Single Parent's Saturday Night

The day started out at the Polo Field near the ocean. First the girls had to tuck in their shorts and check in with the ref.



This team is young for its age bracket, something that happens in kids' sports. So they are always playing larger and older kids and always losing their games.



But they have a great cheer and great team spirit. They finished the first half down only 0-1.



We will not discuss what happened in the second half.



By mid-afternoon, the big boys were readying to play at Franklin Square. There were a number of tense events today. Something in the air smelled wrong.



The opponent is coached by a Frenchman who clearly teaches that fouling is a great way to conduct yourself in a soccer game, especially if the referee doesn't catch you at it. Also, a coach who likes to call kids on the opposing team names, including profound names, like the F word, as well as to encourage his assistants to do so.



My son was tripped, kicked, pushed, headed, and tackled from behind, and taunted by the other team's coaches. To my amazement, he held his cool and never retaliated, and also played a brilliant game.



He had an assist in a hard-fought 2-2 tie. Late in the game, when the ref yellow-carded two of the opposition players within a minute, and ejected one of their assistant coaches from the pitch, I had a proud parent moment. The man was cursing and seething, yelling at any kid in an orange jersey who was within earshot, as if it were their fault that he had been ejected for his own inappropriate behavior.

He tried his act on my son ("You are a %^$#&^ just like your parents") and to his credit, my 14-year-old (who's probably three inches taller and already a much more mature human being than this pathetic loser) looked down at the man, and said in his deep, calm voice, "No, but it is time for you to be leaving now."

Such are the moments a parent savors on yet another Saturday night I will spend alone. I love my freedom. I can do anything, be anywhere, go out with anyone I want to. This is a freedom I've seldom known in my life.

Lonely? My own company is plenty to keep. I'm sure my mood will escalate and collapse in several wide undulations yet this warm, summery evening. I'm hoping those who were hurt today recover. I'm hoping those feeling hopeless tonight find hope.

As for me, I'm writing, here and in other venues. Before the day ends, thousands of words will have escaped straight from my chest, which is hurting. I don't know why my chest hurts.

But I do know that that is where the heart resides.

-30-

The Riches of the Faithful Souls

Colors surround me. Brilliant colors of life.



The sweet, heavy scents of jasmine, lilac and roses enter my house.



My effort to become a proper vegetarian cook for my youngest child, now she has embraced vegetarianism, continues, with mixed results. I realize I don't really know what I am doing, absent the gratifying contributions of meat.

All of a sudden, every meal I try to prepare for her seems unbalanced. I use too many vegetables -- that is clear. I wish I had more knowledge about this sort of thing.

Summer came back. This weather is downright weird. It's cold; it's hot. No rhyme or reason. It is disorienting.

All of sudden, also, I am busy. People keep discovering the things I write about on my Bnet blog. Maybe I've become a witness to history.

The death of the old and the birth of the new? Now I am in demand. Going here and there. Getting quoted. Giving speeches, appearing on panels. People buy me meals.

It's all good. It's all fine. It's happened many times before. When you suddenly once again discover that you are at the center of some particular universe, it can be a heady moment, at least when you are young.

Now it just is what it is. I'm grateful, very much so. I feel like I'm back on the road to economic recovery, on a personal basis, so I hope the country soon is too. But there is no particular sense of pride or self-oriented feeling available.

It's more like the stream of life, you know. We are always moving, in this world, even when we feel like we're standing still. We never are still. Thanks to gravity, we are clinging to a ball of rock spinning madly through a giant universe, only alive at all because we can grow crops in the six inches or so of soil that is the entire legacy of all of our ancestors and all other organic life on earth.

That's it. And that's why the "primitive" religions of aborigines are far more appealing, on a sensible, scientific level, than these fancy, over-bloated majors that rely on invented narratives rather than on the basic facts of life.

Worshiping our ancestors is the right thing to do. From them, and what they have given our soils, the nutrients yielding all edibles sprout. There is no "us" without "them."

It's as simple as that. The Japanese thank all food with a lovely, simple prayer before they consume it. As far as I can tell, they say, "Thank you for giving your life so that I may live."

We all should learn that prayer. Forget the bullshit they teach at temple, church or mosque. Or don't. If you must believe, go ahead. I have nothing against Jews, Christians or Moslems.

You are welcome to your beliefs, and I see clearly all the good you do as you draw energy from these faiths. But, please, stop imposing your systems on other people. You have no right to do that!

Every human has the right to choose his or her own way to get through this dangerous time on the planet. Shut your mouth instead of evangelizing, accept God on your own private terms, and leave everyone else alone! Accept the documented truth that whichever major religion you embrace has killed far more people than it ever could "save."

So suck it up and get over it. Cut your self-righteousness; there is nothing special about you because you are a practicing believer.

The religions that appeal to me are far smaller and more modest. They try to convert nobody. They have no arrogance. They are true to the facts.

Tonight, I live as a free man, free from the pollution of religion, but proudly spiritual, embracing of all life. There's nothing special about this. It's called having a beating heart, a thinking mind, and empathy for all others, not just those have happen to practice one narrow ideology (religions are no better than Communism!) or another.

-30-

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...

-30-

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?