Confessions of a Starving Artist

Money never starts an idea; it is always an idea that starts money.  ~ Owen Laughlin

Contrary to popular belief, I’ll be the first to admit that there are things which I have little or no knowledge of.  I’m not terribly smart when it comes to the majority of traditional European sports, save rugby and soccer, nor am I all that versed in matters of biology as the last class on the subject that I took was my freshmen year… of high school.  I don’t know that much about dog breeding or detailed home repair or the legal process in general.  These are all gray areas from which I gleam a theoretical concept, but don’t have much in the way of practical experience or know-how which I further cover up by overcompensating in my more gifted fields of understanding, sometimes ad nosium.  However, all of my budding ignorance listed here is dwarfed by one fundamental space in my front teeth of comprehension; the economy.

My scholarly understanding of economics started and stopped at micro-econ.  My business savvy halts at “the customer is always right”, a concept which until recently I considered to be universally understood.  However, my latest trip to The Dollar Tree has me reconsidering…

Some considerations and observations – every time that any expert comes onto the television or radio and gives me their read on this financial debacle that we as a nation currently find ourselves a part of, I first look to see from which political camp they hail.  Provided that small piece of information was removed, I would likely nod my head at near everything that is offered up as solution or astute study.  I noted this when tuning-in half way through a political commentary.  Upon conclusion, I thought, well that doesn’t sound too bad.  Then I found out that our esteemed scholar was a principal Republican financial advisor to the President.  It was then when I confirmed my said lack of knowledge on economic details. 

Of course the topic “du jour” on nearly every form of media is the eminent fall of worlds’ economies.  Perhaps my closet rants on the misallocation of checks and balances within the globalizated market place are somewhat warranted… but I digress.  Nonetheless, I can no longer now watch these fiscal reports without falling prey to my own subconscious warning me that I have really no basis to debunk or concur anything that is fed to us, the ever-hungry consumer.  I can go with my gut on big issues, but on the minutia of matters, I can only agree that these things should likely be left to the experts.  Could Alan Greenspan’s absence from the political theater be responsible for all this?  Maybe so…

I liken it to such: when I watch Scrubs and Dr. Cox gives a rapid diagnosis on a patient, I, as the viewer, don’t sit at home and think, ‘this guy is completely sideways.  This patient is suffering from abnormal gastrointestinal clotting.  He needs fifty cc of doxyclin… obviously.’ 

Not a person to take a lack of understanding lightly, I looked for solutions which I could work from the comfort of my own home.  Going back and taking some college classes was way out; too time consuming and expensive.  Further, I wouldn’t get answers in a timely manner, though they would likely be thorough.  I could go a few lectures at the local University, but then we are back to the same lack of knowledge base that I ran into initially.  I am in need of fundamentals and theory not strategy.  Then I came up with a brilliant suggestion that only a Gen. Xer ever could conceive.  I bought a copy of SIMCity4: Deluxe.

Here’s my plan:  I build a sprawling metropolis over the course of the next few weeks.  Once the population growth and general sociological structure is diverse enough to support it, I will institute different tax plans, which will mirror those close to what the candidates are offering us for suitable suggestions.  I will base my all further politico-economic thoughts on the Galup Polls of my Sims. 

This idea may put Ralph Nader ahead of me in the polls, but for now, I’ll give it a shot.  After all, Wall Street is just a bunch of numbers on a board, and by that same logic, isn’t a computer program?

I got a beautiful wife and three tow-headed kids / I got a couple big secrets I’d kill to keep hid.  ~ The Drive-By Truckers The Righteous Path

It would appear that not too much ruffles my feathers anymore, at least, not as often as it would once upon a time.  Lately, should something irksome pass me by, I may contemplate upon it for a short allowance of moments, but dalliance seems to be a bit too costly of a mental measure, what with all my nettling chores in anticipation for the forthcoming holiday season.  The election seems a foregone conclusion and the economy is entering into what I think is only the first quarter of this so-called recession; both of these topics seem trite and not really even worth my passing interest.  Even celebrity gossip has me a bit ho-hum as the vast majority of celebrities who are photographed in any given People or Us magazine are either individuals whom I would hardly consider worthy of a pop culture reference or that I have never even heard of at all.  And while it is entirely possible that I am just out of touch (one can only hope), it point is that it is one less thing that I can sit around the ol’ coffee house bistro and run my suck about… oh wait, I don’t really go there that much anymore either… troubling.

Nonetheless and true to form, I have found that some things do still catch my ire in a manner than forces me to sit up and draw other people’s attention to it, even if it is a singular case in nature.  As I picked up my dry cleaning the other day I looked down toward a pile of newspaper and fliers and saw the latest edition of The Army Times, a weekly publication that reads like a news-and-reviews for us boys in green.  The headline was a bit captivating:  Colonels Could Face Jail Time in Paternity Case.  On that note, I was interested to the point where I ceased waiting for Mrs. Yon to find my order, and sat down to read. 

The gist of the tale is that in 1997 (I was a senior in high school…) a young Lieutenant Colonel had a torrid affair with a young specialist that led to a child.  Both parties were married at the time, and both had children with their respective others.  The two remained professional regardless, and he began child support payments even though the child’s real father was kept a secret.  However, earlier this year, this same man, now a full Colonel, after being forced to take a paternity test in order to pay full child support, supposedly asked another Colonel to take the test for him in order to provide DNA that would show that he was not the father and thus relieve him from further payments and obligations.  Now, as the title of the article gives way to, both men could serve up to nine months in jail and loss of their pensions. 

I’ll skip the basic knee-jerk reaction.  Is this whole sorry story as backwards as a room full of French dyslectics?  Yes sir.  I mean, it covers everything from stupid to just plain morally bankrupt.  But that was not what concerned me after my first read, nor did it change after my second and third.  What jumped out at me within the first couple of paragraphs is that the woman in question was not going to be named or photographed while both of these senior military officials are having their stupid mugs plastered all across this week’s front page.

Because you see kids, the unspoken double standard of feminism and chivalry never ceases to piss me off.  The fact that two men with nearly a combined sixty years of service to this country can have their entire lives crushed at the whim of somebody else is a bit appalling.  However, I understand that these men rather lost their rights to an anonymous nature when they botched their “evidence tampering” so crudely.  Further, they are currently in the midst of legal proceedings as well, so I’m not defending them or their right to privacy whatsoever.  Rather, what I’m questioning is the continuing rational that leaves us with Mrs. Jane Doe as our mystery whistle blower.

I think that it’s important to remember that whistles are not all that Mrs. Doe has been blowing.  Keep in mind that this was a mutual affair that was had in ’97, which also leaves her guilty of Adultery and Fraternization with a Senior Officer under the Uniform Code of Military Justice.  I could see not naming her if she was the victim of some horrible crime such as gang rape or some strange military fertilization testing… or military fertilized in some sort of gang banging fashion; but this was not the case!  This is a glorified episode of Judge Judy, and there is no blacking out faces in prime time.  Keeping her identity out of the matter only adds to celebrification of this case, this article, and all further outcomes and reports.

The real antagonist in all this is The Army Times, another real shocker that the media in all their journalistic integrity are the root of all that is controversial.  They are the ones who granted this woman clemency because of her young daughter…  wait… what?!  What about the daughter of the Colonel in question who is currently serving in Iraq in the Marine Corps?  What about the family of both Colonels who will likely suffer an increased social stigma?  I can’t understand the rationale behind that level of moderation of disclosure.  Wasn’t the whole point of this to begin with so that this young daughter can find out who her father really is?  Her mother’s lack of identity becomes this young girl’s likely unvoiced decision as well, which in turn means that she will not be able to have any contact with him for the foreseeable future.  Notably, a reunion was not the whole point… 

I do long for the days when adults settled their problems, for better or worse or not at all, as just that – adults; out of court and out of public eye, because after all, it’s nobody’s business but theirs’.  However, as a twenty-eight year old, I barely remember the twilight of those times.  The root motivation of this young woman was greed and a sense of self entitlement, not some form of uniting passion nor higher moral good.  No, this is a woman who bore a bastard daughter while in wedlock to another man and later ruined her marriage with other adulterous affairs.  Her justly hard trodden path has further led her to the wanton behavior we have today by attacking the father of her child who, while not paying full child support, had been supporting her in a way that kept his own life from falling apart.  In this young officer’s humble opinion, it would seem for her troubles that a reduced child support would be warranted, not considered a thing of injustice.

As I said before, this is a white trash love affair wrapped in the gauze of American patriotism, not unlike the Bill Clinton / Monica Lewinski media event.  However, in those cases, women came out of the wood work to claim that they had slept with our President, even some that I’m sure the Command in Chief wishes would have asked for their faces to be blacked out. 

I guess that my final thought here would be that in today’s world where info-tainment has replaced honest and guided journalism, please respect one last person’s right to privacy – mine.  Don’t bring me every piece of societal refuse smeared on newsprint because it makes me think less of everyone and everything around me.  I’d rather not be exposed to it… and I think that’s as good of a reason as the one that Mrs. Doe gave to be excused from this all as well.

A good way to threaten somebody is to light a stick of dynamite.  The call the guy and hold the burning fuse up to the phone.  “Hear that?” you say, “That’s dynamite, baby.”  ~ Deep Thoughts with Jack Handy

I think that we take a great deal of life lessons from our parents, the majority of which we barely know that we are assimilating until it is engrained in our ever-blossoming gray matter.  I have a thesis stating this is how nice girls grow up to be just like their crazy mothers when originally they claim that they will never have anything in common with her, but that is not really the subject I would care to broach at this time… not really.

It’s funny that the when we are younger the somewhat strange activities of our mothers and fathers get written off as just that: a bit odd, but still an acceptable form of behavior.  When we are older we are much more capable of calling a spade a spade; our parents were and are just acting fucking crazy.  But then sometime later there is the occasional third bend in the road where you find out that other people do the same weird shit as mom and pop, which, for the record, doesn’t validate your parent’s actions in anyway; it just means that they are in good company.

I was probably the last batch of children raised in America prior to the cell phone boom of the turn of the century.  My senior year of high school was when I remember those little noise makers first starting to pop-up in classrooms of  my rural northern Maine school district.  Probably then it is safe to assume that a year or two earlier (or five or six) they permeated the rest of the country as well along with its teenage youth.  That being said, my high school and middle school existed in that golden area when kids had to fight for their right to talk on the phone, especially if they had to share it with a younger sister who was by all respects a bit more popular that they were.  Further, the range of some of those new-fangled cordless telephones didn’t quite reach the length of our house, so while it did grant a level of freedom, the absolute privacy that kids today get to experience was absolutely foreign to me and mine.  My idea of privacy was talking under a wool blanket in the far corner of the house with the lights off after everyone else had gone to bed.  Perhaps a bit overcomplicated, but you get the idea.  How ironic that now I have a place in the United States Department of Defense’s overarching plan for national security?

So it was in this age of call waiting that subsisted as both a technical term and a conceptual state of being that meant, someone else is on the phone; it was here that I got observe and craft my own flare and style for speaking on the phone.  Like developmental portions of a child’s life, their models are naturally their mother and father.  I do believe that I received my jovial nature in telecommunications from my father and my formal tone from my mother, but not-so-strangely I also noted a few things to avoid.  To be more to the point, it would be my mother’s tone of voice when dealing with telephone business representatives. 

I could always tell when she was on the phone with one, because it sounded just a bit more hateful than if she was talking with someone from the local School Board.  Yet, it was not some sort of overt and steady dripping of venom from her lower mandibles carrying off into the next room as well as across the wires.  No, it was more an absence of any tone whatsoever leaving nothing that could be considered endearing or offering in anyway.  Mingle that with the directed conversation skills of an out of work shylock, and you have some idea of the sugar-and-honey technique that my mother seemingly had perfected so well.  At first, I accepted this as a tried and true method, but was quickly confused when my mother scolded me for yelling at the person on the other end of the line at one point when I was eighteen.  I considered this as the founding proof that my initial observations were indeed correct: my mother was abrasive to these people, and that her honey was actually a mixture of cooking wine and salt.  It was sometime in college when I was home that I think I actually took the phone from my mother, who was getting nowhere with this health care rep, calmed the situation with my some of my father’s telephonic good-nature, and shortly thereafter ended the phone call with an acceptable remedy to both parties differences.  This was the point where I reached a certain level of adulthood awareness that allowed me to look at my mother and say, I love you dearly, but on this, you’re crazy.

Fast forward to this weekend.  LL and I are rolling down the rainy road toward the inner coastal waterways, which serve as a back drop to the wildly popular Dawson’s Creek when she gets a phone call from some internet site representative claiming her animal shelter’s page is shy a logo thus denying it an actual functioning nature.  Subject of the call aside, my ears perked up at the sound and edge of the conversation.  Rather than relive the description provided above, I will simply note the tone as one that was exceedingly direct.  I think I may have made mention of it, but instead, I forgave pushing the issue.  However, the very next day at the drive-thru, LL once again returned to this communication tactic becoming very forceful with the voice on the other end of the box.  “…Yes, hi.  I will have a number one with two slices of Canadian bacon and a medium orange juice.  I will also have two breakfast sausage wraps, no meal; thank you.  Make sure that the Canadian bacon is on the top of the sandwich and not the bottom.  I want four napkins and a straw as well… I’ll meet you at the next window where I will give you exact change.”

Though the miracle of the typed word, I think you get the general idea.  After that, I couldn’t help but say something.  But something derogatory?  How could I?  It was a language that I knew.  All I could do was point out that it was present, and that my mother did the same thing… which I believe may have been enough to mentally meddle with LL enough at least make her think next time the phone rings from an unknown number. 

Lesson learned here?  Everyone does stuff they aren’t one hundred percent sure they are doing.  Also, desired effects are not guaranteed, and in all actuality, they probably need to be measured more closely test groups whose original responses so carefully garnered the technique in the first place.  For me though, I’ve learned that I’m probably always going to be the guy who has to answer the phone and deal with the insurance company.