Merry Christmas! End of Year 2013!!!

2013 is coming to an end.  My apologies to everybody who won't be getting a Christmas card this year.  It sort of snuck up on me and I guess I'm still shaking off mope-mode.

2012 was a terrible year.  Just a year where a whole lot of terrible things all happened in rapid succession.  2013, I feel like I've stopped losing ground.  Things didn't get good, per se, but at least I wasn't in full retreat all year like I was in 2012.

I did get a few small mercies in 2013.  I found a great condo.  It isn't my ideal living situation, but it's spacious and feels homey.  It's within walking distance of Logan's home games at his Junior High.  The job continues to go well.  The longer I do it, the more I like it.  I was dealing with lingering ill effects of 2012 all year, but I have my fingers crossed that everything should be taken care of from here on out.

I am also grateful for my job, especially in an economy where so many others are struggling.  I have friends and I have my son.  So, I have some blessings to count.

2014 is still a little early for me to say I'll turn the tide, but it's going to be a year where I get my feet more solidly underneath me.

My brother is moving back to Ohio.  It'll be good to have Rob back in the state.  He was a lot of fun to chum around with before he moved to California.  It'll be good to see a lot more of him.

I am sorta making peace with my current situation.  I drive to Dayton for work during the week, then back up here on weekends.  I also try to drive up for Logan's sporting events.  It's a hassle.  I do a lot of driving, but it could be worse.  At least I do get quite a few days with my son.  It's not as good as if I had an actual job around here, but it is what it is.  Toledo has a horrible economy.

There will be some developments at work in 2014.  I will rotate out of my current office and I'm looking forward to seeing where I go next.  There are a few other opportunities that may pop up, too.

Until then, well, it feels like I'm still treading water, but at least I'm not drowning so much anymore.

I'm hopeful that my December 2014 update has a lot more good news.  We'll see.  Sometimes you just have to play the game to see how it ends.

Driving forward through the darkness

As much as I'd like to believe the disasters of 2012 are behind me, there seems to be something every week or two that drags me back into it.

As an example, I got a notice from the State of Michigan that I owed them $225.  They said they were going to start tacking on penalties and interest.  So, I mailed the check and contacted my payroll servicer who screwed up a tax return to them.  They admitted their mistake and sent an amended return.

Now, State of Michigan should refund the overpayment to me.  But they'll probably send it in my business name.  That means that depositing the check is going to be a hassle.  Oh well.  I'll figure something out.  God only knows what, but I'll figure something out.

Things like that are just depressing.  I'm trying to focus on building things back up and it just defeats me to have to get dragged back into the past again.  Not once have any of these episodes been because of anything I did wrong.  It's always some governmental agency or court screwing up some sort of paperwork or whatnot.

I think if I can just hang on, I can be done with it all sometime before the end of 2014.  It won't last forever.  So, I persevere.

Logan's football season is over.  He tries out for basketball next year.  After the fiasco with the Mavericks a few years back, I'm always more nervous than ever at tryout time.

I just want him to have a shot at making his high school teams if he wants to play in high school.

I will breathe a big sigh of relief if he makes his 7th grade team, though.  I think his chances are excellent, but it's never a done deal until it's final.

Anyway, I don't feel that great now.  Like I said, I'll feel better when 2012 is behind me, but it isn't yet, and might not be for a while.  So, I just do what I have to do and keep trying to move forward.

Reunion Weekend!

Who was she?  She was elegant and beautiful: looked at least 20 years younger than our age.  That wasn't all that unusual.  At least half a dozen of the women at the reunion had defied the laws of human physiology and simply had not aged since the 80s.  It was that I had no idea, whatsoever, who she was.  Everybody else at the reunion did, but I didn't.  She wasn't a spouse of a classmate.  She was a Tallmadge High graduate.  Her date was a guy who everybody knew.  He clearly knew her.  She had apparently attended High School with me, based on her Facebook profile.  The way she interacted with all the other Facebook friends indicated that, without a doubt, she was part of the class of '83.  I had no clue, though.  

I recognized about half the folks at the reunion on sight.  With half of the rest, I could suss it out after studying their faces for a few seconds.  The remainder?  It took a glance at the name tag.  There were just a few, though, who I honestly didn't have any recollection of at all.

The reunion weekend was something I had looked forward to for thirty years.  I had complicated matters by completing my requirements early and graduating with the class of '82.  So, for the past thirty years, I've been getting notifications of their reunions, but not from my class.  Tallmadge is a small town and back then it didn't have much of a transient population.  So, a good number of these folks are people I attended kindergarten and first grade with.  I wanted to attend the reunions for class of '83.

It wasn't until Facebook that I was able to get in contact with a critical mass of classmates and was able to get on the mailing list for this reunion.  30 years later.  That is a long, long time.

I had some apprehension about attending.  For those who have followed my ups and downs, 2012 was a bit of a disaster for me.  I got beat on pretty hard by an unfortunate series of events that upended most aspects of my life.  2012 was the year when I sold off what was left of my business, finished my divorce, and had to take a job that largely takes me away from my son.  It was, in the vernacular, "a shitty year."

I have felt like a loser for a while, now.  Strange, it's just a habit you get into, even when things are on the upswing.  So, part of me was a little reluctant to go show my loser self off to all my classmates.  If I had made my 20 year reunion, I would have just come off of my Ironman Lake Placid finish and would have been at the height of my corporate career.  At the 25 year point, I was a millionaire (at least on paper) and at the helm of the company I had started.

As it stood, I didn't get to see those folks until my 30th reunion, at a time in my life when I was rebuilding.  I was going to meet my High School classmates at a time when I was in the process of trying to figure out what I was going to do next with my life.  Which means, basically, I hadn't really made any progress in the past 30 years.

If anything, I'd regressed.  At least in the 80s, I had hair.  (In case I made things sound too bleak for dramatic effect, don't be concerned.  I have a great job with the DoD and am doing fine.  It's just a huge adjustment from the way things were before the economy tanked.)

I missed a lot of folks who I really wished I could see.  Somebody mentioned that some of them will probably never come back to a reunion because they hated high school so much.  I hated high school, too, but not because of my classmates.

Really, when I think back on my school years, what strikes me most was not how horrible my classmates were, but how really nice most of them were.  I won't paint a Pollyanna picture here.  There were some kids who were pretty mean.  It's a phase for most folks.  I'm sure I did things and said things I should regret, if only the memory weren't mercifully concealed by the fog of adolescence.

It was give and take, too.  There are a couple of folks where I sorta flinch at the prospect of meeting.  Then, I think about it and realize that I'm basing this phobia on something that happened when we were 12 years old.  They've probably grown just like I have.

That's the jungle of middle school, mostly.  Lots of hormones and immaturity, combined with adult capability to inflict emotional duress on people if you're of a mind to be careless.

There were kids who were picked on.  (A few of them, in particular, were picked on so mercilessly I will probably always carry at least a little guilt for even being in the same school when it was happening.)

So, it wasn't perfect.  It had commonality with the school experience everywhere.

That having been said, for the most part folks just sorta did their thing on their way to who they would eventually become, especially once they hit High School.  Folks were basically civil.  Differences were generally appreciated.

After I graduated, I'd see teen movies where the jocks were mean and stuffed nerdy kids into lockers, etc.  I never quite got that.  The jocks in my school were always pretty nice.  For years, I thought maybe it was because I was a self-imposed nerd.  I had been a starter on the Freshman football team before I stopped playing sports and became a guitar nerd.  Now, though, I am old enough to know that most of them had no idea who the first-stringers were on the Freshman team.  Hell, it's pitiful that I knew.  They were nice to me because they were nice people.  Beginning and end of story right there.

I hit Facebook to to try and brush up on the 3 or 4 people who I honestly didn't remember from school.  I was actually Facebook friends with her.  Like most of my Facebook friends, though, we probably connected just because we were part of the same group, not because we had been actual friends.  Her name gave me no clue at all.  But that was a married name.  What about her maiden name?  No.  Nothing.  I vaguely remembered it, but for the life of me, I can't connect it to her face.  I would have remembered an attractive female classmate.  I thought I knew everybody in my class by name. What about her date, everybody knew him... is there a clue in there somewhere?  Who did he date in High School?  No clue.  I have no idea who this woman is... I can place every other single person at this reunion, but her.

High School was awful for me not because of what High School was, or who the other kids were, but because of who I was.  I had a difficult family situation, no money and was one of only a small handful of ethnic minorities at the school.  Difficult to fathom today.

I worried that my son might feel isolated being that he's 1/4 Korean heritage.  Those fears are poorly founded.  Bedroom communities like the one I grew up in are full of Asian people these days.  The halfback who runs behind him on his middle school football team is named Chan Jin.  It's just not something kids today are bothered with thinking about.

I was also gangly and awkward.  Had crazy hair, bad complexion and a nerd's personality.  I also thought it was funny to verbally cut people down now and then.  It's hard to know, this long after the fact, whether I was just doing the normal amount of schoolyard putdowns or whether I was genuinely mean to folks.  For anything I may have ever said that hurt another kid, I am genuinely sorry and carry that regret to this day.  I can only pray that I never said anything that truly hurt a person, but the trouble with being careless is that you just can't know.

From a sociological perspective, I had a lot of early indicators of a youth at risk, and I think most of my classmates would be alarmed to know that I walked pretty far down that path before turning my life around in the Army.

When I think back on my time at school, though, it's as though nobody judged me for any of that. There was never a time when I didn't have friends.  Folks accepted me as I was.  The jocks and cool kids weren't mean in my school.  They knew you, would say hello to you and accepted pretty much everybody.  It was a place more like college than high school, I think.  It was a place where kids had the space to explore and try different things.  A place where you may not know how to "be yourself", yet, but everybody seemed to give you the space to make the effort.

It could have been so much worse, and it is so much worse for so many kids.  I was lucky.

In teen movies, the typical arc of the story involves a sensationally beautiful girl who wears glasses and a ponytail.  Eventually, she takes off the glasses, gets big hair and then everybody is stunned at the transformation.  It is, along with Superman's glasses, the stupidest plot device in the history of drama.  Cute girls in high school don't fly under the radar just because they wear glasses.  That's not real life.  That's not how it happens.

The first night of the reunion was an informal get together at a sports bar.  I connected to good friends I had been close to in middle school.  Hung out with others who reminded me of how close we had been as friends in the 3rd grade.  That is half the beauty of these reunions to me:  these people literally knew you when you were a child.  When you think of them, you think of things like the time they blew milk out of their nose while laughing in the 2nd grade.

Another grade school friend said he felt bad for poking me in the face with a pencil in the 1st grade.  Trouble was, he didn't do it.  I slipped and fell on a pencil I was carrying and poked myself in the face.  It was gruesome:  went all the way through my cheek.  Lots of blood and I ended up going to the hospital.

I can only imagine that since we were friends and he was only six, that he felt bad that I'd had that accident.  I also imagine that our teacher came in and yelled at the class because we'd been roughhousing during an indoor recess.  So, over the years, his memory had played tricks on him and convinced him that he had done it.

I hope he didn't lose any sleep over that one.  I straightened the story out so he can at least rest easy from now on.

Some guys from the basketball team were at a table and honestly, they looked like they could take the court today.  They were all fit, tall and didn't look that much different, other than the random gray hair here or there.  If there's a Gus Macker 30-year reunion category, these guys would clean house.

It took me a while to realize that nobody here thought I was a loser.  I was able to relax almost immediately.  Nobody was wondering how the hell you go from a seven-figure net worth to zero in 3 years.  Nobody thought that only an idiot marries a supermodel-gorgeous woman and divorces her twelve years later.  Nobody was questioning what sort of dad has to take a job that takes him away from his son most weeks.

Just like when I was in high school, my anxieties were based on things inside myself.  These people were just happy to see me.  These were the people I grew up with.  The folks I rode the bus with.  Now, as then, we're all in our own lives.

Tallmadge was not, by and large, a place where you judged other people for what they were doing or not-doing.  The middle class was different in the 1970s.  Unions were still strong.  Your neighbor could have been anything from a rubber worker at Goodyear to an office worker at Goodyear.  Okay, some of them worked for Firestone and BF Goodrich.  Seriously, though, the middle class was more diverse, then.  Your neighbor could have been a plumber or a professor at a university. So, there was more of a sense of respect for every family and their contribution to society and the community.  Not everybody's parents went to college.

You didn't have to be a millionaire:  it was enough to simply be a decent person.  It was a place with industrial midwestern sensibilities where you worked on your own life and if you were lucky, you got to take joy in the lives of others.

I hadn't seen most of these people in 30 years and all it took was a few minutes with them and our friendships took off right from where we'd left off.  I didn't have to be a millionaire for these folks to accept me.  It was enough that we were friends when we were kids.

That maiden name.  It looks familiar.  There was that girl... no... no way...

It was 1977.  The most anxiety-producing part of gym class in Junior High, other than our first communal showers, was square dancing.  I can only figure that somebody, while designing the curriculum, thought this was a good way to introduce social skills to boys and girls in a form of dancing that's as far from twerking (though that didn't exist at the time) as it could possibly be.

For those not-familiar, square dancing is country and western dancing where 4 couples dance while standing in proximity (sort of like the 4 corners of a square) and a person yells directions to them.  The thing is, they yell these directions while also telling you to do these things to the left or the right.  So, for instance, "left allemand your partner", or "dosey-do to the right."

This was a problem for me on so many levels.  The first and most obvious was that I didn't know my right from my left.  I knew they existed as concepts.  If I thought about it long enough, I could figure out which was which, but there is a psychological disorder where people can't tell their right from their left.  I have it.  So does my aunt.  I've heard that children who have this disorder never crawled as babies, they sat up and scooted around on their butts.  So, it's a real thing and it was a real problem for me in the seventh grade.

That, though, was the least of my worries.  The worst part was that boys and girls were left to their own devices to chose a square dancing partner.  Oh.  My.  God.  

I was a pimply, gangly, awkward, nerdy, Asian kid wearing garage sale clothing who, since the school wasn't air-conditioned, probably actually smelled bad.  This was going to be difficult.

I can't speak to women today, but in the seventh grade?  If they had offered the option of taking a beating, instead, I would have chosen the beating.  This was required, though and we were actually graded on it.  So... I mustered up my courage and approached a girl I'd known since grade school, who was actually sort of a family friend.  Had a brief exchange and got the vibe that she'd rather chew glass than to be put into a situation where she would have to physically touch me, then slinked off before the exchange could get any more humiliating.  

The couples were pairing off quickly.  Seventh grade had combined a few grade-schools, so I didn't know half the people in my seventh grade class when school started.  Over across the room I saw a cute little girl standing by herself.  She was pretty.  Hair pulled back.  Face partially concealed by the gigantic glasses that were popular at the time.  

"Do you wanna square dance?"

The response took less than a second, but I am certain that Einstein is right about the relativity of time because I think I aged 3 years during that second.

"Okay."

Thank.  You.  Jesus.  

Trouble is, I wasn't out of the woods.  Remember that old left-right thing?  Yeah.  That didn't go away.  

You can see the end of this story almost before it begins.  I faked my way through much of the dancing, but at a critical time, he told me to go left, I went right.  She was a tiny girl, wearing the glasses that were fashionable at the time, which means that her glasses were probably the physcially largest thing about her at the moment.  And...  *smack* right into her glasses which made an alarming crunching sound.

Oh my god, the kindest girl in the 7th grade and I just broke her glasses by smashing them into her face.  Even after this unintentional physical assault that resulted in destroying... I dunno... her means of seeing... she was gracious and kind and completed the next few days of the square dancing segment of PE without demanding a different, less-destructive dance partner. 

The last name is the same, but is that her?  Is it?  No.  It can't be.  But the more I thought about it, yes, it was.  It was the same girl, minus the pony tail and glasses.  And as a woman, she's probably hiding her absolutely beautiful freckles behind a flawless base-coat of makeup.

It is her.  Mystery solved.  I guess the movie makers really were right.  There were stunningly beautiful women in my school disgused with glasses and pony tails.  Thing is, they don't look better without the glasses and pony tail.  They just look different.  They were beautiful then, too.  And in more than a few cases, they were beautiful inside as well.

The thing that's remarkable about the square dance story is not that it was a special moment.  It really wasn't.  In fact, I'd pretty much forgotten all about it until I was desperately trying to comb my memories for what I could connect to this classmate's maiden name.

What's remarkable is that when I think back on my school days, they were filled with thousands of small kindnesses that happened all the time.  The kid who unexpectedly stood up for you, or the kid who took the time to pay you a compliment.  The kid who was the big man on campus, but who didn't consider themselves too good to talk to the nerds and geeks.  The girls who could have been cruel, but weren't.  The kids who took you seriously at a point in your life when no sane person should have taken you seriously.

I was lucky to go to school when I did, with the people I did.  I'm so glad we're back in touch after so many years.  We basically grew up together.

Included in all the horrible things that happened in 2012, my grandmother, who raised me, passed away at the age of 94.  (Yeah, 2012 was like that for me.)

I tried to visit her regularly when she was alive.  So, in a way, it's good to reconnect with my classmates.  I hope to get back to Tallmadge to see them a little more often than once every 3 decades from here on out.  Reconnecting will give me more reasons to go home now and then.

Because, hey, it's good to stay in touch with the folks who knew you when you were nothing more than potential and dreams.

Turning of the Seasons

I drove to work on Monday in the dark.  First time this year.  The days are already getting shorter.  The first day of Fall is still more than a month away, but it feels like I'm putting away this year's Summer, now.

Logan starts school in a couple of days.  His first football game is next week.  In the seasons of sports and school, the Summer is essentially over.  He's starting the seventh grade, now.  He plays football for his school and will try out for the basketball team sometime November.

I feel like I'm really missing out on parts of his life.  Like a good many fathers and sons, sports always connected us.  It was where we spent our quality time together.  It was where I taught him to catch, hit, throw and shoot.  It was where he taught me to be patient with him because he was always trying his best.

Life is slowly but surely getting better but being away from him is the worst.  I've seen the worst of the trials of last year.  Things are on a slow uphill climb to "better".  I'm on much more solid ground.

I still wish my life were different in a big way.  I wish I wasn't in a hotel 3 hours away.  I wish I could watch every practice.  I wish I could be there for every game.  I'm afraid that despite my best efforts, I may not be able to.

So, that's what keeps me from feeling really good about the way my life is at the moment.  What will I ever be able to do about it?  Hard to know at this point.  So, I just put one foot in front of the other and keep trying to make progress.

Sometimes, you just cowboy up and do the best you can do.

The Start of Another Year

August marks the beginning of another year of Federal Service for me, and another grade for Logan.  He's in the 7th grade this year.

Because my job is so far away, I miss out on a lot these days.  Can't be helped.  I figure my first preference in life would be to be local and take part in as much of his life as I can.  If I can't do that, my goal would be to have a high enough paying job to make it worth the separation.

My current situation is like the worst of both worlds.  I'm not sure how I'll get the time off to see his football and basketball games.

Still, all in all, at this point, I'm in much better shape than I was a year ago.  The past year was a never ending deluge of bad news that I had to deal with.  The worst part was that I couldn't just raise my hands and say, "no mas".  I had to endure wave after wave after wave.  Now, it's almost all in the past, other than my career and my separation from my son.

If only my job were local, my life would be close enough to ideal that I wouldn't gripe.  It's still an adjustment getting used to less money, but without having to essentially maintain two households, it could be done.

There will be a few interesting opportunities coming up, though.  I'll play my cards close to the vest until they come through.  But some real game-changer opportunities are on the horizon.

Until then, I just need to keep on keeping on.  I'll do what I can.  It's all I can do.

Long Time, No Blog...

It's been a while since I've written.  I guess I'm just still in mid-air trying to figure out what the last half of my working life is going to be.

In what can only be described as the continuation of a hilarious string of bad-luck, I'm one of the federal employees who has been furloughed due to sequestration.  Basically, I lose 11 days of pay, or just a little more than one paycheck.  The irony here is that working for the federal government isn't particularly well-paying, but the paycheck is supposed to be steady and dependable.  Of course, if they're going to periodically tell us not to bother to show up, that's going to put a big ding in the motivations to be a federal employee.

I'm coming up on my 1 year anniversary.  That's significant for a few reasons.  Mainly, that's the end of my probationary period.  During your first year of federal employment, you can be let go for pretty much any reason at all.  After that, you've got almost union-like job protection.  It's very difficult to fire a federal employee, and you have layers of appeals you can file, etc.

I just moved to a condo that I'm renting very reasonably.  The place is gigantic.  About 2,000 square feet, 2 living areas, 3 bedrooms, a dining room.  Huge closet space everywhere.  On top of all that, I get a garage and basement for a price I can afford.  It's sorta dated and it isn't perfect, but for what I can afford, it's perfect for right now.

I felt terrible about leaving the house, regardless of how impossible it was for me to stay.  That was the last that my son would get to live in the neighborhood where he was born.  However, I am thrilled beyond belief that he seems to love the new condo.  There's lots of middle-school aged kids there.  There's a pool for him to swim in during these hot Summer months.  So far, perfect.  One less thing to feel guilty about.

I still hate all the time away from him, but life is just that way sometimes.  You do what you have to do.

During the move, I uncovered my old CD set for Tony Robbins Personal Power II.  For a bunch of stuff that was recorded in the 80s, I love these CDs and right now is a perfect time to listen to them again.

One way or another, the worst of it is clearly over.  Life sorta beat me down pretty good last year and it has taken a while to get my feet back under me.  In the process, I made a few really good friends working for the Air Force.  At this point, more than any other in my life previously, I really don't know where my life is headed, but I feel like things will be okay.  The worst is behind me.

March, a Year Later

It's been a long time since I've blogged.  It's not that I haven't had things going on.  It's that I've had too much going on, and all of a pretty personal nature.

It was last March when my life began to unravel in earnest.  A series of events made it undeniable that I had to proceed with my divorce.  The business was failing.  I was so stressed that I did a terrible job in my 2nd semester of law school.

Now, it's still not over.  I still haven't transitioned from where things were to where they're going to be.  However, I've made a lot of solid steps forward.  The divorce is final.  I'm on my way to finishing up with the financial collapse.  I am still in the same house.  That's a small blessing.  However, I won't be here much longer.  Probably sometime in the next year, I'll have to find a new place to live.

My life, last March and prior, was pretty good, really.  I was living separately from my wife, but other than that, our houses were close together.  My son seemed to be doing well.  Now, she moved further away.  It's not that convenient for him to just walk over.  I have shared custody, but with working out of town, I only have him every other weekend and every Wednesday evening.

The business really had been dying since March of 2011.  I'm honestly surprised it hung on as long as it did.  That provided nonstop stress for me.  Through 2010, I was able to convince myself that it would come back.  2011, though, was when it was clear that unless something major happened, that the business was either going to be barely profitable, or could not be saved.

I have to constantly remind myself that things could be much worse.  On average, I havemy son one less day per week.  It's not the end of the world, but I feel the loss.

More than anything, I try not to look back.  I made the decisions I made, and I live with the consequences.  At no point did I have anything but the best of intentions.  Things just didn't work out for my business and that pretty much dragged the rest of my life down with it.

Still, the divorce is final, now.  So, that's a small step forward, I guess.  I do miss owning my own business, but I don't miss losing everything I have trying to keep it afloat.  It was something I always wanted to try.  I had good times and bad, but it's over, now.

I don't miss the money or the stuff.  What I miss is being able to stay at home on a weekday morning and let my son sleep in until 8:15 and running him to school at 9:00.  I miss being here when he got off the bus if I wanted to.  That's what I miss.  I try to remind myself that the way I see him now, although not as good as what it was, is pretty much the way most working people see their kids.

The weather was very, very nice today.  I'll be glad of the Spring.  The end of the Winter coincides with the beginning of me building a life again.  Just having a nice warm day really lifted my spirits.

I still have a lot of uncertainty in my life over the next year or two.  However, closing up the wreckage of my old life is a project.  Finishing it up will be a relief.  It has to happen for me to be able to move forward.

Now that things are clearing up a bit, I've had some time to grieve over my grandmother's passing last May.  I'm so glad I got to see her a couple of times in the month before she went.  Sometimes I wonder what's the greater part of grief:  losing the person, or losing the commonalities you had with that person.

My grandmother raised me.  So, there are vast swaths of my childhood where she was essentially the only living person who was there.  So, now that she's gone, it feels like, to some degree, that part of me is gone, too.  The last person who shared it with me has passed.

There's probably a little midlife crisis wrapped up in there as well.  Mine came a little late, but I'm starting to feel the weight of my years.  Grandma was just a couple years older than me when I came to live with her and grandpa.  Her tales of her childhood, to me, are as quaint as tales of my childhood must seem to my son.  That's how far removed the modern day is from the 60s and 70s.

I really wasn't that sad at the moment grandma passed away.  I was sad, but not as sad as I should have been for somebody who had been so important in my life.  Everything else in my life was being turned upside down.  I knew that it would hit me eventually, and it has really started.

I need to get back to Tallmadge to visit my aunts and uncles, especially the McAlarneys, but it's a really long drive and my week is already full with my 300 mile round-trips to Dayton and back.

My son is going to wrap up 6th grade in a few months, here.  At that point, I'm down to just 6 more years until he's off to college.  If he goes to OSU, Miami or U Cinci, he will only be an hour or so from me in Dayton.  I won't have to drive around quite so much.

If I could have just one wish, it'd be for a local job where I don't have to be away from him so much.  Given how little the people in power care about anybody in this country who isn't on Wall Street, though, I don't see that happening.  Nobody cares about working people in this country.  We've all been sold out.  

So, I just keep doing the best I can.  Keep trying to look forward.  There's no sense in mourning for what's lost for long after the initial shock.  You just do what you can and move forward.

The Truth About the Music Industry, or "those grapes were probably sour, anyway"

This blog posting is inspired by my reading of the life of Kevin Gilbert and also by an acquaintance who is a talented musician who asked about the wisdom of staying in school or striking out on a music career.

I never was, or am, much of a musician.  I started learning too late in life to ever really be any good.  However, there was a pretty big chunk of my life where being a professional musician was something I truly wanted to pursue.  I studied music in college (sight singing, ear training, music theory, applied classical guitar, etc.)  I taught music (both guitar and bass... if they had wanted, I was desperate enough I'd have taught accordion  too) at a couple of music stores in the Dallas Fort Worth area.

The last paying gig I had was getting $45 to accompany two sweet old ladies singing a Bobby Vinton song at a Seventh Day Adventist Church. I noodled around with a little band project with two of my best friends in college.   I sort of outgrew them and started working with some other bands here and there.  At a crossroads, I left Texas and came back home when my grandfather was diagnosed with cancer.

For years, I had pretty much daily regrets about that decision.  Music is something that will always be one of my greatest loves in life. Somebody once asked me how anybody could enjoy practicing an instrument.  I told them that if I had enough money, that is all I would ever do.  I would literally never do anything else.  I love it so much that, at an emotional level, I usually can't bring myself to take my guitar out of its case because I can't deal with the emotions of having to put it away after an hour or two, and the though of going a few days without playing again (because I have to earn a living), is too depressing to deal with.

Clearly I have some issues with regard to music.  Haha!

That having been said, yeah, I'm not much of a musician.  However, I am a businessperson, or at least somebody with some knowledge and experience in business.  I'm also a student of history and a guy who needs to know how things work.

So, here is what I know about the music industry.  Yeah, I'm not an industry insider.  If you really want to know the insider's perspective, the best one I ever read was written by Courtney Love.  This is a live link to it:

http://www.salon.com/2000/06/14/love_7/

That's the boots on the ground view.  I'll give you the 20,000 foot view.  This is something to consider if you're going to make major life changes or sacrifices to try and pursue a career in music.

First, the biggest and best way to get a huge career in the music industry will be based on your looks.  Yes, your physical appearance.  What?  You don't want to be in the market segment of Justin Bieber?  Look at the bands you like.  Not very many homely looking guys in those.  And the few that you can think of probably hit big prior to the 80s.  The 80s, in case that doesn't sound too far away, were 3 decades ago.  Video did, indeed, kill the radio star.  And even bands like Zeppelin, the Beatles and the Who had good looking members.

But you don't want to be big?  You just want to make music?  Here's the thing.  Thanks to modern technology, you can make phenomenal music in your home.

But you want to make money doing this?  Go back to the paragraph that starts with "First..."

So, you're good looking.  Can you sing?  It has literally never been more true that you don't need a great singing voice to sing pop.  Trouble is, it's very, very difficult to get anybody to take you seriously if you don't sing at least pretty well.

So, you can sing?  Then you need to be able to write songs.

The fun part sorta happens there.  Even bands that aren't very good can usually find places to play out.  And yes, if you're a guy who likes women, that's a great way to find some.

But what about the money aspect of the industry?  I am sure that people can make money in the music industry.  However, I'm equally sure that most of them make less money than accountants.

The music industry just needs a celebrity.  In much the same fashion as Kim Kardashian is on TV, a record label just needs a celebrity to sell records for them.

These days, the rest really doesn't have a lot to do with the "artist".  Most of the work of producing a hit is done by engineers and producers these days.  If you can't write songs, there are plenty of teams that will write one for you.

Now, here's the tough part to understand, mentally:  they don't need "the best" person to turn into a star.  They just need "a person".  It's not necessarily a meritocracy.  They just need somebody.  And thanks to autotune, being the best singer doesn't really give you a leg-up over other merely adequate singers.

Yes, if you blow up huge, you can gain some power over your career, but honestly, that is maybe 2 or 3 artists or bands a year who get to that point.  And then, the bad news is that with power comes responsibility.  Once you take control of your career, you have to keep it afloat.  Remember that Dixie Chicks album they released in the past 4 years?  Yeah, me neither.

This aspect of the music industry is unique.  In the movies, you have to be able to act, for the most part.  (To have a long career, anyway.)  In sports, with few exceptions, the best will continue to advance and the rest fall by the wayside.

In the music industry, they only need a person who appears to be singing.

Another reality is that the industry is largely driven by 14 year old girls.  If you don't appeal to them, it's nearly impossible to blow up big.  See previous paragraph that starts with "First..."

My friend Tom castigates me for being too lazy to go out and find the good bands that are recording and making great music, today.  The reason I don't is that I really don't have time to listen to 500 albums to see if one of them is good.

That used to be the role of the labels and of radio.  But now, what happens is that the label decides who they want to promote.  They go to these companies called "Independent Promotion" companies and pay those companies a few hundred thousand bucks to see if they can get the record a couple of spins at the various radio stations.

The radio stations will play stuff that's being independently promoted because the radio stations own the independent promotion companies.  Yes, you will only get your stuff played on the radio if somebody pays the radio station a few hundred thousand.  That person, or label, will only do it if they're pretty sure you're going to blow up huge.  They figure you're going to blow up huge if you're very good-looking and you made a record that appeals to 14 year old girls.

And contrary to appearances, there are only two radio stations in America:  Clearchannel and Cumulus.  The FCC changed the laws on radio station ownership.  Used to be every city had a bunch of radio stations that tried to get an edge on the other stations by discovering good music the other guys weren't playing.  That ceased to exist, at all, in the 90s.

That having been said, it's not all bad news.  Those are just things to consider if you have aspirations to blow up huge in the music industry.  It's an obstacle course to get there, and even if you fit the bill 100%, in the end, the record label will narrow it down to a handful of candidates and essentially chose one of them at random, with no rhyme or reason to why they picked one person over another.

If you want to make money in music, though, it isn't impossible to do.  I know a lot of folks who make money in areas not related to recording and performing.  I taught guitar at the same place that Chuck Rainey taught bass.  (If you don't know who he is, watch a Steeley Dan documentary on Netflix sometime.  The guy played with everybody.)

If the idea of teaching bass at a music store when you are 50 years old appeals to you, then hey, this is the industry for you.  He did make more money than me.  I think I made like $16 an hour and he probably made something like $25.

Other folks I know opened music stores.  Most of them made little to no money.  The employees stole from them.  The tax man had his way with them once a year.  It was a retail job selling cheap, crappy musical instruments.  The guys working at Guitar Center made more money.

Then, there are the guys I know who were very creative.  They opened up their own recording studios.  They came up with awesome tribute acts.  They did pretty well for themselves, actually.

However, those guys were organized, focused and very, very business-minded.  Personally, knowing what I know of them, if they'd started life as garbage men, they'd own waste disposal companies right now and be doing just as well if not better.

Then, there's the guy who wrote "code monkey" and he made like half a mil a year for a while.  Social media is pretty powerful and if you can go viral, you can make a decent pile until the next thing comes along.

It's not that I want to discourage anybody from pursuing anything.  Just that the reality of the music industry is very, very far removed from the glamorous surface.  When I think of people like Kevin Gilbert, I stand back and think that on my very best day, I would not have had enough talent to wipe down the guy's guitar strings.  He had a major record deal.  He was good-looking.  He was insanely talented.  In the end, he had enough money to live on (almost all due to songwriting credits on Sheryl Crow's first album), but the whole rock star thing eluded him.

Personally, what I think ate him up is that the record labels didn't throw all that money into making him a star.  He watched as the labels created George Michael... hell, he watched as they created Milli Vanilli.  He worked with Madonna and saw how a nearly completely talentless hack can be the queen of the music industry if the label puts the money behind her.  Even all that wasn't what broke him.

What broke him was when his girlfriend, a former Michael Jackson backup singer, who he hired as a fill-in keyboard player for his band's tour and introduced to his buddies, recorded an album that A&M records threw their entire weight behind.

The first single fizzled.  The second single fizzled.  The label stood by her and kept throwing money into independent promotion.  The third single, written by her, Kevin and his friends, "grew legs" and the album, Sheryl Crow's "Tuesday Night Music Club" (named after Kevin and his friends' weekly jam session) went on to sell ten million units.

Why her?  Not him?  Who the hell knows.  The label picked her, not him.  Pretty much the beginning and end of story right there.

So, my advice would be to stay in school.  Get a bachelor's degree.  Afterwards, if you want to spend four years hitting the clubs in LA trying to make it big, more power to ya.  However, just realize that for all but a statistically insignificant few, that ride, however fun it may be, ends pretty quickly.  Pretty much you'll know your fate by the time you hit 30 years old.  That means you'll have to fill the next five decades with something else.

In the mean time, nothing keeps you from playing, writing and thanks to modern technology, from recording. So, my advice:  spend your life savings on at least one channel of badass preamps and record the **** out of your awesome ideas.

Here's one manufacturer of high-end preamps:

http://www.baeaudio.com/pages/products/index.php?option=com_content&view=article&id=204&Itemid=29

And here is my one crowning masterpiece composition, recorded with copious amounts of help and saintly patience by my good friend, Michael Papatonis, who owns Greek Isle Studios in Cleveland.  (Yes, it's obvious that I wasn't likely to make it as a vocalist):

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZRKENXcVFuE

Here's a great planet money podcast on how stuff gets on the radio:

http://www.npr.org/blogs/money/2011/07/11/137705590/the-friday-podcast-manufacturing-the-song-of-the-summer

The Bizarre Life

I used to think I had a hard life.  Over the passage of years and travels of miles, I know now that this isn't really true.  My difficulties, in the grand scheme of things, have been minor.  Sometimes a little perspective goes a long, long way.

It's been a hard fall down the ladder of success that I had climbed.  In first half of 2009, I was at the peak.  I had pretty much everything I ever wanted in life.  I had nearly every material possession I had ever desired.  I was even talking to the folks at Cessna about buying an airplane.

Most importantly, I had my son.  If I were to write blog posts from now until the day I die, I could never fully express just how much I love him and how wonderful he is.  It is as though I willed him into existence selecting everything I wish I would have been in life.  He's handsome, funny, smart, hard-working, compassionate, athletic... they type of kid who loves all and in return is loved by all.

Now, it's almost all gone.  I have had precious few mercies in the past four years.  The one good turn I have had is my job.  Getting a job I love is a pretty big thing.  It makes life difficult with the long drive, but I'm more fortunate than many.  So many people without jobs, and so many slogging along in jobs they hate.

Still, the indignity and incongruity of this situation is hard for me to bear sometimes.  I sink into foul moods and wonder why in the world it seems that I'm always the one who is tasked with making the most when given the least.  I've had to sit by while I lose both the houses that had been so easy to afford just a few years ago.  Meanwhile, others close to me have been given homes or had their mortgages paid for them.

I've lost my business when I treated my employees well and by all measures was steering it as well as possible given the current business climate.  The weather, the divorce and the economy amounted to a perfect storm I just couldn't get past.  Others not far away had the weather it took to keep things afloat.  Lean times are not uncommon in that business, and if you're unlucky enough to have enough lean times in a row, you're going down.  Near as I can figure, 4 other franchisees around me have thrown in the towel in the past year.  The weather was the biggie.  You just can't fix disasters when the weather doesn't produce any.

Strangely, my biggest opportunities these days are in war.  I have skills and connections and military rank that would allow me to help right my floundering financial ship if I could get overseas to Afghanistan.  Fortunately for the world, Iraq has closed down and Afghanistan is due to be completely over by 2014.  So, there's really nothing left to save me.

In a way, I feel betrayed by the promises that were made to me in my youth.  Again, I didn't have it bad in the grand scheme of things, but it didn't take a genius to figure out that I was a kid who got the raw end of the deal.  The assurance was that as time progressed, that the hardship I faced earlier would equate to success later.  When I was in my 30s, I realized what a lie that was.  The fortunate kids ended up being fortunate adults, but without all the angst and fear.

Ultimately, a day doesn't go by where I don't beat myself up pretty bad for having a knack of always choosing option A when option B was the right choice.

So, here I am.  Almost 50 years old and starting essentially from scratch.  Time to take inventory.  Time to look around.  I have a good job that I really like.  I have the best son I could ever imagine.  If the universe makes bargains, then I guess I can live with this one.  I'd rather have my son than all the wealth of the world. That's really the only important thing in my life.

I can figure out the rest as I go.