Pages

Monday, December 30

Affluenza




This case is over but still warrants attention. A teen that happens to have wealthy parents killed four and injured two people when the vehicle he was driving collided with a broken-down car located on the side of the road. The teen's sentence: 10 years probation and mandatory rehabilitation treatment. The defense: affluenza. 

The teen was drunk (under age drinking - bang).

The teen was driving (DUI - bang).

Two people injured (bang, bang).

Four people dead (kaboom). 

Yet, the justice system awarded the teen probation. Corruption? Maybe, but no evidence has been found, and affluenza, what the fuck is that?

Affluenza, as defined by the defense attorney means wealthy to the extent an individual is not responsible for their behavior. The teen's lawyer argued his parents never set limits, and gave him whatever he wanted, so how could he know how to act? 

It's shameful, but one bad decision by a judge does not mean the system is broken. However, this decision highlights the imperfection of the justice system, and the inequality that is brewing within our country.

If the four individuals killed in the collision were black it's reasonable to state that 
racially charged statements and assessments would have muddled this cased. They were not, which provides an opportunity to engage without the veil of race. 

If the teen had been poor, would he have served jail time? Could a public defender argue the parents never set limits, and let him do whatever he wanted because they were busy working long hours, so how could he know how to act?

Large banks and insurance companies, and the executives that control them just happen to be wealthy. In 2008, the U.S. Treasury and the Federal Reserve bailed out numerous large banks and insurance companies. Congress at the request of President George W. Bush, Vice President Richard B. Cheney, and the famous down on one knee plea of Treasury Secretary Hank Paulson, passed the Troubled Asset Relief Program also known as "TARP." The defense: affluenza, there was little regulation, so how could the bankers and insurance executives know how to act?

The justice system has yet to award prison sentences to any large bank or insurance company executive involved in creating the financial crisis. Corruption? Maybe, but no evidence has been found, and affluenza, according to the Advanced English Dictionary means, a feeling of dissatisfaction, anxiety etc, causes by the dogged pursuit of more. Really?

There are people who just happen to be classified as poor, working, and middle class but when it comes to providing assistance or leniency:

Proposing to cut 39 billion in SNAP (food stamps) benefits, and not extending unemployment benefits for 1.3 million during --- by all accounts --- a sluggish recovery (bang).

Declining ACA Medicare Expansion to the poor in some states (bang).

Cuts to military veteran retirement benefits (bang, bang).

Allowing the payroll tax cut on the middle and working class to expire with no fuss, but fiercely fighting to keep tax cuts for top earners, some wanted to make them permanent (kaboom).

If I were to define the ridiculous diagnosis of affluenza, I would say its a condition were the well off and wealthy are viewed as deserving of aid, perks, and benefits while the middle, working, and poor are seen as lazy, irresponsible, and undeserving.

It's obvious wealth influenced the teens trial, and wealth influences our politicians. Could wealth and our dogged pursuit of more be influencing us. A recent discussion about government spending and future prospects for the U.S. between myself and a friend – both working class – highlights affluenza's potential influence. He engaged me on the premise that money spent on social programs is wrecking the country financially. However, he rejected any harm was being done by corporate subsides, or that tax rates are historically low, or all time low average worker wages have somehow produced all time high corporate profits, or the huge income disparity that exits between the top 1% and the rest of us. To me it appeared he held the view shared prosperity is a myth, and people in need of assistance were lazy, or irresponsible. At one point he cited the “Unabashed Surfer Receiving Food Stamps to Buy Sushi and Avoid Work” story reported by Fox News as evidence. I countered but he failed to accept that some bank executives abused TARP. To be clear, my friend is one person, but he is not alone. To the point, abuse of any program aimed to provide temporary assistance is going to happen, the goal is to minimize abuse. Nevertheless, the focus in day-to-day conversation and news coverage seems centered on people being undeserving of aid, higher wages (minimum wage increase—forget-about-it), or leniency unless you're a part of the wealthy class. We can change that, but first we have to diagnosis the illness.

Does the country have affluenza?

 

----------------------------------------------

Just before I finished this blog, I came across “Why Talking About Employee Poverty Makes Us Uncomfortable” by HBR. The article provides further evidence that view my friend has is shared by many:

One camp simply denied that low-wage workers and their families are truly in need, typically based on heroic assumptions about how little it actually costs to live. Whether or not we personally believe these workers are poor enough to merit attention, however, the U.S. government has determined that the roughly 10 million working poor are paid too little to make it without government help. 
A similar assertion was that the working poor are there by choice… 
The HBR piece is an interesting quick read. I wonder why to do so many see the fellow man as wanting a handout, versus wanting an opportunity to earn a living.

Monday, December 23

Product Hysteria

I like fresh J's like the next sane individual.

  • Cost: $170

  • Cost to make: $16.25 (unverifiable); rough estimate: $50

  • Stampeding through a door for a pair: Priceless

I like the iPhone like the next sane individual.

  • Cost: (5S) $649 to $849 without contract

  • Cost to make: $199 to $218 (verified) 

  • Waiting in line for days, literally sleeping on the street, to be the first to buy one: Priceless






Kudos to Nike/Jordan and Apple. The ability to arouse consumer interest to this level is no easy feat. 

Lesson: branding and marketing cannot be ignored if you look to achieve success. Protect and nourish your brand, personal and business. 

In spite of that, consumer complicity in the hoopla: Stupid.





  
-----
Source for Apple iPhone 5S costs: http://www.cnbc.com/id/101058725

Navy Satire via Broadside...















I love these comics strips...

Source: http://www.broadside.net/index.htm

Friday, December 20

The Most In-Demand Job Skills Of 2013





If you’re in the market for a new job, you might want to consider the tech sector. According to LinkedIn, the most desirable skills in 2013 were dominated by tech.

LinkedIn took a look at the skills and employment history of over 259 million members to determine what the most popular skills were this year. Based off new jobs added by people with select skills and recruiter search activity, the company found that social media marketing led the way followed by mobile development, cloud and distributed computing, Ruby, Python and Perl coding languages, and statistical analysis.

Tech Is So Hot Right Now 


This year put an increased emphasis on technical education that translated into the job market.


Free open online courses, often called MOOCs, became extremely popular in 2013, and a significant number of those programs focus on technical skills including programming and Web development. Students were able to become self-taught experts in some of the most marketable skills, and, especially in technical fields,job opportunities stemmed from completion of online courses.

A push to learn coding also put more attention on the importance of technical skills in the job market. Code.org, a non-profit organization led by some of the most prominent names in tech including Mark Zuckerberg and Bill Gates, launched the Hour of Code this month in an effort to get people across the country excited about programming. Headlining the movement is the projected billion-dollar job market built on computing jobs. Tech turns out it’s a pretty good job market to be in.

If you’re thinking about a career in technology, you’ll be in good company. Tech jobs make up almost half of the best companies to work for, as many of tech’s most popular companies are truly changing human behavior, have enviable office cultures, and maintain high employee satisfaction. Not a bad gig.

Business Is Growing 


You might be scratching your head at what, exactly, social media marketing is. But it’s on the same list as recruiting, business development, and public relations—all essential functions of growing a company.


The tech sector is booming, which means so are its support roles. In order for successful businesses to grow, they need cheerleaders in non-technical jobs to promote, pitch, market and expand the company. This encompasses more than just the technology industry. Companies large and small are trying to harness the power of social media to gain awareness for their brands and get their message in front of as many eyeballs as possible. While social media marketing might seem a bit shallow, there is no shortage of opportunity for people to start their careers on the strength of their Twitter accounts.

If you don’t have the technical capabilities to build or code a product, chances are you can still work in the ever-growing tech sector by focusing on marketing and business development skills.

It’s likely we’ll see this trend continue in 2014. If you’re looking to pick up a new skill or job in the New Year, tech might be a good place to start. See the full list of LinkedIn's most in-demand job skills of 2013 below.

+LinkedIn; +USAjobs Gov


Author: Selen Larson

Source: http://readwrite.com/2013/12/19/the-top-skill-in-2013-was-social-media-marketing?awesm=readwr.it_p0im#awesm=~oqCbkfLcVgbtQ3

CNO Holiday Message 2013

Shipmates, this holiday season Darleen and I would
like to thank you, our Navy Team, for all that you do in the 
service of our Nation.
 
During 2013, our Navy professionally conducted a broad array
of exercises and operations with allies and partners around the
globe.  In every real world and training event, our success 
rested upon the dedication and integrity of our Sailors, 
Civilians, and Families.  Your indomitable commitment to 
accomplish a staggering array of missions has been
inspirational.

At this moment, tens of thousands of our shipmates are operating forward, on land and at sea, in every corner of the world. They are on station, ready to respond where it matters, when it matters. For those who are deployed this season, you and your families are in our thoughts and prayers, we wish you well, and we thank you for your service. For those at home, Darleen and I wish you a safe holiday season filled with joy and time shared with loved ones. For the entire Navy family, we wish you a Merry Christmas and a Happy New Year!

Released by the Chief of Naval Operations. +U.S. Navy 







Wednesday, December 18

Own It!

“What it’s like to Fail” and “Why I make Terrible Decisions, or, Poverty’s Thoughts” are both refreshing and bona fide. In Why I make terrible Decisions, or, Poverty’s Thoughts the author, goes by KILLERMARTINIS (KM), shares her view of poverty, and why it’s a Herculean task to blossom beyond poverty into adequate means or richness. She aims to add her voice of experience to the poverty discussion. In What it’s like to Fail the author, David, grew up in a great neighborhood, went to good schools, found a great career and was making over $300,000 a year. He shares his story of success and failure, as well as his struggle to reclaim success.

What I’ve found to be relatively true ­–– born rich, born-dirt poor, or somewhere in-between ­­–– at some point in your life you become solely responsible for your choices and your life. Anyone can experience life-changing failure, and we all live weary of failing beyond the point of recovery. David didn’t fail, he made a choice to leave his job in order to spend more time with his family.

“It (his job) was heaven. Except it wasn’t for Marina. Or my family. The working hours were hideous: Most days started at 10 a.m. and ended at 3 a.m. The easy nights were the nights we filmed, when we finished by 10 p.m. I barely saw Marina and the children, except on weekends. Our house was not a home but the place I checked into when I wasn’t working. Marina, meanwhile, struggled to deal with eight children. Both my family and my marriage started to fall apart. My comedy writer skillset -- being a quick-witted wisenheimer who could debate endlessly -- didn’t transfer well to a home setting. Whereas I was well-compensated to have a dad in a sitcom make a joke out of his daughter’s emotional crisis, it wasn’t funny with real daughters and real sons and a real wife. It was irritating and provoked resentment.
So I had to make a change. I had to quit my dream job. I had carefully saved and we had lived well below our means, so I decided to take a couple of years off to devote time to my real job: husband and father.”
To declare husband and father are the “real jobs” doesn’t adequately describe what it means to be both. Why was the weekend not enough for he and his family? Only they know; all the same, I can relate. My wife has engaged (quite aggressively) with me about the lack of time we spend together. At one point in our relationship, she shared her dislike with me concerning her perceived view that I had the habit of coming home and falling asleep on the couch instead of spending time with her. One, it wasn’t true, did I fall asleep on the couch –– sure, but it wasn’t a habit or problem that needed to be addressed. Two, I will never apologize for working in order to provide for our family, nor, will I apologize for being tired as a result. And, unlike David, I will never quit my career solely to spend more time with my family. I do understand though, songs have been written about the intoxicating power of love, think, “What You Won’t Do for Love,” by Bobby Caldwell. David put ownership of his life in the hands of his wife when they were supposed to be partners. Had he retained ownership, he would’ve or should ‘ve saw that without his career and income, he and his family (eight children) would solve the problem of “not enough time together” but have new problems sustaining a lifestyle.

To continue a bit on David’s wife. People are hard to please, and I charge you with your happiness –– OWN IT. I can’t make you happy beyond a moment, you can’t make me happy beyond a moment. Day to day, in the long term, you and I are responsible for our happiness (a religious person might say inner peace or inner joy). David’s wife was unhappy, and he attempted to make her happy by doing what she wanted, which brought about the very thing he was trying to avoid, divorce, and a broken home. I was heartbroken when I read that she left him after he provided exactly what she asked for –– more time together. A sad and prime example of how fickle we are, and why you can’ t live trying to please anyone other than yourself.

KM is hopeless. Her statement, “We know that the very act of being poor guarantees that we will never not be poor. It doesn't give us much reason to improve ourselves,” further indicates the depth of her mental defeat. Unless her mental state changes, her situation is unlikely to change. KM’s hopelessness is a result of her choices. She became pregnant while living out of a motel. Nevertheless, mistakes happen. Assuming pregnancy was purely a mistake, one can’t find fault with a woman for giving birth over abortion regardless of her situation, or, find fault with her for attempting to take care of her responsibility instead of providing the young person for adoption. However, without any improvement in her situation, she became pregnant again, which was a bad choice with regard to establishing stability for herself and her family. KM’s second child surely threw a wrench into any forward progress she had made toward stability and adequate means. I do not believe she owned that decision, she gave in to her mate, or was reckless, in either case, she failed to own that choice.

Own it, no matter the age. I attended Patterson Senior High School for 9th and 10th grade. A person can obtain a great education from Patterson and go onto be anything they want, if they apply themselves. I did not; I engaged in the many distractions that were available to me. Following my 10th grade year, I felt that if I stayed at Patterson I would not be in a position to establish stable employment following high school. I didn’t see college in the cards at the time, so I figured I would learn a trade to be employable after high school. I took action to get myself transferred to Carver Vocational - Technical High School. I only required my grandmother to sign the paperwork, which she did; for that, I thank her. There was a point during the process when she asked me if I was sure that transferring was what I wanted to do. She asked me, the teen, if I was sure that I wanted to transfer. She herself had limited academic education, thus it was on me. Besides, she had done more than enough for me already by providing a home, food, and stability in the absence of my mother and father. For the record, we were working poor; I assert, being poor does not ensure you will never not be poor. Back to my point, the decision to transfer to Carver in an attempt to better my prospects for employment following high school was mine. I took ownership for my future.

Part of being a man or woman is taking ownership of your life –– responsibility for ones actions, as well as being able to face life as is, whatever the circumstances. If you are able to do that, you will be able to make good and reasonable choices that are critical to the trajectory of your life.

I am self-conscious to the fact that I am typing this in the comfort of my home, warm, and relatively safe. I’m self-aware that I am passing judgment on two authors who’ve courageously shared their life experience. I’ve done this to share my view of where they went wrong, and my feelings about how you and I can avoid such a fate. I wish both David and KM successes. I thank them for sharing their stories. Each story encouraged me to reflect on my life and appreciate my situation. My reality: life could be better, life could be a hell-of-a lot worse, but overall, life is good. Fact: one wrong choice can change that in a heartbeat. Success is not guaranteed, if you fail, fail based on your choices, your terms, not that of another. If you succeed, succeed on your terms, based on your choices, take credit (and share as applicable). OWN IT –– take ownership of your life.



Sunday, December 8

Nelson Rolihlahla Mandela --- "Madiba"



"For to be free is not merely to cast off one's chains, but to live in a way that respects and enhances the freedom of others.”




"Hope is a powerful weapon, and (one) no one power on earth can deprive you of."



“Difficulties break some men but make others. No axe is sharp enough to cut the soul of a sinner who keeps on trying, one armed with the hope that he will rise even in the end."




"Death is something inevitable. When a man has done what he considers to be his duty to his people and his country, he can rest in peace."



"I learned that courage was not the absence of fear, but the triumph over it. The brave man is not he who does not feel afraid, but he who conquers that fear."



“Education is the most powerful weapon which you can use to change the world.”




"A good leader can engage in a debate frankly and thoroughly, knowing that at the end he and the other side must be closer, and thus emerge stronger. You don't have that idea when you are arrogant, superficial, and uninformed."



"Long speeches, the shaking of fists, the banging of tables and strongly worded resolutions out of touch with the objective conditions do not bring about mass action and can do a great deal of harm to the organisation and the struggle we serve."


"Everyone can rise above their circumstances and achieve success if they are dedicated to and passionate about what they do."




"What counts in life is not the mere fact that we have lived. It is what difference we have made to the lives of others that will determine the significance of the life we lead.”





Talent is Insignificant

"Talent is insignificant. I know a lot of talented ruins. Beyond talent lie all the usual words: discipline, love, luck, but, most of all, endurance."

May 17, 1963


Baldwin vs Buckley Debate




- Interview with James Baldwin abridged:

INTERVIEWER

“What other people write about me is irrelevant,” you once wrote in Essence. Was that meant to go unqualified; do you not relate to criticism in any way?


BALDWIN

It is never entirely true that you don’t give a shit what others say about you, but you must throw it out of your mind. I went through a very trying period, after all, where on one side of town I was an Uncle Tom and on the other the Angry Young Man. It could make one’s head spin, the number of labels that have been attached to me. And it was inevitably painful, and surprising, and indeed, bewildering. I do care what certain people think about me. 

INTERVIEWER

Would you tell us how you came to leave the States?

JAMES BALDWIN

I was broke. I got to Paris with forty dollars in my pocket, but I had to get out of New York. My reflexes were tormented by the plight of other people. Reading had taken me away for long periods at a time, yet I still had to deal with the streets and the authorities and the cold. I knew what it meant to be white and I knew what it meant to be a nigger, and I knew what was going to happen to me. My luck was running out. I was going to go to jail, I was going to kill somebody or be killed. My best friend had committed suicide two years earlier, jumping off the George Washington Bridge.

When I arrived in Paris in 1948 I didn’t know a word of French. I didn’t know anyone and I didn’t want to know anyone. Later, when I’d encountered other Americans, I began to avoid them because they had more money than I did and I didn’t want to feel like a freeloader. The forty dollars I came with, I recall, lasted me two or three days. Borrowing money whenever I could—often at the last minute—I moved from one hotel to another, not knowing what was going to happen to me. Then I got sick. To my surprise I wasn’t thrown out of the hotel. This Corsican family, for reasons I’ll never understand, took care of me. An old, old lady, a great old matriarch, nursed me back to health after three months; she used old folk remedies. And she had to climb five flights of stairs every morning to make sure I was kept alive. I went through this period where I was very much alone, and wanted to be. I wasn’t part of any community until I later became the Angry Young Man in New York.

INTERVIEWER

Why did you choose France?

BALDWIN

It wasn’t so much a matter of choosing France—it was a matter of getting out of America. I didn’t know what was going to happen to me in France but I knew what was going to happen to me in New York. If I had stayed there, I would have gone under, like my friend on the George Washington Bridge.

INTERVIEWER

You say the city beat him to death. You mean that metaphorically.

BALDWIN

Not so metaphorically. Looking for a place to live. Looking for a job. You begin to doubt your judgment, you begin to doubt everything. You become imprecise. And that’s when you’re beginning to go under. You’ve been beaten, and it’s been deliberate. The whole society has decided to make you nothing. And they don’t even know they’re doing it.



INTERVIEWER

If you felt that it was a white man’s world, what made you think that there was any point in writing? And why is writing a white man’s world?

BALDWIN

Because they own the business. Well, in retrospect, what it came down to was that I would not allow myself to be defined by other people, white or black. It was beneath me to blame anybody for what happened to me. What happened to me was my responsibility. I didn’t want any pity. “Leave me alone, I’ll figure it out.” I was very wounded and I was very dangerous because you become what you hate. It’s what happened to my father and I didn’t want it to happen to me. His hatred was suppressed and turned against himself. He couldn’t let it out—he could only let it out in the house with rage, and I found it happening to myself as well. And after my best friend jumped off the bridge, I knew that I was next. So—Paris. With forty dollars and a one-way ticket.



INTERVIEWER

Although you are aware of the fact that many people read and are moved by your essays, as well as your speeches and lectures . . .

BALDWIN

Let’s go back now. Those essays really date from the time I was in my early twenties, and were written for the New Leader and The Nation all those years ago. They were an attempt to get me beyond the chaos I mentioned earlier. I lived in Paris long enough to finish my first novel, which was very important for me (or I wouldn’t be here at all). What held me in Paris later—from ’55 to ’57—was the fact that I was going through a kind of breakup in my private life, yet I knew I had to go back to America. And I went. Once I was in the civil-rights milieu, once I’d met Martin Luther King Jr. and Malcolm X and Medgar Evers and all those other people, the role I had to play was confirmed. I didn’t think of myself as a public speaker, or as a spokesman, but I knew I could get a story past the editor’s desk. And once you realize that you can do something, it would be difficult to live with yourself if you didn’t do it.



INTERVIEWER

When do you know something is the way you want it?

BALDWIN

I do a lot of rewriting. It’s very painful. You know it’s finished when you can’t do anything more to it, though it’s never exactly the way you want it. In fact, the hardest thing I ever wrote was that suicide scene in Another Country. I always knew that Rufus had to commit suicide very early on, because that was the key to the book. But I kept putting it off. It had to do, of course, with reliving the suicide of my friend who jumped off the bridge. Also, it was very dangerous to do from the technical point of view because this central character dies in the first hundred pages, with a couple of hundred pages to go. The point up to the suicide is like a long prologue, and it is the only light on Ida. You never go into her mind, but I had to make you see what is happening to this girl by making you feel the blow of her brother’s death—the key to her relationship with everybody. She tries to make everybody pay for it. You cannot do that, life is not like that, you only destroy yourself.

INTERVIEWER

What are your first drafts like?

BALDWIN

They are overwritten. Most of the rewrite, then, is cleaning. Don’t describe it, show it. That’s what I try to teach all young writers—take it out! Don’t describe a purple sunset, make me see that it is purple.

INTERVIEWER

The attitudes you found in America which made you go to France—are they still with us, are they exactly the same?

BALDWIN

I always knew I would have to come back. If I were twenty-four now, I don’t know if and where I would go. I don’t know if I would go to France, I might go to Africa. You must remember when I was twenty-four there was really no Africa to go to, except Liberia. I thought of going to Israel, but I never did, and I was right about that. Now, though, a kid now . . . well, you see, something has happened which no one has really noticed, but it’s very important: Europe is no longer a frame of reference, a standard-bearer, the classic model for literature and for civilization. It’s not the measuring stick. There are other standards in the world. It’s a fascinating time to be living. There’s a whole wide world which isn’t now as it was when I was younger. When I was a kid the world was white, for all intents and purposes, and now it is struggling to remain white—a very different thing.



INTERVIEWER

You seem very troubled—but not by death?

BALDWIN

Yes, true, but not at all by death. I’m troubled over getting my work done and over all the things I’ve not learned. It’s useless to be troubled by death, because then, of course, you can’t live at all.

INTERVIEWER

Yes, before 1968, you said, “I love America.”

BALDWIN

Long before then. I still do, though that feeling has changed in the face of it. I think that it is a spiritual disaster to pretend that one doesn’t love one’s country. You may disapprove of it, you may be forced to leave it, you may live your whole life as a battle, yet I don’t think you can escape it. There isn’t any other place to go—you don’t pull up your roots and put them down someplace else. At least not in a single lifetime, or, if you do, you’ll be aware of precisely what it means, knowing that your real roots are always elsewhere. If you try to pretend you don’t see the immediate reality that formed you I think you’ll go blind.



INTERVIEWER

Can you discern talent in someone?

BALDWIN

Talent is insignificant. I know a lot of talented ruins. Beyond talent lie all the usual words: discipline, love, luck, but, most of all, endurance.



INTERVIEWER

How does it strike you that in many circles James Baldwin is known as a prophetic writer?

BALDWIN

I don’t try to be prophetic, as I don’t sit down to write literature. It is simply this: a writer has to take all the risks of putting down what he sees. No one can tell him about that. No one can control that reality. It reminds me of something Pablo Picasso was supposed to have said to Gertrude Stein while he was painting her portrait. Gertrude said, “I don’t look like that.” And Picasso replied, “You will.” And he was right.





Interview with James Baldwin, by Jordan Elgrably full: 


http://www.theparisreview.org/interviews/2994/the-art-of-fiction-no-78-james-baldwin


Wednesday, December 4

WISDOM

Wisdom

"Right is of no Sex - Truth is of no Color - God is the Father of us all, and we are all brethren." 


“If there is no struggle, there is no progress. Those who profess to favor freedom, and deprecate agitation, are men who want crops without plowing up the ground, they want rain without thunder and lightning.”


"I prefer to be true to myself, even at the hazard of incurring the ridicule of others, rather than to be false, and to incur my own abhorrence."


Thursday, November 28

Happy Thanksgiving




Happy Thanksgiving

It’s Thanksgiving Day, and I am thankful for my life as is. I appreciate my life, and view my life through the lens of reality that is the human existence as we know it.  

My situation is fragile, just as most are. I work to stabilize my situation to the furtherest extent possible, but, life is fragile. There is not much we can really do about it.

My situation is not the best relative to a situation with more resources, and my situation is not the worse relative to a situation without resources. 

My situation is unique and mine alone. I am enjoying it, knowing that my situation has the potential to change for the worse or better, knowing that my time awake is short, knowing that I have friends and family that love me, and knowing that I have friends and family that I love. I am truly thankful for my life as is today.

Happy Thanksgiving.

What are you thankful for?

Monday, November 25

What It's Like to Fail

On Christmas Day, 2001, I sat down at my Yamaha G2 grand piano, set up my metronome, and opened up a book of Shostakovich’s “Preludes.” It was late afternoon, and the warm, orange light of the fading day poured into my five-bedroom house — paid for by my $300,000 a year income as a Hollywood comedy writer — in San Marino, California, a wealthy suburb of Los Angeles. My wife, Marina, was cooking dinner for me and our eight children, and it was as happy a Christmas afternoon as I would ever have.
****
On Christmas morning, 2008, I woke up on the floor of the 1997 Chrysler minivan I lived in, parked behind the Kinko’s just two miles from my old house in San Marino. It was raining, and I was cold, even though I had slept in three layers of clothes. It was one of those blustery storms that regularly whoosh down from the Gulf of Alaska and pummel Los Angeles during the winter. I climbed out of the van and walked to a Starbucks five blocks away. Although I didn’t have any money, I had scavenged the Sunday Los Angeles Times crossword puzzle from another coffeehouse a couple days before. The baristas didn’t mind me sitting quietly for several hours every day to warm up and kill time.
I was neither a drug addict nor an alcoholic, nor was I a criminal. But I had committed one of the more basic of American sins: I had failed. In eight years, my career had vanished, then my savings, and then our home. My family broke apart. I was alone, hungry, and defeated.
Between 2007 and 2011, some five million American families lost their homes to foreclosure. Some of them found alternative housing by renting an apartment or moving in with family members. But not all of them. Many American families broke apart during this time. Mine was one of them. And I was one of the people who ended up homeless. This, however, is not the story of five million American families. This is just my story.  
Our family faced the same economic forces that hurt many families, but I don’t blame the banks or politicians or anyone else for what happened to us. I made a thousand decisions, large and small, that seemed reasonable at the time but cumulatively led to our situation. It is tempting to blame external forces for the disasters that befall us, but as Shakespeare wrote in “Julius Ceasar,” the fault for what happens to us “is not in our stars but in ourselves.”
It was Christmas. I stared out the Starbucks window at the rain. God, help me. I had said this prayer a thousand times, and would say it a thousand more. I had to find a way back to my life.  
And over the course of the next four years, I would do just that. I would do it with the pure, unquenchable, unrelenting — some might say naïve — belief that things would work out. And I would do it through Craigslist, the omnifariously oddball website that has nearly destroyed the newspaper industry by taking over the classified advertising business. But it would be Craigslist that would help me find my way back.
People say you can find just about anything you need on Craigslist.
You might even find your life again.
***
My fall was all the harder because I had my dream job. You know, the job you dreamt of as a little kid: quarterback in the NFL, supermodel, astronaut… Something crazy and cool that hardly anybody is lucky or talented enough to land.
It all started like this: I was maybe six years old and watching “The Ed Sullivan Show.” Ed Sullivan thanked the last performer and then turned to the audience and said, “Ladies and gentlemen, Alan King!” A burly, handsome man walked alone onto the stage in a dark suit and tie and began talking. And he was funny!  And the audience was laughing. I was enthralled.  It seemed like magic. The next morning, I came downstairs for breakfast and told my mother I wanted to write jokes for a living.
“Oh, no, you’re not going to do that!” she said. “That’s just foolishness.”
This convinced me that this was something I absolutely wanted to do with my life.
A couple of decades later, I took time off from my budding career as a newspaper man to travel around Europe. While in Germany, I met a beautiful and mysterious Serbian poet named Marina. We met by accident, but we latched on to each other with a ferocious and unstoppable kind of love. We got married a year later.
Suddenly reality came crashing. I was married and needed a real job. I decided to launch a magazine in Minneapolis with a friend from college. We made two basic mistakes: First, the magazine wasn’t very good, and, second, we didn’t have any money. The second problem seemed solvable. I got a job as a bartender to pay the rent and keep the lights on.
The place I tended bar turned out to be crucial: William’s Pub, in the Uptown neighborhood of Minneapolis. It was a comedy club. I met dozens of young stand-up comics. I learned how to craft jokes and started writing some of my own. Among the people I befriended was a young comic, Tom Arnold, who also worked at William’s. We became fast friends, and wrote together and did comedy bits together and were having the time of our lives until Marina became pregnant.  
Okay, I thought, now it’s really time to get a real job. My experience launching the magazine helped me land a job with a trade magazine publishing company that specialized in computer magazines. I left Minneapolis and took a job in their Peterborough, NH, offices.  And that was apparently the end of my career in comedy. I spent the next eight years wearing a suit and being thoroughly respectable. I developed all sorts of useful skills such as how to do market research, how to create financial models on Excel, how to negotiate with vendors, and how to sell. I was so unhappy. And then one day in line at a supermarket I glanced at the tabloids and saw Tom Arnold on the cover with sitcom star Roseanne Barr!
I called him in Los Angeles. He immediately took my call and we talked and talked, and then he told me he wanted to hire me onto the “Roseanne” show but needed a writing sample. He sent me some scripts and asked me to write one of my own to see if I could do the job. Without a clue as to what I was doing, I wrote a script that must have been just good enough for him to justify hiring me. And so Marina, our five children, and I moved to Los Angeles. And voila! I had my dream job doing what I had dreamt of doing since I first saw Alan King telling jokes on the Ed Sullivan show nearly thirty years earlier.
But was it as good as I expected? Are you kidding me? Of course it was! I loved everything about writing for television. I loved sitting in the writing room with twelve other smart and funny people arguing all day about the script. I loved walking down to the stage and seeing our stuff in rehearsals, the taping nights in front of live studio audiences, and seeing great actors saying our jokes and getting laughs from the crowd. I loved the post-taping commiseration sessions at saloons near the studios and I loved the media acclaim.
In the writer's room of Roseanne during a break
And I was making great money. Writers/producers typically are paid on a per episode basis. At my level of experience and background in the late 90s, I made between $12,000 and $15,000 per episode for a 22 episode season. In addition, I had certain script guarantees. I received writing credit on at least three episodes per season, which paid another $20,000 per episode. A studio also paid me another $650,000 a year just to come up with ideas for television series. If one of my shows made it on the air and into syndication (endless reruns on afternoon local television), I could make tens, if not hundreds, of millions of dollars.
It was heaven. Except it wasn’t for Marina. Or my family. The working hours were hideous: Most days started at 10 a.m. and ended at 3 a.m. The easy nights were the nights we filmed, when we finished by 10 p.m. I barely saw Marina and the children, except on weekends. Our house was not a home but the place I checked into when I wasn’t working. Marina, meanwhile, struggled to deal with eight children. Both my family and my marriage started to fall apart. My comedy writer skillset  -- being a quick-witted wisenheimer who could debate endlessly -- didn’t transfer well to a home setting. Whereas I was well-compensated to have a dad in a sitcom make a joke out of his daughter’s emotional crisis, it wasn’t funny with real daughters and real sons and a real wife. It was irritating and provoked resentment.
So I had to make a change. I had to quit my dream job. (And honestly, I probably only had a few more working years left because comedy writers rarely work into their fifties.) I had carefully saved and we had lived well below our means, so I decided to take a couple of years off to devote time to my real job: husband and father.
For the next two years, I did that job full-time. We restored balance to our family life, and I was happy. I decided it was time to return to television.  
Television, however, had other ideas. In the interim, reality programming had boomed. It made perfect economic sense: It was cheap to produce and audiences were interested. The number of sitcoms plummeted and so did employment for comedy writers. The fall primetime network schedule in 2002-03 had 43 sitcoms. When I returned in 2004-2005, there were 32. My agent told me there were about half as many jobs available as there were when I left. By 2007-08, there were only 18 sitcoms on the air. I was now nearly 50 years old and had been out of the business for two years. Nobody was going to hire me anymore. My agent told me that I faced a common problem for writers my age: Producers could hire a team of first-time writers for less than the fee they would pay me for my services. But they won’t know what they’re doing, I countered. They don’t care, he responded. 
I had prudently saved and invested during my years in television, so I had a $500,000 nest egg between various mutual funds and an annuity I had invested in during my working years. But I was supporting a pretty large infrastructure. 
The expensive part of having eight children isn’t the present: feeding and clothing them. The expensive part of having eight children is their future. Good schooling was our priority. But there was no way we could send eight children to private schools, even with an enormous salary. We had to find a great public school system, and we did in San Marino, an old-money suburb near Los Angeles. In 1995, we bought a house there. It was a big one because, well, we needed a big one. And then there are all the other investments you make in their future: piano lessons, club sports fees, tutoring, and so on.  
After a year, when it became clear that I could not return to television, I realized that I would have to pursue my old career: magazine publishing. I sent out hundreds of resumes. Nothing. With our savings running down over the next two years, we did what everyone advised in the mid 2000s: take advantage of the soaring equity in our house. We refinanced and refinanced and refinanced again, taking out money for living expenses each time.  This was considered a smart move by many in those years.
But eventually we reached our limits. At one point, the water was shut off for several days when we failed to pay a bill. Under cover of darkness, we hooked up a hose to the outside spigot of our neighbor’s house and ran the hose into our kitchen. We filled pots to cook pasta with and to heat up for sponge baths. It’s amusing to think about now, but at the time it was mortifying. We were stealing water! From the nice old lady who lived next door! 
Finally, in 2006, unable to refinance any further, we lost our home to foreclosure. Actually, you don’t lose the house. The house loses you. The house isn’t going anywhere. You and your family are the ones who get lost. In our case, an investor bought the house with the intention of renovating it and flipping it. I hope she made money on it.
  
David's house in San Marino
The worst moment is the day the sheriff comes. Two armed members of the county sheriff’s department showed up with a locksmith as we were moving out. The investor stood on the opposite side of the street as we packed and loaded a moving van. She watched us load our furniture, which we put into storage because the two bedroom apartment we managed to lease with the help of a friend didn’t have room for 4,000 square feet worth of furniture. The deputies came and talked with us to make sure we really were moving out, and we felt like criminals for spending a final few hours in the house we owned for twelve years.  
Over the next couple of years, our economic situation worsened. I couldn’t find any kind of work. When I applied at Trader Joe’s, the manager saw four years of unemployment and twelve years spent writing television comedy. Sir, are you sure you want stack loaves of bread here at Trader Joe’s? Yes, I really do. Well, we’ve decided to hire the 24 year-old woman with purple hair and nose piercings instead.
The Writer’s Guild of America has a term for my situation: They call it “The Gap.” It’s the time period between when your years as a working writer end and your retirement begins. I actually have an excellent pension for when I finally retire. The Guild is a strong union and it has negotiated an excellent pension plan for writers who have more than seven consecutive years of service. When I finally hit 65, my WGA pension combined with Social Security means I should have a comfortable retirement. 
I was 46 when I had my last writing job in television. That meant I faced a 19 year Gap. As with other writers facing The Gap, my resume was a problem. I worked as a publishing executive before becoming a writer. I had a nice, solid resume that showed constant forward progress in my publishing career from financial analyst to business manager to circulation director. Which is great… except that progress ended in 1991 and I was applying in 2004.  
I sent off resumes and scored occasional interviews. But the interviewers mainly wanted to hear Hollywood stories and then said, “Thanks we’ll be in touch.” I don’t blame them. I’d hire the person currently working in the magazine business instead of the guy who had a lot of amusing stories about comedy writing but hadn’t worked in a publishing environment for more than a decade.  
By 2008, with the older children off at college or working and my job prospects bleak, Marina and I decided to separate. She moved to San Francisco with our two youngest daughters and settled in temporarily with two of our oldest daughters who worked there. I could no longer even afford to house myself. I found friends to take in my two remaining high schoolers.
And then I became homeless.
Yes, I, David Raether, the smart and funny guy who graduated with honors from college and read thousands of books and played the piano and went to church and won television awards, was homeless.    
What happens when you hit bottom? I can tell you one thing: you don’t bounce back. You crawl back, fighting every step of the way. It isn’t a straight arc back up either; there are dozens of setbacks every step of the way. And the place you land isn’t anywhere near where you were when you slipped off the cliff.
In the first days and weeks after I became homeless, I was in a daze, utterly and completely disoriented. I felt like a boxer staggering around the ring after a rapid series of blows I didn’t see coming. It took me several months to figure it all out.
When you become homeless, you face a number of practical issues. In fact, when you are homeless, all you face are practical issues.
Where am I going to sleep tonight?  
What supermarket has the best samples today with the most protein in them?   
How am I going to deal with rainstorms dumping water into my usual sleeping spot?  
I have a job interview; I have clean clothes, but how can I make sure I don’t smell?
These are the issues you deal with on a daily basis. Dreary, boring, painful issues that relate directly to your body. And that’s because homelessness is a dreary, boring, and often painful condition.  
Your days are very long. The rhythm of work followed by home is gone. It’s replaced by long stretches of empty time. No company, no conversation, no deadlines, nothing.  
Several years earlier, one of my sons played on a mainly Hispanic soccer team in Bell Gardens, a working class Hispanic suburb of Los Angeles. I got to know one of the fathers quite well. He was from Guatemala City.
“What’s Guatemala City like?” I asked him one day.
“The days are very long in Guatemala City,” he said.
That was all he said about his life there. And that would probably be the best description of life as a homeless person. The days are very long.
In my past life, I spent a typical autumn Saturday reading the paper and drinking several pots of coffee while working two or three crossword puzzles. Around 11 a.m., Marina and I would drive one or two or six of the kids to the farmers' market in the parking lot at Pasadena High School. Then we would return home and I would come up with an interesting set of reasons for not working in the yard while settling down on the couch to watch college football. Several hours later, I’d pour a glass or two of wine as the day turned into night, watch a movie, and settle into bed. Not much of a day, really. But when I think of those days now, they seem like some kind of lost paradise.  
A Saturday during my homelessness went like this.
I would wake up around 4 a.m., brush myself off, and wander around the streets for awhile until Starbucks opened. I'd spend what little money I had on coffee and hope someone left a copy of the Los Angeles Times so I could work the crossword puzzle. I'd wait. And wait. At 10 a.m., the Pasadena Central Library opens. I would walk up there and surf job websites and send off some resumes and read articles online during my allotted time until noon, or, if I was lucky, early afternoon.  
That was the hard part of the day. I’d be hungry. Really hungry. A week since I had a real meal hungry. I'd walk over to Whole Foods on the Arroyo Parkway, which has good food samples on Saturdays, grab a cart, and pretend to shop. (It always helps to put some items in the cart to look the part.) The fruits are by the door - I'd grab a bunch of orange slices and watermelon chunks. Next I go upstairs to where the muffin bits and cheese chunks are and gorge as subtly as possible. I'd return the unpurchased items to their places in the store and exit.
By then it would be mid-afternoon. I'd dream of lying on a couch in a warm living room, watching college football. Instead I would walk to another public library to access the Internet. As the sun sets, I'd head to a coffeehouse in South Pasadena called Kaldi where I could find someone to talk with. It wasn't the company of loved ones, but they were decent people who didn't ask too many questions about my circumstances.
Night. At 8 p.m. I'd return to the Starbucks. I would find discarded copies of the New York Timesand start working the crossword puzzle. And that was Saturday.  
Sundays were the same, and so were Monday and Tuesday and Wednesday and Thursday and Friday. On public holidays, the libraries closed and I needed to find someplace else to spend my days. Only the rare job interview broke the monotony.
Gradually, however, I adjusted. I accepted that I was not going to have a career anytime soon, but I did need a job. I was not going to own a house, but I did need to find a place to live. I couldn’t cook or afford restaurants, but I did need to eat.   
After the first few disorienting weeks of homelessness, I got myself up off the canvas and begin to bob and weave and shake my head. I sniffed the ammonia capsule of reality and realized that I was in the biggest battle of my life.
During the nearly 18 months I spent homeless off and on, and during the ensuing years, I learned that I am more resourceful than I ever imagined, less respectable than I ever figured, and, ultimately, braver and more resilient than I ever dreamed. An important tool in my return to life has been Craigslist. It was through Craigslist that I found odd jobs -- gigs, they often are called -- doing everything from ghost-writing a memoir for a retired Caltech professor who had aphasia to web content writing jobs to actual real jobs with actual real startups.  
Real companies advertise career jobs on Craigslist, but gigs were a godsend because they didn’t require five years of similar professional work, recent recommendations, or even a permanent residence. Pay generally ran between $10 to $15 per hour.
The ghost-writing work was the perfect example of a Craigslist gig. I ghost-wrote for a professor in his eighties. He had lived a remarkable life: traveling all over the world, writing dozens of books, and becoming a respected figure in academia. In his late eighties, however, he suffered a stroke as he began to write his memoirs. The stroke afflicted him with aphasia, which basically is an inability to communicate. He couldn’t put together more than a few words at a time, couldn’t type, and couldn’t write. But his mind was still sharp and he could read and edit.
So I sat in his office and took notes as he haltingly described an incident or person he wanted to write about. I would guess at what he was trying to tell me and if I was right, he’d say yes. And then I’d try to renarrate the story back to him to verify it. It was painstaking work, but after two years of occasional afternoons in his office, we produced a book. He died not long after that, and the book was never published.
I worked a number of other gigs: I provided editorial content for a commercial real estate agent’s website, helped high school seniors write college essays, worked as an office equipment mover, and helped reorganize a small warehouse.  
I got my first Craigslist gig in early 2009. When I managed to string together a couple of these at the same time, I could save enough money to rent a room for around $500 a month. Craigslist advertises a nearly endless supply of rooms available for rent. The situation is always the same:Hey, we have a roommate who is traveling/away for the semester/in rehab or jail and we need to rent out a room in our apartment to help pay the rent. You don’t need a credit report, three references, and a deposit. All you need, usually, is to show up, look clean, and be willing to move out when the regular tenant returns from Europe/rehab/jail. I was able to rent a room by late winter of 2009 after seven months of homelessness. But I was homeless again by summer until I managed to save enough to rent a room once again in the fall.
These situations can be quite nice, and not too many questions are asked. I once lived in a house owned by a young Pasadena attorney who was on a two-month assignment in New York and needed someone to house sit. Some, however, can be dicey. I came home one day to a ramshackle house in northeast Pasadena and there was a gun on the kitchen counter. I moved out a couple days later, not because I have an intrinsic objection to handguns; I just didn’t want to live in a place where the other residents were better armed than I was.  
Losing my career and home changed my economic circumstances and day to day life. But it also upended my priorities. At the peak of my career, I ferociously pursued my goal of creating a hit TV show. It was my greatest ambition - and a lucrative one. But after years of homelessness and isolation, my single greatest desire became company. I wanted to spend more and more time with family and the people I loved. The goal of having a hit television show in syndication seemed so uninteresting compared to sitting across the table from my two daughters in a small apartment that we shared. Family and love became my top priorities. Everything else seemed insignificant. I had lost everything else, but these were still my children and I missed them and they missed me.  
This desire led me one of the most remarkable services on Craigslist: Rideshare. Rideshare is a refined form of hitchhiking. Let’s say you want to go from Los Angeles to San Francisco to visit your daughters. On the Rideshare listings you can find someone making that drive who is looking for a rider to pitch in for gas and help with the driving. Or you can post your own ad: “I’m in Pasadena and want to go to Berkeley on Saturday. Flexible on time.”
I traveled between Los Angeles and San Francisco a hundred times and never had a problem. The car could be a bit crowded and the company a bit irritating, but most of the time I met interesting people: engineers, scientists, medical students, writers, artists, gallery owners, and guys like me -- traveling to see their families on a budget. Most Rideshares I took cost about $35, which allowed me to see my now separated family far more than I would have otherwise.
In the years since I became homeless, Marina and I split up permanently. As a child, her parents had emigrated from Serbia to Germany, so she holds German citizenship. All of our children do as well. Germany has a stronger social safety net, so she decided to return with our two youngest daughters. They spent their high school years there and received a great education. They are now fluent in German, but will return to the US for college. I managed to find friends to host my children already in high school so they could continue attending the same San Marino school. One of my daughters stayed mostly with one family, but one of my sons lived in fourteen different homes. Still, they graduated from one of the most elite public high schools in California, which prepared them for college. I remained active in their lives by visiting them after school each day, volunteering for school activities, and disguising my homelessness with my “San Marino disguise.” It is a community of professionals: doctors, lawyers, and bankers. So whenever I met my children in a public place, I wore dress slacks, a dress shirt, and a tie. Friends and parents didn’t need to know I was sleeping in parking garages.
The other children have finished college or are nearing completion. Two of them intend to go on to graduate school in the sciences. The rest have decent, solid careers in decent, solid professions such as business administration, nursing, and education. They are all funny and smart and not one of them has expressed an ounce of interest in becoming a television writer. Marina is happy and content in Germany, having fallen in love again there with a pleasant and quiet man.
I now live in Berkeley and have worked for several startups in the Bay Area as a content specialist. I currently blog for Degreed.com, a lifelong learning and self-education website in San Francisco. It keeps the wolf from the door, which is good because it means I actually have a door. I share a cozy house in Berkeley with two housemates.  
My economic situation is still unstable; occasionally, I’ll fall behind on rent. But it happens less frequently now and I’ve figured out enough about how to survive that I can recover from small setbacks like that. Since I moved to the Bay Area, I’ve worked on two startups. I had a substantial equity stake in one of them and was promised an equity stake in the other once the next round of financing came through. As I worked on them, I imagined having a full-time job, nice apartment, and good salary until retirement. But neither panned out. I could despair when the startups fail or I fall behind on rent once again, but I just don’t worry about stuff like that anymore. I already know what the worst possible outcome would be -- homelessness -- and I know I can survive that. So why ruin your day fretting about rent? I’ll figure something out. I know how to take a punch and still keep standing.  
So full-time, permanent employment in a real company with actual revenues is still an elusive prey. Life is still perilous for me and blogging is hardly a lucrative profession. But life is good. My emotional, psychological, and spiritual situation is considerably improved. I am close to my children, and I speak to most of them almost every day. I am healthy, strong, and full of hope and ambition again. I have survived failure. I lost my career, my home, all my savings -- just about everything that seemed important. But I have held onto what I value much more: my children and their enduring love and affection, my health, and my ambition and self-belief. And in the end, those were the only things worth keeping.
This essay is based on David Raether's recently published memoir, "Tell Me Something, She Said." To support David, we encourage you to order his book from Amazon and visit his website.
------------------------
[My thoughts on what the author has written to be posted later in conjunction and comparison with thoughts on "Why I Make Terrible Decisions, or, Poverty Thoughts"...]