Something Fishy

Did you know that you can bring a live fish on a plane? I had read about it, but I wasn't sure how it would go down. Because I was planning on being gone for a while, Jen wanted to keep Buck with her at home rather than me bringing him with me. I understand that. It compounds my loneliness when Jen is away and the dog isn't there. The house seems so very empty. With Jen keeping Buck I decided it would be worth it trying to get my Betta fish, named W.B. Fish, to Florida. I still had a few ghost shrimp living with W.B. that I would bring as well.

I had bought a small gallon and a half aquarium to carry my fishy friends. It isn't watertight having some slots on top to allow for air. In case TSA or the Southwest crew insisted on everything being watertight, I brought a gallon ziplock bag as well. I also came prepared with chocolate bars in order to bribe the flight attendants. "Is that a fish you are carrying in there?!" "Would you like a chocolate bar, ma'am?" I had also ordered an aquarium on Amazon to be waiting at the condo when we arrived.

Before the fish became an issue, though, I had to deal with getting through TSA without a different sort of incident. As I stuffed everything I had on my person into my carryon bag -- phone, wallet, loose change, a tin foil-wrapped cucumber -- I must have hit the emergency call button on my phone. Suddenly a loud alarm began wailing from my bag as if a nuclear reactor were melting down. Luckily the hum of the hall where security is at DIA was so loud that only myself and the kid standing next to me heard it. His eyes got like saucers as I hurriedly reached into my bag to shut it off before the phone, or someone else, dialed the local authorities. An inauspicious start to the trip.

(Actually the inauspicious start began when the flight I was trying to fly standby on went from fourteen seats available to none overnight. The rest of the flights that day also had either one or no seats available. Being all packed on already on our way to the airport, I bought what the site showed to be the last ticket on the last flight out on Saturday.)

With my phone silenced and stowed away, I got to the xray machine and held up the reusable shopping bag that held the little aquarium. "I have a fish in here!" I proclaimed. The TSA agent at the metal detector gave me a look as if this was not at all usual nor was it completely unheard of. "Hey, he's got a fish here," he said to the guy running the x-ray scanner. "Just put it through."

Could a betta survive a little zap of x-rays? Could the little ghost shrimp? I guessed we were going to find out. Before that could happen, though, an agent with a little better head on his shoulders came over. "No, no, no. He just has to show me the fish." On the other side of the scanners, I was handed the bag. Could I take the aquarium out so we could make sure the fish is alive. So I pulled it out and W.B. was still swimming around. "One agent leaned over to his more experienced counterpart. "What if the fish hadn't been so... fortunate." "Well, then he couldn't bring it through." "Nor would I want to," I added.

There was a bit of water leaking from the bag due to some sloshing that had happened, so I made my escape quickly. I had a long wait at the gate since I had shown up for the earlier flight. When we finally got lined up in Southwest's cattle call line, I heard over the P.A., "Would standby passenger Benjamin Rice please come to the podium if you are in the gate area." Aw geeze. I hadn't told anyone that I had bought a ticket and should be taken off the standby list. "I have your ticket here. All I need is your i.d." My name had rolled over onto the standby list for this later flight after a ticket was not issued for the earlier flight. I had to sheepishly admit that I had already paid for a ticket since I didn't think I would make it on standby. Live and learn.

I gave the chocolate bars to the flight attendant as I boarded. As I moved down the aisle, she came on the PA to announce that the guy "in the cool hat" had brought chocolate. I had on a dark straw hat that is of the type that can really only be worn by the beach that I was taking down. No one noticed my friend swimming away inside his grocery bag.

"Oh, chocolate! You know how it goes then. Everything on us," said the flight attendant standing in the exit row. I gave her a grin and took a spot in a window seat. The bribery concept has made its rounds on TikTok now so is no longer a secret for getting free drinks on a flight. I was looking forward now to turning down those drinks. Hopefully they wouldn't find out the real reason that I wanted to win favor was so I wouldn't get a hard time carrying on live aquatic creatures. I had made sure that I could find even on Southwest's website their policy on bringing fish aboard, though.

The flight was really uneventful other than a bit of concern with the tilt of the grocery bag on take-off and landing. When I ordered my coffee, the flight attendant asked if I didn't want anything else with it, and when she came around with snacks I was offered extra but turned it down. Of course I really am appreciative of the fact that these women and men are working jobs where they have to be away from family, pets, and home for days at a time.

Back on the ground in Orlando, I checked on W.B. and friends all of which seemed to have made it without too much problem, though they had lost about a third of the water in the process. We got into the condo late that night, all a bit weary. The box with the aquarium was waiting for us as predicted. The water in the little travelling aquarium was looking cloudy, so I added some new, conditioned water to top things off before bed.

I sadly must report that in the morning, the shrimp had not made it through the night. I suspect that the cloudiness of the water came from the new gravel in the carrier. I had rinsed it before putting it in, but perhaps not well enough. Of course there was the stress of the entire ordeal and the temperature in the condo was below ideal, but still relatively warm. No autopsy was done, however, so we are left to speculate. W.B. did come through swimmingly. My top priority for Sunday then was to get the aquarium set up, though I did take the immediate step of fishing out his deceased crustacean friends, so he wouldn't be subject to that any longer.

Exeunt, Pursued by a Bear

I need to add a little bit of context to this one as well. I started it a few nights ago, and then my class assignments took over. I'm just coming back to it now, and like anything I've written my thoughts about it have changed just over the past couple of days. I thought I would come back to it and write a lot more, but I don't think there is a lot more to say about it just now.

The title of this is probably one of Shakespeare's stage directions. It comes from yet another of Shakepeare's plays that I have not read, yet. As a former English major it is embarrassing how little of the Bard I have actually read. What's funny about the line is that there is no mention of a bear in the play prior to this. Apparently, the Bard just was having some writer's block or something trying to figure out a way to kill off the character, Antigonus. Maybe he figured he would catch up on some sleep and come back to it.

Anyway, the title really has very little to do with this post except that the death of Antigonus occurs offstage by said bear. Really I have been thinking not about The Winter's Tale nor even about a play written by Shakespeare, exactly. I have been thinking about Tom Stoppard's play Rosencrantz and Guildenstren are Dead. Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are minor characters in Shakespeare's Hamlet. Spoiler alert: they die. Stoppard, though, wrote his play that mostly takes place in the wings of Hamlet. He makes them into the main characters of the play. Indeed they are the main characters in their own respective tragedies, though much of their play occurs in the wings of Hamlet. I have been thinking about that because I have been thinking about being my own main character in my own play.

I am going to go down to Florida for a little while. I want, need, to have a bit of escape from the main action going on stage here to take a moment in the wings. I need a pause to think about the direction my life is headed and take some control, at least in my own mind, of what Act Three is going to look like, now that I have mostly coasted along in the first two acts.

I want to be the main character in the story I am writing. A friend put it to me this way before. We all should be the main characters in the life stories we are writing, I have been the main character at times. I have made some important, life-changing decisions. In high school I decided that I really wanted to go to school in France. I decided to leave the state of Michigan to go to school at Northwestern. I have proposed and been married twice. I have decided on job offers that led me to the career I have. Along with Jennifer, we decided to buy a place down in Florida. There have been smaller decisions. I have taken up surfing and bought a surfboard, for example.

There have been some life-changing decisions made for me. Those I do not want to broach here, Our main character has to face a number of adversities at times, things he or she does not have control over. The story would not be particularly interesting without them.

It is those uninteresting times that I have struggled with, the times where I have felt, not like some other person were necessarily directly affecting me, but more like I was a helpless plastic bag being borne through the city, through my life, on a breeze. Floating from one day to the next, marking time by the passage of television series that I binge. I think it was mostly those times that led me to self-destructive behaviors, actions that allowed me to take control of my life again despite their very negative consequences.

With a new medication the urge for self-destructive behavior has been blunted, but the urge to control my own life and be that main character has not. The question is, how do I row through the doldrums of life rather than simply letting the current take me where it will? I know that it doesn't matter which way the winds blow or current runs if I have no destination in mind. I think that is how others deal with the doldrums. In those relatively quiet times, other people have something to row towards. They appreciate the times when the winds are at their back, but they also appreciate the quiet times where they can row towards their destination (albeit still hard work) and take a break from tacking against the winds that blow in their faces.

I had no destination in my mind last fall. I had no destination in mind for many years before that even. Last year I weathered a tropical storm, literally and figuratively. With the storm winding down now, I again face the fact that I still have no destination. I feel very selfish for even saying that I want to chart my own course or be the main character in my own play. (Re-reading this post makes me realize how selfish it is and really how selfish this blog is even.) It is much less selfish, though, than the ways in which I tried to gain control of my life in the past. What I really need to work on is becoming more self-less. Some people get away to find themselves, and I need to get away to lose mine.

Did you know Florida has over 4,000 bears?

Hard Battles

I had posted the following on LinkedIn, thus the focus on work, but thought I might share it here too:

"Be kind, for everyone you meet is fighting a hard battle."

I have been reminded of that quote often in the past several days. It has come up in several completely unrelated contexts. Maybe I am just more attuned to hearing it at the moment. (Apparently, there is a bit of argument as to who said it first, which is why I did not attribute it here.)

We are all fighting hard battles, and, though I know it is difficult to believe, not all of those battles are going on at work. There are people every day who were up with a sick child all night or have some financial worry or struggling with mental health issues, who wake up and put on a happy face and come to work to deal with relatively minor issues if only to take their minds off the very heavy battles they left at home.

I am reading When Breath Becomes Air right now and amazed that someone, a doctor, knowing his time left on earth is not being counted in months decides that he is going to go back to work. I wonder what his patients thought, maybe not knowing the courage their surgeon had in even showing up that morning. "Wow! Doc looks awful!"

I especially have a lot of sympathy for those working in customer service or other customer-facing jobs. My wife is a flight attendant, and I know there are many who have to leave a sick child or spouse to leave on a three-day trip and deal with customers who have had their "lives ruined" because their flight was delayed a couple hours and now they are going to be late to the bachelor party.

Some of your coworkers, some of your vendors, the person making your Subway sandwich at lunch -- they left the heavy battles at home today. So be kind to each other.

Onwards!

"Onwards!" was a saying that Nordstrom's former CTO Edmond Mesrobian would use. It seemed pretty forced, but after hearing it enough, it gets kind of catchy.

"Move fast and break things." That is another saying. Not one of Edmond's but one that Mark Zuckerberg used at Facebook. It was kind of the subject of the final paper I just wrote for my first class of my master's program. I used it at Nordstrom and I remember a program manager saying, "Okay, but please don't try and break anything." It wasn't like we were trying to break things. The idea was to push the technology as fast and hard as possible to its breaking point. Then find what changes you can do to push it past that point.

"Move fast and break things," has fallen out of favor recently in the tech. industry. Too many people are too aware of disastrous failures like Theranos. That was so bad that its leaders were charged with felonies and Hulu made a mini-series about it. My paper argues that moving fast can work when teams are led by servant leaders and backed by ethical behavior. The examples of where "Move fast and break things," failed are either because it was tried by hardware companies that cannot recover quickly enough or because of bad ethics that permeated the company (or both).

I fully believe that a software organization that delivers small, incremental changes and is led by ethical servant leaders cannot only deliver quality products faster but can also build good citizens and have a beneficial impact to society as a whole. 

My friend, Josh Maletz, taught me what good servant leadership looks like. Servant leadership helps not just those being led and not just the organization in which it is used, but aims to help society as a whole. Research I read showed that servant leadership aligns with consequentialism, the philosophy that what is moral is that which is good for humanity as a whole. It also showed that the environment created by servant leaders inspires those being led to also become servant leaders and the effect snowballs.

[Note that at this point I realized the time was 11:53 PM MDT. I think I mentioned before that I do a lot of these blog posts within a website 750words.com that kind of gamifies sitting down to write each day. I had written a few hundred words last night and this morning, but hadn't hit the 750 word mark yet. So I switched over to write there. I include it here, misspelled words and all, to give a little insight to what a shitshow my mind can be.]

You know, I keep doing this to myself, trying to bang out my last few hundred words with little time left on the clock. Tonight I have about six minutes left to try and get in another 300 words. I am not even sure that I can type that fast, but I am about to give it a shot. Please forgive the misspellings.

I have another idea for a story. A short story this time based on the 7k I tried to run with my brother a few years back, before Covid. I wanted to get him off to a good start because I knew he wanted to do well in the race. So I started off fast. Too fast. Just about the one mile mark I got a bad charly horse in one of my calves. i tried to massage it out, but had trouble with it all through the race. I had not really trained well enough. Plus it was excrutiatingly hot! I was probably already dehydrated by that first mile.

So at that point I knew that I wasn't going to have the race that I had hoped for. All I could really do was soldier on as best I could. If you've ever run any distance that you are really not in shape for, then you will understand this next part. I began picking out milestones, saying to myself, just make it to that next tree. Just make it to that next signpost. Just make it up this hill and you can walk the rest. It was so hot that some of the milestones I chose were shade beneath the sparse treees along the roue in Fort Collins. I would say, just get to the shadow of that next tr...

[The clock hits midnight.]

e next bit of shade und3er the next tree. There were so many times ... Ugh! I missed getting in my words by like two words because the damn site would not save it. Ah well, Today (Thursday) is another day.

Okay, so here I am going to switch gears. I'll come back to the 7k story later when I write out the short story that I have in mind. For those wondering, I did finish the race. It was brutal. I am not sure that it was worth it, but Rob did well. So I guess that made it worth it. It was hellish for me, to be frank.

I want to get back to "Onwards!" though. So I just finished my first class. I had a 98.8% going into the last paper. I was about halfway done with the paper and thought I had managed my time well and then realized that I really had not done what the question asked. During this class I have had the habit of plowing forward with an assignment before reading all the assignment materials and asking any questions that I should. In the first assignment I had banged out a beautiful 2000 word essay in no time at all and then found that the assignment was for 500-700 words. Now, I don't know how someone could have answered the question being asked in fewer than 700 words, but I did spend half the time on the assignment trying to parse my ideas down to 1200 words. It turns out that I had far too many direct quotes from the sources I was citing. If I would have summarized those instead, I could have gotten down to under 700 words (maybe), but still half my wonderful ideas would have stayed on the cutting room floor. Just a couple lessons I learned from that first class.

So, I know I passed the class. I would have even had I not done the last paper. I want an 'A', though. I read through the paper late last night after putting it together. I was going to have the entire night tonight just to do the citations for it. I read it over and wanted to completely start over. I can't exactly say what was wrong with it. It just wasn't good. There were lots of little things wrong with it: it wasn't researched as well as it could have been, it was too wordy in parts and had no depth in others, and it really didn't answer the question being asked. I spent part of the night tonight re-writing it before working on the citations.

I am not a perfectionist. I understand that we are not all perfect human beings and don't expect myself to be one. I do get horribly disappointed, however, if I feel like I am not doing my very best given the circumstances. I have been feeling that way a lot lately, that I am not living up to the best person I can be. I hate feeling so disappointed in myself. I hate that I can't enjoy any sort of feeling of accomplishment. Michael Jordan once said that his achievements didn't come from his desire to win so badly. They came through his hating to lose. I understand that.

I hate so much the disappointing things that I did in the past. I ruminate on them. I can't shake them. They drive me as well. I want to run further this year. I want to write more this year. I want to stop disappointing people including myself. I want to leave this world having made one little contribution to the betterment of it, no matter how small. However, I feel like it's miserably hot and that I really have not trained for this like I should. I am picking out signposts. Make it to Mardi Gras. Make it to St. Patrick's Day. Make it to Easter. Get to the top of this hill (Christ! This is a big fuckin' hill!), and you can have a little bit of a break. What else can one do? Onwards!

The Gift of the Muse

I am starting to get the hang of this writing thing. The books I have been reading have just advised over and over that to be a writer you just need to write. Write and write and write and write some more. So, I started to, but it is just hard to be motivated when you are not writing anything good. I started making more use of this site, 750words.com. The idea behind 750 Words is to just get you writing every day. It was inspired by a book I like, The Artist's Way, in which the author advises anyone who aspires to be any sort of artist to write three pages every day. The makers of 750 words figured that was about how many words would end up on three notebook pages.

I had been using the site in the past, mostly to journal. I would get on a little writing streaks going. The site gamifies things, giving you points for writing, but more points for stringing together streaks of days of writing a little like scoring a bowling game. 

Over the past year I have been trying to write more and more. It was still mostly journaling, though I would use this other book of writing prompts when I wanted to write but could not think of anything. Of course, in September and October of last year I ran off the rails. I came back to it in November and then especially at the beginning of this year. Incidentally, it is no coincidence that my writing output has mirrored my sobriety. Knowing that I had a decent year writing last year, I have sought this year to consistently write more than the same month in 2022. And that has just been on 750 Words. I am writing other little things. I started a novel that I really have no idea where it will go, if it even does. Now I am also writing papers for school. The writing for school has been maybe too easy. Our first assignment was a paper of 500-750 words and after a couple hours I had over 2000 words! I had to spend another couple hours cutting it down in half!

I worked away at writing more and a lot of it, at least 90% was still crap or it was just journal entries that are not all that creative and not anything I want to publish, and by publish I mean even just put it in my blog, my own little hidden corner of the Internet. There were glimmers here and there though. I began entering contests, and had a modicum of success, though I was also getting to compare my writing with other more successful contest entries and getting feedback from professional editors. My writing is not as good as those other writers, but I also know that I can get better. I can get better by working at it.

So I have been working at it. I have been experimenting. I have been applying the lessons I am learning from Stephen King and others who have written books on writing. I have been reading good books and studying what is good about them. I have been reading some really crap books and noticing what is crap about them! Most of all, I have been writing, writing, and writing. It's after 1:30 AM now, and I really should be going to bed, but here I am writing.

And after all this writing and reading something begins to happen, and it happens quickly, like getting hit with Cupid's arrow. I was about to say that it is like getting hit by another car as you are making a turn onto a street and you were sure that car was not just there a moment ago. Without the whiplash, of course. It is sudden like that. It was not there a moment ago, but suddenly it is. But getting hit by a car... you know, that is not all that positive a thing. so I changed that to Cupid's arrow. It is wonderful as well as sudden like that. Maybe not all that sudden though. Probably more like when you are going to the gym consistently, making little gains, and then one day you look in the mirror and think, "Hey, that doesn't look half bad." After all this practice I looked in the mirror the other day and thought, Hey I might just be a writer.

And then this other thing happens. The gift of the Muse. That's that sudden creative inspiration that hits. That's the inspiration we think just suddenly overcame Dickens and Hemingway and Stephen King. Where did they come up with these things? we wonder and figure they must just have been blessed with some angelic touch. So when we just begin writing we wonder why that inspiration will not come to us? Where is our creative fairy Godmother, and why isn't she waving her little magic wand over our heads? We get frustrated and quit. 

Well, your creative Godmother comes after you put in some work. Tonight I was just watching some sportsball and the Muse came. A novel. Twenty-five chapter's worth, in my estimation. Of course, I still need to write it. She doesn't just hand you a couple hundred completed pages. I could write it, and it could be complete garbage. I am going to write it, though, and if it is garbage I will see if I can make it a bit better. And if I can't make it publishable, at least it will be something that I can submit and get feedback on to make something less garbage-like. 

Night

Just past the witching hour, and I am dragging the trash bin out to the curb at 61 S. 5th Avenue for tomorrow's pickup. The plastic wheels of the bin rumble along the pavement. My shoes make a combination of a clicking and scuffing sound. There is a train horn sounding somewhere between here and Denver to the south. It will get louder with each successive crossing as it comes north to rumble through town as well.

It is cold as it is only early March. It would be colder, but a blanket of clouds hangs over the metro area as evidenced by the lack of stars in the blue-black sky. I have on a leather jacket perfect for this time of year, but even my bare hands and face are not bothered by the brisk air. I hardly notice the cold at all. 

The cold night air carries the warm smell of a far-off wood fire. It seems as if the darkness is a better conductor of both sound and smell. As I walk back up the walk, I ponder for a moment just how much that could be true, how much of it owes to there being few smog-belching, growling, clanging cars on the road, and how much is my imagination. 

Once back inside it isn't that I so much notice the warmth of the house as it is that I now notice the absence of the chill on my face and hands. I scramble out of the jacket and find its hanger in the front closet. It's just cool enough in the house now that I leave the rest of my clothes on, including the soft, warm cashmere cardigan I am wearing. There is something about the night that already makes me feel unfettered anyway. A certain freedom comes over me that is not there during the day. With the whole rest of the world in bed, I have the feeling that I could completely disrobe if the notion overtook me. I could pick my nose or rob the bank down the street or rob the bank in the nude while picking my nose were I so inclined. I am not, but the feeling of it remains even while my clothes stay on.

I come back to the nest I have built for myself on the couch, throwing an afghan across my lap. My books and journals are piled around me, not so much as a fortress wall, but as the lint and papers and feathers that a bird uses to line its nest. Next to me a book on fiction. At my feet a book on writing software. In front of me several journals, a fountain pen, a mechanical pencil that is a pleasure to hold, a highlighter, an eraser. Other detritus of the night clutters the end table: my wallet, another highlighter, a used one of those plastic flossers for your teeth, the ubiquitous USB cord. The lamp on the end table at its peak brightness.

The only sound in the world is the clock ticking on the mantel. If my wife existed I might even be able to listen closely to hear her soft breathing in bed, She was gone though before the mantel's clock showed ten though, the only evidence of her now another throw crumpled in the place she had dozed on the couch.

I am completely alone in the world, but it feels okay to be alone at night. There is no loneliness because there is no one to miss. No one to share my thoughts and ideas with except for this page, and that is all that is required. 

Daytime, my nemesis, will come and I will be alone, alone, and exposed. The people and the cars and the clouds will all reincorporate. The worry and stress and confusion of the light will re-emerge. And if I am lucky, I will get a free hour to pull close the black-out curtains and slide my nude body into the sheets, close my eyes and dream that it is night once again.