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Patient Effort Will Out

March 24, 2014 7 Comments

Patient effort will out. It is the only lesson I have, to teach to my children. I do not have anything else to offer them. It’s a kind of faith.

Faith is not a lever you pull and out pops the candy. Faith is putting your candy into the machine, over and over, because you know in your heart it’s the right thing to do, all the while knowing that nothing might ever come back out of it for you. You’re just serene in the knowledge that the machine itself is a worthwhile apparatus, despite a lot of evidence to the contrary. That’s why they call it faith. Duh.

The young man in the video grew up, his entire life, with a boot on his face. The Soviet Union was the largest example of the worst state of affairs ever conceived by humans. There are plenty of pikers plying their trade at human misery, retail, in places like basements in Cleveland, and organized and disorganized crime, or in franchises like North Korea and various other gulags with a seat at the United Nations and “Democratic” in their names, but for institutional unkindness, the soviets transformed mom and pop cruelty into an industrial-scaled enterprise. They were the multinational of misery.

This young man must have put his candy into the machine, day after day, never knowing if anything would come back out for him besides a mailed fist. He simply didn’t put it into the wrong machine — the machine that required everything from a man, even his soul — he snuck around back and put it in the hidden slot any man can find if he looks hard enough. That slot isn’t often labeled. Check that; it’s usually mislabeled by the makers of the evil machine. They label it poison or greed or wrecker or apostate or denier or extremist or whatever they think might frighten you off. If you labeled it yourself, you might write, “I am a human being.”

My family and I are required to submit to many indignities. Our arm is twisted and our candy is often mashed into the front of a machine we’d break if we had a hammer big enough. But every night while the people that warm themselves over the exhaust grate of that infernal machine are sleeping, we tiptoe around it and put our patient efforts into another, kindler, gentler machine. We do not know for certain if the machine will ever disburse anything we can use. We are only certain the other machine never will.

Doing The Show

March 23, 2014 6 Comments

Here’s some more of my boys “doing the show” at the Opera House in Skowhegan, Maine last Saturday, for the town’s Maple Festival.You can see the original mention of it here: A Day In The Life. The performance was captured on nothing more than an ambient microphone on a flip camera, hidden behind their stand-up sign onstage.

I was a performer for a long time. I have a finely trained ear about some things. There are various kinds of applause, for instance. Some people applaud out of nothing more than politesse. A great many people applaud things because they are determined to like things in the first place, whether they are any good or not. Sometimes you get golf claps because you don’t suck, but you’re in the wrong place.  Many applaud simply to celebrate the end of something they don’t like.

That sound on the video is real, live applause. I’d know it anywhere, because it is so rare.

Unorganized Hancock

Notes From All Over

March 22, 2014 5 Comments

My friend Gerard occasionally writes an essay to demonstrate that I’m the second-best essayist on the Intertunnel, and no better:  It was one of those small town events that puts your faith in the essential goodness of people back into your soul.

My friend Bird Dog is the only person that’s ever noticed that I occasionally insert lyrics of my own devising into other people’s songs when I write about them. I suspect he’s just feigning ignorance that I wrote them:  Sipp has all the verses, including the ones often left out… 

Unorganized Hancock’s Facebook page has a lot of fun pictures on it. In the dressing room with Unorganized Hancock at the Skowhegan Opera House.  

Admit it: If you don’t like musicals, you always end up rooting for the Nazis in this one. But I’d totally get on board with the Von Trapps if they remade The Sound Of Music like this:

♫ The hills are alive, with the sound of Uzis… ♫

My friend Steve Layman reminds me of one of my favorite Beatles songs to play. I once played in a band that was a Beatles tribute band before I met them, and at the drop of a hat they could bang out any Beatles song like pros. We were jerks, and sang: “I’m gonna let you down ’cause you are flat… “

Sometimes I think there aren’t enough pleasant people on the Intertunnel. Then I find people like The Execupundit. 

Other times I think there aren’t enough pleasant people on the Intertunnel. Then I visit the Daughter of the Golden West.  We decorated our Christmas tree with her ornaments. You should too.

Gagdad Bob is the only blogger with a profile page more amusing than mine. I want to go over to his house and listen to Pharoah Sanders records, but I have to shovel my driveway.

Still plenty of nice stuff, discounted, and with free shipping, for sale at fastique.com.  I don’t like to brag, but I know how to make an end table out of a tree.  Just sayin’.

Why I Never Hire Brilliant Men

March 21, 2014 2 Comments

I have only infrequently been an employee. When I was an employee, I would always be hired as the lowest of peons, then immediately be promoted to just short of the top of the greasy pole. In the past, I’ve been the employer of a good number of people, and as a manager acting for others I have supervised many hundreds. I now work alone.

When I had a handful of men working directly for me, I was in a business that absolutely demanded that the world be altered in a concrete, demonstrable, measurable, and productive way, every day, all the time, and without exception. I employed a rather bright fellow I recall now with fondness. I didn’t employ him because he was bright, because that was mostly superfluous to the topic at hand. He was pleasant, and cooperative. He was not a lifer in the manual trades. 
One day, I gave a raft of instructions to him and all my other employees, and then left on an important business errand. When I returned, everything was either not done, or not done correctly, or an admixture of those two. I was rather heated in my reaction. In a quiet moment later, he said something to me that I found interesting, and useful. He told me that no one that worked for me was as smart as I was, and they couldn’t understand things that I took for granted, and that there was no way the work would ever come out like I wanted it to unless I did it myself, and I was wasting my time trying to make it happen.
Since I did not make this assessment myself,  I guess I can tell you about it without feeling like it’s simply rotomontade on my part. I had made a very bad mistake, and had hired a brilliant person to run my affairs, which is a very big mistake indeed. To hire a brilliant person to run your affairs marks a man as none too bright, if you ask me. It makes no nevermind that the brilliant person was me. 
I do not employ a brilliant person in this capacity any longer. If he gets up to anything brilliant-sounding, I tell him to put a sock in it, and sand another tabletop, because that’s what needs doing.

But that’s old advice, of course. Here it is, from 1924:

 Why I Never Hire Brilliant Men
by: Unknown

SITTING in my office last week, facing the man whom I had just fired,
I thought of the contrast between that interview and our first one,
nearly two years ago! Then he did almost all the talking, while I
listened with eager interest. Last week it was I who talked, while he
sulked like a petulant child.

“Your contract has sixteen months to run,” I said. “My proposition is
that we cancel it at once, and that I hand you this check for ten
thousand dollars.”
With a show of bravado he waved the check aside. He would hold me to
the letter of the contract if it were the last thing he ever did.
I told him he had that privilege, but I was sure he would see the futility of exercising it.
“Let me review the situation for a moment,” I continued: “You came to
us as general sales manager on January 1st, 1922, at a salary of
twenty-five thousand dollars. It was by far the largest salary we had
ever paid in any executive position; but your record seemed to justify
it.
“The letters you brought spoke in the highest terms of your sales
genius. The only question which they did not answer to my satisfaction
was why companies which had valued you so highly should ever have
allowed you to get away! When I voiced this, you stated that they merely
had been outbid by their competitors — and I accepted your statement.
It wasn’t until you had been here a year that I learned the truth. You
are a quick starter, but a poor finisher — no finisher at all, in
fact.”

(more…)

Yay Spring. You Go, Spring

March 20, 2014 8 Comments

It’ s the first day of Spring today. Yay Spring. You go, Spring. Attaboy, Spring. It’s been snowing for twelve straight hours, but that Spring he’s just being coy. He’s got Winter right where he wants him, trapped in my driveway. He can’t escape, and Spring knows it. Spring doesn’t worry. Spring is like Dirty Harry. He’s gonna finish his hot dog before he comes out blastin’. I just know it.

There appears to be some sort of Civil War battleship foundered on my lawn that got snowed over. But that wily Spring, he’s just waiting for the snow on the lawn to connect up with the snow on the roof, and then Bam!, that Spring’s going to send the whole megillah into my basement. Then I’ll be able to drag the Monitor or the Merrimack or whatever it is under there to the scrapyard and get rich like a metal thief.

There is no more firewood. That’s bad. But I have a metal basket to burn wood pellets in when the firewood runs out. That’s good. But after two years of hard use, the bottom of the basket burned clean through the other night, and the pellets just tumble out. That’s bad. But my son and I found a stainless steel lid from a warming tray, like you’d see in a buffet line, and by modifying it a bit with a metal grinder and some pliers, I lined the bottom of the pellet basket. That’s good. But we ran out of pellets, too. That’s bad. But they sell pellets in every grocery store, supermarket, lumber yard, opium den, bordello, Walmart, and feed store in Maine. That’s good. But every single one of them is completely out of pellets, in the whole state of Maine. That’s bad. But I’m currently making ten pieces of furniture, and I burn the tapered cut-offs from the legs for heat. That’s good. But they only lasted a day. That’s bad. But the Tractor Supply company down the street got a pallet of pellets yesterday. That’s good. The people before us bought twenty bags. That’s bad. We bought the other thirty bags. That’s good. Maine is nothing but trees, trees everywhere, trees growing out of the gutters on your house, trees crowding out the flowers in your pots, but the pellets came in bags labeled: Made in Alabama. I have no idea if that’s good or bad, but it sure is something.

Yay Spring.

Month: March 2014

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sippicancottage

A Man Who Has Nothing In Particular To Recommend Him Discusses All Sorts of Subjects at Random as Though He Knew Everything.

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