Letting Go

I never got to say goodbye to my father. One moment he was, and then he was not, in the space of time it took to write those words. And that event, it seems, was only important to me, for the world didn't even note his passing.

"Here is wisdom: for he that increaseth knwoledge, increaseth sorrow." You probably don't recognize that; if not, go read Ecclesiastes. It's the most beautiful book in the Bible, and a rather surprising inclusion. It is, after all, far from a hopeful work. But it resonates with me on a level that is difficult to explain, for it encapsulates the last lesson my father ever taught me. Whatever comes after this life is neither Heaven nor Hell, but the eternal silence of the grave.

Perhaps that is why there is such a nihilistic streak to my soul, or maybe it's just the frustration of the warrior-poet with no war to fight. Born of haunted blood from a haunted land, the ghosts of my Irish forebears dog my steps and plague my dreams. Show me a lost cause and I'll show you an Irishman in the thick of it, swinging away until the bitter end. When the British took away our own country, we went off and built another, yet never lost that ache in the soul unique to us. An Irishman may be predisposed by blood to never say goodbye, I don't know. But it does seem to be a theme in my life.

There was a girl once, who came into my life just when I needed her the most, who saved me from myself. I never got to say goodbye to her, when she left my life just as suddenly as she had appeared. Moments in time, almost three years of them, preserved forever in memory but never to be again. Whoever said that it was better to have loved and lost than to have never loved at all was an ass. Better by far to be numb than to live with the exquisite ache of loss, that void that can never be filled.

It's been almost twenty-five years since I last saw my best friend. We didn't part with a goodbye, but with a "see you later," never guessing that later actually meant forever. He saved my life once, too, and how do you repay a debt like that? One moment he, too, was here, and the next he was lost to time and life, a fading whisper in the wind, a ghost of a memory.

A friend of mine died a while ago in the cold, bitter mountains of a distant, bitter land, and the world didn't notice his passing, either. He traveled a long way to die, so it seemed only fitting that I travel a long way to say goodbye. But it was far too late for words, and all I was left with was the crushing knowledge that I should have been there for him, but I was not. The dead have wisdom for us, but we don't want to listen.

I never got to say goodbye to my mother who, like my father, was and then was not. I worked for several years to keep her alive, and the last words I had with her were spoken in anger. I loved her, but I couldn't say it, and I will bear both those burdens on my soul until the day that I, too, am no more. Time wounds all heels, and I wouldn't wish that on my worst enemy.

In one form or another, I spent my entire adult life helping people, but when I was the one who needed help, I found out just how alone I really was. Poetic justice, I suppose, for a life not worth living. I've known my entire life what I was running from, but never where I was running to, and in the end discovered I was in a head-long rush to nowhere. There's some irony for you.

Letting go is the hardest thing in the world to do, for in a very real sense it means saying goodbye to the things that make you you. The comfort of an immutable past is seductive, safe, but holding on to it blinds you to the future. I can't change my past, yet perhaps I can finally say goodbye to it, for the first time in my life. The man I was is dead, and I'm not sure yet if I'll mourn that fact or not. It may be too late, but perhaps now I can be the man I should have been.

And the McChrystal Ball Says . . .

Oh, Stanley, you have got to be one of the dumbest brilliant people I have ever heard of . . .

Just in case anyone out there has retreated under their personal rock again and somehow missed it, President Obama fired General Stanley McChrystal as commander of U.S. forces in Afghanistan today. Yeah, sure, offically the General "resigned," but let's face it, he was fired. Only when someone reaches that level of Government service and screws up, they're not publicly fired, they're resigned. Everybody involved gets to save a little bit of face that way, and at least some pretense can be made that the dirty laundry isn't being aired in public.

Now, let's also be clear on this from the outset: the President had no choice but to fire General McChrystal. What the man did ranks right up there with what MacArthur did that forced Truman to "resign" him. And what did McChrystal do? He shot his mouth off, and allowed his staff to shoot their mouths off, in front of a Rolling Stone reporter.

Nor should anyone make a mistake about this: the article in Rolling Stone that caused the President to fire General McChrystal was an out-and-out hatchet job from beginning to end. If you haven't read it, you really should; it is a classic example of an ill-informed reporter with an ideological agenda. To say that the author has an unflattering opinion of not only McChrystal and his staff, but of the military in general, would be an understatement. The article in question is, in tone, denigrating of the General, the people, and the institution.

On the flip side, the mind boggles not so much at the fact that McChrystal would allow a reporter, any reporter, that kind of access, but that he would, frankly, be dumb enough to allow his staff to speak that way in front of a reporter, whether or not they believed those conversations to be on the record or not. Look, it is an article of faith in the military that it is every soldier's God-given right to bitch about anything and everything, and if we were going to be completely honest, there probably wasn't anything quoted in that article that isn't being said by the troops out on the sharp end of the stick. But those are the bits of dirty laundry that you just don't air out in public.

Everyone has an opinion, but when an opinion becomes corrosive to the chain-of-command, they need to not be aired. There was nothing in that article, aside from a single snarky comment about the Vice President, that was directly attributed to General McChrystal. The problem was, however, that McChrystal allowed his staff to make those corrosive comments and, just like a politician's staff, a General's staff speaks ex cathedra for their commander. If McChrystal's staff felt comfortable enough to make the comments quoted in the article, then it is an almost sure bet that he shared those opinions.

So, the President made the only choice he could have, both to preserve the idea of good order and discipline within the military, and to once again reaffirm the notion of civilian control over the military. The President also made a good choice in dual-hatting General Petraeus as both CentCom commander and commander of our forces in Afghanistan. And the net effect of all of this?

We're still going to lose the war in Afghanistan.

The President has stated it on multiple occasions in the past, and he stated it again today when he announced McChrystal's resignation: the war in Afghanistan is vital to our national security. But he has also stated on multiple occasions in the past, and again today, that he will withdraw our troops from that country next summer. And that is why we are going to lose the war.

Does anyone else see the contradiction inherent in those two statements? If winning the war and stabilizing Afghanistan is vital to our national security, how can you then possibly say that you are going to withdraw the troops in less than a year? That would be like announcing on June 6, 1944, "Well, if we're not done by December 6, 1944, we're packing up and going home." It just doesn't make sense to say, on the one hand, that we're going to "relentlessy pursue the Taliban" and "strengthen Afghan capabilities" and then set an arbitrary end date, regardless of conditions on the ground.

The President has, in fact, told the enemy that if they only hang on until the summer of 2011, they've won. That one, single act of setting the withdrawal date renders any other initiative the President tries to institute in that Theatre moot. You can not apply diplomatic pressure on th enemy because, again, you've already told them that all they have to do is hang on until your withdrawal date. And any military pressure you try to apply is, in the end, just a waste of your soldiers' lives. Is it any wonder, then, that the soldiers might have a diminished opinion about their political masters?

Afghanistan itself is a classic example of what the military lovingly refers to as "mission creep." Our involvement there has expanded, almost inevitably, well beyond just toppling the Taliban to the State Department's favourite activity, "nation building." The problem there is that Afghanistan is never going to be a Western-style, liberal parliamentary democracy, which is what the State Department and liberals like the President want. No matter what we do - or don't do, for that matter - Afghanistan, in the end, is going to be what it has always been: a collection of provinces ruled by local strongmen who pay nominal alleigance to a weak central government that, in effect, bribes them to play along.

That is a hard thing for people whose political theories have been shaped by events that reach back through the Ages of Reason and the Enlightenment to roots that spring from Magna Carta to accept. Then again, those vast areas of the globe that don't trace their origins back to Western Europe have never played by those rules to begin with, which is also a difficult idea for people raised in our liberal society to accept. That is, nonetheless, the reality of the world we live in.

Any "solution" that we come up with to the "problem" of Afghanistan has to take that reality into account, or it is stillborn and doomed to failure before it even starts. Which is, again, why we are going to fail in Afghanistan, regardless of what General McChrystal did or did not say in front of an ideologue reporter from Rolling Stone, or what ideologues on either the Right or Left choose to beat their chests over as a result of that article.

There are those among us, who seem to get their History from the likes of CNN or MSNBC, who say that it is impossible to win a war in Afghanistan - indeed, that was a not-so-subtle subtext to the article in question - and smugly point out that no one has ever won a war in that sad, little country. But that isn't quite true. Yes, neither the Soviets nor the British at the height of their empire won in Afghanistan, but on the other hand, the Mongols and Alexander the Great did. What the latter had that the former did, and we do not, have was both the will and the understanding of the country to win. Nor did they set an arbitrary deadline on winning.

But, really, Stanley . . . you should have kept your mouth shut and reined your staff in.

This is How You Remind Me

There once was a man named Clarence.

I actually know very little about him, other than what I gleaned in brief encounters, moments in time forever preserved in the fragile amber of my memory. He was the maitre'd of the restaurant in the Pearson Hotel, a one-time Chicago landmark that was long ago demolished in an act of economic greed, replaced by The Water Tower Place.

Clarence was probably the first Black man I ever met, and certainly the first Black man that I can remember clearly. In the days that I knew him, the Pearson was in decline, fading away as it lived on the echoes of past glory. The word threadbare comes to mind, yet that isn't really a truly accurate description of the place. Decrepit might be a better word, from the lush carpeting to the dark paneling of the walls to the crystal chandeliers, mute witnesses to a time that was rapidly fading away as another time replaced it. But a kind of quiet dignity oozed from every pore of that building, the same kind of quiet dignity with which Clarence carried himself.

My parents used to take my brother and I to the Pearson every Sunday for brunch, something they did even after we moved from our apartment at 222 E. Chestnut, a few blocks from the hotel, to a brownstone a block away from Grant Hospital in Lincoln Park. Some days it was a somewhat informal affair, but mostly it was a gathering of what I suppose could be called the "movers and shakers" in the city. But what I remember most of those brunches - other than a weird aversion to scambled eggs - was Clarence, dressed in his black tuxedo and white gloves. For whatever reason, perhaps because of that dignity and genuine warmth that the man exuded, I always greeted him with a big hug, a gesture he always willingly returned.

To say that I was a rambunctious child would be something of an understatement. The business of adults was excruciatingly boring, and despite my mother's best attempts, the concept of children should be seen and not heard never quite sank in. I remember one Sunday, when the brunch consisted of about twenty couples seated at a long table, that I mortified my parents by deciding to entertain myself with getting on the floor and crawling under the length of that table.

My father started to get under the table to retrieve me but Clarence, ever attendant to his guests' needs, beat him to the punch, so to speak. Tuxedo, gloves and all, he got down under that table and crawled after me, the two of us knocking knees with the best of them.

Mostly, though, when Clarence noticed the terminal ennui getting to me, he would go out of his way to find things to entertain me and give the adults a break. Sometimes he would take me back to the kitchen, where the chefs and waiters would watch me; other times, he would take me into the ballroom, and let me bang away at the keys of an old grand piano. And sometimes, he would sit down at another table with me, and just talk.

In the late 1960s, a time when racial tensions in this country were coming to an explosive head, he taught me more about race relations than anyone else ever did, merely by being who he was. A man, after all, is a man, and it is the content of his character that defines him, not the colour of his skin. Whether he knew it or not, that was the lesson he taught me every time I saw him, perhaps one of the most important lessons I ever learned.

I have no idea what ever became of Clarence. Time went on, and old traditions fell into disuse, left behind as memories of an almost mythical simpler time. But I still think of him from time to time, and I treasure his memory not just because it is a part of a lost childhood, but because I look back with adult eyes and see that lesson. The world would, I think, be a better place if we all had had a Clarence, and I can think of no better epitaph for any man than that.

Waiting on a Lifetime

This is, I suppose, what I get for having cut myself off from old friends for so long.

I discovered today that I am an uncle. And have been for the past five years.

It's a strange feeling, made all the stranger by the circumstances surrounding my finding this out. Time is a funny thing for me, forever both constant and inconstant, always moving forward but finding strange ways to trap me in the past. But age, it seems, has a way of forcing the soul to let go of things that the psyche will not. It's not a mellowing, as some might put it but, perhaps, just an unwillingness to continue fighting old battles, long ago lost.

For whatever reason, as suddenly as I cut off contact, I've started to reconnect with old friends of mine, friends from my childhood. From a time that was simultaneously, paradoxically, both the best and the worst part of my life, for a variety of reasons.

I had lunch this afternoon with a man who, through those years and into my early adulthood, was more of a brother to me than the one I was born with. Some might find that to be a harsh judgment of the oldest son my parents produced, but there were, and are, reasons for that.

This man was, and is, my friend. Nothing will ever change that and, to this day, I would lay down my life for him. But it was a strange experience seeing him again; I looked at the man he had become in my absence, and yet I could still see faint images of the boy he was. Like seeing a ghost, forever young, or peering into a looking glass darkly.

But for that moment in time, I could see him as we once were, riding our bikes along the lakefront and down the streets of Chicago's Near North Side, and finding ways to, shall we say, creatively occupy our time without involving the Chicago Police Department - and mostly succeeding in that.

And as we talked, one thing became painful obvious in its clarity: I never should have left. Something of which my friend pointedly reminded me of. When he asked me, inevitably, I suppose, why, I had no answer to give.

We all ask ourselves that question, that "Why?", and it takes a certain level of introspection to come up with an answer, a level of introspection that I suspect most of us just don't have. I'm certainly not certain that I do. What answer could I possibly give him, what answer could he possibly understand?

I went to a very dark place in those twenty years since the last time I saw him, a place of nightmares and shattered hopes, populated by the lost and forgotten. How does one explain to someone who's never seen it the brutality that we are capable of inflicting on each other? Yes, I've left that part of my life behind me, and yet in many ways, I've never left it. Call it a case of questionable judgment or collateral damage, if you will, but the things I've seen can never be unseen, there is some damge done to the soul that can never be undone.

So, I guess, there is just no answer for that particular question. I had to live in a place where people held there own lives to be meaningless and, in the process, my own life became meaningless. Such is the way of the world, I suppose.

I never should have left. I would, perhaps, have been a better man if I had not. But that's another battle from a war long past, a moment in time gone beyond all hope of recall. Things can never be the same, nor should they be. All I can do now is be the friend that I should have been, and be the uncle that I should have been. Perhaps then my friends and my family can finally forgive me, and I can finally stop waiting on a lifetime.

Quo Vadis?

What does Memorial Day mean to you? Aside from being a long weekend, a break from work, an excuse to fire up the barbeque? That's not an idle question. Does Memorial Day mean anything to you, other than marking the start of Summer?

The pain of loss is always a constant companion, sometimes sharp, sometimes fading into a kind of background ache that over the years has, perhaps perversely, become a comforting warmth. To carry that pain is a part of the bargain going in, but something that, while you may appreciate it intellectually, you are never really prepared for. Emotional scars are the worst scars, for the physical may heal but the wounds dealt to the soul never do. A smell, a turn of phrase, a fragment of a song, and the memories come flooding back in a rush, an elephant kneeling on your chest in all his crushing weight.

I can never smell jet fuel again without being transported back to another time and place, without seeing one future closed off and another opened. Faces of the living and dead alike fade into an indistinct haze, yet there are moments in time perserved in startling clarity, as fresh and as urgent in the mind as the day they happened. Echoes of a past as immutable as the stone beneath our feet, you are left to wither and age while there are those who shall be forever young, forever cut off from your future and theirs. Ashes to ashes, dust to dust, and who can say who got the better end of that deal?

At some point you learn that the "peace" everyone else takes for granted is an illusion, a lie we tell ourselves to hide the fact that it is bought with blood. Orwell said it best, that we sleep peacefully in our beds at night because rough men stand ready to do violence on our behalf. And, never having fired a shot in anger, there are those who pass from this world to whatever comes next, if anything comes next other than the cold silence of the grave. Moments caught in time, where "No fair!" doesn't count and the saddest words in the world are "Why me?"

The hardest thing I've ever had to do is look into a widow's eyes and see reflected there the same question that torments me in the small hours of the night: why him and not you? Years pass and that question never loses its edge, an exquisitely sharp knife that strikes straight into the heart. There's that elephant again, demanding that, at the very least, you bear witness to what you are and to what those who are gone are not.

Someone once told me that it's not necessary to lose your soul in that job, but that a certain amount of violence will be done to it. And to some, it is only a job, while to others its something more, a calling verging on a religious faith. There are as many reasons for joining up as there are those who have joined, but there is one tradition that everyone shares: dying young. That, too, is an inescapable fact of life, the most vital of lotteries determined by the most random of chances. The winners get to go home and live with the questions and the guilt, and the losers, well, they get a white marble marker and a holiday.

There are those of us who don't need an arbitrary day on the calendar to remember; we remember every day, even as we carry on. There is an obligation we carry, to live the lives that they can not. But on this day in particular, that pain of loss is more urgent, more demanding, more accusatory. Large or small, everything you do matters, and the flip side of that obligation is to make the sacrifices of the past and present, both yours and theirs, worth the price.

So, what does Memorial Day mean to you?

Sins of the Past

Time is a funny thing. So real to us that it dictates the tempo of our lives, yet so ethereal that it can slip away between your fingers like grains of sand at the beach. Both it and we have no meaning, no context for us before we are born, it has none after we are gone, and we can never get enough of it while we are.

I found out today that someone from my past, someone that, at the time and in my own, poor way I cared about, died. I don't know what killed her, or anything else except that at the time it happened I was so wrapped up in myself that I didn't even notice her passing.

I don't know, maybe that's a good thing given my track record, maybe it's not. I've had friend die in the cold, bitter mountains and arid deserts of far-off lands, but there's a distance to that, both physical and emotional, that buffers the blow. But this one . . . this one strikes somewhat closer to home, literally and figuratively. There's that one small part of my soul that examines what I am, and doesn't like what it finds.

The sins of our past, our sins of commission and omission, always come back to haunt us, ghosts as ethereal and as real as the time we grapple with. We can seek refuge from them in our friends, in the arms of our lovers, in whomever we please, but that is only an illusion. We can't redeem ourselves from ourselves.

She died, and I had no idea she died. Just another ghost to stand in silent accusation, to show no mercy in my fevered dreams. The man who said that it was better to have loved and lost than to have never loved at all was a dreamer, and a fool. Is it really? For if one never loves, than one never has to feel the exquisite pain of loss, that sharp knife that cuts so cruelly. Yet if one never loves, then one can never really call themselves human, and loss is a part of the bargain. You pays your money, and you takes your chances.

Would it have been better to have never known, to have gone on deluding myself that she was living a happy life somewhere? I truly can't answer that. All I know is that it feels like another part of my life has been chipped away, that I should have paid more attention before it was lost beyond recall.

Ultimately, we can't hide from the sins of our past. No matter how many times we stand before those ghosts and plea mea culpa, there is no judgment that will satisfy them and wash away the guilt. The evil we do under the Sun comes back to inhabit our nights, and all that we do is all that we will ever do.

Friday's Child

Friday is finally over. Goodbye, and good riddance to it.

As hard as I try to wish that day away, it just keeps coming, like some nemesis out of an old, dusty myth. And, like that nemesis, it is as equally unforgiving. There have been thirty-four of these days so far but, I think, the ones that arrive on their yearly date on a Friday are the most poignant.

My father died on the third Friday of May in 1976, a Friday just like yesterday. Thirty-four years and, somehow, the scar tissue never formed, that wound is just as raw as the morning I found his body in our living room. Since I looked into his eyes and saw eternity staring back at me, the impossible, bottomless emptiness of forever.

That morning he taught me the last lesson he would ever teach me, and perhaps it was a lesson that no child should ever learn. As God wills, insh'Allah, maybe it's all just random chance, maybe it's not. When my friends and peers were still safely living out the last days of their childhood, I was pondering the last of our days. Personally, I would have preferred to remain blithely ignorant for a while longer.

All that remains of my father are a few old photographs, and a warm, vaguely comforting sense of great warmth. I remember specific incidents, but I have long ago forgotten what his voice sounded like, the smell of his aftershave, even the features of his face. I remember him holding me in his arms on the deck of a car ferry travelling to Michigan, the irrational fear that he would drop me over the side, his reassurances that he would never do that. I remember sitting in a back room of his office suite as he saw his patients, surrounded by model kits to keep me busy. I remember him walking me to school every morning and that day, shortly before he died when, with a wisp of nostalgia in his voice, he lamented the fact that I was probably too old to kiss him goodbye. And I remember talking to him on the phone every night, before I went to bed.

I talked to him the night before he died, too, and the bitch of it is that I knew what was going to happen. It would be easy, I suppose, to write that off as hindsight, as the confusion of a long-ago memory, but for the fact that when I hung up that phone, I knew that I would never speak to him again.

I wanted to call him back, to tell him, to plead with him to do something; what, I don't know, and what exactly does a child say to a parent at that moment? I wanted to call him back, to hear his voice just one more time, but I talked myself out of it, shook that cold feeling of dread off, and went to sleep. Perhaps the last peaceful night of sleep I ever had, for the next morning, on that Friday, the world irrevocably changed for me.

I should have done it; I should have called him back, and I will bear the burden of not having done so until the day I, too, shall end. Maybe that's fair, maybe it's not, but it is real and just as heavy as the one Atlas bore. My father would have been 91 this September, and maye he would have been if only I had been a better son.

Thirty-four years, and that knife still twists just as exquisitely as the day I found him. I miss him terribly, and I've spent a lifetime trying to redeem the irredeemable. But, somehow, I've found that while I can put the broken pieces of other people back together, the shards of my own soul have been shattered beyond recall. My father would have hated that, which means I've failed him yet again.

Of all the days in the year, I detest this one the most. Some people wonder what they would do if they only had the time to correct just one mistake. I've never had to ask myself that question. I love you, dad, and I miss you, and I'm sorry.

Over the Rainbow

My mother would have been 83 today.

Somehow, I doubt that she would have enjoyed being that old, or at least being reminded of it, but I thought it appropriate that someone should remember. Someone should, after all, bear witness to such days. I have a brother somewhere, and, perhaps, he remembers this day, too. Or perhaps not. All I know is that I do.

My mother died when she was 59, having made it two years past the age my father was when he died a decade earlier. Practical joker that He is, in both cases God managed to arrange things so I would be the one to find both of their bodies after they were done using them. My father may be chalked up to simple fate and bad luck; but my mother, well, that's not so simple. She had gotten ill and was progressively deteriorating and, rather than shuffle her off to a home as my brother wanted to do, I moved back home to take care of her. I had an idea, I suppose, that things would not end happily, even if I wasn't able to admit that to myself. But what else was I supposed to do? Does not the child bear an obligation to his parent? At least she was in her own home when the end came.

There are metaphors everywhere around you, if you care to look for them. My mother died on a night when Nature herself seemed to be in a rage, over what I can not say. Pure nihilism? Spite? A desperate, hopeless cry against the unjust and the inevitable? Take your pick. The wind beat furiously, uselessly, against the unyielding glass and steel of our apartment building, and Lake Michigan herself spilled out from her confining bowl to wash out the Outer Drive. Perhaps that is just the way of it when a star sputters out as it falls into the black void.

One of my mother's favourite movies was The Wizard of Oz, a movie from her childhood, from a simpler time before her father and her brother went off to war. When I was a child, whenever it was on television, she would gather my brother and I together to watch it. And, when the time came, she would break into an intentionally over-the-top falsetto and sing along with Somewhere, Over the Rainbow.

Which is where she is now. Or maybe not. Perhaps there is nothing after this life except the silence of the grave and the weight of eternity. For my part, at least, I hope that she has finally been reunited with my father, the great love of her life. But I can only hope, and only she knows for sure.

They say that God gives people no more weight than they can bear, but I'm not so sure. If that's true, then He must think I have a soul of adamantine. And He's wrong. Somewhere along the line, I gave up. I've spent so much time living with the dead, I've forgotten how to be with the living. Too much time, I suppose, wading through the blood and wreckage of other people's lives to worry about my own.

Why did you leave, mom? Why was I unable to keep you alive? Dying is easy, everybody can do that; living is what's hard to do. Did you give so much of your fire to me that, when you needed it the most, there was nothing left for you? But I did what I was trained to do, I fought for your life, and I lost. It's no easy thing to admit that my best just wasn't good enough.

My mother should have been 83 today. But she is not, and I miss her terribly. My mind tells me I was playing a game I never could win, but the mind does not always rule the heart, some wounds just do not heal. And I can't even tell you how sorry I am, for so many things. But I will remember this day, until the time comes when I, too, can remember nothing at all.

Ruminations of a Brown Shoe Man

Did I ever tell you how much I hate battleships?

Well, no, "hate" is, I suppose, too strong a word. I don't hate battleships, I guess, but I have pretty much had it with their prima-donna pretentiousness. Realy, now, just what about them is it that justifies their oh-so-high-and-mighty attitude? Not one darn thing, that's what.

Think about them for a minute. Big, slow and ponderous, a battleship is just like that funny old lady down the street who insists on stuffing herself into a dress three sizes too small. Pathetic, right? A battleship is about as sexy as someone wearing blonde pigtails, a helmet with horns stuck on the side, and belting out a Viking aria.

Queens of the battle line? More like hussies of the sea, if you ask me, and just about as attractive. A battleship lacks the graceful elegance of a cruiser, or the lithe, athletic agility of a destroyer. Overweight, overwrought and overhyped, a battleship just sort of plods around like that one kid everybody politely refers to as "special," and with about the same expectation of actually producing any useful results.

And, really, when was the last time a battleship actually ever did anything? Oh, sure, they love to see themselves in the headlines, but all they really do is just sit around eating and getting fat. Not like they couldn't afford to lose a few pounds, but you go and try telling them that. I dare you. They're like an old movie star who just can't give up the limelight gracefully, always going on and on about "Jutland this . . ." and "Surigao that . . ." Bah! Get over yourselves already!

I tell you, there's no sadder sight in the world than a battleship all gussied up like a Times Square harlot. Who do they think they're fooling? You just can't hide poundage like that under a pretty dress and, no matter how much lipstick you slather on a pig, it's still a pig. Watching battleships move is like watching a waltz of the elephants, and just about as graceful, too.

Just a bunch of big talkers with nothing to back it up, that's what battleships are. But if you listen closely to them, you invariably find out that for all their stories, it always comes down to them just sort of hanging around while someone else did all the work. All the battleships do is try and claim the credit afterwards. And is that really something we want to hold up as an example? I think not.

Remember, the best thing you can do when you see a battleship is just ignore it. Don't encourage it, whatever you do. Bad behaviour, after all, should be pitied, not rewarded.

More Meaningless Meanderings

*Sigh* Well, she's at it again. By "she," I mean my friend with the penchant for falling for ponzi schemes, and by "it" I mean the, well, ponzi schemes.

You know, I really feel like I should be doing my best Ted Koppel imitation right now: "Welcome to Nightline and Day 125 of the Iraqi Dinar Crisis . . ." Yeah, my friend brought that one up again, how all her financial dreams will be fulfilled, and that $10 thousand dollars she owes me will be repaid "with interest," just as soon as The Big Move takes place with the Iraqi dinar. They are, you see, going to "revalue" it right after their elections in early March. Oh, yeah, and it seems that Donald Trump just bought $300 million in dinar, so you know it just has to be true.

Pardon me while I vomit. For those of you who may, God knows why, have been paying attention to such things, at the current exchange rate 100,000 Iraqi dinar equates to the whopping total of $83.73. Methinks it's going to take one hell of a "revaluing" to make any money off that cow of a currency. But what do I know? I'm not Donald Trump . . .

Oh, well. I suppose one of these days that pig will just have to fly.

In more amusing news, I read today that the Secretary of Defence has directed the Navy to lift its ban on women serving aboard submarines. What a truly horrible idea.

Look, I have no problem with women serving in the military, nor do I necessarily have a problem with women serving aboard ships (I do have a problem with women serving in certain combat billets, like the Infantry in the Army, but that's got more to do with the physical standards being relaxed than anything else). Women have been serving aboard U.S. warships for quite a while now and, aside from, I'm sure, a purely coincidental rash of pregnancies among the first mixed crews, that has been pretty much a success.

But a surface ship is not a submarine. Crew space is always at a premium on a warship - remember, machinery and weapons come first, people come second - but it is a relatively eas thing to refit an aircraft carrier to accept a mixed crew than it is a submarine. More to the point, it just can't be done with a submarine. Sure, for a boat that hasn't been built yet, you can redo the plans to make that allowance. But in a boat that's already in service? Nope.

Think of a submarine this way: it's a tube, about thirty feet in diameter and three hundred or so feet long. Into that tube go the ballast tanks that make it go up and down, and the pressure hull in which the crew lives and works. Everything from the Reactor Room aft is occupied by the machinery that makes the boat go. Everything forward is full of the machinery and weapons that allow the boat to fight, the batteries, and the air plant that allows them to blow water out of the ballast tanks so the boat can surface. Next comes all the pumps and piping that allows them to fill the ballast tanks, trim the boat, and empty the tanks. Then come the electrical runs, HVAC runs, food storage, weapons storage, generators, etc. and etc. Last of all come accomodations for the crew, which are crammed in wherever they can find room forward of the Reactor and Engineering spaces.

Put another way, the average Los Angeles-class SSN has a crew of 130, and only enough space to put in bunks for about half that. The Navy gets around this problem through the practice of "hot bunking" - three guys share on bunk, on the theory that one of them will always be on watch, one of them will be engaged in ship's work, and the third one gets to sleep. It's called "hot bunking" because when you get in, the bed is still warm from the guy who preceded you.

Even at that, the bunk itself is only the size of an average coffin and, unlike in surface ships that have the room for distinct "bunk rooms," those on a submarine are crammed in wherever they can find the room. Privacy is nil, and there's just no way to create sex-segregated sleeping areas.

So just why in the hell is this a good idea? I'm all for progress, but why when you're trying to force a foot into a shoe that won't fit? Again, I have no problem with women serving on the boats, but I think it would be a much better idea to leave that to the next generation of submarines we build, where the appropriate allowances can be designed in. It just seems to me that by pushing this for the existing generation of boats, we're just trying to prove how progressive and P.C. we are, and to hell with the consequences.

Oh, well. My time in the Navy has been over for a long time, now. I guess I'm just too set in my ways to realize that the military exists solely to be a laboratory for social engineering . . .

P.S. Battleships suck big donkey balls.

Be Careful What You Wish For . . .

Once upon a time, in the Land of Strong, Female Talking Ponies, there lived a strong, female talking pony, who was the Queen of her realm. Coinicidentally enough, among all the other strong, female talking ponies who inhabited the land - of which, really, there weren't that many, since everyone knows what a disaster it is to have that many strong, talking females gathered in one place, especially when they're all wearing the same outfit - she was known as the Strong, Female Talking Pony.

Now, the Land of Strong, Female Talking Ponies was a magical place, full of cotton candy clouds and bubbling brooks of tasty dark chocolate, where the oats for all the talking ponies grew strong and tall under the brilliant sunshine that poured down out of the sky on thousands of Bluebirds of Happiness as they pooped on statues of beetle-browed, knuckle-walking gender-threatened men placed there specifically for that purpose.

The Strong, Female Talking Pony was quite happy with the way in which she had ordered her realm, for she spent her days expounding on her Strong, Female Talking Pony Opinions to her subjects and basking in their adulation, which made her happy. She also spent her days denying tasty bacon treats to her faithful dogs, which made them unhappy, but in the Land of Strong, Female Talking Ponies, no dog should have unhealthy treats, and apple cores are just fine for them, the ungrateful, whining snots.

Then, one day, blatantly ignoring the posted signs saying "NO BOYZ OR OTHER OPINIONS ALLOWED," a group of beetle-browed, knuckle-walking gender-threatened men blundered their way into this magical queendom. Loud, crude, and scratching themselves in delicate places in public, this testosterone-laden invasion greatly distressed the Strong, Female Talking Pony and made her cross to no end. So she set forth from her shining Ivory Tower to overwhelm the beasts with the shining logic of her unassailable secular-humanist opinions.

"What do you want here?" she demanded when she finally confronted the interlopers.

"Oh, we're just looking around," replied the beetle-browed, knuckle-walking gender-threatened men. "Nice place you've got here. Could use a big-screen HDTV, though."

"For what? So you can watch sports?" the Strong, Female Talking Pony asked with a sneer.

"Well, yeah. That's kind of the point behind a big-screen HDTV," the beetle-browed, knuckle-walking gender-threatened men said. "Oh, and video games, too."

"Never!" the Strong, Female Talking Pony said. "I shall never allow big-screen HDTVs showing beetle-browed, knuckle-walking gender-threatened men bashing each other about in sweaty, pointless juvenile contests with no point to disrupt the peace and harmony of the Land of Strong, Female Talking Ponies!"

"Suit yourself," the beetle-browed, knuckle-walking gender-threatened men shrugged. "Er, by the way, who are you?"

"Why, I am the Strong, Female Talking Pony, Queen of this Land of Strong, Talking Female Ponies," the Strong, Talking Female Pony said. "I have many deeply-held opinions which are unquestionably true."

"Oh? Like what?" the beetle-browed, knuckle-walking gender-threatened men asked.

"There are so many, but my favourites are the unerring correctness of tax-and-spend policies and the brilliant, unquestionable truths of Keynesian philiosophy," the Strong, Female Talking Pony said. "Oh, and that the word 'he' is designed solely to keep Strong, Female Talking Ponies down."

"Really?" the beetle-browed, knuckle-walking gender-threatened men asked. "And if we said that you can't tax your way out of every economic problem, or legislate away peoples' beliefs?"

"I would say that your opinions are not mine, and so can not possibly have any validity," the Strong, Female Talking Pony sniffed with an air of absolute certainty.

"Well, as long as you're being open-minded about it . . ." the beetle-browed, knuckle-walking gender-threatened men said.

"You still haven't told me why you are darkening my realm with your absurd conservative theories that can't possibly be true because I don't want them to be," the Strong, Female Talking Pony said.

"Oh, that," the beetle-browed, knuckle-walking gender-threatened men said. "We're just here to clear this land for the development of a couple of strip malls, and maybe a subdivision with a golf course."

"What? You can't do that!" the Strong, Female Talking Pony said.

"Of course we can," the beetle-browed, knuckle-walking gender-threatened men said. "If it helps, just think of the increased tax base."

And with that, a great hammer descended from the sky and smacked the Strong, Female Talking Pony right between the eyes. As she was being hauled off to the nearest glue factory, the beetle-browed, knuckle-walking gender-threatened men shrugged.

"Oh, well. Guess you can't stand in the way of progress." And then they built a hockey arena.

Fly Me to the Moon . . . Or Not

Okay, I'm confused. Granted, that isn't really a hard thing to accomplish; just ask the dogs I live with, they do that regularly. But I really don't understand how someone can say one thing to one group of people, then turn right around and say something completely different to another group, all without batting an eye. Maybe it's just a continuity error, or maybe I should just remind myself that when dealing with politicians, lying is a way of life.

In case you missed it, last week the President floated a budget plan for NASA that, while increasing spending for that agency by approximately $6 billion dollars, also entailed scrapping the two new boost vehicles (on which we've already spend several billion dollars) and the programme to return a manned mission to the Moon by 2020. In return for, well . . . nothing.

Right, a President can propose any kind of budget he wants. That's not what I have an issue with, although in this case, peremptorily shutting down a return to the Moon is just a stupid idea. But, just in case you missed this one, too, in a monumentally transparent "Pay no attention to what I'm saying" moment, the President spoke to the current crew on the ISS and told them not only how "proud" he was of their efforts, but how "committed" he was to furthering the manned exploration and exploitation of space.

Umm . . . what? It could just be me, but I'm having problems reconciling those two statements. I mean, you can't possibly be committed to the exploration of space when you just got done cancelling . . . the exploration of space.

Somehow, this reminds me of Senator William Proxmire and his "Golden Fleece Awards." For those of you who don't remember, he was the guy who would periodically hold press conferences and hand out these "awards" to individuals and programmes that he viewed as a complete waste of public money. NASA in particular, and the space programme in general, were frequent "winners" and, as far as I can tell, handing out these "Golden Fleece Awards" was about the only thing Proxmire ever accomplished while in the Senate.

It's an easy thing, I suppose, when you don't really know what you're talking about, to look at the money spent on a space programme and blanch. I mean, it really is a pile of cash. But the fact remains that for every dollar spent on the space programme, somewhere between four and five dollars is returned in terms of useful technology.

Don't believe me? Velcro is a product of the old Apollo programme. That cell phone you're talking on? Your microwave? Your PC and laptop? LEDs? The computer chip controlling your car? GPS? Just some of the things derived from the space programme.

And, yes, good old Tang, too. But some returns are more valuable than others.

But that isn't really the point. No, the real point is that, while people here are wringing their hands and worrying over depletion of resources and a resulting fall in standards of living, there's a whole solar system full of resources just waiting to be exploited. All we have to do is have the intestinal fortitude to go out and get them.

Returning to the Moon would be a good way to start, though it seems the President is blithely oblivious to that fact. One would think that, as "green" as he claims himself to be, he would realize that setting up solar-energy collecting "farms" on the Moon would be a great way to help knock us off our oil addiction, but, well . . . he'd first have to realize that we'd have to go back to the Moon to do that.

Of course, there are also all sorts of rare metals on the Moon that might help us out, too. You know, things like chromium and oh, yeah, gold, as just two examples. But move beyond the Moon. Out in the asteroid belt there's iron, nickel, silver, platinum, irridium, just all sorts of goodies. How about going out into the solar system and mining bodies for water ice, so maybe we can truly turn deserts here into green areas? Or, at least, head off some unnecessary tussling over fresh water resources here? The possibilities are pretty much endless.

I can understand, I suppose, a reluctance to rely on government to fund the whole thing. And, in truth, government can't afford to do so. If we are really going to exploit the resources that are present in the solar system, the private sector is going to have to get involved, too. But the private sector isn't going to do that if the government won't do it, either.

Pay attention, Mr. President. At least in the short term, the government is going to have to do the heavy lifting, so to speak. Call it a proof-of-concept. Of course, the government is also going to have to provide the private sector with some sort of incentives to get involved. The cash outlay for the private sector is going to be just as large as it is for the government, so they might like to be assured of making some sort of profit in return for their effort. In other words, you and every other politician out there are going to have to resist the urge to tax the snot out of them just because you can. Besides which, if you get off your rear end and seriously start to get out into the solar system, you're going to wind up rolling around in more revenues than you know what to do with.

But, really, to say that you're committed to exploring space while emasculating the ability to do so? C'mon, now, it isn't April Fool's Day yet.

More Random Musings for No Reason

For those of you who think your local politicians are corrupt, I have but one word: pikers. Give it up now, folks, nothing beats a Chicago politician for plumbing the depths of just how low a so-called "public servant" can sink.

You see, last December, a piece of artwork - a statue, in fact - managed to "disappear" from the grounds of Chicago State University. The piece in question was an ebony sculpture of an African woman, and had been commissioned by CSU as part of gallery on the history of African-Americans in the U.S.

Well, since it isn't every day that pieces of public art just up and disappear, the Chicago Police Department was kind of interested in what had happened to it. Questioning the other statues on the grounds of CSU, however, didn't produce any useable leads, so . . .

The good news in this is that the statue eventually turned up in the Chicago offices of one of our State legislators. Why it turned up there, however, remains something of an unanswered question. It has something to do with the legislator in question claiming that the funds used to pay the sculptor were somehow misappropriated by CSU which, if the money had been granted to pay an artist for a piece of artwork, seems to be something of a non-starter. The only thing that is clear in this whole thing is that the legislator refuses to return the statue to Chicago State University, and it still occupies a back office in her suite.

But think about this for a moment. This woman had to get her staff together, hire a truck and a crane, and have them abscond with this statue in the middle of the night. That's right, folks, only in Chicago would a public servant steal a piece of public art purchased with public funds . . .

And, just to further embarrass the people and State of Illinois, the corrupt Governor we just tossed out of office is going to appear on Trump's Celebrity Apprentice. Can someone just not make Rod Blagoevich go away? Personally, I'm hoping that he and former Governor Ryan can share a cell.

And once again in the Only in Illinois category, we just got done with our Primaries not too long ago. In which, yes, we learned through a campaign commercial that one of our candidates for State Comptroller allegedly had personal ties to such luminaries as Sam Giancanna and Tony "the Big Tuna" Accardo. Before you know it, someone's going to drag Al Capone into it, too . . .

In a recent poll, it seems that while 53% of Illinois voters approve of what the President is doing, the other 47% want to run him up a tree and set fire to it . . . and those numbers are narrowing. Me, I'm still ambivalent in that there are some things the President is doing that I don't like, and some things that I do like. But when your own home State starts to turn on you, it might be time to rethink a few positions.

Lindsey Vonn finally got her Olympic gold medal. Good for her, she deserved it. Flimsy Chokabellis, however, might want to find out who she pissed off before her snowboard run . . .

Note to the figure skating judges: if you want people to stop talking about how corruptible the scoring system is, how about coming up with an open system that people can understand? Just asking.

Once again, to all the brain-dead morons out there: when you see a six-inch-curb with yellow lines painted on either side of it, chances are they don't want you to make a left-hand turn right there.

Peyton Manning crying in his beer; always good for the soul. But I still want to know who the '72 Dolphins paid off to maintain their record for a perfect season.

Did you know that I'm scared all the time? I didn't used to be, but I am now. I'm scared that the rest of my life is going to be just one long procession of visiting different doctors. I'm scared that I'll never marry or have children. There are some nights that I'm scared to go to bed, because of the fear that I might not wake up. Most of all, though, I'm scared that while people are telling me to exercise more because of the arterial blockages in my legs, someone else will amputate my legs because of those blockages . . .

Ah, well, no one listens anyway . . .

Arrows of Orion (redux)

15th day of Midyear, P.C. 22473
21 August 2015



The President heaved a great sigh and looked out the window past the imposing monuments and the public buildings of the capital, the white of the marble stark against the sky, at the distant horizon. Great, blue-black clouds gathered and piled up on each other in a boiling mass, reaching out for him, as sheet lightning flared fitfully and occasionally resolved itself into a multitude of bluish-white bolts tracing incredibly intiricate and brief patterns across the sky. There was a storm coming, alright, no doubt about it. Though he couldn't hear it yet, if he concentrated hard enough, he could just feel the ominous rumble of ditant thunder.

He sighed again, taking that as a warning. He couldn't help but feel that if he were truly lucky, one of those lightning bolts would reach out of the sky and end what was rapidly becoming a miserable existence. At least then, all of his worries would become someone else's problem, and he could at last rest.

The reason for his bout of melancholy lay untouched on top of his low desk, the latest report from the war zones, nestled between its bright red covers, the security seals unbroken. He hadn't bothered to read it, already knowing what it said.

The cold, precise language would drone on for pages, backed up by charts and graphs and statistics, but in the end it would all come down to a single, inescapable conclusion. They were all living on the borrowed time of a terminally ill patient, and time was running out.

The intercom on his desk buzzed, breaking his train of thought as it demanded his attention. He turned away from the window and the approaching storm, silencing it.

"Yes?"

"Mr. President, the Chief Minister is here," his receptionist said.

"Thank you. Please show him in," the President said. He got up and came around the desk as the door opened to greet his visitor.

"Good afternoon, Estlandor," the Chief Minister said, raising a hand and bowing slightly. Having known him since childhood, he was one of only a very select few who would dare to address the President by his familiar name.

"Athlenshar. It is good to see you," the President eplied, returning the gesture with a slightly deeper bow.

"Is it?" Athlenshar said, his ears twitching in amusement.

"Why wouldn't it be?" the President asked, knowing exactly why it wouldn't but observing the niceties nonetheless. He indicated a chair. "Please, sit."

"Thank you." There was a low, drawn-out boom as Athlenshar slid into the seat, rattling the windows in their frames. "Quite a storm brewing, isn't there?" he asked.

Estlandor grunted, wondering how much of a double meaning his visitor had really intended. It was, he decied, no doubt deliberate, given the reason for the Chief Minister's visit. He had known it was coming, and had dreaded it. "The likes of which we have rarely seen," he agreed, answering one double-entendre with another.

"You have no interest in keeping up with your reading?" Athlenshar asked, gesturing at the report sitting untouched on the desk.

"What's the point? I already know what it says," Estlandor replied, holding his hands out in a shrug. "And it's depressingly the same as the one before that, and the one before that . . ."

"The war does not go well," Athlenshar said, flapping his ears in agreement. "Ninth Fleet is smashed, Eslanor and Arason are lost, and the enemy continues to come on."

"The war has never gone well, my friend, and now it is going from bad to worse. The Outer Rim is long gone, the Mid-Marches are all but gone, and it won't be long before the Core is breached."

"And you do not believe we can prevent that," Athlenshar said.

"Not quite true," Estlandor said, twitching a hand in negation. "We have, as you well know, one possibility. But we have to be willing to take it."

"There is, you know, a sizeable minority of the Master's Council that believes that would be a mistake," Athlenshar said carefully.

"I am aware of that. They are being foolish."

The Chief Minister sighed. This was an old argument and, in truth, one on which he was himself undecided. He could see merits on both sides of the debate. "Be that as it may, even you have to admit that the results the last time were, shall we say, less than optimal."

"We acted hastily then. The Council wanted results immediately, misjudged the need for further development, then overcompensated and acted rashly. That was a mistake," Estlandor said, waving away the objection. "We have learned from that, refined our techniques, and the subjects are more mature now."

"Indeed," Athlenshar said in a neutral tone.

"The point is, we have no choice, now. You know that, and so do they, if they would stop considering their own fears and really look at the data. Our resources are stretched past their limits, and every day we wait, the more we lose and the weaker we become," Estlandor said, irritation creeping into his voice. Tell me, will they not act until the enemy is pounding on the doors of Parliament?"

"It isn't that easy a decision," Athlenshar said, trying to soothe his friend.

"Isn't it? This falls to me, you know, in my capacity as Chair of the Security Council. I could make it an Order of State."

"You could also be removed from office in a vote of No Confidence," Athlenshar pointed out. "And you will be if you try and force your hand without convincing the Master's Council of the need."

"We have no other options," Estlandor said stubbornly. "What more convincing do they need?"

"There are other considerations that have to be taken into account, my friend," Athlenshar said, gesturing for the other to see the reasoning. "Are you sure the subjects can be controlled, for instance? What do we stand to lose if we let them loose on the universe? There will be consequences for that, both for them and ourselves. Their culture is young and uncertain, and they are often unpredictable, while ours is cursed with the fragility of great age. The ones that was have assimilated have become saddled with that same curse, a loss for both them and us. We haven't been terribly successful in mixing, and forcing the issue could be a shattering experience for both. That is the concern."

"A greater concern than losing everything? You've read the reports, too," Estlandor said, gesturing at the one on his desk. "It's a simple data-set. Either we continue on as we have, and the result will be as if we had never existed, or we take the one option open to us and perhaps survive. We can, and we will, guide them, just as any good parent would do. That is our responsibility, to lead them to that which is best for them, and for us. And we have more experience in dealing with their kind, now."

"Well, at least you are confident," Athlenshar said, his ears twitching in amusement again. "Though I must admit that I am hrd pressed to see how a few anthropological expeditions and cullings to replenish the 'wild' strain count as more experience."

"A confidence born of desperation, you mean?" Estlandor asked. "Very well, then, yes. But again, we have little choice. They are a war-like race, and when was the last time we fought a real war? Five thousand years ago? Six? Very few of us are war-like races, and those few are close to exhaustion."

"And that, too, is a concern," Athlenshar said with a sigh. "It would hardly be an optimal solution to be saved from one enemy, only to have our saviours turn on us in the end."

"They won't," Estlandor said, putting as much confidence into his words as he could. It helped that he firmly believed that, too.

"All right, I know you have a plan," Athlenshar said after a moment's thought. "Give it to me, and I will convince the Master's Council, somehow. It may take my first-born, but . . ."

"Thank you, Athlenshar," the President said. He opened a drawer and handed over a thick sheaf of papers.

The Chief Minister looked at them for a moment as if they might bite him. "You realize, of course, that if I do this, they will insist on holding you responsible for whatever happens?" he asked.

"I do."

"All right, then," Athlenshar said, getting to his feet. "I truly hope that you know what you are doing with this. I'll let you know what the Council's decision is." The windows rattled again to another rumbling peal of thunder and the sibilant hiss of a wind gust.

"You should hurry," Estlandor said to his guest. "The storm won't wait long."

Arrows of Orion

Our hearts so stout have got us fame,
For soon 'tis known from whence we came;
Where'er we go they fear the name
Of Garryowen in glory!



Arrows of Orion

15th Day of Endyear, P.C. 22480
11 November 2022

This was really stupid. He didn't need to be right here, playing Forward Observer; he needed to be back in the TOC, running the Regiment, and allowing a real red-leg to be out here, playing hero. Then again, he apparently hadn't done a very good job of that, so the least he could do was try and cover the retreat of what was left. After asking the men and women under his command to risk everything on what turned out to be a fool's errand, he could hardly avoid doing the same.

He set his fieldglasses aside and took a moment to consult his map, verifying the coordinates before he called them in. It had, after all, been a while since he had done this, and it momentarily diverted his mind from the churning mass in the valley and what it meant. The act also served admirably to keep the bittersweet thoughts of his wife and children from breaking through. At last satisfied that he hadn't screwed this up, too, he reached for the radio lying in the dirt by his side.

"Uniform 39, this is Whiskey 77 Alpha," Kelly said into the handset. "Target is approximately four thousand Chirpers, in the open. Fire for effect, VT, UTM CK3397122631." It was a bit of a long shot, but Kelly was confident the artillery could make it.

"Uniform 39. Four thousand Chirpers in the open, fire for effect, VT, UTM CK3397122631," the operator in the Fire Direction Centre replied, repeating the fire request back. There was a few seconds' pause, then, "Shot, out."

"Shot, out," Kelly repeated, then started counting to himself.

"Shot, splash."

"Shot, splash," Kelly repeated again, just as the artillery arrived. He heard a series of muffled thumps as the shells split open in midair among clouds of greyish-white smoke, the sound reaching his ears a few seconds after the sight, scattering their submunitions across the advancing aliens. Each submunition, the size of a softball and packed with explosives and razor-sharp notched wire, exploded either on contact with the ground or at a pre-determined height above it. The result was a rapid series of crack-crack-crack sounds, like all the fireworks in the world going off at once, and the leading Chirper ranks disappeared in boiling clouds of black and grey. Three battalion volleys crashed into the aliens, the shrapnel tearing into their bodies, mixing blood and body parts with the churned earth of the valley.

"Uniform 39, Whiskey 77 Alpha. Adjust fire," Kelly said into the handset, his fieldglasses back up to his eyes even before the last volley fell. He already had his next target picked out. "Target is six thousand Chirpers under partial wooded cover, fire for effect, VT, UTM CK33969122628."

"Uniform 39. Six thousand Chirpers under partial wooded cover, fire for effect, VT, UTM CK33969122628," the FDC answered. "Shot, out."

"Shot, out." A part of Kelly's mind marveled at the coolness of the operator's voice. Of course, the FDC was twenty-five miles behind the rapidly disintegrating front line; that man could afford to be calm.

"Shot, splash."

"Shot, splash," Kelly said. Again, the artillery tore through the Chirpers, the hot, sharp pieces of metal augmented in their effect by jagged, shattered chunks of tree limbs and trunks. The aliens were mangled and torn, dying in their hundreds and thousands, but still they kept coming. Those in back trampled over the dead and dying in a single-minded desire to close with the human enemy, an ocean tide that would not be denied. Watching that writhing mass, Kelly knew beyond a doubt that he was going to die, and the only comfort he could take from that thought was the knowledge that the longer he delayed the Chirpers, the more time he bought for the survivors of this debacle to retreat and for the Army to reform a new line.

Some comfort, he snorted to himself. Pity I won't be there to see it.

Scanning with his glasses, he spotted another large group of aliens advancing out of an abandoned farm. "What a marvellous day for a killing," he mused out loud. "Uniform 39, Whiskey 77. Adjust fire. Five thousand Chirpers in the open, fire for effect, VT, UTM CK33973226626."

Shell after shell screamed out of the sky, tearing through the mass of aliens like a scythe. He could almost feel sorry for them, a race of beings that had mastered the heavens, but somehow missed the concept of indirect-fire weapons. Almost. If it hadn't been for all the death and destruction they'd caused, not just in the United States but all over the world. There had been six billion people and change in the world when the Chirpers arrived; no one knew exactly how many were left, but large areas of the globe had been depopulated by them.

It took him a moment to realize that the last volley had fallen. He scanned for the next target and saw the largest group of Chirpers yet, gathering on the far side of the valley where the Interstate crested a ridge. They were well back from where the other groups had been; Kelly checked his map, and decided to call it in anyway. This group looked like it was taking its time and spreading out to minimize its losses.

"Terrific. Smart Chirpers. Just what I needed," he grumbled. "Uniform 39, Whiskey 77. Adjust fire. Approximately fifteen thousand Chirpers in the open, fire for effect, VT, UTM CK338119225783."

"Uniform 39, negative, Whiskey 77. We can not fire that grid," came the reply. Kelly's heart sank, even though he had been half-expecting it.

"Uniform 39, Whiskey 77. I really need those final protective fires."

"Uniform 39, understood, but we just don't have the range." For the first time, Kelly heard a hint of emotion in the other voice, a sadness tinged with deep frustration.

"Shit." Kelly looked through his fieldglasses at the Chirpers. More and more of them were gathering, in such numbers that even if he brought them under artillery fire as soon as they came in range, he doubted it would stop them. Hell, he doubted he'd be able to adjust fire quickly enough to even irritate them.

"Uniform 39, Whiskey 77. Are there any other batteries in range of that grid?"

The reply took a few moments in coming. "Whiskey 77, Uniform 39. Negative on your last."

Kelly sighed. So, it was finally all over. Well, he thought grimly, everybody has to die some time. "Uniform 39, Whiskey 77. Understood," he said into the handset. "Might be time for you to start thinking about pulling out. There isn't a whole lot between you and the Chirpers, you know."

"Roger, Whiskey 77. I could say the same to you."

Kelly smiled mirthlessly, reaching for his carbine with his free hand. "Uniform 39, negative on that. I kind of like the scenery. I always wanted to retire to the country." He realized it was an empty gesture, but it was far too late for him to try and run now.

"Ah, roger that, Whiskey 77," the FDC operator replied, the calm voice nearly breaking. "We're kind of happy where we are, too."

"Uniform 39, Whiskey 77. It's been nice working with a professional. I'll call you for the last FPF when they're in range," Kelly said. "Been nice knowing you."

"Whisky 77, Uniform 39. Sorry, brother."

Kelly was about to drop the handset when a powerful carrier wave squealed over the radio, and a new voice broke into the net.

"Whiskey 77 Alpha, standby one. We can reach that TRP," a calm, cool female voice said. "Duck and cover, this is going to be Danger Close. Shot, out."

"Unidentified station this net, shot, out. Who is this?" Kelly asked, confused. Not that he was going to look a gift horse in the mouth, but he couldn't help wondering who his saviour was and just what the hell was danger close when the Corps guns were out of range.

"Shot, splash," the voice said, ignoring the question.

Kelly opened his mouth to respond, but never got the words out. The heavens were torn asunder by a shriek almost beyond hearing, the noise hammering his ears as the ground bucked and heaved beneath him like a living thing, tossing him into the air again and again. Streaks of living fire reached down out of the sky, starkly bright, the fingers of God raking languidly across the earth, leaving devastation in their wake. When the bolts finally stopped falling, everything that had been in the valley was gone, and the ground looked like a moonscape.

"Unidentified station this net . . . who . . . who the hell are you?" Kelly finally managed to stammer out. The air smelled like ozone, the smoke and dust churned up by the bombardment slowly beginning to drift away on the wind.

"Whiskey 77, this is TF-58. Nice to see you're still with us," the lilting female voice answered. "Do you require further orbital gunfire support?"

"Jesus . . . God . . . no," Kelly said. Nothing moved out where the Chirpers had been. There was nothing left to move.

"We will continue to monitor this net. Have a good one, Whiskey 77. TF-58, out."

Kelly looked skyward as the radio fell silent, dropping the handset to the ground. Unbidden, tears welled up from his eyes and began to slip down his dirt-streaked face. He was going to live; they were all going to live.

Pity the poor Chirpers. The Navy had finally come home.

The Ghost Mumblers

I hate idiots. Really, there's nothing worse in the world. Except, perhaps, for self-important idiots with a talent for negotiating contracts with the idiots in charge of Cable programming. Yep, those idiots are the worst.

So, I guess what I'm really saying is that I hate self-important idiots who have their own TV shows. Why? Well, the simple answer would be, I suppose, because I don't have my own Cable TV show. I mean, I can be a self-important idiot, too . . .

But what is giving rise to my current eruption of spleen is a bit of channel-surfing I did earlier tonight. As I passed by the SciFi Channel - or, as they now like to call themselves in a fit of trying to shove their own heads up their rectums, SyFy - I caught a bit of the latest episode of Ghosthunters International. It seems that that intrepid band of bungling ghost-wranglers - I mean, really, the fact that they've never actually "caught" a ghost does not speak well of their "hunting" abilities - took a little trip to Argentina. To "hunt" for the ghost of Adolf Hitler.

Oy. So many people to smack in the back of the head, so little time.

Leaving aside the fact that there are no ghosts or, if we were to be exceptionally generous, that no one has ever produced bullet-proof evidence of spirits from the hereafter, I again have to just ask, are people really that stupid? Or is this just another example of us not bothering to teach History in school any more?

"Oh, no, senor, Mister Hitler is no here . . ."

I really can't stand bad History, probably because that was one of my Majors in college. Of course, given that I'm talking about a bunch of gullible but, I suppose, ultimately harmless nitwits, I probably wouldn't care all that much . . . except for having also recently suffered through a "documentary" on The Discovery Channel that purported to investigate the "disappearance" of Mr. Adolf at the end of the war, and his "possible" escape to South America.

Again, so mny people to smack . . . but I digress.

Yeah, I know, there's nothing like a good conspiracy theory, because it makes dumb people feel like they're smart. But come on, every good theory has to have some plausible fact on which to hang, which this one does not. Let's face it: how, exactly, did our little Bavarian corporal make it from Berlin to Argentina?

Let's leave aside the fact that we have the testimony of witnesses who were present tha Hitler shot himself in the bunker. Let's also leave aside the fact that we have the testimony of the people who burned his body and the body of Eva Braun in the garden of the Reichschancellery. Hell, let's even toss out the fact that some partial remains of the not-departed-quickly-enough leader of Nazi Germany reside in the Russian national archives - to wit, fragments of his skull and jaw. We'll even ignore that the jaw matches Hitler's dental records, and that DNA testing of the remains - the man did have relatives, you know, who survived the war - confirms their identity. After all, a good conspiracy theorist would tell you all that information could be faked. What possible reason there could be for perpetuating the idea that the greatest war criminal of all time lived out an apparently quiet and happy retirement on a ranch in Argentina is a bit more slippery to explain, but oh, well . . .

Quick History lesson. At the time Uncle Adolf put the Walther in his mouth and finally did the world an overdue favour, Berlin was surrounded by the Red Army. There was no way in, and no way out. Let's remember, the Nazi leaders who survived the fall of Berlin - namely, Goering and Himmler - had gotten out of the city long before the Soviets arrived. Now, do we really think it possible for Hitler to waltz through fifty or so miles of territory controlled by the Red Army in order to reach German lines unnoticed to be credible? The only way he could do it would be to fly and, well, there's a problem with that. By the time he committed suicide, the Soviets had overrun all the airfields in and around Berlin. Yes, Hannah Reitsch managed to fly into the city, using the Unter den Linden as a landing strip, and managed to get her plane shot to pieces in the process. And, yes, she managed to fly out, too, but once again got her plane shot to pieces. Are you really going to put der Fuehrer in that position?

Furthermore, even if you turn your brain off and swallow the idea that Hitler got out of Berlin, you run into another problem. Where, exactly, do you go? I mean, how do you get him from Germany to Argentina? It's not like he could book passage on Queen Elizabeth, you know, and I'm pretty sure that Lufthansa was out of business by then.

Right, so he'd have to go by submarine. I mean, by that time in the war, someone would have noticed a German surface ship, right? So, u-boat it is. But then we run into another little problem: we knew where the u-boats were and what they were doing.

The Allies, you see, were cheating. They were reading the Germans' mail. The British called it "Magic." With a little help from the Poles, they had broken the German Enigma codes at the beginning of the war. In addition, at the end of the war, every German u-boat that was at sea was required to surface and turn itself in to the nearest Allied port or task force. Most did exactly that, and the few that didn't scuttled themselves and hoped that the nearby Allied warships would be kind enough to pick up the now-swimming crews. In any event, no u-boats showed up unexpectedly in Argentine ports or anywhere else in South America.

Finally, consider this. Hitler had literally just turned 56 when he killed himself. In other words, he had a few good years left in him. Even if we presume that he made it all the way from Berlin to Argentina, what did he do with himself for the next twenty or thirty years? This was a man with an ego bigger than God's, who had been a vocal political agitator since the 1920s, and who had run Germany since 1933. Somehow, I just can't picture him sitting around on the veranda, sipping margaritas and waiting to die. Not to mention the fact that he'd have had to spend all that time rubbing elbows with people he would have considered as untermenschen, which would have driven him even more berserk than he already was . . .

Bad History, folks. I've seen enough episodes of Ghosthunters and its spin-offs to know that they conclude every show with a presentation of some sort of "evidence" of paranormal activity. From "personal experiences" to technical glitches with the equipment that get blithely explained away as supernatural forces at work, confirmation bias is truly a wonderful thing to behold.

Except that in a case like this, the whole smoke-and-mirrors thing and the idea of "I believe in the paranormal, therefore it is" tends to trivialize and render mundane something that really shouldn't be. We are, after all, talking about a man who started a war that ultimately claimed over 60 million lives, and who's wishes resulted in the deaths of 12 million people in the industrial machinery of the concentration camps. So, please, rather than chase phantom phantoms and try to spike ratings with what is really nothing more than an insulting publicity stunt, just stop this nonsense.

Don't Worry, We're Just Stopping for Some Ice . . .

You recognize that line, don't you? They come from the Famous Last Words Section, uttered by Captain Smith right after Titanic hit the iceberg. Okay, fine, it's an apocryphal story, at best, but it also seems to sum up the Administration's fumbling of the "Detroit Terror Plot."

In short, we first have Janet Napolitano hold a press conference and say that there was "no indication" that the putz with the bomb on his way to Detroit was involved in any wider plot or had any connections to Al Qaeda. Because, you know, PETN (the explosive compound he had) is so easy to come by. I mean, you can walk into any hardware store anywhere and . . . not get it. But I digress. According to our esteemed head of DHS, the guy was acting all alone. Despite the fact that, more than a month ago, his father came forward and reported to Federal authorities that his son had been "radicalized" and had ties to Al Qaeda. Despite the fact that the guy was on a Federal terror watchlist.

Bang-on job there, Janet, if you'll excuse the pun. And your statement might even have worked if, two days later, the President hadn't come out and said that the guy was linked to Al Qaeda. But, hey, do please keep on telling us that the air transportation system is perfectly safe . . . even though our friend with the bomb in his shorts got the device past two separate checkpoints. Perhaps you'd feel better if you had DHS publish another circular about how the possible rise of home-grown, right-wing terrorism in the U.S. is a bigger threat, and how a sharp eye should be kept on all those NRA members and returning veterans. In a gesture of good faith, I'll even provide you with the fiddle to play . . .

Way to drop the ball, guys.

On the other hand, since it seems that the real threat to America comes from so-called right-wing, conservative Americans and not radicalized individuals and groups from . . . er . . . how do I say this in a politically correct way? . . . certain nations in the Middle East that have a surfeit of a black, gooey substance that powers our industries, runs our cars and pollutes our environment, perhaps now would be a good time to jump sides and avoid the suspicion. Death to America!

Hmm, kind of rolls right off the tongue, doesn't it? Death to America! Try it. Death to America! Short, to the point and, if you use it repeatedly, guaranteed to deflect attention if you're still worried about the PATRIOT Act. Why, I bet that if you tossed it into your conversations often enough, people would hardly notice.

"I need to go to the grocery store and pick up some milk and eggs. Death to America!"

"I was at the mall the other day, and I saw the cutest little leather outfit at Lord & Taylor! Death to America!"

"Tonight, it will be cloudy and very cold, with a wind chill factor around five below zero. But, as we can see from the five day forecast, we'll have a slight warming trend, with temperatures reaching into the mid-thirties by Tuesday. Death to America!"

"Oh, man, that new girl slinging suds down at the bar is hot! Death to America!"

"Man, did you see the way the Packers creamed Arizona last Sunday? I'd hate to be in the Cardinals' locker room after that game. Death to America!"

"Sorry I'm late checking in, but my connecting flight on Jihadi Airways was delayed, death to America! I'm really sorry if I created any problems, death to America! Why, no, I'm certainly not carrying any explosives, why do you ask? Death to America!"

See how easy it is? And I'll bet you hardly noticed the phrase being used, thus proving DHS right. I mean, anyone who runs around screaming "Death to America!" can't really mean it, unless, of course, they're devoted listeners of Rush Limbaugh and Glenn Beck. Always remember that FoxNews is a bigger threat to the American way of life than those poor, misunderstood Al Qaeda folks, death to America!

I sometimes have to wonder, just what is it going to take for people in this country to wake up? Another incident on the scale of 9/11? Look, let's be real clear on this: not every Muslim in the world is just aching to strap on a bomb and take as many of us out as possible. But there is a significant minority of believers in that religion who are so radicalized that that is exactly what they want to do, and Islam is fractured enough that they can find the justification in the theology. To pretend otherwise is, well, very much akin to explaining that we're just stopping to pick up some ice . . .

Heads I Win, Tails You Lose

For one of the few times in my life, I find myself at a loss for words. Which, really, is kind of a scary concept for one so thoroughly Irish as I am; you know, that whole thing about Irishmen being blessed with the gift of gab and all. On the other hand, while some might view a mick being confounded on what to say as a tragedy, others might view it as a blessing.

Actually, it's not so much that I don't know what to say as it is that whatever I do say is not only not going to be appreciated, it's going to fall on deaf ears. Ah, but I've neglected to tell just what it is that gives rise to this line of thought.

Today is December 22, the "last" day, so to speak. The last day of what? Why, the last day on which my friend's ponzi scheme she's involved in was supposed to pay out, of course. You see, the individual running this little ploy very solemnly promised that everyone would be "paid out" between the 18th and 22nd of this month. Insert pained sigh here.

Naturally, as I had predicted before, no one actually got "paid" except the - and I'm being gentle here - douchebag at the top of this particular pyramid. Which, of course, is how pyramid schemes work. The immoral prey upon the gullible, and there isn't a whole lot that anybody can do about that.

I'm not sure how much money my friend threw away on this particular gambit, nor do I really care. For her "investment," she was convinced that she was going to make $100,000.00 for herself, $48,000.00 for her husband, and $12,500.00 for me. Yes, that's right, she bought into three "slots" in this scheme.

Oh, those dreams of internet wealth. To her, this wasn't a ponzi scheme doomed to see her taken to the cleaners, but an "investment opportunity." That's right folks, your $5,000.00 today could be $300,000.00 in only three months, and you don't have to do anything other than try and convince some other poor saps to fork over their cash.

Come on, I can't be the only one who sees something wrong with this. Really, it's the oldest trick in the book, the old something for (relatively) nothing scam. I still have trouble believing that people are really that gullible, even though I am living with proof of that assertion. On the one hand, I can't talk this person out of such things, and on the other, I can't shoot the people responsible. Frustrating, to say the least.

The thing is, even though I am not the one who participated in this scheme - I didn't hand over any money - I am not unaffected by the fallout. Over the past year, I've given my friend over $10,000.00 - cash I really could not afford to part with - in order to pay off her Federal income tax debt and delinquent property taxes. And why did she and her husband not have the money to take care of those debts? Because she threw it away, and keeps on throwing it away, on these asinine internet schemes that a six-year-old would know are scams.

Now, I know I'm never going to see that money again. Ten grand may not be much in the big picture, but it was all I had, almost my entire savings. Nor is it like I can make it up; I can't work, and Disability barely pays for all the medications I have to take for my various illnesses. Which is what really pisses me off: that someone would call upon the bonds of friendship to take from someone who really can't afford to give, because they can't control themselves when it comes to money. It really makes me long for the days when I had a gun and a uniform that said it was legal . . .

But what can you do with an addict? Drugs, alcohol, gambling, ponzi schemes . . . an addiction is an addiction. Tomorrow, she's going to get on the computer and find some other get-rich-quick scheme. Just more proof of my assertion that a fool and your money will soon be partners. Hell, she's still waiting for her big "investment" in Iraqi dinar to pay off. The fact that the dinar is worthless and some schmuck in Baghdad who needed a hard currency now has hers is, of course, immaterial. The e-mail said she would get rich by buying the currency, so it must be so.

Which begs the question of just how many times someone needs a rock to fall on their head before they start getting the idea that not all is as it is promised, but . . . See the earlier point about addictions. Now, I've been around the block enough times to know that if someone really wants to ride the express elevator to hell, I'm not going to get in their way. I just really resent it, though, when they want to take the rest of us along for the ride.

So, what can I say? "I told you so" is right up there; short, to the point, but somehow so crude. "Just what did you think would happen?" is also a contender, except that it verges on being a rhetorical question. I mean, I already know what she expected to happen, regardless of the fact that a blind man could see it wouldn't. Therein lies the conundrum: there just isn't really anything I can say, and certainly nothing that is going to make any impact. But I do wonder what is going to happen the next time she finds she doesn't have the money to pay things like taxes, because she's thrown it all away on these bogus schemes. Because the next time, there won't be anyone to bail her out.

A Nice Dinner Might Have Helped . . .

Oh, the indignities just continue to pile up, one after another. I never used to believe in reincarnation, but now I do. And I am convinved that, in my last life, I was a Brooklyn cab driver, and am being punished for that in this life.

If you don't know why I am picking on cab drivers from Brooklyn, specifically, or New York City, in general, then you need to get out more.

Anyway, last night I showed up at the medical arts building for the long-awaited "sleep study" that my doctors wanted me to take. In the middle of a blizzard. Where the local authorities were doing the kind of street plowing that got Mayor Bilandic fired in Chicago back in 1978. After getting caught behind an 18-wheeler that had gotten stuck in the middle of the road - and no, don't ask me how something that big and that heavy can get stuck in two inches of snow. Maybe after you add in the other five inches that fell while I was not sleeping in the sleep centre, but I digress.

Now, if you've never had to undergo one of these "sleep studies" - an exercise in a self-fulfilling prophecy designed to tell you that you suffer from sleep apnea - then you have missed out on a truly joyful experience. Really. It's a lot like spending a night in a budget motel, onl without any of the amenities.

Okay, first of all, they make you go in the back door of the building, presumably because they tell you to show up at 8:30 PM, and the main entrance is closed. Or, perhaps, it's because they just make the Irish use the back door - some people are just funny that way.

Actually, the room they put you in is fairly nice - if, of course, you can ignore all the chain-saw snoring emanating from the other rooms. There's a nice leather chair, a queen-size bed, a nice armoire to stash your belongings in, and a 50-inch flat-panel LCD TV mounted on the wall, complete with satellite access and, erm, the porn channels. Quite aside from the, ah, adult selections available, such a nice TV set does seem to be a bit of a waste, since you're not actually given an opportunity to watch anything. You are, after all, there to sleep.

Oh, yeah, I forgot about the ceiling-mounted IR camera, so the nurses can watch you. Note to self: don't pick your nose or play with yourself.

So, after you change into whatever it is you like to sleep in - and for God's sake, let's hope that camera is off while you're changing - the nurse comes in to hook you up to what you can only presume are some very expensive machines. And, yes, while we're at it, I did toy with the idea of telling them that I slept in the nude, but I actually don't advise doing that. You never can tell what might show up on YouTube.

They get the ball rolling, so to speak, with something that felt very much like a phrenological exam (oh, go look it up). The nurse had me sit in a chair, and then she broke out a tape measure and started measuring my head. She said it was so she would know where to put the EEG leads, but I would have thought they'd have a standardized chart for that. Oh, well. Then, she started drawing dots and lines all over my skull and forehead with a red magic marker. Again, she said, so she would know where to place the leads, but it did kind of feel like she was just playing tic-tac-toe, though I could just be reading things into it.

Then came the goop. Like she dumped an industrial-sized jar of K-Y Jelly on my head. A nice, big, heaping dollop for every lead. And by "dollop," I mean that when she was done, I looked like the victim of a bukkake party. Once again, if you don't know what a bukkake party is, you need to get out more. All I know is that two showers later, I've still got this gunk in my hair.

Once she got done spewing my head, the Great Electrode Placement occurred. This was really fun, because it took about ten minutes to get all the leads placed - head, chest, back, arms and legs. During this process, I somehow felt compelled to ask if the Governor had called yet to commute my sentence. All of these leads, of course, are connected to a set of machines on a night table so, after you're wired, if you have to do something like, oh, go to the bathroom, they have to come in and disconnect you and plug you into a box you can walk around with. Trust me, not a process for those of you who are weak of bladder . . .

When they've finally gotten you all hooked up, it's time for bed. The mattress, of course, is like a slab of cement. Sleep-number, my ass. What I discovered is that you can pick up the controller for the mattress, pick the firmness number you want, and all the bed does is, well, fart. And the mattress remains just as firm as ever. Look, I set the damned thing all the way down to 50, and it was still like lying on a slab of concrete, no matter how many times I made the mattress fart.

Oh, by the way, that's something else you probably don't want to do. They are listening to you, remember.

Then there are the pillows, which are so good it's like sleeping with no pillows at all. I had two of them, and those suckers must have compressed completely flat as soon as my head hit them. Or, perhaps, with all the petroleum jelly on my head, I just kept slipping off them. I suppose that's a possibility, too. All I know for sure is that I haven't seen that much grease on a pillow case since I was a teenager. Ah, memories . . . The good news is that once you are finally all settled in bed, the nurse tucks you in, which no one has done for me since I was about six.

Note to Centegra Health Systems, Inc.: if you actually wanted me to sleep, you shouldn't have given me a cute nurse with large breasts who was willing to crawl into bed with me.

Not that I actually did much sleeping, but at one point it seems that one of the leads came off my back, and I was rather pleasantly awakened - or unpleasantly, depending on personal preference or embarrassment factor - to my nurse crawling under the covers and looking for it. When she asked if there was anything else I could think of to ask for, I was truly at a loss for words. Okay, maybe not so much as at a loss for words, but the classic problem of which voice to listen to, the angel on my right shoulder or the devil on my left. But I did periodically make sure to knock a lead loose here and there . . .

But as I said, at least for me, there really wasn't a whole lot of sleeping involved in this "sleep study." Look, I got there at 8:30 PM and, by the time all the preliminaries were over and they made me look like an x-rated movie actor ready for execution, it was 11:30 PM. By the time I was stretched out on the flatulent cement slab, it was midnight and I still wasn't tired. So, they gave me a sleeping pill . . . which didn't work. Which kind of defeats the point of a sleeping pill, but what do I know? Between midnight and about 4:00 AM, all I did was kind of drift in and out of a sort of half-sleep. You know, that really restful kind where you sleep for a couple of minutes before waking up, all the time aware of everything that's going on around you. Rinse and repeat as often as necessary.

Finally, at about four in the morning, I finally fell into what you can properly classify as "sleep." The problem being that they wake you up at 5:00 AM and kick you out. Surprise! The. Most. Miserable. Night. Ever. And then, on basically one hour's sleep, I got to drive home in the same freaking blizzard that had plagued me the night before. Note to Chevy: the HHR is really not designed to be driven in the snow.

And you know what? I'm going to get to do this all over again, because according to the nurse, I have severe sleep apnea. Which means that they're going to make me do another "sleep study" so they can either fit me with one of those funky masks they use to treat apnea at home, or decide if maybe I should have the "corrective" surgery. Of course, my failure to sleep adequately could have nothing to do with the rock-hard mattress or, perhaps, that same nurse causing random erections by getting into bed with me, but that just shows my failure to understand the problem. I mean, I'm not the one who spent four years in medical school and three years in residency so I could watch tapes of people sleeping, right?

Really, now, the only thing I learned from this experience is that I really want a 50-inch flat-panel LCD TV, and a bed that doesn't fart . . .

A Life More Ordinary

This must be what Custer felt like towards the very end, as he stood on that hilltop at the Little Big Horn, looking around and realizing that there was no help coming. That sinking feeling of knowing that everything was drawing inexorably to an end, that awesome loneliness of knowing that there were no more choices to be made, no way to retrieve the situation or to redeem himself. Surely a situation to try even those with the strongest of faith.

When I look back, I'm not sure what it is that I see. Meaning seems to merge into futility until the identity of each is lost as they merge into something else, something I just can't really come to grips with. Perhaps I am just to close to the events in question, or perhaps I am just unwilling to admit to what is right there in front of me, that there is, in the end, no meaning and everything is just a lesson in futility.

For fifteen years, I ran a group home for a social services agency that put such an emphasis on living up to those goals that they fired me when I had a heart attack. The ugly truth of that place was that the people running it were far more interested in preserving their own positions than they were in anything so mundane as actually taking care of the kids they were in charge of. Ostensibly a 501(c) organization, the administration was always after those of us who were actually running the day-to-day operations to find ways to save money and keep expenses down. Now, while that may make sense for a company that's supposed to turn a profit, it really doesn't make a whole lot of sense for a company that is a non-profit organization. As an example, every time money was tight, the push was to cut back on what was being spent on the kids living in the group homes, including the clothing budget and what was being spent to feed them; at the same time, the senior administration gave themselves a 22% pay raise. And those of us who would be considered the "middle-managers," when we pointed out that perhaps the priorities were a little misguided, well, we were labelled the "trouble-makers."

Kids and adolescents living in group homes can be quite a creative bunch. In my time as a unit supervisor, I was confronted not only by children wielding knives, but by just about anything else you can think of that can be used as a weapon. Chairs were always fun, as several of my broken ribs can attest to, as were things like pool balls stuffed into socks.

One afternoon, I walked into the house I supervised to find that one of the 18-year-old residents had discovered a roofing shovel somewhere, and was using it to threaten the other residents and the staff. When I came in, as a matter of fact, one of my staff was in the dining room, wrestling with this kid and trying to get that shovel away from him. I just walked past those two, made sure that everyone else got out of the house, then went into my office and called the police. That kid followed me, all the time swinging the shovel around and, while I was speaking to the 911 operator, pulled the phone cord out of the wall. I'm not entirely sure what he was thinking, if he believed that by disconnecting the phone the cops wouldn't know where to go, but I have been around long enough to know that when a 911 operator is told that an armed assault is going on, they tend to get a bit concerned when the call is suddenly cut off.

I obviously don't know what that operator said when she put the call out, but she must have made it sound like everybody in the house was being murdered. Frankly, when that kid yanked the phone cord out of the wall, I just left. No point in sticking around and winding up as a blood splash on the wall, right? But before I had taken two steps out the front door, it was like I was suddenly in The Blues Brothers. Every squad car on the west side of town that day must have responded to that call; I counted at least ten by the time I was done, all with lights and sirens. I remember two of them charging right across the curb and across the front lawn while a third pulled a violent u-turn in front of the house, as well as the ones that screamed up the driveway and the ones that came in through the back drive. Needless to say, after the police were done, we never saw that kid again . . .

I remember the day I got crunched in a restraint, where one of my more unreasonable kids decided to lose his mind and come after me with a chair. It didn't hurt nearly as much when he broke one of my ribs with that chair as it did when two of my staff tackled the kid, with me unfortunately still on the bottom of that particular pile. By the time they managed to extricate me from that scrum, I was having trouble breathing and couldn't move my left arm. Still, being the guy in charge, I somehow felt the need to help my remaining staff keep control over the house while that particular situation was resolved, despite the other kids pleading with me to go to the hospital.

By the time I finally did go, that kid was calm again and the other kids, having had no interest in involving themselves in his malfunction, had gone back to more important things to them, like watching TV. And the punchline to this particular story is that, while I was in the Emergency Room listening to the doctor tell me something I already knew - namely, that I had a broken rib - my boss called me to say that I was in trouble because I hadn't asked for her permission to go to the hospital. I've often wondered what the people in charge of enforcing the Worker's Compensation laws would have had to say about that, had I bothered to inform them . . .

Before I went to work for that agency, I spent five years or so as an indpendent contractor to the Illinois Department of Children and Family Services, meeting and greeting every schizo in the fifty wards of Chicago. I spent part of that magical, mystery tour doing psych evals and profiles of DCFS clients, and part of it investigating charges of abuse and neglect. If I wasn't a cynic before I did those things, I certainly was after.

I could tell you about the eleven-year-old girl who was in a group home in the city that I profiled, who tried to seduce me during the interview. She was, shall we say, a well-developed child which, I came to find out, was one of the results of sexual abuse. It seems that that tends to stimulate the hormones in charge of sexual development. Anyway, it turned out that, as she coyly unbuttoned the top few buttons of her blouse, that her main ambition in life was to be a Playboy playmate and have lots of sex . . . In order to finish that interview, I had to call in one of that agencey's child care workers and have her sit in as a witness.

God, are you out there?

I could tell you about the sixteen-year-old girl I profiled, who was six months pregnant and refused to acknowledge that little fact. She had all the affect of a rock, and the reason I was testing her was because she had taken a five inch bite out of her mother's shoulder. By the time I was done with the interview, my skin was literally crawling, and I knew with the certainty of the tomb that if she were allowed to give birth and keep her child, that child was as good as dead. And there wasn't a damned thing I could do about it.

God, are you listening?

Or I could tell you about the parents I interviewed, who had beaten one of their toddlers to death with a baseball bat. They had completed their court-ordered parenting classes and the judge, it seemed, was considering returning their other children to them. You know, the ones who had been starved, used as ashtrays, beaten with extension cords, all those normal things that parents do. All of the screening I did on them pointed to the fact that they had learned nothing from all the court-ordered intervention, but what do I know?

God, are you there?

One day, I walked into an apartment in the Robert Taylor Homes, your basic urban demilitarized zone, to inestigate a charge of possible abuse. The place, I must say, was kept very neat, and came complete with hot- and cold-running roaches. The father was an assistant chef at a very well-known Chicago restaurant, favourite of yuppies everywhere, and the mother was a very pleasant woman who apparently collected Government money for having children. It was an exceptionally beautiful day, with brilliant sunlight pouring through the windows . . . and there, lying curled up in a frying pan on the stove, was the infant who had been the cause of the abuse charge. I never even conducted the interview. There was no reason to. I turned right around, left, and called the police.

God, do you even care?

I look back, and I can't help wondering what it was all for. All I can see is the blood and the wreckage and the tears, a trail of small horrors that merge into a kind of meta-tragedy that has no beginning and no end. There was a time in my life when I would receive letters from former clients of mine, all of them reducable to the same, depressing message: if I had only listened to you, things would be different. A few, here and there, who actually did make it, the one who found a foster family he fit in with, and who later on became a police officer. The girl who went on to join the National Guard, and leveraged that into going to college. But balanced against all the others who just continued to spiral on down into the darkness . . .

What was it all for? All the time and effort, and the dismal banality of it all just rolls right along without interruption. Perhaps that is just the greatest practical joke of all, the illusion that we can make a difference, that we can change things. For in the end, there is only what there is.