Life in the Box

Imagine a house. Find an empty shoebox. Grab some scraps of this and that. Throw it together and what have you got?

A box house.

I love the way a ten-year-old thinks when she is bored. This little contraption resulted from a period when she'd finished her homework, practiced basketball, and exhausted every other diversion around here.

She didn't tell me what she was doing. She just rummaged up the materials and set to work.

Ninety percent of parenting is being there. Another ninety percent (yes, I can do the math) is worrying. I worry all the time. My 14-year-old was back in the E.R. yesterday for the third time recently for X-rays.

First, a head injury. Second, a foot injury. This time it is a finger, which got bent back when another kid hit him with a basketball, apparently as a lark.

An expensive lark. We've not been able to completely pay off the previous two E.R. visits yet. We won't know if his finger is broken until later today. Luckily, it isn't basketball season. Unluckily, it is on his writing and throwing hand.

I can tape it for soccer games, but if it's broken and he has to wear a splint, that may end his soccer season.

Kids! If I could do a chant that would allay my worries, I'd try it. Trouble is stuff keeps happening to them. I guess it's that growing up thing. Making mistakes and all that.

What is to become of the parent from all of this?

Speaking of parents, especially single parents, I can see that it makes absolutely no sense for anyone to ever consider dating them until their kids are grown. There is simply too much baggage in the equation.

The only possible exception would be another single parent. Two single parents able to juggle their parenting with their singleness might make for a workable combination. I've seen it work, or appear to work, for a number of couples.

There is the *rare* single woman who can date a single Dad. Circumstances determine when that can work. It depends a lot on the ex-wife, who has a ton of power, whether she exercises it or not.

Making a man look helplessly manipulated by his ex- is not exactly sexy stuff. Most single women will find better options that to witness such drivel.

I take their point. It's hard to be a parent in a "broken" family nowadays. Boundaries get blurry; favors continue to pass back and forth between the ex's. Sometimes they are good terms; sometimes one or the other goes nuclear.

Still, it is not endless psychodrama between the parents that concerns me, but the strain of witnessing it for a person intimate with one of those same two ex-partner parents.

I've noted many times that marriage is an outdated institution, simply from my personal perspective. A more informal set of arrangements could better define relationships between amorous couples. Getting locked down in a marriage, where every stress has to be fully aired and shared, where raising kids in a world that is only partly friendly to them creates huge new worries and pressures, where earning enough money is about as likely as a hamster ever getting anywhere running on his wheel -- the whole damn experience sucks.

The *only* good thing, at the end of the day, is your relationship with your kids. As you lie awake, sleepless yet again, alone in the dark, wondering why the hell your life turned this way, and fully aware that you have no better future left, the warmth of their love embraces you.

Then, at last, you might sleep before returning to the work of worrying about them, as well as how the hell you're gonna pay all those bills stacking up on your Ikea kitchen table.

Just one guy's opinion.

-30-

One Little Tree in a Great Big City

Breakfast. I like to cook, mainly for others, but as I'm living alone, I'm learning to like cooking for myself.



From nearby Franklin Square, just above the site of the original big-league baseball park here in San Francisco, Seals Stadium, and the place the Giants first played when they changed their first name from "New York" to "San Francisco," you can see the lights above what is now known as AT&T Park, which is the pretty field on the edge of San Francisco Bay.



Some ten years ago, I planted this small tree in front of the house where we then lived -- my then-wife, three tiny kidlets, and me. I walk by it every time I accompany my 14-year-old on his dog-walking duties. That's one of my pleasures as an unemployed fellow -- 'special time' with each of my kids.

He and I walk and we talk, while the dogs do what dogs do on a walk, much of which is frankly disgusting and some of the rest downright cute. It is nice to see it there, thriving (the tree, that is).

One small sign that I had an impact.

I imagine many others share this feeling when they see something growing thanks to their hand...

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As the Alps Melt, Blogger Erupts

The borders of Italy are in flux, courtesy of climate change. Glaciers in the Alps are melting, so Italians are growing unsure where their country ends and that of their neighbors begins.

I learned about this, like so many things, from public radio's program "The World."

These days, public radio is a good companion as my blogging habit has gone on steroids, with most of the output going out over at Bnet. For those so inclined, I'm posting a set of links to recent posts there, followed by some comments (below):

May 6 Publishers and Mobile: Follow the Music
"As we continue to track the emerging synergy between print publications and mobile devices, it’s worth noting some of the parallels with the music industry..."

May 5 Smashwords Broadens its Reach to Publishers
"Over its first year of operations, the eBook publishing platform and online book store Smashwords has catered mainly to authors, publishing some 1,200 titles from about 600 authors. As is fitting on its first-year anniversary, Smashwords announced today that it is broadening its services to add support for book publishers..."

May 5 The Sweet Spot: How Print and Mobile Will Converge
"If you’ve been struggling to imagine how newspapers, magazines and books will be able to survive the historic transformation to online digital media, one answer may be that you may have gotten stuck at the desktop and/or laptop stage of thinking..."


May 5 White House to Newspapers: No Bailouts, Guys
"It’s time to kick ‘em when they’re down. At his annual shareholder’s meeting in Omaha over the weekend, the world’s second-richest man (and most-renowned investor), Warren Buffett, answered one question by allowing that he wouldn’t buy most American newspaper companies “at any price...”


May 4 WashPost Ad Revenue Plummets by One-Third in Q-1
"Of all the major newspapers on various “endangered” lists these days, one that rarely gets mentioned is the Washington Post. Unlike many of its competitors, whose stocks trade for pennies or a few dollars, the Post has been soaring up there in Google-like territory..."


May 4 NY Times Pulls Plug: Boston Globe has 60 Days Left
"Though it has been inevitable for months, it was still a shock to see the headline that the Boston Globe is to close its doors ..."


May 3 World Wide Web War 3.0 -- Facebook vs. Twitter
"Wow. This one has been developing for some time now right before our eyes, but the titanic nature of the faceoff between what are arguably the two most aggressive representatives of Web 2.0 — Facebook and Twitter — has only recently heated up to the boiling point..."


May 2 How to Make Money via Twitter
"The rap from cynics throughout the Web 2.0 period is much like that during Web 1.0 — “where’s the business model?”

May 2 What's Bigger than Email? Social Media (by the numbers)
"The worldwide web is a still a teenager, but it is poised to become a legal adult later this summer, on a date nobody is likely to notice, let alone celebrate. How tender and young the web still is can be hard to remember, since it has come to dominate our lives in so many ways so quickly..."


May 1 Dancing With Google, Does the AP Have the Moves?
"...the latest revelations about which company is the real target of the AP’s wrath comes as no surprise: Google..."


May 1 Google's Split Personality: Good vs. Evil
"If Google were reduced to a single character in film, it might well be Anakin Skywalker, George Lucas’s heroic Jedi Knight who tragically yields to the Force to become the evil Darth Vader..."

*********

These are my first 11 posts for May. What I am trying to do is to track the collapse of old media industries and the emergence of new. Many of the major news brands will survive, but they need to adapt quickly.

That's the purpose of my blog -- to try to help my fellow media industry workers figure out survival strategies. Hopefully, some of the pieces will appeal to a more general audience as well, since the media affects everybody. As always, I appreciate any questions, critiques, or feedback of any kind!

Cheers,

David

Paranoid Encounter

So, it was nothing, right? Even though I didn't stop shaking for an hour afterward. Who knows why, maybe because I have been reading Dave Cullen's spellbinding book, Columbine, but today I felt I had a brush with terrorist-instigated mortality.

It was a day like any other. Except that today I had to fulfill my civic duty by showing up for jury service. Now, I have never served on a jury, during my 38 years since I relocated here in San Francisco, though I have often answered the summons from Superior Court to do so.

I have no particular aversion to such service, but the only times I've made it past the screening process to actually sit down in a judge's room, I have been rejected during voir dire, due to my background as an investigative reporter.

Anyway, today I joined the line of citizens waiting to enter one of our local court buildings, when a nervous-acting man ahead of me caught my attention. He was a white man, balding, dressed in formal clothes, with a pot belly, large, dark-rimmed glasses, and an extremely nervous manner about him.

To enter the building, one has to clear security. Two places in front of me was a younger woman, pleasant-enough looking that she probably sometimes has had to fend off unwanted physical attention from the kinds of creeps who grope, "bump" or otherwise invade her physical space.

One place in front of me was this suspicious-acting man.

As she started to go through the security device, he pushed into her rear end. She turned around, and confronted him. "Excuse me?"

She cleared.

His turn.

He didn't. All sorts of alarms went off.

"Maybe it's your belt, sir, try taking that off," the security guard, an attractive African-American woman offered.

He did that but he also pushed through again, still triggering an alarm.

At this point, she waved me through, and I glided through effortlessly. As I turned to pick up my cellphone and keys, the suspicious man was exploding.

"What is your name?" he was screaming at the security guard. Clearly, he was trying to intimidate her, as if he were above being challenged for the right to enter the court building.

I proceeded into the central jury pool room with another hundred of citizens or so. Then began a long, boring, two-hour process of being excused from service. Halfway through, something extremely disconcerting occurred.

That same man, now looking whiter than ever, entered the jury room from the back of the room. He sat for a moment, then walked toward the front and exited. Along the way, he deposited a book on a table in the precise center of the facility.

From that moment on, I was sure we were all dead. This was certainly a terrorist, angry at who knows what (there are so many injustices in our courts, almost anyone could turn into a mass killer, right?).

The next hour was one of the longest of my life. At first, I tried to find someone to alert about that book. Why would such a strange acting man do what he had done? Is there a "bomb squad" around to secure the item?

But no, here in the bureaucratic belly of the beast, I was stuck. No cops. Nobody but a nice young woman who said I couldn't leave until my name was called.

Fine, I thought. I'll die this way if it comes to that. After all, who ever heard of an exploding book? Probably the guy is just the kind of madman who drops crazed literature in public places.

***

That's pretty much it. Nothing happened. I was excused. And I scooted out of that place, gratefully. As I glanced back over my shoulder, however, the book was still there.

-30-

Children & Music

Beethoven, Bach and Mozart were my personal heroes as a child piano player. Tonight was a recital by my 13-year-old, who, though he claims to hate being on center stage, played a mean version, not of the classics, but of the theme from "Mission, Impossible."

Afterward, he and his fellow students had to endure a photo session on-stage. I congratulated him for his ability to stay cool. He told me he loves music, and doesn't half mind piano, actually.

Maybe these years of playing a keyboard will help him embrace other instruments?

Love Hurts

So, my question tonight is the same as Tolstoy's: What is art?"

What if all art is nothing more than the little twists and turns in our private little worlds, that only but for the turn of fate, remain so unexceptionable as to be dismissed as trivia?

Watch these two videos, please.





No one could argue that Eric Clapton's brilliant work here was anything short of artistic, in rock n roll terms.

Yet, all he was talking about, in the real world, was his forbidden love for Pattie Boyd Harrison, the wife of Beatle George Harrison. That's all. Forbidden fruit. The muse for many an artist.



(Pattie & George.) Actually, in reality, Clapton succeeded in stealing Harrison's wife from him, and then, later on, this illicit couple broke up as well. Maybe that is why they call it the blues...

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All That Matters

In my confusion, having trouble finding my way, one thing anchors me, and that is witnessing my children as they work their way, each at his or her own stage, through this troubling and confusing game of life.

My 14-year-old is an athlete of uncommon grace and skill. On the soccer pitch, he has emerged as a force to be reckoned with.



Today was one of his days. He played brilliantly, and as I watched him, all of my other concerns evaporated. Forget about this problem and forget about that! Screw that jerk who treated me so unkindly! Fuck that idiot who tried to take advantage of me! Who cares about the one who treats me as if I am a creep when the truth is I am a sweetie pie, always have been, always will be.

All I do, in the end, is love others; it is their problem when they cannot let that in! But I do keep a soft spot for each of those who truly love me even if they can't quite currently say it. Toward all of these very special souls, I bear absolutely no amimus. I'll wait for each of you as long as you wait for me.

Meanwhile, who cares about money, and who cares about "success"? What are these anyway but empty concepts, created, no doubt, by those with so much emptiness inside that a big, sloppy, sharing, caring mess of a man is an easy target for their twisted desire to score a takedown.

Enjoy!



No, tonight I am envying no man, desiring no woman, not aspiring or even willing to trade places with anyone else on this precious planet. Because today I got to walk aside my son after he and his 'mates utterly and oh so artistically demolished their opponent.

In soccer, winning is sweet. In life, sadly, all is only bittersweet meaninglessness.

-30-

Six a.m. in New York to One p.m. in San Francisco

The haze moved in over Manhattan late yesterday; after a day up and down in the skyscrapers of some of our country's leading media companies, and a relaxing decompression meeting in the Gramercy Park Hotel, it was a night of reporting, writing, and publishing from my large (but cheap) hotel room at the Hotel Metro.



Around midnight, I went up to the roof terrace to check out the view and my memory. But the Empire State Building, so brilliant just last week, looked like the Golden Gate Bridge in heavy fog: You knew it was up there, you just couldn't see anything, except for some dull wattage from its lights at the bottom of the fogbelt.

Three girls giggled over in the far corner. I stood there for a moment, shivered, and went back to my room, for a couple more hours of work.

Up by six for a quick breakfast and off to JFK, where I once again jumped on an earlier flight. We landed in the rain after 1 p.m. local time, after vectoring in over the north and east bay.

Ten days: five here and five out there. If I am supposed to feel jet-lagged, it's taking its time to hit me. Mainly, it's good to be home, as always, and I think this will be Pizza Friday Night at Dad's House.

Some people live a cross-country lifestyle, I know; and in the past, I was one of those folks as well. A life combining the Bay Area with New York City has a lot of appeal, and there's just one thing you need plenty of to pull it off.

M-o-n-e-y.

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