These Are Days of Miracles and Wonders

But understand this, that in the last days there will come times of difficulty. For people will be lovers of self, lovers of money, proud, arrogant, abusive, disobedient to their parents, ungrateful, unholy,heartless, unappeasable, slanderous, without self-control, brutal, not loving good,treacherous, reckless, swollen with conceit, lovers of pleasure rather than lovers of God, having the appearance of godliness, but denying its power. Avoid such people.

2 Timothy 3:1-5, ESV

A quick scan of yahoo news in the morning is all the convincing needed. An earthquake in a California border town moved the entire town two and a half feet. In February a tremor in Chile, one of the largest in recorded history, slightly changed the earth's axis and moved the town ten feet. Scientists have fitted a cat with bionic legs. Another team has restored vision to a man's damaged eye using his stem cells.

Marine biologists studying sperm whales in the South Pacific have discovered the earth's largest mammals have concentrations of toxic metals in their blood and tissues, chromium,cadmium, mercury, lead, aluminum among others, that are sixteen times the level considered dangerous. Biologist Roger Payne believes these man-made contaminants threaten the whales with extinction, and could lead to the collapse of the entire food chain in the world's oceans. Much of the earth's human population depends on the seas for vital protein.

A Portland masseuse told the Oregonian former Vice President Al Gore sexually groped her in a hotel room at a luxury hotel in October 2006. He had been in town that night to give a speech at the Rose Garden on global warming, and requested a massage. The details are sordid. She recalls them with convincing detail. I'm dismayed but not surprised. Portland police never prosecuted because of a lack of sufficient evidence. The Gores announced they were separating a few weeks ago. At the time they insisted there was no affair or scandal. The timing of this story seems curious, and sad. Human failings have no limits, no boundaries, no borders. A man can seem mild-mannered and principled and well-behaved, and disgrace himself in the most common way. My life couldn't stand that kind of scrutiny. Could yours?

There's no pattern to any of this and no cohesive meaning. If I have a thesis at all in what caught my eye today it's simply to say the world around us is chaotic and uncertain and often unrewarding to view. Meaning and hope have to be personal. Your love, your worth, your belief and your admiration have to be invested in those close to you, those you truly love and know. Public figures are brought down every day in base and demeaning ways. Disasters come. Dire predictions follow. What gives meaning to life, and sustaining grace, is the child you hold in your arms and the one you love. The reliable miracle we have is each other. The wonder is we make through the chaos. And we couldn't possibly, without remembering always and holding on for dear life. We have to trust and love and rely on each other, because the world is an unmanageable mess, and the people running it aren't much better.

Take Time For a Nothing Day

Once or twice in a while, we ought to take time for a nothing day. Call in well at work. Sleep in. Leave the dishes in the sink. Take a nap instead of going to the gym. Write a one-paragraph blog post and let the dog play in the back yard. Have cereal for supper.

It's a slippery slope though. Once or twice in a while, this is recreation and rejuvenation and a tonic for your soul. Once or twice in a week, this becomes a way of life, and I become the fat, slovenly unmotivated monster, a living embodiment of the green guy in the mucous commercial.

Today is my nothing day. I played three games of dime poker and had chocolate milk for breakfast. Now it's time for my nap. I love you, but today you are all on your own.

Some Men Dream Things That Never Were

Earlier in the week I had a vision. That's not unusual for me because I'm a dreamer by nature, though a casual dreamer. Over the course of my life like many people I've fallen into the habit of discounting my own dreams. I rarely listen to them. I don't hear the hope of inspiration in the dream, and I don't hear my true path calling to me. Inwardly I dismiss it as a flight of fancy. I enjoy the trip for a moment of time and let the wind take it out of my grasp like so many dandelion seeds floating on the breeze, not realizing what I had in my hands was my own destiny and my true voice.

It's so easy to let yourself be discouraged, to slip back resignedly into your old unexpectant life with no ambitions and no dreams, just the steady, slow discouraging drumbeat of watching the clock and gathering yourself to go to work. My boss called me into his office again last night. He accused me of not reporting to work last Tuesday. He's so eager to throw me under the bus he hallucinates false evidence and misreads time reports and falsely recalls warnings that were never issued. It's become an active vendetta, a campaign of misinformation and hate. Somehow I became a target, which is terribly odd to me, because I work hard at not becoming one, maintaining the golden mean of doing my job and doing nothing to attract attention or animosity. But something about me has gotten under his skin. The numbers don't justify his vengeance. I'm neither at the top of the pack or the bottom. Maybe I remind him of someone who stole his girlfriend in eighth grade; I have utterly no idea and don't want to know. Shift bid is executed in three weeks and I just want to survive until then.

See, I did it again. I started out talking about a dream and digressed into a mundane and painful digression. You see how easy it is to lose the thread of a dream and diffuse its energy? We do it every day.

Our dreams tell us something vital about who we are and where we want to go. Often the specifics are not important. It's the energy of the dream, the urgency, the way we see ourselves living and interacting and using our talents in the dream scenario. That's the vital thing. In our dreams we are vibrant and active people. We're doing things. We're energized and alive and competing for the prize. We're strong, active, decisive. And that is what we are meant to be.

So, I want to encourage you. Don't discount your dreams. Reflect on them for a moment or two, and try to discover what they are telling you about yourself and your true hopes.

In my dream, the one that came to me and won't quite leave me alone, I bought a restaurant and bar, the place where Marie and I met. It's called the Tillicum and it used to be a warm and welcoming place with good food and good music. Over the years with bad management and absentee ownership it's become a shell of itself. A couple of weeks ago Marie and I went there on a Friday night and it was nearly empty. The shrill Irish woman who ran the place into the ground ran us out with her rude behavior. Then just this Saturday our friend Jay sent us a text and told us the place was closed. The Tilly empty and disbanded on a Saturday night, the place where Portland legend Norman Sylvester used to sing the blues and encourage the crowd to "put your hands in the air like you just don't care."

I've run restaurants and have a gift for liking people and creating community. I've run promotions and special events. I created a women's golf benefit dinner attended by a hundred people and a children's clinic attended by 300. I created them out of thin air, off a scrap of paper and a couple of lists composed at my kitchen table. I know I could save the Tilly. I know I could learn what I don't know, assemble a staff, build fierce loyalties and synergies and joys of belonging and comfort and welcome. I know I could be an agent of social change, a principled businessman and give life and joy to that neighborhood restaurant and lounge, make it a special place again. I know I could do this. I know I could find out how. I could raise the money and dream a dream big enough to start the music again in a place that is now gathering dust, a place some clown will probably turn in to another strip mall or another strip club, neither of which Beaverton needs. There are far too many of those already.

So this morning I called the real estate agent who's listing the property. He quickly sized me off as "not a serious offer", assured the property was sold but the business was still listed, but it was the wrong square footage for a restaurant. "Nobody wants a restaurant with that square footage anymore. What are you going to do with it?"

I've always thought the Tillicum was the perfect size. There was room at the bar and a place to dance and a place to eat and two pool tables in back. People came and got along and had a good time. They had great music and great food.

Of course there are all kinds of practical reasons not to get involved in this. There's certainly no guarantee of success and there's a high probability of failure. The failure rate for restaurants and bars is extremely high, particularly for owners who don't know what they are doing. People are far too ready to put other people in that category. Just because I haven't done something before doesn't mean I can't do it. The fundamentals of success in any business aren't complicated; it's just a matter of executing them over and over. Cleanliness, service, courtesy, communication, problem solving, attention to detail: I understand those things. I've practiced them all my life.

The other problem is money. Financing this particular dream would be a challenge. It would take money, someone to believe in the project and the business plan, some willing to see the vision and take the risk. Just because that hasn't happened doesn't mean it can't.

I just got a call from work. I got my last choice for shift bid. I'm working for this same manager again. I had deliberately made his shifts my last six choices, but by the time I picked that was all that were left. It's telling that his shifts were all that were left. Apparently I'm not the only one trying to avoid him. The universe calls us to our destiny in a great variety of ways, even when we refuse to listen.

It could be that this particular dream is worth discarding, for a great many reasons, but one thing is clear: I want to do something more with my life. I want a bigger canvas, a larger hope, a way to earn a living that engages more of my energies and talents, where I have more say in where my life is taking me and what I produce and contribute to the world around me.

In three and a half hours, though, I'll put on the headset and have my senses assaulted afresh by insensitivity and discourtesy, horrible venting hostility over trivia and problems that could be solved without a trace of the animosity and brutal unkindness people chose to lead with. I would have be perfectly willing to help them in whatever way they'd ask if they'd simply ask, but somehow life has given them the message they'll get better results with sarcasm, profanity, and condescension. So I endure it because I have to pay the rent. I know I'm foolish to think I'd find less of it elsewhere, but the hope endures. At least if it was my place, I'd have the option of asking them to leave, if it came to that. It's comforting to think of a setting where I had that kind of autonomy and influence, though in most cases I'd handle it in another way. I just like the thought of having the option, knowing I currently work in an environment where I have very few of them.

Have You No Sense of Decency?

A quick scan of yahoo news is all the convincing anyone should ever need. There's a frenzy of excess out there. The entire world is as giddy and crazed as World Cup fans after a goal in the 85th minute.

A time share magnate in Orlando Florida has fallen on hard times. He's selling his $75 million dollar home. It's 90,000 square feet and has 23 bathrooms, 13 bedrooms and 3 pools. The garage holds twenty cars. But there's a catch: he ran out of money when the recession killed his business, and the house is unfinished. It has no carpet or interior walls. Still, it's a steal at $75 million. Maybe he'll take a little less. I think I'll have my guy call his guy.

The 17th richest woman in the world is French shampoo and cosmetics heiress Liliane Bettancourt. She was caught on tape recently plotting tax evasion, and has since declared her solemn intention to declare all her foreign assets, including the secret Swiss bank accounts. The State of Oregon garnished my wages last week because I owed them $192. The trouble was, they already deducted the same debt from my Federal tax refund. I could have used that money. $192 is six bags of groceries, or the start of the down payment on my new mansion in Florida, which has a bowling alley and a movie theater. I'm telling the guy he has to put in a putting green or it's no deal.

Disgraced financier Bernie Madoff is in the federal slammer now, but he's bragging to the other inmates that he managed to squirrel away nine billion dollars before the Feds sent him to the pokey. He gave it to three of his pals for safekeeping. One of the friends reportedly was the guy who ratted him out. If I were him I'd be worried that that one might just tell him, "What money, Bernie? I don't remember any three billion dollars. Are you sure you didn't leave it with Charles or Liliane?" Bernie is also worried his wife may be cheating on him. A new book came out that detailed his many extramarital affairs. Bernie is considered a celebrity in prison because of the scale of his crimes, and the prison inner circle provides him protection. But he's sought out the prison psychiatrist for help with his depression and anxiety.

A federal judge in New Orleans blocked a proposed moratorium on more deepwater drilling in the Gulf of Mexico, while the federal government has begun processing a $20 billion fund for compensation claims in the current Gulf oil disaster. Boy, that judge ought to take a few minutes a day to read yahoo news. It might be a good idea to slow down on more drilling until they find a way to drill without spilling so much. Like my mother used to say, I won't be around to clean up your messes forever.

General Stanley McChrystal is being summoned to the White House after he gave an interview to Rolling Stone highly critical of U.S. policy in the war in Afghanistan. He made derogatory remarks about President Obama and his staff. I guess he forgot that part in the Constitution about the Commander-in-Chief. It's a good thing the Rolling Stone doesn't interview me about my boss. But then again I don't think he reads the Rolling Stone. I'm not even sure he reads. I know he writes emails. I get a new one every day detailing the latest way I screwed up. Yesterday it was the all-important phone transfer policy. I forgot billing closed at nine. I didn't actually transfer the customer; I just dialed the extension before I remembered. But I got a memo anyway. I hate memos. They're not as bad as being summoned to the White House, but still. Maybe I should send a memo to the State of Oregon.

I Hate Tiger Woods, A Continuing Series

This meeting of the He-Man Tiger Woods Haters Club is now in session.

I hate Tiger Woods. I always have. I used to work in the golf business and it would nauseate me how 25-handicappers would come into the shop with idiot grins on their faces saying, "Didjya see what Tiger did today?" as if he were their long lost son. People bought into the marketing hype, thought they had this personal connection to this arrogant and spoiled golf savant who didn't care two cents about anyone or anything other than his pursuit of Jack Nicklaus, a much better person and a much better golfer. (Yeah that's what I said. Jack played with dignity and grace. And he set his records with 3-piece wound balls and a persimmon driver and forged irons with a sweet spot the size of a shirt button, against Hogan and Watson and Player and Palmer.) I hated the way the media fawned over Woods and gave him a pass on all his bad on-course behavior. In golf, a champion should act like one. It's what sets the sport apart from the others.

The off-course scandals just sealed the deal for me. The bizarre sleazeball behavior confirmed what I suspected all along. He's even a bad tipper, ungenerous, crude, self-absorbed. Tiger Woods was a thorough-going phony and a marketing creation. It's been fun to watch him squirm and fume and twist in the wind. Still he's always ready with an excuse. Tiger Woods has never lost a golf tournament. He's just made mental mistakes or there was something wrong with the greens.

It would tickle me if he never won another major. A whole new generation of young guns is coming along now, golfers who grew up imagining themselves lining a crucial putt to beat him on the eighteenth hole, guys from all over the world, McElroy and Ishikawa and Dustin Johnson, and some of his old whipping boys have closed the gap. Ernie Els and Phil Mickelson, two men with far better character, have rededicated themselves and racheted up their games. The intimidation factor is gone. The stare doesn't have the same chilling effect. Last season Y.E. Yang outdueled him at the PGA. Yesterday a Frenchmen ranked 361st in the world played alongside him and made par after par, unrattled. Woods shot four over on Sunday. A poised Graeme McDowell became the first European to win the U.S. Open in forty years.

Woods gave another rude two-sentence interview to the NBC after the match. The entire experience of losing his marketing empire, his wife and family and his carefully crafted and patently false public image has taught him nothing.

Next month is the Open Championship at Saint Andrews, and he will once again be lauded as the favorite. I'll be rooting against him, cheering every missed putt and profanity and thrown club.

The Names Have Been Changed to Protect the Infant

Alicia is twenty and was born with a withered hand. Her mother abused drugs when she was in the womb and her fingers never developed. Her left hand is a stub with tiny baby fingers that look like toes. Her mother continued to abuse drugs throughout Alicia's life. She was raised by her grandmother and her parents divorced when she was young. She grew up homely and neglected. Her father cleaned up and started a new family. She has two younger half-brothers, whom she adores. Phillip and Ethan are eight now. They live across town, in St. Johns.

When Alicia was in her teens she started to blossom and grew a figure. She was petite with long dark hair and brown eyes. Still self-conscious about the deformed hand she hid it in long sleeves or behind her hip. Young children can be cruel. The brutal teasing will ring in her ears and night thoughts forever.

But one sweet, kind boy noticed her. She was fourteen when they fell in love. He liked her quiet way and vulnerability, and his eyes lighted on her budding figure. She wasn't homely anymore. Someone liked her. He was a good-looking boy and he smelled nice. Not good in school. An outcast like her, a boy from the neighborhood, but he was a hard worker. He got a job at a smoothie shop and hustled. They promoted him to assistant manager. Then he got a new job, a better one, waiting tables in a nice Italian restaurant. The customers liked him. He was polite and quick and had good people skills. He smelled nice and had a knack for sensing what people needed, how they wanted to be spoken to. The street smarts and basic intelligence and natural charm made him a crackjack waiter. He found he could make $35,000-$40,000 a year, most of it under the table. David and Alicia moved in together. They were nineteen now and the world was perfect. He was the only boy she had ever slept with, the first time under blankets on his mother's living room floor.

Alicia hadn't had the best upbringing, with her mother in and out of prison and her grandmother just overwhelmed trying to hold down a job and keep her raised. Alicia had trouble reading and writing and dropped out of school. The peer pressure and contemptuous looks made that an easy decision. As much as she loved David, who'd lifted her out of loneliness and the hard life of waiting for her mom to make parole, a part of her thirsted for bling and excitement and something more. They bickered and sniped at each other. She chafed under his expectations. He nagged her because she didn't keep house like his mom.

Her friends were other girls like her, dropouts and disaffected, a little ghetto in their outlook. They all wanted bling and excitement and attention. They discovered as young women budding into women, young women without careers or families or education, they had one power in life and one asset: their sexuality. One of the friends started dancing in a club. The City of Portland has more strip clubs per capita than any city in the country, and when you add in the lotion studios and adult shops and glossy magazines offering the true girlfriend experience, it is a thriving cesspool of distorted desire and easy money. The lure of easy money, it has a very strong appeal.

Alicia tried out at a juice bar and started dancing four nights a week. She bought some lucite five-inch high heels and a stripper pole for her bedroom, to practice her moves. One night she took home $750 in cash. She spread the bills out on the living room floor in a pile and sorted them. Her only other job had been a couple of years ago at Twenty Below, for minimum wage. This was the most money she had ever had in her hands at one time. The next night she made five hundred.

Everything was cool, except everything changed. She got her hair frosted and bought herself new braces. She'd always been self-conscious about her teeth, her weak chin. It was exhilarating to have the admiring eyes on her. It was exhilarating to be able to shut down the creeps with one withering glance, knowing the bouncer and the bodyguard had her back. She was the queen in this new world, the star.

At home though the strain colored everything. David struggled to deal with her new independence, the thought of those other men looking at her, the thought of the temptations and distractions that came with that kind of money and that lifestyle. They both had dabbled in drugs throughout their disaffected lives, weed and a few pain pills, but the other girls liked to party, and party hard, and they had the money to do it and they didn't have to go to work until 8 p.m.

And then Alicia found out she was pregnant.

They hadn't planned it but part of her had always wanted to have a baby with David. Once before when she was sixteen they'd gotten an abortion, but this time it felt right. At least mostly right. They were fighting a lot now, over the dancing and money and housework and his video games and what time he or she got home. Maybe a baby would make things better.

She took a break from dancing and had the baby. It was a healthy pregnancy and they had a beautiful baby girl. She nursed and the baby thrived. David was a wonderful, attentive father. Her adored his daughter, would hold her and kiss her soft cheek and talk to her in a soothing whisper.

Alicia lost the baby weight quickly, thanks to nursing and working out on the pole at home. They moved into a nicer apartment and got the baby some new things. When Merrylin was four months she went back to work, this time at Starz Caberet, an exclusive gentlemen's club on the Westside of town, in the suburbs just off I-5.

Two months went by. More piles of cash. More late nights and unwashed plates on the living room floor. The diaper pail overflowed. David's mom came over to visit and he was frantic with embarrassment. He lit into Alicia when she left, another loud and bitter fight. The baby cried for 45 minutes when she left for work. Merrylin wanted to nurse and was inconsolable. She cried herself to sleep, exhausted and screaming. When she woke up it was a little better and she ate a jar of baby food, the squash, her favorite.

Nobody knows what happens now. It's easy to be sucked in to the "glamour," the attention, the lifestyle. The new found imbalance of power at home changes everything. Now every argument is full of unstated hurt, and the temptation is great to tune it out or just escape it for a while. Every night she gets invitations, come-ons, offers, pitches, flattery and promises, and another pile of money. Women in the sex industry grow old quickly. There are a thousand ways to fall off the track or into the abyss. It's possible to have a healthy post-modern relationship with that environment and that milleu, but Alicia hasn't had the best start in life. She doesn't have the best emotional and spiritual resources for the decisions she's making, for the situations she finds herself in.

Merrylin needs her. She wants to nurse. Alicia has a little family at home, falling apart in the saddest possible way.

News of the Weirder Still

The male ego is a gluttonous monster, hungry for attention and approval. Sometimes it takes on ridiculous proportions and outrageous ambitions. Men think they can change history or take on an Army. Sometimes they succeed. Thomas Edison and Henry Ford certainly changed the world. Mozart did. Einstein did. But for every genius there are a thousand deluded quacks and a hundred lucky bumblers. Columbus and Cortez thought they conquered a new world but it in the end it was Guns Germs and Steel. Men shoot for the North Pole or Paris or the moon and miss altogether. Sometimes they fly the wrong way.

There's a part of a man that needs big dreams, although often we're not equal to them. My dad used to sit at the kitchen table and sketch and draw figures for big projects, large-scale farming or cement barges, dredging round river rock, a mobile restaurant. For years he had three fifty-pound sacks of donut flour in his garage. Once he wanted to start a trucking school. When we became adults he would call us every so often, wanting us to enlist in his schemes. He was Don Quixote and he needed a Sancho Panza. His eyes saw windmills and stars. We begged off and rolled our eyes, but truth be told, we all have windmills and stars of our own. Part of us needs them, to escape the drudgery. Nobody wants to believe that this is all there is, that we were born to be a nobody in a nothing job with no visions worth sketching out at the kitchen table. Colonel Sanders' kids probably rolled their eyes at him, and he wound up conquering the world with fried chicken.

In the news the other day was the story of a man who set out to assassinate Osama bin Laden single-handedly. Gary Brooks Faulkner is 52 and suffering from kidney failure. He saved up money from construction jobs, got on a plane in Denver to fly to Pakistan. He told friends and family he was going to climb a mountain. In Chitral, the mountainous Nortern region, Pakistani police detained him after he checked out of his hotel overnight without telling anyone. They found him carrying a pistol, a sword, a dagger, and night vision goggles. They found him in a forest, headed for the Afghan border.

He's crazed and deluded and single-minded, but so were the Wright brothers and Warren Buffet. Every man has his sound and fury. In the sixties the CIA tried to kill Castro with an exploding cigar. In the seventies Nixon had his enemies list. For years J. Edgar Hoover and the FBI kept secret tapes on many prominent Americans, film and football stars, politicians. He had to have the dirt. It kept him in control. In the mid-90's bin Laden himself launched a plot to kill Bill Clinton. They wired a bridge with explosives on his visit to the Phillipines. The Secret Service picked up radio chat and diverted the motorcade.

That plot failed but another succeeded. Strangers on plane managed to change the world forever. Crazed and deluded and single-minded, they crashed three planes into tall buildings, and the world has been in the grip of sound and fury ever since. Gary Faulkner tried to strike a blow for justice, but he did succeed in reminding us that these are the crazed last days. In the larger world, justice is impossible. Insanity and evil reign forever, until the coming king.