my old neighborhood was tucked away between railroad tracks, a cemetery, and a creek — all natural boundaries that made it a nicely self-contained place for two hours of candy-ransacking. When we were older, and Halloween fell under a full moon, dashing through the cemetery was especially exciting.

But was I mis-remembering how wonderful it was? I polled my sister and several next-door neighbors from those days. My sister Ann remembers a late-1950s group effort in which every house had a different activity — one was a haunted house where the kids reached into bags to feel creepy things they were told were eyeballs; at our house, our mother made donuts (which was almost as cool as caramel apples, but she never did it again).

But my brother-and-sister neighbors both recounted the embarrassing year that their father, on a health food kick, passed out apples instead of candy. As if that wasn't bad enough, he ran out of apples and started handing out potatoes instead. This could so easily have been the inspiration for Charlie Brown saying, "I got a rock," in It’s The Great Pumpkin, Charlie Brown. In the dark, a potato would look and feel like a rock.

Even so, amid the shower of candy, I doubt kids would remember the potato or the apples. At the same time, I find it so ironic than in the white-bread, Christian-dominated world of the 1950s (when "under God" was added to the Pledge of Allegiance, after all), a completely pagan holiday such as Halloween could thrive. Yet now, in the 21st century, a much more secular time, Halloween seems to have withered like an aging witch. The very same people who presumably enjoyed it as children are the ones sitting with the lights off and the curtains closed.

I don't know what happened, but I will keep buying full-size candy bars until that sad, dark evening that the doorbell doesn’t ring at all.

Happy Holidays!

2009-10-26T07:32:00.000-07:00

Today Middle-Age Cranky takes a hiatus from being cranky and turns to the subject of celebrating, fun, merriment, and other holiday-related activities. Too soon for the holidays, you say? Au contraire -- not in my territory.

I know that most of the rest of the country thinks people in the San Francisco Bay Area are crazy. We're the land of fruits and nuts. If you tip the U.S. on its side, everything loose will roll to the coast. One of my favorite comments came when Glenn Close and Mandy Patinkin made a movie here called Maxie back in the 1980s: “Only in San Francisco would the female lead of a movie be named Glenn and the male lead be named Mandy.”

Personally, I attribute it to jealousy.

The bottom line is, we know how to have fun here, more fun than the rest of the country. Take the concept of the holidays. In the rest of the country, the holidays tend to start around Thanksgiving (though Hallmark keeps trying to push it earlier). I have long harbored a theory that the holiday season in San Francisco actually starts with Halloween and continues through Valentine's Day.

I cite the Halloween kickoff for a couple of reasons. First, the holidays always involve sweets, whether through baking or candy, and Halloween is ground zero for candy. I also tip my hat to those wild and crazy guys in the Castro District. They know how to party-hearty when it comes to costumes, bless them.

Then come the traditional holidays we share with everyone else: Thanksgiving, Chanukah, Christmas, New Years. Thanks to a vibrant African-American community, throw Kwanzaa in there too.

Come January 2nd, you might think the party’s over. Not here. Unlike most areas, we have two football teams to choose from. Though they've lapsed considerably in the last few years, between 1970 and 2002 (with the exception of three seasons), either the San Francisco 49ers or the Oakland Raiders competed in the NFL playoffs. That meant every weekend in January was a celebration worthy of tailgating or football-watching parties. (We still do this, but the efforts are little more half-hearted.)

February, of course, signals the beginning of the Chinese New Year. For many years, San Francisco had the largest concentration of people of Chinese descent in the U.S. (though it has recently been superseded by New York City). Hence, that was always a big deal.

Finally, given its official song ("I Left My Heart in San Francisco") and its unofficial motto ("the cool grey city of love"), the holidays really don’t wrap up around here until Valentine's Day.

That's three-and-a-half solid months of celebrations and merry-making. Call us crazy if you must, but don't call us too early because we’ve been out the night before having fun.

Funny How Things Turn Out

2009-10-19T07:43:00.000-07:00

When singer Billy Joel was being interviewed by Playboy many years ago, he took the reporter out to the dock behind his Long Island home. It was night and the house glowed with warm light. Joel confessed to the reporter, "I keep waiting for the parents to come home."

The idea that we are living in our parents' home even when we're the ones making the mortgage payments is a powerful one. It was only some months after we bought our current home five years ago that I realized that I had unintentionally but delightfully bought an upgraded version of the house I grew up in. The house I grew up in was built in 1956; our current home was built in 1960. They were admittedly tract homes, but I like the consistency that a tract brings.

There were, of course, numerous apartments and condos and townhouses in the interim; young-adult accommodations that had their own sense of excitement and enjoyment. But I have to admit that there is nothing so comforting as coming home to a home that feels like a home is supposed to feel.

Because California real estate is a strange and unexpected world, the house in which I was raised has already been razed and replaced by a McMansion. But like our current house, it had a family room with a fireplace and a living room with a fireplace. It had an expansive backyard that was, in fact, two lots; another house has already been built on the second lot. We currently have a pie-shaped lot that provides plenty of space for gardening and other pursuits.

But there are totems in our current house that carry fond memories of that long-gone home. A conch shell (above), origins unknown, sits on our hearth, just as it did in the house of my childhood. A Howard Miller Westminster chime clock sits on the mantel, just as one from Seth Thomas did before. The family photograph that was shot in our living room in 1968 hangs on the wall in the upstairs hallway.

How strange to find that the memories and archetypes of childhood are so strong that they would infuse my adult life. On the other hand, growing up in the 50s and 60s in suburban California contributed to more archetypes than my own. I never thought that the tree-lined streets of Leave It To Beaver and Father Knows Best were fake — that was exactly what my neighborhood looked like. It’s what my neighborhood still looks like.

Of course, the ironies here are thick enough to cut with a knife. While my childhood may have been physically comfortable, it was not emotionally comfortable. The unhappy memories outnumber the happy ones considerably. Perhaps that's why I love our current house so much. I'm not waiting for the parents to come home. This time around, I get to be the adult.

Help Save Coco and Cookie From Their Irresponsible Parents

2009-10-12T06:01:00.000-07:00

Every so often I get something via e-mail that makes my blood boil. Last Friday I got an e-mail from an acquaintance with whom I’ve occasionally worked in feral cat rescue; we are usually the recipients of anything relating to animals in need.

But there's a difference between animals in need and animals being abandoned. I've seen pleas similar to this one before, and I don't understand them anymore than if they were written in Sanskrit.

"We are moving overseas in just 2 weeks. Unfortunately, I have still not been able to find a good home for Cookie and Coco. We're not able to take our beloved doggies with us and I've been desperately trying to find a home for both of them together . They were raised together and pine without each other. The Lab rescue [groups] have already said that they would probably separate them, so this is my last resort. Recently I tried to take Coco out in my car alone and she TOTALLY refused to even get into the car without Cookie......!!!! She absolutely pulled back on her haunches until Cookie was by her side.”

Hey, lady, how do you think they're going to react without you? Cookie and Coco look to you as the head of their pack. You don't think they’re going to miss you?

Why in the world would someone adopt two dogs if there was even a modicum of a chance you’d have to leave the country three years later? I keep hoping to hear that there are some sort of extenuating circumstances here, but I can't fathom any (and I haven’t heard back from my acquaintance about this person's circumstances [see update below]).

Many years ago, there was a flyer posted on the door of our then-veterinarian's office. It was a similar plea to adopt a cat. Why? Because the woman had had a baby and they wouldn't be able to pay attention to the cat. I wanted to call them and ask if they were going to give the first baby away when a second one arrived because they wouldn't be able to pay as much attention to it.

I just don't get this. Adopting an animal is a commitment for the animal's lifetime. They're not furniture you turn over to Goodwill because suddenly they don't match the décor. Even in our late Tuxedo's worst days of barfing and spraying, we never considered traipsing him down to the animal shelter and surrendering him. The day we adopted him, we made a commitment to him that he would always be safe and warm and well-fed (we kind of went overboard on that last one). We couldn't have loved him more than we did — and we certainly cherished him more than any piece of furniture or carpeting.

What saddens me most is that animal lovers will read this and understand. And the people who really need to get the message won’t.

Postscript: I learned after posting the real story about Coco and Cookie. They were indeed available for adoption, but back in February. They have been with a new family for quite a while. Their owners were not going overseas -- their house had been foreclosed upon and they were moving into an apartment that didn't accept animals. I can accept these as extenuating circumstances in this case, with regrets. However, my disdain for people who treat animals like furniture remains intact.

What Was This Blog Entry Supposed To Be About?

2009-10-05T07:12:00.000-07:00

I am happy to report that I have stopped having college-related nightmares. It only took 30-plus years.

The one that I had most frequently throughout the years took place around finals week. I would suddenly realize that I was supposed to have been attending a particular class all quarter. While I may have dropped in on a few classes earlier in the term, months have passed and I have blanked on that particular commitment. It doesn't help that, as I try to conjure an explanation for the professor, I can't find the classroom anywhere.

The other nightmare that seems to have faded into justified obscurity over the years relates to post-graduation call from some administrative office within the university. A less-than-apologetic voice explains that an error has been made, and I really didn't have enough credits to graduate. My diploma is now invalid, and to gain proper standing as an alumnus, I need to take one more class.

If there's a theme here, it's that something’s missing; something's been overlooked and it's my fault. I wish I knew where this fear of forgetfulness comes from, this internal requirement to be sharp, be alert, don't let anything slip by you. Heck, I'm usually extremely organized.

The times I really have screwed up have been few and far between, but they make wonderful cocktail-party fodder. I cited one a few weeks ago in The Fees, The Rule of Three, and Me, when I incurred change fees from United because I'd made online reservations for the wrong day. The more interesting one occurred when I diligently researched flight schedules for a trip from San Francisco to Vancouver in advance of a cruise to Alaska my wife and I were taking. I noted the flight time in my calendar.

But as the day for the cruise approached, I realized I had no paperwork confirming those reservations. No e-mail from the airline either. This gave me the same frisson of fear that the finals week dream did. I called the airline and said hopefully, "I want to confirm my reservations for tomorrow's flight."

The reservations clerk was dutifully apologetic when he said, "I'm sorry, Mr. Baldwin, but you have no reservations on that flight." Further, he said, there were no remaining seats. There were seats available on a flight a few hours later, he added; I could almost hear him gulp as he said this: "The fare is $1,200." I told him I had no choice and booked the seats (it turned out they were $1,200 because they were in first class, and that figure included our return flight as well).

Ever since, when I put a flight schedule in my calendar, I amend it with the notation "reservation not yet made."

With a modicum of dread, I assume there must be a middle-aged equivalent of the forgetting-class dream. Will I show up at some border crossing without my passport? Will I fill out Part B of my Medicare application incorrectly? Will I start being ostracized at reunions? (Although that dream may have already started.)

More likely — I hope — the middle-aged resourcefulness that spawns notations like "reservation not yet made" will detour these dreams deeper into my subconscious, where forgetfulness can legitimately take over.

Yes, Virginia, There Is A Downside

2009-09-28T07:49:00.000-07:00

Every so often I feel like "Middle-Age Cranky" puts a false face on me. I'm generally a positive, upbeat person; that's probably why the aggravations of life seem bigger to me: I don't generally focus on them, until it's time to post here.

In fact, every so often something sweet will happen and I'll want to write about it, but then I realize I'd be violating my published persona as a certified grouch, misanthrope, and pessimist.

Take the change of seasons. I love the fall, for so many reasons. As a change of pace, I thought about documenting those reasons. But then I realized there was a downside to every single one of them.

Upside: The NFL Season Launches
Marrying an Oakland Raiders’ fan has given me a much deeper appreciation for football, as has TiVo, because we can fast forward through the timeouts and the blathering. At the beginning of the NFL season, optimism about the 49ers’ and Raiders’ playoff hopes is at its highest.

Downside: The College Football Season Launches
My spouse has also developed an abiding love of college football, which makes me a football widower on both Saturday and Sunday. I can barely keep track of the players on my favorite professional teams in this era of free agency, much less the college players. And I don't care whether Lane Kiffin and Urban Meyer serenade Carrot Top all night long.

Upside: The New TV Season
After a summer of re-runs, I’m ready for new stories. We’re a big fan of Jerry Bruckheimer’s procedurals (CSI: Anywhere, Cold Case) and NCIS.

Downside: The New TV Season
There are two problems here. First, the Netflix DVDs tend to sit unwatched for weeks on end. Second, my spouse loves the dancing shows. I'm okay with the dancing, but I despise shrieking. This means I have to stifle the urge to strangle 1) Mary Murphy on So You Think You Can Dance and 2) the entire audience of Dancing With The Stars.

Upside: Cooler Temperatures
There is a wonderful county park not far from us with extensive hiking trails. The cooler temperatures of autumn and its rolling trails make it a perfect place to hike, without the summer swarms of visitors.

Downside: Cooler Temperatures
Fall brings different kinds of swarms to the park: an unbelievable number of both flies (there is a working farm in the middle of the park) and cross-country runners from local high schools. Neither the flies nor the runners seem to understand English.

Upside: Halloween
I love Halloween. Not for what it has become — an opportunity for teen-agers to roam looking to score candy, but as a remnant of childhood and waiting anxiously for darkness to come so children can roam the streets and still feel safe.

Downside: Halloween
Halloween is also the unofficial launch of the holiday candy season, a celebration I am trying to forego this season. 'Tis better to give than receive, so I'm trying to shed pounds rather than receive them. Somewhere there are Milky Way bars with my name on them, and I'd just as soon they didn't find out where I live.

Upside: Getting Dark Earlier
I thought about this a lot. There is no upside to it getting dark earlier.

Downside: Getting Dark Earlier
Daylight savings time used to occur each year on the weekend nearest my birthday and my half-birthday. Then they moved it, so it's harder to remember when to change the clocks. Besides, it's an antediluvian throwback to an agrarian culture that doesn't exist any more.

Oh, my. I guess I really am cranky.

Shreds of My Existence

2009-09-21T07:50:00.000-07:00

Not too long ago, the police department of the city in which I live sponsored a shredding event. Citizens could take up to ten boxes of records, receipts, and refuse in to have the contents shredded under the purview of the people sworn to ensure that our credit numbers wouldn't float away into the hands of criminals.

Although I thought this was a great idea, it's not exactly the way I like to see my tax dollars spent. I also realized that given the material being shredded, there wouldn't be a lot of time or effort expended to separate recyclable paper from old carbon receipts. I decided I would tackle the separating and shredding process myself.

That was how I ended up climbing into the attic and discovering that, while I had been diligent about saving evidence of my business expenditures, I had also lost track of way too much time. I had receipts dating back to the earliest days of the Reagan administration, which meant that I had carted these boxes unnecessarily through no less than four moves.

Even more enlightening was how even the flotsam of life has changed. Before computers, we were awash in carbon paper from credit card imprinters (which, interestingly enough, you can still purchase). These decades-old receipts all had long-lost credit card numbers on them, plain as day. What wasn't plain was the reasoning behind some of the purchases I'd made and long ago forgotten. I marveled at all the money that seemed to flow through my hands in my bachelor days, seemingly as plentiful and unmemorable as water.

It was also an agonizing reminder of how old I am (or, to put it in a sunnier way, how much life I've lived). I had:

• check stubs from projects I'd forgotten I'd done
• prescription receipts from illnesses I've long been cured of
• flight coupons from airlines that haven't existed for 20 years
• restaurant receipts from meals with people whose names (and even affiliations) were mysteries
• W-2s from too many companies that are out of businesses

It wasn't so much like walking down memory lane as it was walking through a graveyard of events that seemed very important at the time, but were just — especially after I subjected them to the voracious blades — shreds of my existence.

The Fees, the Rule of Three, and Me

2009-09-14T08:23:00.000-07:00

Twice in the same day last week, two companies I've done business with for a long time hit me with outrageous penalty fees that were (in my mind, of course) unjustified. One was United Airlines. I had made return flight reservations for the wrong day and had to change them; the fee to change them wasn’t much ($6), but without explanation, I lost our Economy Plus upgrades, which cost significantly more.

The other was the Bank of America, with whom I've had a love-hate relationship since college. My credit card bill was due on Labor Day, and I made the payment through online banking on the preceding Sunday. No, came back the reply, this won’t post until Tuesday. I'm confident there will be a $39 late fee for that (which, as a supposed valued customer, I will contest).

My rant, however, is not about these fees. It's that I feel powerless about protesting.

The most logical protest is to take my business elsewhere. But where? In economics, there's a concept called the "Rule of Three" (though I'll be darned if I can find who first proposed it). According to this rule, eventually competitors get whittled through attrition and acquisition until only three major players remain.

Take major American airlines. In my youth, you could chose from American, Delta, United, Pan Am, Eastern, National, and TWA for transcontinental flights. Today, only the first three remain. The idea of leaving United behind only brings back worse memories of the times I previously attempted to do so. Of the first three flights I booked on Delta, two were cancelled. The last time I flew on American, the gate agent tore out the wrong coupon from my multi-leg itinerary — and couldn't understand why I was so upset at the idea of arriving at my next destination without a ticket. (For you younger readers, this was when we still actually used tickets.)

Once upon a time, Macy's was our default department store. Retailers would supposedly kill for that kind of loyalty, right? No. After several bad-tasting episodes (one of which involving the receipt a grammatically incorrect, non-apologetic response from some assistant in customer service), we said hasta la vista, returning our credit cards sliced in two.

So what happened? Macy’s (then called Federated Department Stores) went on a buying frenzy. I think the only stores it currently doesn’t own are Wal-Mart and Nordstrom. I haven’t yet gotten to the point where I’ll shop at Wal-Mart, but I do patronize the latter. (To be completely truthful, though, because Federated bought Frederick & Nelson, we have been known to sneak into Macy’s and buy Frangos.)

The same obstacle applies to switching banks. I've never heard anyone say they were happy with their bank (though there have been times I’ve been happy with Bank of America, even after it was acquired by NationsBank). So what's the point of switching? No other institution is better; they've all risen to the same level of barely adequate.

So when you get to middle age, having tried most of the options available and found them lacking, you're stuck when it comes to taking your business elsewhere. There is no elsewhere. Besides, I've spent 20 years learning where all the Versateller machines are, and I'd hate to have to start over.

A Parade of Changing Tastes, Part II

2009-09-07T07:33:00.000-07:00

A couple of weeks ago, I had something to eat I hadn't had in years. It was something I’d fantasized about, and as with many fantasies, the reality fell short.

It was a fluffy, puffy cloud of pink cotton candy, straight out of the drum.

As any cotton candy aficionado knows, the food police have ruined the whole idea by requiring that it be put into plastic bags for cleanliness. But I was attending an A's game at the Oakland Coliseum, and to my delight, the vendor asked me if I wanted my cotton candy freshly made. I looked at him as if he'd just offered me a ride in a time machine.

But it was not the way I remember cotton candy. It didn’t taste as sweet. It didn’t crystallize in the air the way I expected.

There are probably multiple reasons for this. First, our taste buds, like everything else, age as we do. They get less sensitive (this is apparently why every restaurant in Palm Springs, including the Italian ones, forgoes spices in its food). Second, my primary venue for cotton candy as a child was the Santa Cruz Boardwalk. Perhaps a necessary ingredient to perfect cotton candy is salty sea air moistening selected crystals and turning them from wispy to hard and from pink to magenta. I can still remember the light crunching of the sugar and the incipient rotting of my teeth.

But it's not just cotton candy. I used to love fast food — Jack in the Box, Arby’s, Kentucky Fried Chicken. Up until recently, when I was on my own for dinner, I would visit KFC. I haven't been for quite a while. I can't tell if it's the memory of the greasiness that's deterred me, or the distant sound of my spouse's voice saying, "If you sit quietly while you eat that, you can hear your arteries slam shut."

It's not just the health concerns that haunt me. There's something about the taste of fast food that seems ... different from when I was younger. It doesn't have the same pop on the tongue that it used to. Not rancid, but perhaps the same freeway exit.

And breakfast cereals. You know how Jerry Seinfeld used to have ten boxes of cereal on a shelf in his kitchen on his TV show? That was my idea of heaven. I mourned the passing from my childhood of Post Crispy Critters and Sugar Rice Krinkles. I loved the Kellogg’s Jumbo Pac — 18 perforated boxes that you could open, pour in the milk, and eat right out of. (The Product 19 and the Rice Krispies were always left over.)

I used to love Trix and Froot Loops, but not after they added the radioactive colors. In the last few years, I have bought Post Alpha-Bits or General Mills Frosty O's in the hopes of crunching into old memory, but even those have lost their appeal. This from a man who used to think of Cocoa Krispies as boxed heroin.

When I was a child, I looked forward to a time when I could afford to indulge in any kind of food I wanted. But I have been betrayed — whether by my mind, whispering about health concerns, or by my withering taste buds, straining to reproduce a forgotten memory, I do not know.

I can look at old pictures; I can listen to old recordings; I can touch old toys; I can inhale aromas. Taste, I fear, is the only one of the senses that can never be recaptured.

A Parade of Changing Tastes

2009-08-31T08:21:00.000-07:00

I am beginning to doubt my taste. This is nothing new. I have friends who have doubted my taste for years.

I originally started to think about this in relation to one of the shows I loved as a child. Bewitched was the story of a mortal who marries a beautiful witch. I found Elizabeth Montgomery enchanting, pun intended.

I saw a re-run recently on TV Land and thought it was the most idiotic thing I'd ever seen. I couldn’t believe I'd actually looked forward to watching that show each week.

Okay, so the tastes of a child are different than the tastes of a man. But I also watched The Godfather again recently, which I had disliked as a teen-ager. I probably found it overly violent and wasn’t convinced by Michael Corleone's sudden transition from a soldier in the U.S. Army to a commander of a Mafia family. This time around, I understood better its rich undertones of family, loyalty, and the fact that sometimes life takes you unexpected places.

Then there's The Poseidon Adventure. I think I saw this disaster movie six times as a teen-ager. Now I can't bear to watch it. The action is all in the beginning of the movie, and the religious metaphor of climbing upward toward salvation annoys me. I am only somewhat placated by the fact that it was the top-grossing movie of 1973, so at least other people agreed with my initial assessment.

But the more I think about this, the more embarrassed I get. Most people don't know that I spent six years early in my career as a movie reviewer. (I rarely go now, not only because the incessant chattering aggravates me, and also because theaters don’t have captions like DVDs do.) The bulk of my reviews were published in the Stanford Daily, but some did appear in daily newspapers and magazines. I'm beginning to wonder if I owe a whole bunch of those readers an apology.

Sometimes, admittedly, I was dead-on. I skewered most of Peter Bogdanovich's post-Paper Moon disasters, such as Nickelodeon and At Long Last Love. I lavishly praised One Flew Over The Cuckoo’s Nest. But anything by offbeat or foreign directors, such as Altman or Antonioni, just left me cold. Oh, and I liked Funny Lady, the sequel to Funny Girl that disappeared like a rock and, to my knowledge, has never surfaced again. A classmate once told me that he and his friends used my reviews as a contrarian device; if I hated it, they bought tickets.

Now that I'm in middle-age, I'm wondering, do I have to re-think my whole value system regarding what's good entertainment? Do I have to go back and watch all the movies from my past all over again in order to form a more accurate opinion? The idea of sitting down for hours to prove myself wrong seems counter-productive, a time-consuming search for an inconvenient truth.

On the other hand, making amends may not be such a bad idea.

As I Lay Thinking About Death

2009-08-23T18:47:00.000-07:00

At the last high school reunion I attended, someone had the bizarre idea to create a memorial to all the people in the class, as well as those from the adjacent classes, who had died. It had roughly the same unsettling effect as the hagiography that's become part of the Academy Award ceremony, where they flash the famous faces who've passed on in the previous twelve months ("Richard Widmark died? When did that happen?").

On the sheet of poster paper, nicely laid out on a picnic table, I saw too many names I recognized — classmates, siblings of classmates, names of girls I'd dated, and names of girls I'd wanted to date. It shocked me anew that I'd gotten to the time in my life when I look at the ages in the obituary column and notice how close they are to my own.

It's only going to get worse. I've had close friends pass away, but not often: once when I was 21, again when I was 42. But those were on the upward slope of middle age. Now we're on the evening side of the mountain. One of my classmates since second grade passed away this year, in his early 50s, and I received via e-mail a link to his obituary. When I saw it, I couldn't help thinking, "Ah, the deluge begins."

In the 21st century, of course, we won't even have to wait until reunions to find out the death toll. With Facebook, the word about the sick, dead, and dying can spread even faster than before. Admittedly, though, there are kinks to work out; I received a Facebook message recently asking if I'd heard a rumor that a mutual friend had died in a hiking accident. Trying to confirm the rumor, I received the response: "Yes, it's true — but that was ten years ago."

That was disconcerting, but what is more disconcerting to me is my own ambivalence about death. The joyous part of me wouldn't mind hanging around another 50 years. The pragmatic part of me acknowledges that I've done almost everything I've wanted to do in my lifetime, including owning a convertible, swimming in a Tahitian lagoon, and sleeping with a virgin. (Shoot me, I'm a guy.) If I had to go soon, I'd have no regrets.

But then I'm back at the reunion, staring at the roll call of death and missing the missing. They're like the winners of a lottery you wouldn't want to enter. Against really high odds, they become famous and talked about, except for the wrong reason. Then, as time goes on, the odds start changing in all the Boomers' favor.

That's when death becomes more ordinary, and dare I say, desirable. I had a friend once, one of the older members of my college fraternity, who lived well into his 90s. He had an amazing life — graduating from Stanford to become a stockbroker in 1927, just before the stock market crash; becoming an itinerant agriculture buyer; going bankrupt; and eventually building a comfortable life for himself in San Francisco. But he outlived his younger brother, his wife, and most of his classmates.

That was life's bitter trade-off, he told me: the price of living a long time is having to say good-bye to all your friends as they leave. How sad to be the last one left at the reunion.

The Road Not Taken

2009-08-17T07:24:00.000-07:00

In a recession, it's natural to look back at your career and think, did I make the right choices along the way? What if events had transpired differently? I've started thinking back on some of the situations that have had the most impact on my career. Today, they're clearly inflection points from which two different possible sequences of events flow. I didn't know that term in the 70s; I only knew the Robert Frost poem, "The Road Not Taken," in which two roads diverged in a yellow wood.

My first magazine job out of college was with a company called the American Adventurers Association. The entrepreneur who founded it essentially wanted his own National Geographic Society, choosing to ignore that there already was a National Geographic Society. (The backstory of how I came to be in Seattle and got that job represents a whole different set of inflection points.) The AAA published a bi-monthly magazine on adventure travel and an annual guidebook listing adventurous trips -- river rafting, ballooning, mountain climbing. Only rarely did the staff actually get to engage in any of these activities.

It was a lush magazine, published nevertheless on a shoestring (most of us were paid $3 per hour in the beginning). My responsibilities encompassed acting as an assistant in every department -- editorial, circulation, administration -- and after three years at the magazine, I had a wholly inflated sense of my potential in the publishing industry. Growing up in Palo Alto and going to Stanford will do that to you.

Thinking anything was possible, I planned my next move: getting an ever-so-fashionable master's degree in business administration. After that, I would move to New York and use my soon-to-be-acquired business acumen and my recently acquired editorial experience to become a publisher. Isn't youthful enthusiasm intoxicating?

Of the ten graduate schools I applied to, only Cornell accepted me (this should have been a tip-off as to what was coming). As it happened, the Cornell curriculum of statistics, economics, and accounting was far more quantitative than the average English major could fathom, and it was especially difficult for one who was used to blissfully skating through life without working too hard. For the first time in my life, I had a report card full of Cs and Ds.

Before the beginning of the second semester, I was ordered to appear before the Academic Standards Committee. Outside, snowflakes gently floated down. Inside, my plans were harsly batted down. The three dour professors on the committee informed me that because what was taught in the first semester formed the foundation for the three semesters that followed, and I had clearly not grasped those fundamentals, I would not be allowed to re-register. Ever since, I've blithely said that if you're going to get thrown out of somewhere, make it someplace classy like the Ivy League.

I went back to California, drank a few years away, and eventually started writing about technology. I was writing for a McGraw-Hill publication when I had a meeting with an executive who actually had gotten a Cornell MBA. I mentioned in passing that I had been kicked out of that program. He replied immediately with a riposte I have never forgotten: "And look how it's ruined your life."

He was right, of course, and now, twenty years later, that executive's remark is even more prescient. If I had been able to stick to my original plan, I would now be sitting in Manhattan among the rubble of the publishing industry, scrambling to find perhaps the last in a string of non-existent jobs in a diminishing world. The Web is rewriting the rules of everything printed without offering insights to the future -- just as strikingly as the Academic Standards Committee rewrote my plans and fogged up my future.

But I was able to come back to the land of innovation and sunshine and ride the rise of the personal computer, the Internet, and corporate networks into a wonderfully fulfilling career. The end of my Cornellian dreams, the road involuntarily taken, has indeed made all the difference.

Lawyers, Used Car Dealers .. and Veterinarians?

2009-08-09T17:36:00.000-07:00

Last week I had to commit a heinous but necessary act. It's one many of us are forced to do in our lifetimes, frequently more than once, but one we rarely talk about, except among our immediate families.

I had to take something that I had loved and nurtured for 18 years and have it killed: my beloved orange marmalade tabby Tuxedo.

But this is not a blog about a lost pet. Tuxedo had a wonderful life and was clearly in physical pain at the end. I told him that he had to tell me when it was time to go, and over the previous week, his cries became more plaintive, and on Wednesday he stopped eating. But this is a blog devoted to life's aggravations, and this entry is specific about raw anger about how Tuxedo's death was handled by the people who were supposed to care for him — with a bit of a twist.

We have been patronizing a local veterinarian's office almost since it opened seven years ago. It's only about three blocks away, so it's easy to transport cats in distress when necessary. The doctors there were the first to diagnose trouble with our cat Fluffy, who eventually passed away from lymphoma five years ago. Tuxedo, Gus, Bandit, and even Midnight, the stray who lives outside and whom we once trapped for neutering, have all been there.

When Tuxedo's time approached, I wanted him to pass away at home, where he was comfortable and the smells familiar. But when I called our clinic, I was curtly told by the receptionist, "We don’t do home visits." I was aghast. At the very time when an animal needs the most compassion (not to mention its parents), it's denied. At the very time when an animal is the most vulnerable, it's supposed to be brought to the one place it associates with fear and pain. I find this unconscionable — particularly from a clinic that lists "compassion" as the first word in its motto.

Irate, I called the doctor that had administered Fluffy's lymphoma’s treatments (work beyond the ability of our primary care clinic), who had graciously agreed to euthanize Fluffy in our backyard, where he would feel the most comfortable. I got a call back from her technician. "She doesn’t have time to do that anymore," I was told. (Never mind that we have paid thousands of dollars in treatment costs to both of these clinics over the years.)

Eventually, it was too late to dither. Tuxedo's anguish took precedence over my anger, and, without having a chance to hear an explanation of the clinic's lead vet, I took him on his last ride. And that's where the story becomes a little gray.

Tuxedo was the first cat we had as adults. My wife and I adopted him even before we were married. I always said that before Tuxedo, we were a couple; after Tuxedo, we were a family. In addition to being frequently cantankerous — as male orange tabbies are wont to be, I later learned — he was also a teacher. He taught us how to be good parents.

When he was young, he pounced on the bed at 2 a.m. because he was lonely and wanted to play. To my eternal regret, we had to shut him in the bathroom to get any sleep. But we realized quickly that he needed a playmate; he taught us just how social cats are and how much they enjoy having other animals around. That was how Fluffy came into our lives. Tuxedo was jealous of Fluffy for all of 36 hours, until we could almost see the light bulb go on with his realization that we had finally figured out that he wanted a friend.

Another time, many years ago, Tuxedo was clearly in some sort of distress. We had no idea what it was, but when we brought out the carrying case we used for taking him to the vet, he walked right in and lay down. He knew he wasn't feeling well and that — as much as he hated it — he had to go see the doctor.

Fast forward to last week. Tuxedo initially whimpered when I put him in the car; the car always meant going to the doctor. But then he was quiet, even after I carried him into the exam room. The only time he cried again was after they put the catheter into his vein to give him an initial sedative. But he knew it was time to go; once again, he was saying, please take care of me.

I think — I hope — that Tuxedo understood that, rather than being a place of fear, the vet’s office was the place where he would finally be released from his pain. It was the launching point for his trip to Rainbow Bridge. He was a smart cat that way.

I'm still angry at those veterinarians; I'm still anxious to discern their definition of compassion. And while there is a big hole in the house that little cat used to be, I am glad to know that he is finally at peace, hopefully romping with his brother, his teaching career finally over.

A Hair-Raising Experience (With Any Luck)

2009-08-03T08:07:00.000-07:00

It's a true Baby Boomer phenomena — the increasing attention to cosmetic surgery. According to statistics from the American Society of Plastic Surgeons, people in the 40-54 age group had 5.7 million cosmetic procedures in 2008, a 4 percent increase over 2007 (the 30-39 year olds had 2.3 million, up only 1 percent).

Anyone who's seen Joan Rivers or Faye Dunaway recently can discern how flawed this process can be. Yet, the siren call of maintaining our youth still wails, at least to me. I still remember the morning in my room at the fraternity when I noticed that my hairline had receded from its original location. I was twenty. It seemed patently unfair.

When I was thirty, I scheduled a consultation with a hair-transplant surgeon in San Francisco. If the cost of the surgery hadn’t been roughly equivalent to half my annual salary, I might have considered it.

And even though I married a wonderful woman who insisted she was more concerned with what was in my heart than on my head, the idea of returning my head to a more hirsute state stayed with me. The only place it seemed that bald men weren’t dorks or nerds were in Rob Reiner movies. Even Ron Howard seems to favor nicely actors with full manes like Tom Hanks and Russell Crowe.

Now it's more than twenty years later, and the wailing is getting louder than ever. Hair-transplant surgery is no longer half my annual salary, but it's still a five-figure commitment, with other toys on the list ahead of it, such as a remodeled kitchen or a cruise in the Greek isles.

And while it may be too late in middle-age for one to consider such a hefty investment, the fact remains that my father is approaching his 90th birthday, and his mother died just a couple of weeks before her 102nd birthday. If those genetics hold, I would have transplanted hair longer than I'd live in the house with a new kitchen.

Thus I was naturally intrigued when I saw an ad in the San Francisco Chronicle announcing a hair-transplant study and looking for men with specific characteristics: dark hair, balding in a specific pattern, and between 30 and 59. The study was being done by a start-up in Sunnyvale called Restoration Robotics, which has developed a device that would harvest hair follicles individually (more elegant than plugs) faster than a cosmetic surgeon could. The goal of the study was to determine that the robotic device could harvest follicles as safely and efficiently as a human surgeon.

I applied to and was accepted into the study, and underwent the surgery at the end of July. It’s important to note that the goal of the study is to test the efficacy of the machine, not to bestow full hair transplants.

But I did have an ulterior motive: I wanted to see if I could stand the pain of cosmetic surgery. Just as with my first colonoscopy, I was given a shot of the sedative Versed. But there was also a double-Valium chaser prior to the surgery, not to mention a supply of Vicodin to take home. Talk about V for victory.

I took a Vicodin before going to sleep that first night, and even then did not sleep well. When I woke up, I felt like someone had used my head for a piñata. Even raising my eyebrows caused a twinge. Another Vicodin in the morning helped considerably, but I was truthfully glad I didn’t have any deadlines that morning. The sole extent of my output that day was to coin the phrase "Vicodin vacation."

As the week has gone on, the pain has diminished but the itching sensation — both where the hair was harvested and where it was implanted — has increased. A Vicodin at night is still a good idea. All this for a patch of fuzz on the very top of my head that I can only feel, rather than see, and has roughly the same surface size and texture as a Brillo pad.

It remains to be seen whether I'll talk to the surgeon about more transplants — which would be on my dime, rather than that of Restoration Robotics. I have reached one certain decision. Rather than do a transplant in stages, as time and money permitted, I will certainly deal with it all at once. To ease the scratching and wincing, I will probably schedule a week of recovery at an oceanside resort in Hawaii. When the Vicodin ran out, the daiquiris could flow in.

Only one question remains: whose makeover am I itching for more, mine or the kitchen's?

Cambridge Blues

2009-07-27T07:55:00.000-07:00

In his movie reviews, one of my favorite critics, Roger Ebert, occasionally refers to "the idiot plot." This is a device in which, in order for the plot of the movie to move forward, the leading characters must react to the situation unfolding around them like blithering idiots. This is not a compliment.

Reading the news reports of the arrest of Harvard professor Henry Louis Gates Jr. by Cambridge police officer James Crowley brings to mind Ebert's description. According to various sources, a passerby saw Gates and his driver trying to shove open his stuck front door. I had a cousin who used to live in Cambridge, and you could drop a marble at one end of her apartment and watch it roll to the other. The way some of those houses have settled over the years, a stuck door is perfectly logical.

The passerby called the police, and Officer Crowley responded. He asked Gates for identification. According to Crowley, Gates refused to show him his driver’s license and only showed his Harvard employee ID. According to Gates, he showed both forms of ID. When Crowley tried to determine if anyone else was in the house, Gates became abusive and was arrested for disorderly conduct.

Now, like most Stanford graduates, I've always harbored doubts about Harvard, and not just because it awarded a diploma to George W. Bush. Its motto is "veritas," which is Latin for truth. But any campus tour guide will happily tell you that the statue of John Harvard is colloquially known as the statue of three lies. The statue bears the inscription, John Harvard, Founder, 1638. In reality, the institution was founded in 1636, not 1638, and as New College; it was renamed Harvard College in 1639 after John Harvard contributed a significant amount of money (with the stipulation that his name be applied to the college, if memory serves). The statue was cast by Daniel Chester French in 1884, but because there were no likenesses of John Harvard available, French used a student as a model. Veritas, indeed.

Back to the idiot plot. You have a woman passing by a professor's home — presumably a local citizen — who has no idea who lives there. Here's a tip — get to know your neighbors, lady.*

Then you have a police officer sent to the house who somehow believes that the 58-year-old man within is potentially a burglar. Here's another tip: show some respect for your elders. Unless you’re a big fan of Going in Style (in which George Burns, Art Carney, and Lee Strasberg play a trio of unlikely bank robbers), you should know that guys with canes aren’t usually burglars. Heck, I can't even lift my television set, and I'm younger than Gates.

Then you have a Harvard professor, who, admittedly, is probably cranky after a long trip. Here's a tip: show the officer some respect for the job he has to do. Be thankful that if a burglary was indeed taking place while you were away, he arrived to investigate it.

What I find equally mystifying about this idiocy is that everyone — from Gates to Crowley to the Cambridge police chief — is sticking to his guns about who was right and who was wrong. That is, they're continuing to be idiots about the whole sequence of events.

I gotta tell you: Even with a cameo by the president, this is not a movie I would pay to watch. Even as a comedy.

*After this was posted, I learned that the woman was actually an employee of one of Gates' neighbors.

Seven Things That Really Frost Me About Middle Age

2009-07-20T07:00:00.000-07:00

When I think back on some of the things I did to my body when I was younger — alcoholic binges, all-night poker games — I probably shouldn't be surprised that it's taking its revenge on me now when I'm most defenseless. Here are seven problems with my body that really make middle age a challenge.

After The Laughter Is Gone. There’s nothing more delightful than finding something so hilarious that you just descend into an uncontrollable paroxysm of laughter. Every so often, my wife and I will start dishing on someone or something and just fall into a state of uproariousness that won’t stop. The problem now is that, instead of laughing uncontrollably, I always end up coughing uncontrollably. That just hacks.

Back When My Back Was Young. I am astonished at how the slightest twist in the wrong direction can make my back not only twinge, but turn into some sort of spasm-inducing fiend bent on crumbling my evolutionary right to walk erect. When I was a teen-ager, there was a movie called Hot Rods To Hell. In it, Dana Andrews (on the downside of his career) played a man on a driving vacation with his family who was tormented by hot-rodders on the same highway. Whenever Andrews tried to take on the hoodlums, his back would go out. I thought it was a way-too-inconvenient device to keep the movie going; now I'm convinced it's just sadly true-to-life.

Overwhelming Underarms. Is it just me, or is my body odor worse now than when I was a teen-ager?

Midnight Runs. It's not getting up in the middle of the night to use the bathroom that bothers me; I actually find the preceding dreams about unsuccessfully searching for a urinal rather humorous in retrospect. No, it's the occasional inability to go back to sleep afterwards that I hate. At least now there are 100 DirecTV channels to entertain me, as opposed to test patterns and all-night talk radio when I was a kid.

Food, Wonderful Food. It is a cruel trick of nature that, once you reach the point where you can pretty much afford to eat whatever you want, there sits a roadblock. Whether it’s the threat of heartburn or the peril of prescription drug interaction (I want my grapefruit back, Lipitor!), I now have to be careful about what I eat and when I eat it.

No More Marathon Drives. After I graduated from college, I lived in Seattle for three years, but frequently visited friends in San Francisco. It was anywhere from an 18- to a 22-hour drive, and I used to be able to do that in one shot, only stopping for Coca-Cola, fast food, and gasoline. (Though this was after Starbucks was founded, it was before I had discovered coffee.) Now my stamina for long drives is so low (translation: my butt begins to hurt), I can’t even get from San Francisco to Los Angeles in one shot. If there were still double features at movie theatres, I wouldn’t be able to sit through them either.

To Caption It All Off. And speaking of movies, it’s all but impossible for me to go to movie theatres anymore. It's not just the idea of showing up on the movie theatre's schedule, listening to other people's conversations during the movie, not being able to pause it the way I can with a DVD or a DVR, or paying more for snacks that the actual admission. It's that I have become so accustomed to watching movies with the subtitles on to catch all the dialogue that I really can’t understand what the heck the characters are saying most of the time.

The really sad part is that I checked and found that none of the foregoing body parts are candidates for transplant surgery.

When Foreclosure Comes, Blame The Cats

2009-07-13T07:46:00.000-07:00

I do my best work in the morning. That's when my mind is most active and alert. When I commuted to magazine jobs in San Francisco throughout the 90s, I would get proportionally more work done on the train (this was before cell phones were wildly popular) than I ever did once at my desk.

Now that I'm self-employed and work at home, I'm still at my best in the morning. The problem is, so are the cats. I'm positive that if the house gets foreclosed upon, it will be because the money dried up because I couldn't work because the cats wouldn't leave me alone in the morning.

They apparently think my job is not to write, but rather to entertain and minister to them. It's a wonder I get anything done. They have not yet made the connection that the house they sleep in, the yard they play in, and the food they eat is a direct by-product of my work.

It starts with Panther and Midnight, both named for their beautiful black coats. Midnight was a skinny stray that we noticed hanging around the house not long after we moved in five years ago. We started feeding her (yes, after trapping her and taking her to the vet, we confirmed she had been spayed) and she’s filled out considerably.

For a long time, I was amazed at how much food Midnight could put away, until the day when I looked outside and discovered not one but two black cats staring at the house from the front walk, willing someone to come outside with food. Even now, I think they work in concert on bait-and-switch tactics for food: "Oh, no, that wasn’t me you fed an hour ago. That was the other one."

The problem with feeding strays is that it attracts other unwanted animals: in our case, crows. As I'm sitting down to work, there can be an ungodly cawing on the front door step, as one crow will signal the rest of the gang that it's time for the cat-food scavenging to begin. This involves getting up from my desk to retrieve the food dish.

Next on the let's-bother-Daddy agenda is Gus (see photo, in which he has apparently eaten my keyboard). Now, Gus is one of the sweetest cats I've ever adopted. He was one of two ferals whom we were socializing for adoption about six years ago, until my wife decided she couldn't part with them. (Her exact words, as I remember them, were, "If you take those cats to another adoption fair, I'll kill you.") Given toward self-preservation, I kept them.

Though his heritage is unknown, it's clear that Gus has a lot of Ragdoll in him. Ragdolls are traditionally big cats with very soft fur, very affectionate, and prone to bonelessness when you hold them (hence the name). There may also be some Maine coon in him, because he tips the scales at about 18 pounds. A bigger bundle of love you’ll never find.

The problem is that cats love routine. And Gus' routine is to come to Daddy for loving first thing in the morning; he's here purring as I post. This involves jumping on my desk, shoving the coffee mug aside (or over), and butting his head against my hands on the keyboard. I have had to become a lot more assiduous about proofreading since Gus initiated this routine. I know that while we have friends and work, our cats only have us, but I just wish Gus would choose some other time of the day to be so friendly.

Once I convince Gus that only his going into his basket will stave off bankruptcy, Tuxedo will barf up his breakfast. Tuxedo is an orange tabby who will be 18 in a couple of months. I had no idea one cat could expel so much stuff from either end until Tuxedo came into our lives. The veterinarian can't find anything wrong with him – in fact, she considers Tux to be remarkably healthy for his age – so I resign myself to keeping terrycloth and paper towels handy.

Finally, it's Bandit’s turn. Bandit was the other feral. Mostly white (except after he’s been rolling in the garden), he has a black mask that spawned his name (it's also appropriate because he stole our hearts). Far more than Gus, Bandit loves returning to his feral roots and being outdoors as much as possible, especially these days when the weather is nice.

Still within the timeframe of my greatest productivity, about mid-morning, Bandit will return from his adventures in the garden. He doesn't just trot inside, however. For a cat that meowed infrequently as a youngster (like most ferals, who’ve been taught by their mothers not to attract the attention of humans), Bandit has since developed amazing vocal cords. He'll come back in search of brunch and make a noise that sounds like a siren to announce himself. Last week he let out with something so sharp and short, it sounded like a bark. That means it’s time for Daddy to once again interrupt his work and get the kitty treats out of the pantry.

By this point, of course, there's enough kitty hair floating through the air that my eyes begin to itch. This means trotting upstairs for a dose of prescription Systane, something my ophthalmologist gave me that’s far superior to regular eye drops. I don't know what's in it, but I love it.

Eventually, every feline ends up in their favorite basket or sleeping place. Later, I try to nap too, but before that happens, it's my only chance to be productively uninterrupted and avoid foreclosure.

When Memories Collide

2009-07-06T07:28:00.000-07:00

I find myself increasingly drawn to the subject of memories, perhaps because by middle-age we have all amassed an amazing collection of them. Memories are the only things we collect that don't need display cases. I suspect that some memories have greater durability than actual physical matter.

This is not a new concept, of course. In the science fantasy pantheon, there is a much-loved book by Jack Finney called Time and Again (1970). In the broader world, Finney is best known for having written The Body Snatchers, the book upon which the movie Invasion of the Body Snatchers and a gazillion remakes were based.

But Time and Again, named as one of the five best mysteries of all time, is a classic about a man named Simon Morley who finds a way to hypnotize himself back in time. Richard Matheson used the same concept in his book Bid Time Return, so when he wrote the screenplay for the movie adaptation, Somewhere in Time, he named the character of the philosophy professor who coaches Christopher Reeve after Finney.

Less well known is the Time and Again sequel, From Time To Time (1995). In it, scientists start discovering multiple instances of conflicting memories, as if two parallel worlds where similar events had different outcomes suddenly fused together. Some people distinctly remember the Titanic docking at Chelsea Pier in New York City in April 1912, while others remember it sinking. Someone discovers a newspaper from February 22, 1916, the day after the Battle of Verdun began — but there’s nothing about it in the headlines. A campaign button from Jack Kennedy’s 1964 re-election campaign turns up.

A world in which conflicting memories exist side-by-side is not that big a stretch. While the ones in Finney’s book are fiction, so many others are real. Recently in Razed in the U.S.A., I ranted about the disposability of large structures and the havoc it plays on our sense of time and place. Every building that’s been torn down still exists in our memory, side-by-side with what exists now.

In the 70s and 80s, I spent a lot of time in Reno; my best friend at the time attended the University of Nevada for both undergraduate and graduate school. Today, downtown Reno has changed considerably: I look at the Silver Legacy Hotel, the Eldorado, and even the National Bowling Stadium and think, "Wait, what used to be there?"

I've seen this happen with my father. We were heading to the barber recently, a man who’s been in the business in Palo Alto for years. I used to get my hair cut in the shop his father ran. My father had his real estate office in the same building as the barber shop. As we drove to the shop, my father helpfully reminded me that there was parking behind the building.

The only problem: the barber shop hadn’t been in that building for 20 years. The shop was now a block away, in a location that both my father and I had visited. My father was born when Woodrow Wilson was president, but his age is really not the issue. He's been in this area almost twice as long as I have, so he has twice as many opportunities to collect conflicting memories of where things used to be, rather than where they actually are.

As I get older, I feel these conflicting memories grow stronger. Is it possible that the parallel worlds that Finney envisioned actually blossom in our heads? Perhaps that's where we go when we die. Our destination at the end of our physical life is a neighborhood we create in our mind that's comfortable and familiar, with all the amusement parks and ice cream parlors and tree houses we could ever want.

Talkin' About My Generation … Dying

2009-06-29T07:05:00.000-07:00

The passing last week of Farrah Fawcett, Michael Jackson, and Ed McMahon brings back the old axiom about celebrities dying in threes. In my faulty memory (which I'll blog more about next week), there was a period in my adolescence when three groups of three celebrities died around the same time. However, checking the Internet Movie Database's helpful Died In Year database, I can only find two pair (below), not three triplets.

No surprise. I frequently remember things that didn’t happen and forget things that did.

What strikes me as strange about the synchronicity of Fawcett, Jackson, and McMahon is that they were all pop culture figures. When celebrities die in proximity, I usually think, I never would have invited them to congregate in St. Peter’s waiting room at the same time. (If this week's triad is Gale Storm, Billy Mays, and Walter Cronkite, I rest my case.)

The best example of this I could find was May 18, 1995, when television actress Elizabeth Montgomery (Bewitched), ballet dancer and actor Alexander Godunov (best known for Die Hard, among just seven movies he made), and character Elisha Cook Jr. (Wilmer in The Maltese Falcon), all passed away. Like Fawcett and Jackson, Montgomery (age 62) and Godunov (age 45) were astonishingly young.

Other strange celebrity synchronicities:

● Late in January, 1973, tough-guy actor Edward G. Robinson and John Banner, best known for playing Sergeant Schulz on Hogan’s Heroes, died within a couple of days of each other.

● TV actor Wally Cox (Mr. Peepers) and film actor Tim Holt both died February 15, 1973. Pretty much forgotten at the time of his death and never a Hollywood powerhouse even when he was alive, Tim Holt nonetheless had the distinction of acting in three classic movies in the 1940s: Orson Welles’ The Magnificent Ambersons, John Ford’s My Darling Clementine, and John Huston’s The Treasure of the Sierra Madre.

● On three consecutive days (September 30-October 2, 1985), Oscar-winning actress Simone Signoret, author E.B. White, and actor Rock Hudson all passed away.

● The day after Katharine Hepburn died in 2003 (June 29th), comedian Buddy Hackett died (admittedly, they had both appeared in movies with Spencer Tracy).

● On October 2, 2005, comedian Nipsey Russell and playwright August Wilson both passed away.

For other pairings, some strange (Federico Fellini and River Phoenix) and others not-so-strange (Billy Wilder and Milton Berle), check out Associated Content.

Celebrities, like parents and teachers, provide a common touchstone for all of us to measure both the nostalgia and the progress our lives. It’s not so disconcerting when they’re older (Hepburn was 91 and Hackett was 79), but it sure is when you remember their long-ago heyday (as I do with Fawcett), or they’re younger (like Jackson).

It brought back the words of the father of a friend of mine. When Natalie Wood and William Holden died within two weeks of each other in November, 1981, he lamented, “I can deal with William Holden dying. He was old. But Natalie Wood is my generation.”

Taking Aim At An Easy Target

2009-06-22T06:52:00.000-07:00

In a blog devoted to crankiness, technology is a remarkably easy target. But as much as I love it most of the time, I keep coming up with examples of it that aggravate me.

last

more hilariously

Qwest commercial

Well, I feel better. Even if it was too easy.

Razed in the U.S.A.

2009-06-15T07:23:00.000-07:00

Being middle-aged in the place where you grew up and went to college has its pros and cons. On the one hand, you know all the good short-cuts during rush hour. On the other hand, when you run into people who look familiar, you have to run through a long litany of possibilities before you determine where you met them -- high school, college, work, neighborhoods, volunteer work -- pick one. Also, if you live in a place where fifty years is considered old, and buildings are considered to have the same disposability as a Kleenex, it can be highly disconcerting.

Here in Silicon Valley, I can drive down streets no more than a few miles from the neighborhood I grew up in and not recognize a single structure. Even the house I grew up in, which was new when my parents bought it during the 1950s, has already been razed and replaced by a McMansion (in stark contrast, the house in which my late mother grew up in Albany, New York, still stands).

This is why I have developed a simple rule for navigation. When you're giving me directions, don't tell me what to look for today. Tell me what was there 20 years ago, and I'll find it just fine.

But even this is becoming harder and harder to do. Some thirty years ago, in the city where I now live, the city fathers saw downtowns losing business to suburban malls. To avoid that, they simply razed most of the downtown, except for one historic block, and replaced it with a shopping mall. Problem solved, except that other nearby cities had built bigger and better-designed shopping malls. A few years ago, the mall went bankrupt, and now it’s been mostly torn down.

It's supposed to be replaced by the latest trend, a faux urban village with retail on the ground floor and housing and office space on the upper floors. And this has to be melded not only to the remaining historic block, but also to the anchor stores of the mall, which were not torn down because they represented too much tax revenue. It's unclear what this mélange is going to look like because the downturn has wreaked havoc with the downtown project. The project is way behind schedule and may already be doomed because, yes, San Jose has already done something like this much better with its Santana Row development.

And even while this project stumbles along, civic leaders in Santa Clara and San Francisco are arguing about who's going to build a new stadium for the 49ers. This would be to replace Candlestick Park, which is younger than I am. No word about what will happen to Candlestick, which was built for $15 million and has undergone two cycles of renovations, once for the same amount and then again for twice that amount. Even so, we're ahead of Seattle, which spent $67 million on the Kingdome, which it used for all of 24 years before imploding it.

This is not a paean to personal nostalgia. It's a rant against the disposability of structures. I am not suggesting that the world stay the same for my navigational benefit. I just wish we could more frequently apply the concept of "reduce, reuse, and recycle" to big things as much as we do to little things.

The Unmitigated Arrogance of Some People

2009-06-08T07:22:00.000-07:00

I go to the public library so infrequently that I usually have to renew my card every time I'm there. I like having my own books. I figure when I'm old and senile, I'll have forgotten all of them and can re-read them as if they were newly published.

Times being what they are, however, I've been sneaking off to the library more frequently. I’ve bought enough wholly disappointing books (if anybody wants a copy of Billy Wilder’s biography, let me know) that borrowing them first — even if I buy my own copy later — is much more practical.

Because I'm far too organized for my own good, I also keep a list of books I'm interested in. I note them when they're initially published, and then wait about two years to either borrow them from the library, or look for them on the remainder tables. The great thing about middle-age is that two years goes by with the same whizzing sensation as a fast-forward button.

That's how I ended up with a library copy of actress Ellen Burstyn’s fascinating 2006 autobiography, Lessons In Becoming Myself. Before her "overnight" success at 38 in The Last Picture Show, she had endured an unbelievable parade of emotional, physical, and sexual abuse at the hands of parents, boyfriends, and husbands (sometimes her own, sometimes other people's). Her insights into emotional recovery and spirituality resonated with me.

What did not resonate with me — in fact, what drove me absolutely crazy — is that in this particular library book, some self-appointed copy editor had periodically taken pen (not pencil) in hand and made not only grammatical corrections but content suggestions as well. Some of these involved changing "me" to "my," among other stylistic trivialities. Another indelibly suggested that perhaps the actress didn’t mean to refer to Charles Boyer in one instance but rather to Paul Henreid. Both played suave European lovers, so what right does this self-appointed officer of the accuracy police have to suggest Burstyn is wrong?

Even more appalling: this bozo didn’t even catch obvious errors, such as when Burstyn wrote about Edmund G. "Pat" Brown. She noted that he would "later" become governor (a clear confusion of the father and son who bookended Ronald Reagan’s terms as governor of California).

As a professional writer and editor, I kneel at the wisdom of most copy editors. They have been the last bastion of style, accuracy, and consistency at most of the magazines where I've worked. But the editor is the last person to look at the page, and sometimes style must defer to voice, as it should in Burstyn's very personal book.

I took a while to ponder how to deal with this graffiti fascist, and realized that the only way is to take a page from George Orwell (pictured above), who knew a thing or two about fighting such people. In Orwell's book 1984, when the powers that be didn't like something, they erased it and replaced with what they considered the truth. I simply went to Alibris, the Web site for used books, and ordered a replacement copy of Burstyn's book. That's the one I returned to the library, clean and without defacement. The work of that arrogant scribbler? Gone. Thanks, George.

Watch Out!

2009-06-01T07:40:00.000-07:00

Somewhere between the shackles of Kunta Kinte and the two-way wristwatch of Dick Tracy, there must be something appropriate for my wrist. I just haven’t found it yet.

I stopped wearing a wristwatch a few months ago. It was one of those impulsive decisions that I’d been considering for weeks. Time seems to find me well enough without my giving it a place to perch on my arm. There is a clock on the computer, one in the car, one on the cell phone, and one on the iPod.

Initially, my time without a watch worked fine initially. I liked not having something on my wrist. I liked having one less thing, after my wallet and keys, to think about putting in its place when I went out.

But other times being without one ticked me off: playing poker, hiking, greeting at church. I also discovered that substituting a cell phone for a watch requires that there actually be cell phone service when you want to know what time it is. Those of us still campaigning for phones that simply make and receive calls, as opposed to taking pictures and running blood tests, know that uninterrupted cell phone service is, like Bigfoot and Wall Street financial propriety, a myth.

So I suffered a relapse and bought another watch. I’ve never needed to have the timepiece equivalent of a BMW on my wrist, but I do like to have the day-and-date display so I know where I am on the calendar. There’s a little watch sales-and-repair shop in the neighborhood, and the proprietor had always been wonderful about showing me how to figure out the intricacies of an old pocket watch my father gave me. I bought another wristwatch — the brand of which shall remain nameless — which turned out to be a huge mistake.

For one thing, instead of a battery, this watch theoretically wound itself by the ordinary movement of your hand throughout the day. This is exactly the wrong kind of watch for someone who hasn’t been wearing a watch for weeks, and who only needs it for specific occasions. If you don’t wear this kind of watch constantly, it runs down … constantly.

The second problem was that it had a plastic backing, so you could see that the mechanism within was running. I wasn’t quite sure of the design philosophy behind this, but it also turned out that when you did perform vigorous activities while wearing the watch, such as riding a bicycle, the plastic back would fall off. This seemed wholly counterproductive. You had to keep the watch moving to keep it running, but when you did, you were in danger of losing the cover that kept the mechanism clean.

I took it back to the watch shop. The proprietor happily glued the plastic cover back on. But by the time I got home, the glue had seeped into the mechanism and it was clear that time was up for that silly watch. Like a tarnished politician, it never ran again.

Problem solved. I threw it away and haven’t had a second thought about wearing one since.

Seven Things That I Should Have Expected -- But Didn't

2009-05-25T06:33:00.000-07:00

One of the strange facets about getting older: not so much seeing your expectations come true, but realizing the fruition of things you never expected. We make plans for college, plans for careers, plans for retirement, and sometimes we even follow them.

But other things come to pass that we never expected because we never thought about them. For instance, who ever expected the phrase "keep it short, it's long distance" to disappear from the vernacular? Here are seven things I never expected:

The president of the United States is now younger than I am. By virtue of being born in 1961, at least he's still a Baby Boomer (1964 is the cut-off year). But the idea of someone younger than I am having that kind of authority is a little bit unsettling, at least the first time it happens. As my friend Charlotte says, you really only have to start worrying when the Pope is younger than you are.

The TV shows that I stupidly rearranged my schedule to watch as a child and teen-ager are now available anytime on DVD. I spent way too much time watching television as a child, despite growing up in sunny California. Even understanding the concept of reruns, I gasped and grasped at the chance to watch certain shows because I feared they would ethereally slip through my fingers. (Seeing them now and realizing how insipid they are, such as Bewitched, I wonder why I was so dedicated.)

I no longer believe that high school was the best time of my life. With the exception of Grad Nite at Disneyland (see Stumbling Down Memory Lane), I had a pretty terrific senior year. It started with a student tour of the United States after junior year, continued with a sweet and svelte sophomore girlfriend, and ended with a prestigious national writing award. It took a lot of years and a lot of therapy for me to stop idolizing the past and start enjoying the present.

I have forgotten the sound of my mother's voice. I keep searching for it in my memory and I can't conjure it up. Sometimes I feel like I have snippets of it, but the texture isn't there. I have no recordings of her; too bad Hallmark did make those recordable cards ten years ago.

I have become self-employed, just like my father. My father was in real estate, and he was at the beck and call of his clients. In my earliest memory of him, he's heading out the door on a weekend to work. The great thing about being a writer is that you're never really unemployed; you're just freelancing. The last time I made the transition from a staff job to freelancing, I decided to make it permanent, and now I know that serving my clients is what makes the mortgage payments. Although a lot of things about my father aggravate me, the fact that he taught me to have a work ethic isn't one of them.

All those years of painful dating make me appreciate my marriage. Dating was too often a fruitless and frustrating endeavor. But thank goodness I spent all those years doing it, because it makes me appreciate my wife that much more. Though I still want to divorce her twice a year and kill her once a year, I have no fantasies that something better is out there.

There would come a time when the words "I can't afford it" would be replaced by "I don’t want to spend the money." Of course, more recently, "I can’t afford it" has returned with a vengeance.

Generally, I hate surprises, but I can live with these.

Still Confused After All These Years

2009-05-18T07:21:00.000-07:00

I always thought that I’d get smarter as I got older. Instead, I seem to be getting more confused. When ex-football quarterback and politician Jack Kemp died recently, my first thought was that he was already dead. I was confusing him with Jack Kent Cooke, late owner of the Washington Redskins, among other sports teams.

During the course of my lifetime, there have been intermittent bouts of confusion, many now clarified. For instance, I no longer believe that Audrey and Katherine Hepburn were related, or that Jose and Mel Ferrer were related. (Imagine my confusion during the years that Mel Ferrer was married to Audrey Hepburn.) I no longer wonder how Robert Wagner went from being mayor of New York to starring in It Takes A Thief, but now when I hear the name Jon Favreau, I have to discern from its context whether it’s the speechwriter or the actor.

I also admit that I occasionally have trouble when it comes to differentiating Christopher Wren from Christopher Robin; Alex Haley from Arthur Hailey (Roots and Hotel, after all, both took place in the South); Andrei Sakharov from Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn (although I don’t normally confuse physicists and writers); and Tantalus (who had trouble with water) from Sisyphus (who had trouble with rocks).

I can also see where some people would have to think twice about the difference between John Maynard Keynes and Maynard G. Krebs. Both espoused a general theory of employment, certainly; as a beatnik, Krebs’ theory would have been to avoid it at all costs.

On the other hand, it’s easy to tell the difference between Stanley Kubrick and Stanley Kramer, simply because Guess Who’s Coming To Dinner is just a little more straightforward than 2001: A Space Odyssey. Similarly, I don’t confuse Arthur Hiller and Arthur Miller, because no one would put Love Story in the same class as Death of a Salesman.

But I fear the amount of information I do know is outnumbered by the information I don’t know and may never learn, such as the difference between:

If I don’t know these things by middle age, when am I going to learn them? And even if I learned them, would I remember them? There are many things I used to know but don’t any longer. I used to be able to distinguish car makes at a glance; now they’re all aerodynamic blurs. I used to be able to trace the corporate lineage of most mergers and acquisitions. All forgotten now.

Criminy, maybe these are just previews of coming distractions. The human brain is a puzzle. What if senility is just the logical effect of having too many pieces of information in our brain? Eventually the pieces start dropping out of the jigsaw, and the picture doesn’t make sense anymore.

What a depressing scenario. I fear my only hope is to head to the DVD player and put in a double feature of Love Story and Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner.

Stumbling Down Memory Lane

2009-05-10T21:26:00.000-07:00

As I get older, I remember things that didn’t happen and forget things that did. We all do this; we suffuse past relationships with a golden glow right up until the point we discover an old flame has turned into a fire-breathing dragon.

This entry was supposed to be a rant about Disneyland, about how either it’s changed or I have. The last few times I’ve gone through the Haunted Mansion and the Pirates of the Caribbean, I can’t even distinguish the words the spirits and the pirates are singing. Are their tape recordings deteriorating or is my hearing (or both)? The last time I was there with a friend of mine, an Anaheim resident who is also a Disneyphile, she pointed to some scuffed paint on a railing and whispered to me, “Walt never would have allowed this.”

But then my thoughts took an unexpected turn like a re-routed Matterhorn bobsled. If I wasn’t enjoying Disneyland now, when had I enjoyed it? What were my fond memories of it? Was I remembering things that didn’t happen?

In a word, yes. My first trip to Disneyland — of which I have no memory — came when I was two, not long after the park opened. My mother told me I slept in the drawer of a bureau in their room at the Disneyland Hotel. Somewhere there are 8mm home movies of my being tormented to tears in my stroller by an organ grinder’s monkey (though this could have been at Knott’s Berry Farm).

I have no recollection of any other trips until I was 15. I was delighted when my parents agreed to a family trip there, until I learned the reason why: they were only trying to atone for the time a few years earlier when they’d asked my grandmother to baby-sit me while she was, unbeknownst to all, entering the early stages of senility.

It was on that trip, I remember, being supremely embarrassed with General Electric’s Carousel of Progress (where Innoventions is now). Thanks to its sponsor, the Carousel of Progress took you through decades of advancement in kitchen appliances and other labor-saving facets of daily life. I was mortified when I saw that the kitchen of the 1940s had the exact same appliances as the ones we had at home (this was during the Nixon administration, so it was long past the 1940s).

Two years later, I was heady with anticipation of attending Grad Nite at Disneyland. Rick Nelson was the lead musical act; the backup act was Linda Ronstadt, before her first hit solo record. Alas, my girlfriend broke up with me two weeks before graduation; when I entered the park with four other friends, two went in one direction and the other two went in another. I wandered through the park for four hours before I found someone from my class. The park kicked us out at 5 a.m., but because of some bizarre union rule, our bus drivers couldn’t leave until they’d had eight hours rest. For two hours we huddled in the cool dawn air, the parking lot empty of all buses except ours, and watched the sun come up.

As I thought about these Disneyland memories, though, I realized based on the law of averages that it couldn’t have all been bad. I remembered the time that I once ditched a whopping failure of a conference at the Anaheim Convention Center and walked over to the park. If you want to get good service at Disneyland, walk in wearing a coat and tie; everyone will think you’re a Disney exec checking out their efficiency.

There was a drizzly February day I went there with my wife. What perfect weather for Disneyland — there were hardly any lines, and you could walk off a ride and get on it again immediately. Strangely, the only ride that had a line was Storybook Land, which involves open-air boats and, that day, getting wet. I’ve never quite figured that one out. The only drawback was that when we finished hitting every ride in mid-afternoon, I was ready to start over again and she was ready to go back to the hotel and nap.

I suppose that even with the memories, good and bad, I have never lost my inner child’s wonder at the idea of Disneyland, a place where magic and happy are built into the trademarks. I still think about going to Disneyland. I still think I’m going to have a good time. Insanity is doing the same thing over and over and expecting different results, so I’ll just have to admit that I’m crazy about the place.

Why Don't They Remake These Movies?

2009-05-04T01:00:00.000-07:00

One of the strangest feelings I get as a Boomer is seeing movies from my adolescence being remade. Next month’s release of the remake of The Taking of Pelham One Two Three (with numbers instead of words), one of my favorite Walter Matthau movies, comes on the heels of remakes of The Poseidon Adventure, Texas Chainsaw Massacre, and Escape to Witch Mountain, among others. I have mixed feelings about this trend. While I loved The Poseidon Adventure as a teen-ager, especially Shelley Winters’ character, today I can do without the Rev. Scott-as-savior aspect.

The bigger problem is that Hollywood is not remaking a whole slew of the movies that should be redone. My suggestions (and with good reason):

A Little Romance (1979). Those of you who waited until A Walk On The Moon to fall in love with Diane Lane were late to the game. I started drooling over her when she played the delightful Lauren in her debut with none other than Laurence Olivier. The problem with this movie was her co-star, Thelonious Bernard, who (mercifully) made only one other movie. He played her teen-age love interest as a wholly insufferable and unsympathetic prig. Rewrite his part, hire Lane to play the role of her mother (Sally Kellerman in the original), and you’ve got a really sweet movie.

Endless Love (1981). In the novel by Scott Spencer — whom I believe to be the literary descendant of F. Scott Fitzgerald — the primary character is David Axelrod; his love interest, Jade, is practically a supporting role. Casting Brooke Shields as Jade, however, and the horribly wooden Martin Hewitt as David, created a lopsided movie because the focus was on the wrong character. Do it again, and get a star for the boy’s role, and an unknown for the girl’s.

Same Time Next Year (1979). My problem here is that I was lucky enough to see John Lithgow and Gail Strickland do this play at ACT in San Francisco in the summer of 1976. Anyone who remembers Lithgow’s salt-of-the-earth banker in Terms of Endearment knows that he could have pulled off the role of the conflicted accountant in Same Time Next Year much better than Alan Alda, who always seems to be playing Alan Alda. I have the full box set of M*A*S*H DVDs, but please, Hollywood — cast someone as George who isn’t so whiny.

The Way We Were (1973). This may sound like a surprise. The once-only matching of frat-boy Robert Redford with radical Barbra Streisand was a big hit, and deservedly so. But what’s not commonly known — and I only found out by watching the retrospective documentary on the special edition DVD — is that in the original script, Hubbell and Katie didn’t get divorced because he cheated on her; they got divorced because he was going to be blacklisted from the studios if he stayed married to her. She was going to make that sacrifice for his career. In the DVD, director Sydney Pollack tells the story of two previews on two consecutive nights in San Francisco, one including scenes with the politicized ending, and one without those scenes. The first was a bomb, the second was a hit. Here’s a daring idea — remake The Way We Were using Arthur Laurents’ original script.

That said, I have no illusions that Hollywood will follow my suggestions. There is nary a slashing, ship capsizing, or extraterrestrial on the list. They’re all love stories. Criminy — that means we’re stuck with all of them the way they were.

I'll Take Stupid Corporate Decisions for $1000, Alex

2009-04-27T06:29:00.000-07:00

Pontiac? General Motors is killing its Pontiac division? Who signed off on this? This is the stupidest corporate decision since Southwestern Bell, in the early 21st century, decided to rename itself after one of its acquisitions, American Telephone & Telegraph. (Anybody sent a message by telegraph recently? I thought not.)

Pulling the plug on Pontiac is even more surprising given GM’s choice of what to save: Buick. I don’t know about the rest of you, but Buick is an old man’s brand to me. My uncle and grandfather drove Buicks. I can’t imagine what the brand signifies for the generations behind mine.

But I do know what Pontiac signifies for those generations, and for baby boomers: The GTO and the Beach Boys. The Trans Am and Smokey and the Bandit. Even Knight Rider. Why keep the division whose high-end model has the same name as Safeway supermarkets' store brand?

Admittedly, GM had few choices. It already killed its link to the oldest ongoing automobile brand in America, the Oldsmobile (another decision I question). They couldn’t possibly get rid of Chevrolet, its best-known brand; Louis Chevrolet was a race car driver, so that’s cool. It’s unlikely they’d get rid of Cadillac, its luxury brand, even though Antoine Laumet, dit de La Mothe sieur de Cadillac was the founder of the city of Detroit; who wants ties to that these days? At least Pontiac, who was an Ottawa tribal chieftain, you’ve got some Native American mojo to fall back on.

It makes no sense to kill the cool brand and maintain the one that was named after a man who manufactured plumbing supplies, as David Dunbar Buick did before he went into the car business. With decisions like this, I fear GM may still go down the drain.