I could have started - and ended - with this thought:

But I can’t.

Turns out my extended family employers were micro-managing, fake liberals, liars, cheats, mentally challenged, pretend environmentalists, sexual predators, bad business people, book cookers, technically challenged, nutritionally ignorant, and just all around creeps.

Their only “friends” were employees. Minimum wage employees with all the free soft drinks they could drink as the big benefit for working for them. They had sexual encounters with their employees.

Despite all this, I stayed employed with their “company” (more like a “micro-cult”) for 26 years before I decided my health would dictate impending death from the massive stress of continuing to work for them a minute longer.

And then, “out of nowhere”, I suffered an almost deadly septic arthritis of my left sternoclavicular joint that travelled to my left lung and down my left arm to my left ankle. It required four surgeries to remove my left collar joint, drain fluid, and repair the open wound over the cavity left from the radical surgery.

No one should be a victim of this kind of stress.

No One.

I watched the entire first season of Your Friends & Neighbors on Apple TV+.

Factoid: No matter what you’ve achieved in YOUR life, somebody has always been there to try and take it away.

For me, first was my parents. No matter how much “energy” I showed them, they always brought me down to their dull, boring level. I left before I was out of my teenage years.

Then, in my military active duty life (20 years) there was more of the same crap. Because of my work ethic, and it being recognized by my supervisor, I was promoted with the very first STEP promotion in the Military Airlift Command (MAC). My peers weren’t overjoyed. The day it happened, my wife (of 8 years), and my two kids were moving out of my on-base house unit. Then, DURING the ceremony, as the 4-star general was pinning on the new stripes, everyone’s pager went off. President Reagan had been shot, and there was a scramble.

There was a lot of paper plates and cake on the floor.

20 years later,

the dream house I built for my family was taken away by my employer, who just happened to be my sister-in-law. It’s a bit of a long story I’ll share in its own post.

50 years later, in Episode 9 of Your Friends & Neighbors, Jon Hamm provides the “sauce” that everyone who has ever been in a situation like this should hear.

I’ll share both the audio clip and the text.

This is what happens.

You work your ass off to build the life you think you want.

And then one day, someone takes it away from you.

And that's when you learn that there's a world of difference between working hard and fighting for your life.

You've never had to fight before.

You don't even know if you know how, but then you do it to your own great surprise, you win, and it should feel sweet, it should feel like redemption and validation and victory all at once.

But something's changed.

You can see your old life in front of you, there for the taking.

And it would be so easy to jump right back onto that hamster wheel and start running again.

But when you're done licking your wounds and being angry at the world and trying to save everyone you love, you will have to look in the mirror and ask yourself if you can really go back to being who you were .

Because the hard truth is, once you've seen the chaos behind the curtain, you can never really watch the show the same way again.

But right now, right now.

It's time to get back to work.

But, before we get too carried away with this understanding, have you been on the roads lately?

Holy shit!

The driver’s test failure rate may have something to do with how many reckless examples everyone encounters - every time they’re behind the wheel - but the real problem seems to be simple assholic behavior:

Your response to that driver in front of you going 3.5 mph slower than you is intolerable. Excrutiatingly so. It’s time to change lanes and stomp on the accelerator and show that guy the correct speed to be at here! My middle finger waving as I pass on his right and gratifyingly pass 7 more cars in front of him, gives me an unexpected rush of endorphins. Yeah! I showed him! I still have to merge left up ahead, so I dive left between two cars that are already following too close. This is all happening at 70+ miles an hour in a clearly posted 50 mph speed limit area.

The elephant in the room:

Why?

Over-caffeinated? Already left too late to arrive at the destination on time? Watched that drifting movie last night?

No.

It’s just assholic behavior. A “transformed” 5 year old behind the wheel of that two-ton deathtrap.

The thing is, the idea that anyone else [like a police officer, for instance] would protest the bad behavior example above as “reckless” is a thing of the past. A relic. Thoughtless maneuvers are rewarded with nothing at all happening - that is, if an accident doesn’t happen as a result of it.

The bullshit talk that municipalities publish (the police are too busy with other, more important stuff), saying that the focus should be on creating safer highways (duh), instead of expecting law enforcement to, um, enforce the law, does nothing to stave the high level of anxiety every time a driver get’s behind the wheel.

The hell with that nonsense.

Go out and help along the Golden Age of Reckless Driving! It’s here! Now! You’re lucky to be alive at a time when no matter what fuckhead, ill-advised maneuver you do with your car, it’s um….. okay. 🤦‍♂️

On the other hand, consider an interesting learning detour into the practice of driving smoothly. Is it just for pussys that are already driving 3.5 mph slower than I prefer? Weak, spineless humans who have no desire to recreate an imaginary role in an imaginary movie that will never be made.

Driving smoothly?

Really? What heresy is this?

I’ll delve into my next post.

It was 2005, and I was immersed in “playing with” and, more accurately “learning” a relatively new Mac app called Logic Express. It was more energizing than I could imagine with my music writing!

Years earlier, while I wrote Can You Tie Your Own Shoes?, Picture Day, and What’s a Yule Log, I had this idea for a song about a school that WAS a spaceship. How would this work for the kids? What musical vibe would suit the idea best? What I did know was that I wanted it to be an illustration in the music of the concept - not just lyrics and a title that sounded like the songs by the stable of writers at the publishing company. To my ears, those tracks all sounded too much alike and, well, stale. That wouldn’t do for a spaceship school!

When I first started writing music in 1996-97, I knew nothing about piano, just the guitar. To make a respectful start, I purchased a just released (‘96), new Ensoniq MR-76 keyboard. This was a complete synthesizer workstation with a drum machine and large internal sounds library. The “workstation” part meant I could record parts of musical ideas into sections for later assembly into a finished song structure. I would stay up late into the evening coming up with ideas that would become demos for the recording studio. It was beyond fun.

MR76 Sounds Demo

Working with Logic Express and later Logic Pro multiplied the capabilities of the MR 76 exponentially. My sound library was now almost unlimited! I had enjoyed writing songs like “Picture Day”, and “Can You Tie Your Own Shoes?” using sounds I never thought I’d have. I Think My School’s a Spaceship was another step into my own growing, creative expression along with the lyrics the kids sing along with.

Go ahead, sing along with it yourself. Have fun!

These kids are imagining AND singing.

Way back when, I was on active duty with the United States Air Force, working in the Military Airlift Command (MAC) Surgeon’s office at Scott Air Force Base, Illinois. My job was to “collect and process financial and statistical reports on patient airlift movement in the aeromedical evacuation (AE) system.” I was also responsible for “preparing an actual monthly international AE expense report in addition to tracking and validating an international billing program of approximately $18.6 million.” I also composed a daily briefing for the command surgeon and a weekly briefing for the Commander in Chief, MAC.

The computer tools I had access to for my work were quite rudimentary i.e., dot matrix printers NOT laser/inkjet printers, dinky computer screens, minuscule memory, volatile floppy disk storage, etc.

Then, the Command Surgeon’s office received a networked Xerox 6085 computer system. I remember 5 or six workstations being installed that linked to each other for intraoffice messaging and large laser printers. The 6085 is a workstation that includes advanced (for the time) graphics, spreadsheet, page layout, word processing, and database software. It also included a large keyboard, monitor, and mouse. I had purchased a Macintosh computer to use at home.

I started spending nights learning the system. Lots of hours turned into days over and above my regular working hours. This device energized me (!) because I could see that I could leave the “operating system” focus (Z80/CDOS/CPM/early MS-DOS, etc.) behind and focus on simply getting more work done.

I began creating documents with this new tool - documents that I simply couldn’t have done before with the lesser capable tools. I was full-on in the imagination zone!

The daily briefings I compiled and presented - meant that after updating the content on the “slides” I would print transparency versions of each slide and tape them to cardboard mounts for me to “flip” when the briefer said “Next slide, Dave”.

Of course, I was updating some of the slides with data that was arriving very late from multiple sources - frequently within seconds of needing to be in the conference room to start “flipping” for the assembled senior staff.

Being physically behind the projection screen during senior staff briefings allowed me to hear the discussion in the room because of the open microphone at the conference table that allowed me to hear.

One of the topics I had heard senior staff grapple with for over a year - was the health situation created by allowing smoking on board aeromedical evacuation aircraft in the presence of sometimes critically ill patients in close proximity (see onboard pic below).

This, quite obviously, was a seriously unhealthy situation for patients (and everyone involved) to many on the command surgeon’s staff. Seriously ill and trapped in a closed aircraft in clouds of tobacco smoke for a flight duration of how many hours?! The senior staff grappled with this because many of them themselves were chain smokers. It seemed their only goal was to kick the can down the road - and not be responsible for changing the situation for the better. But the command surgeon, seemed to want to change the status quo.

The discussion I overheard, mirrored the non-military general concerns over smoking at the time. Strong “right to smoke” opinions contrasted with “this is just stupid - we have to stop this.”

Using the 6085 workstation, I used the page layout software to mimic a base newspaper article using similar fonts and formatting. My “article” announced, fictitiously, that the command surgeon had already decided to ban all smoking on aeromedical evacuation aircraft extending the ban to patients, passengers, and crew. The feedback on the general’s decision was super-positive and I included lots of it in the fake article.

My last inspiration was to drop a printed copy (not indicating who had created it) in the command surgeon’s physical desk inbox after hours.

The next day, he announced his glowing decision to a stunned senior staff, saying his inspiration had come from an unusual source. Health got a little better that day for a lot of people thanks to the command surgeon decision.

Nobody knows to this day that I was the unusual source. 

I was stunned too… but I never forgot the story that would never land in any of my career performance reports.

I’m not exactly sure how I connected with the “superpower” to “hook” their focus into an imaginary future positive event - but I highly recommend you try it too. Today.

The commercial fleet followed two years later:

“Congressional action in later years led to a ban on inflight smoking.”

“Airlines based in the United States banned smoking on domestic flights of less than two hours, which was extended to domestic flights of less than six hours, and to all domestic and international flights ultimately.”

In the late 80's, Apple came out with HyperCard. I was on active duty with the United States Air Force. Due to my association with Apple at the time, which included being the primary network administrator for a Macintosh "test" network for the Military Airlift Command (MAC!) staff that included speech writers and others on Scott AFB, Illinois, I began to "play" with the $49 software both on duty and off.

The local Apple store had a strong client base (small newspapers) that which they sold Apple hardware. It needed a targeted software application that could be used with a minimum of training and effort to input and format classifieds ads. It needed to include both the input and formatting capability that allowed the output to be exported directly to a page layout application for printing (like Aldus Pagemaker).

Upon receiving the Handbook and Developer's Guide, I decided to tackle the project.

It was fun.

I found the scripting language easy to follow and started to "program" the application small rural newspapers needed. I lost track of how many lines of "code" it took to create the finished app, but it was a lot!

I called my "stacks" - Classifieds! - and my DBA "PersonalVision". As I retired from the USAF in 1993, the local computer store hired me to visit their clients and demo and install Classifieds!. I also provided support both on my corded phone (remember, pre-internet times) and in person. I remember driving to and from several newspapers in Iowa in driving snowstorms.

The one limitation of Hypercard was that it could not interact with the burgeoning "Internet" at the time, and was replaced by superior database applications that worked better with the newer Apple Macintosh computers that were being released.

Steve Jobs disliked the software because Bill Atkinson (HyperCard creator) had chosen to stay at Apple to finish it instead of joining Jobs at NeXT, and (according to Atkinson) "it had Sculley's stink all over it".

Classifieds! faded into history.

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