A Day That Shall Live in Infamy

Two years ago today, November 4, I was laid off from Microsoft. I subsequently discovered that corporations have abused the foreign worker visa system in order to replace US workers with foreign workers.

The following letter is being sent to Senators Chuck Grassley (R-IA) and Dick Durbin (D-IL), and will subsequently be sent to several lawmakers across the country who are involved with commerce and immigration issues.

It is not my intention to make a political statement here. I removed political content from this blog over a year ago, as I wanted this to be a venue to focus inwardly, to contemplate culture and life. However, this issue has become very important to me and I've spent many evenings researching the issue. People who know me know that I'm not a xenophobe. I will therefore not justify myself with the usual bowing and scraping about not being a bigot and so forth. However, as I point out in the letter, I've been a free trade, free immigration advocate. And it's because I've been welcoming to other cultures that I feel all the more betrayed by these corrupt and cynical abuses.

Enough is enough.

11-04-2011

The Honorable Charles Grassley
The Honorable Richard Durbin
United State Senate
Washington, DC 20510

Donn Trenton
88 Wolf Creek Road
Winthrop WA 98862

Dear Senators Grassley and Durbin,

I'm writing today first to thank you for the work you've already done on the issue of visa abuse, particularly on the Durbin-Grassley H-1B and L-1 Visa Reform Act of 2009 (S.887), and to encourage you to continue giving it as much attention as possible in this time of urgent budgetary issues. I would also like to bring to your attention some aspects of the issue that I’ve observed.

It’s probably no surprise to you that the foreign worker visa system comprising H-1B, L-1, B-1, and other visas, has a high level of abuse. For over two decades I’ve worked with many professionals from other countries, whom I’ve found to be honest and intelligent people, and some of whom are personal friends. I supported the H-1B program because I believed it to be an implementation of controlled immigration that brought exceptional workers to the US.

I’ve found, however, that it has become a Trojan Horse for foreign corporations to take over entire business functions (such as software testing) and replace them wholesale with their own employees. The practice of US companies to cut their bottom line by outsourcing certain functions to other countries, or to bring in foreign workers at cheaper wages is debatable, if controversial. But that paints only half the picture.

Foreign corporations, with the aid of their governments, are waging an aggressive campaign on our economy to take over market share by corrupting the legal framework of US immigration and employment law. This campaign is waged under the rubric of "insourcing."

In countries such as India and China, the distinction between large conglomerates and government functions is virtually indistinct. These large corporations have very close relationships with their governments, which lend them special support and favored treatment. The most obvious of such support is the the Indian and Chinese governments’ lobbying of our government to expand the professional visa program.

Indian corporations must be identified as the primary agents in the insourcing campaign. In recent years, 80% of H-1B visas granted have gone to India-based outsourcing firms. Employees of these firms enter the US workforce and study how their respective businesses operate. Many persuade their US business contacts to outsource the rest of their department's work to India, or even more attractively, have their consulting company pitch an offer to provide an entire team of foreign visa workers to replace the current team at a far lower overall cost of operations--lower wages, and virtually no benefits overhead. Doing so using H1-B visas skirts legality and certainly violates the intent of the program. Doing so using B-1 visas is clearly illegal, and some foreign consulting firms have been caught red-handed at it.

Once one company significantly cuts their bottom line by insourcing, other companies compete by following suit. In the present ongoing recession, we’ve seen a chain reaction of companies resorting to this practice.

Worse, this legal and ethical shortcut tempts US executives to eliminate entire teams of US citizens, through elaborately planned management methods, euphemistically called reductions in force, redundancies, forced rankings, etc. Further, it is well known in the industry that some Indian executives simply make a deliberate effort to hire their own countrymen into their organization.

I’ve always supported the right of companies to hire and fire according to their business needs; however, the wholesale replacement of US workers is unethical, and the practice of "body shopping" pushes right through the ethical envelope into illegality. Consulting firms known as "body shops" apply for as many visas as possible, often falsifying the credentials of the workers whom they sponsor. Once they obtain a visa, they shop out the worker to other recruiting firms, to fill job descriptions that do not necessarily match that stated on their visa. Indeed, in some respects, the workers are chattel. If they complain, are resistant to an assignment, or step out of line in any respect, they can have their visa yanked and be sent back to their home country with no recourse.

My personal experience at Microsoft has confirmed everything that I've read about the system. I was a 13-year veteran with a solid record who was laid off along with 5800 other employees in 2009. As I mentioned, I appreciated working with talented people from around the world, and I supported the visa system. When I returned as a contractor in 2010, I saw that the demographic of the company had changed noticeably. Entire test teams were Indian nationals working for India-based consulting firms. It is not difficult to identify employees and the company through which they contract, as this information is readily available in the Outlook global address book.

It’s well known at Microsoft that certain groups have inordinately high rates of hire of Indian nationals. By my count, in one product group, over 35% of the team members were East Indian--considerably more than just one year before. East Asians comprised 12.5%, about the usual level at Microsoft. Like many other prominent high-tech companies, Microsoft has a much-touted Diversity program that’s supposed to encourage, well, diversity--and a strict anti-discrimination policy. Normally, were a manager to hire an entire team based on nationality or ethnicity, HR would have investigated and reprimanded that manager. But neither HR nor Diversity have raised any concerns about what appears to be a consistent pattern of preferential hiring.

In the past I’ve requested demographic data from Diversity to see how Microsoft compares to the population at large. Diversity replied that the company does not disclose its workforce demographics, nor its metrics or criteria for achieving diversity goals. I cannot help but wonder if “Diversity” teams in other high-tech companies are similarly used as window dressers to provide cover for questionable hiring practices.

Just as disturbing, however, is how the Indian-owned/managed recruiters have been cutting in front of local established recruiting firms--through their contacts within companies, the use of "Minority Owned Business" certifications, and "Preferred Vendor" status. These designations afford them protective cover and special consideration, since companies are under pressure to farm out business to minority-owned companies. It seems a cynical misuse of such certifications, meant to give a boost to traditionally underrepresented or disadvantaged groups of US citizens. Indian recruiters are aggressive, and some will exaggerate or misrepresent job descriptions to lure candidates away from local consulting firms.

Knowing this, it’s hard not to conclude that there is an ongoing coordinated campaign of foreign corporations and government to take advantage of our visa system to grab a huge share of our job market. This was never the intention of the professional/academic visa system, which was to bring in people so exceptional that a replacement couldn’t be found in the domestic labor pool. This violates at least the spirit of the law.

The Indian Chambers of Commerce have anticipated the backlash against outsourcing and incourcing and have outlined a strategy to lobby the Indian Government to push for relaxation of US visa requirements. Please urge Congress to resist these PR efforts.

I encourage you to reintroduce your H-1B and L-1 visa reform bill (S.887), which would effect much needed visa reform. I would make the following suggestions:

·         I strongly suggest that you strengthen the prohibition against displacing US workers. Sec.113. Waiver Requirements would amend the Immigration and Nationality Act to require an employer to establish that an H-1B worker "has not displaced, and does not intend to displace, a United States worker employed by the employer within the period beginning 180 days before and ending 180 days after the date of the placement of the nonimmigrant with the employer." I suggest adding a positive prohibition to the following effect:

Any corporation doing business in the US that lays off more than 50 US-based employees in a fiscal year may not sponsor, invite, or hire any foreign visa workers until one year after the date of the last layoff.

The number can be indexed to the size of the company; the point is to provide a strong disincentive to companies against hiring visa workers rather than domestic workers shortly after layoffs.

·         Propose a temporary moratorium or limitation of the H-1B and other visa programs, allowing current visa holders to stay the length of their term, until Congress has investigated and considered how to reform the visa system.

·         Revise the visa lottery system so that no one country can obtain more than 50% of the visas granted for the year.

·         Remove the provision that DOL could initiate investigations without a complaint and without the Labor Secretary’s personal authorization. This is my only disagreement with your bill, as it might give the DOL too much latitude and encourage overzealous investigations.

Once again, I would like to thank you for all your efforts to protect the integrity of our visa system and the rights of US citizens.

Sincerely,

Donn Trenton

Donn Trenton

Quit While You're Ahead

There's a lesson to be be learned in the Methow Valley wolf scandal. A series of lessons, in truth.

If you're going to poach, don't poach an endangered species. If you're going to poach an endangered species, mount the head or pelt in your den and say you inherited it from your bibulous uncle--don't brag about it and certainly don't sell it. If you're going to sell it, don't ship it across state lines (involving the FBI) or to another country (involving the US Customs Service).

But if you really must sell the pelt of an endangered species that you poached and ship it via Fed Ex to another country, for God's sake put it in a Ziploc bag so blood doesn't leak all over, giving the good people at the Fed Ex drop-off cause to think you're shipping your husband's head to Canada.

Moral (choose one of the following):

a. Stupid is as stupid does.
b. When you're in a hole, stop digging.
c. Quit while you're ahead.
d. What was the question?

Death of the Quiet Society

The Adventures of Simplicissimus

Lawn Nazis

I had forgotten that Friday is landscaping day at my apartment complex. I had been working late, slept in somewhat, and woke to the gentle strains of leaf blowers directly outside my window. It was kind of these gentlemen to give me a wake up call exactly at 8:00am.

The modern corporation has solved the office smoking problem and office sexual harrassment problem by simply not having offices anymore. We all work from home. People think this is a dream job, but it isn't; much of my workday is spent finding a suitable workspace, and our lawns are the workplace of so many others. It is amazing that in an ailing economy we spend so much money keeping up the pretense of fastidiously manicured lawns. As William F Buckley once famously paraphrased La Fontaine, "Quelle est cette merde?" What indeed is this fetish about wide expanses of perfectly clipped grass? More significantly, why do we accept the attendant racket that comes with it? What is most disturbing is that no one, a la Candide, attends to their own garden anymore. Not so long ago, people raked their own damn leaves, and it was a long, meditative session of white noise--the rake scratching along the ground, puffing on a cigarette, and perhaps an Autumn breeze gusting by. Then flinging the cigarette away to set the neighborhood ablaze. Now it is done by others, hired to come and invade one's property with the shrill turbine whine of leaf blowers. The opportunity of meditation is lost, not only for you, but for all your neighbors. But to hell with them, the grounds are perfect.

With no hope of being allowed to concentrate, I dressed and went to the library to work.

The Lyceum of Grabassia

The public libraries in my upscale suburban community are well-appointed and designed in a modern, updated style of the classic Northwest mountain lodge. They have audio visual sections and meeting rooms, banks of computers, spacious sections for Children's literature, Young Adult fiction, and the newest mode, teen-only study rooms. All this unfortunately leaves only marginal space for a few carrels of books, and those are increasingly filled with thrillers, tales of gory lurid gore, bodice rippers, and the latest transcriptions of cultural bloviation.

People do not seem to read in the modern library. Why should they? There is much else to do. Answer your phone, text, tweet, chatter, surf, and scurry about in a daylong session of grabassia.

When did our libraries stop being places of of almost reverent silence and become ersatz Romper Rooms? Since when did libraries have to provide day care services? Likewise, why have large sections of libraries been cordoned off for the exclusive use of pimply, wetwired adolescents? The rest of the library is pretty much taken over by old farts such as myself and a few homeless people, who actually fit in rather better than the rest. They might smell, but they read silently and attentively, or better, doze off.

The Great Sniffer of Koryo

Chief among the annoyances, however, among the screeching brattle of unattended waifs and high whine of high-powered Mexican leaf blowers, is the Dreaded Asian Sniffer. Over the years in the diverse Northwest, I've learned much about Asian cultures--the most useful aspect of which is what Asian people do with their mucus.

To the Japanese, blowing one's nose is a gesture of such mortifying rudeness that were one to use a tissue, he would have to exile himself from refined company pretty much forever. The Japanese solution, therefore, when assaulted by the common cold, is cunningly and unobtrusively to wear a surgical mask wherever you go. And what happens behind the mask, stays behind the mask.

The Chinese, I hesitate to report, simply lay a finger aside the nose and hurl it out onto the sidewalk without further consideration. In fact in Jiangxi province it is considered an egregious insult if you do not luge on your neighbor's doorstep before entering.

The Koreans, being historically caught in the middle of these two cultures, cannot decide what the hell to do and simply sniff. In such manner, kotagji can be stored in the ko for hours on end. Oh yes, and if you believe there exists a more annoying sound in the universe, try enduring the occasional yet inevitable long uptake of a runny nose for an hour or so. No earphone or earbud piping in Metallica, can blot out the deadly sniffer.

Pornography and Invisibility

But what endears me most to the library is that, on the best days, I can almost vanish, mentally at least, from the noisome, attention-deficit world at large. To be fair, allow me to point this out: I am more attention-deficit than most. And that is why the library had in the past been for me a sort of guilty pleasure, a wandering about in a sort of Borgesian pleasure dome. Now that inner world has been replaced by the Internet. Is it trite to say it's not the same? Yes, trite.

When you're in a library, you are physically within a library. When you're in cyberspace, you're probably in your pyjamas, and I shall not conjecture further on your threadedness.

We now pretend to search by means of Googling; back in The Day ("The Day" or "ye olde days" being in my 6 year old daughter's words when queried about an ancient book, "The 80s?"), "googling" was checking out a voluptuous coed from betwixt the books of a nearby carrel. Now it is a lame exercise in which a computer tries to finish your sentence as you type, viz. when I tried to research (for purely academic purposes) the keyword string: "Asian hot" and got rather unsatisfying longtails such as:

asian hotel owners association

Essaying forth once more, I did better with:

asian hot dog eating contest winner

Which, for all practical purposes, was close enough. Bravo for Google! Yet the experience is just not the same. It is simply too... virtual for my taste. If I want exposure to porn, I only need go back to one of the larger city libraries, sit behind some good gentleman, and observe casually his online research. Why, only the other day, I sat in the Bellevue Main Library behind an upstanding African American fellow, and was surprised to see a kind of pornography I had never yet observed (and was heretofore grateful for the fact).

This fellow was in the process of "researching" photographs of extremely corpulent females. Perhaps he had mistakenly landed on a site such as celluliteplanet.com; I am not certain. He expanded a photo of the largest female bollocks imaginable; it not only eclipsed the screen, I thought it might perhaps bring the library servers down.

No such luck. However, the man sniffed not at all, nor made any sound, and it went down as one of my more productive days at the library. So I say, pipe in terabytes of porn, give library passes to the trenchcoat brigade, bring Robert Mapplethorpe himself into the library, let him sign books with... well, let him perform a book signing in his own inimitable way!

Maybe then I can get some damn work done.

The Light of the Living

You number my wanderings;
Put my tears into Your bottle;
Are they not in Your book?

In God have I put my trust;
I will not be afraid.
What can man do to me?

Have You not kept my feet from falling,
That I may walk before God
in the light of the living?

--Psalm 56

To the Dreary End

こんな夢を見た。。。

From the annals of the Dream Library, ~8:00am, 2011-07-07

I dreamed that reports had come out that the world was about to end soon. Naturally it was widely covered on cable news; subsequent bulletins and rumors said the event would occur somewhere around 8:30pm. To my surprise, there was no looting or general mayhem; instead, people became unusually pleasant and arranged informal get-togethers to chat about things and maybe bid farewells, if they thought to do so, but not everyone did. No one seemed particularly upset or grief-stricken, though the mood was a little sad, like seeing friends off at the airport, knowing you won't see them for a long time.

I was at an office building that afternoon, presumably at work and said goodbye to some friends. My thought was to get back to my car by 8:30 but then I realized that I had no real home or family to get home to, so I simply stayed where I was. The lobby had a small bar with a TV mounted up above, and a few people sat there talking, an older couple and a young woman. The older gent mixed drinks, free, for presumably no one bothered to charge money any longer. I watched the coverage on Fox News, which was predictably designed to string the audience along when nothing is actually happening, like their signature coverage of missing little girls that they milk on and on for weeks. I had no idea the end of the world would be so boring.

The time came and went. Not daring to be so impolite as to suggest that the world perhps had not ended, I suggested instead that maybe the world had changed in some fundamental way, some physical law of nature had been altered, but we hadn't noticed yet--that the world as we knew it had in fact ended, or perhaps we had ceased to exist in the reality we knew, but we were continuing on in a new reality.

The older couple at the bar were very down to earth and such wooly ideas simply breezed past them. I might as well have been recounting the premise of some pseudoscientific fantasy novel to them. The gentleman at the bar showed me a stunningly beautiful revolver; presumably he had taken it along in case of trouble, which happily had never materialized. It was a stainless steel Ruger snubnose with a 2 inch barrel and engraved vine-and-leaf scrollwork on an unfluted cylinder; caliber .22 magnum, and it held nine rounds. It must have been a special run, as I'd never seen the like before.

He put the pistol in a drawer while he mixed more drinks, and I noticed the young woman at the bar stealthily reach over and put it in her purse. I followed her out, thinking to win her confidence and maybe get the revolver back. We crossed a bridge as we talked and she told me that she was a runaway from a bad situation; I figured she needed cash, so I offered to buy the revolver from her, and I was even tempted to keep it for myself. However, she refused, as she thought she'd need it for protection. Unlike my aesthetic lust for the gun, her interest in it was purely practical--any pistol would have served her purpose.

The dream transitioned abruptly, and I was back at my car. Fritz was there waiting for me to take him along for the ride. I was lucidly aware that he had passed a few months ago, but the reality of his presence was so vivid that I ignored this fact. I picked him up and held him; I could feel his wooly fur and the warmth of his body, and he moved exactly as he had done in life. I put him in the passenger seat as usual and we were off. Originally I had planned to drive home, but now I wasn't sure where home was, and we seemed to have another destination, undefined. The drive was erratic, traffic frequently slowing and speeding up, with sudden stops. We crossed a bridge going rather fast, and hit a dip and hump in the pavement; the car lurched upward and seemed to leave the road's surface for a moment, but we continued on together, safely.

When it all burns down

蔵焼けて障るものなき月見哉

kurayakete sawaru mono naki tsuki mi kana

"My barn burned down; now nothing keeps me from seeing the moon."
--Zen koan by Mizuta Masahide (1657-1723)

On the Long Walk Home

In 2004, I wrote a short piece as part of a novel. The larger story itself is not relevant except that the theme was a young man's regret that he did not reconcile and get to know his father before the father's death. This parable was intended to be delivered as part of the father's eulogy. Worthy though it sound, it is one of the most leaned upon of themes, but one that, if not given over to sentimentality, rarely fails to engage.

It is a very simple tale of how a man deals with his beloved dog's final days. What is remarkable is that I wrote it almost seven years ago, when my dog Fritz was half his age, in full health, before he had any serious health problems. His first serious symptoms came about a year later--it turned out to be arthritis, but at first we had no idea what it might be, or how serious it was. I'm not claiming to scry, skein, or augur into future events. However, I sincerely believe that writing that is genuinely felt or deeply understood through hard experience--that is, true writing, taps into something ineffable that has a quality of cutting through time. It transcends what our poor senses cannot.

It's apparent that I was coming to terms with Fritz's end a long time ago. Some might call this a very foolish exercise in sentimentality. At the time it might have been, and it didn't make my feelings any easier when the end finally came. But it's stunning to me how closely this parable describes my feelings--and my relationship with Fritz in his last days--seven years later.

I had intended to publish this upon his death, but it needed work, and to be blunt, I didn't have the courage to return to this text for over a month. I took my time; I wanted it to be right, a fitting tribute to my little friend.

Someday we might spread Fritz's ashes at Golden Gardens Beach on Puget Sound, his favorite walk of all time, or possibly in the Methow Valley, where he owned a grand domain full of wildlife that he loved to sniff and survey. We might set down a stone. If we do, the epitaph might read:

There will never be another
Fritz

On the Long Walk Home

Once, a man owned a dog that had been a wonderful companion for many years, and the dog likewise trusted the man without reservation. Like all dogs, he craved the reassurance of routine. In fact, the more repeated the activity, the more it seemed to intensify the dog's enjoyment: the familiar smells along a walk, the nightly bone, the happy replenishment of the food and water bowls. He especially looked forward to his afternoon walk when the man returned from work.

In the course of years, the dog grew old, and though he had enjoyed an active, healthy life, he suddenly began to grow weak and listless. Concerned, the man took his dog to the veterinarian. The doctor told him that the dog had a serious disease, and though an operation was possible, it was doubtful that the dog would survive. He prescribed a few palliatives and told the man that if the dog's condition deteriorated, he could bring him in so that his suffering not be prolonged.

Certain thoughts weighed on the man as he headed home. The news was bad, but not surprising. He thought that he should feel worse, but instead felt strangely distant, and could only focus on what to do next. He knew that in the past he had slacked in his duties with the dog. Sometimes he might feel lazy and shorten their walk, or simply let the dog out into the yard. He determined that the days remaining to his dog should be the fullest possible--with everything he had come to expect in his daily routine.

The dog seemed well enough for several weeks, but then became quite sick. Again they went to the vet, who advised him to expect periods of seemingly restored health, punctuated by severe relapses. He cautioned him not to be buoyed by false recoveries. The man said that he understood, and asked how long they had. The vet said that the decision was entirely up to the owner, and the dog would let him know when it's time. The man wondered how he would know.

He took the dog home and struggled with the problem of when. On one hand it seemed selfish to let his friend continue suffering; on the other, he felt the dog deserved to live out whatever time he had. All he knew for certain was that he himself needed a little more time. He still took the dog for walks, but was careful not to go too long, lest the dog become exhausted. After a few days, it became clear that the dog could no longer go the least of what could be called a walk. The next day he decided to take the dog for one last outing.

When the time came, he approached the dog with the leash and said, let's go for a walk. The dog looked up wanly, but his tail quivered with the old enthusiasm. The dog bowed his head slightly to accept the leash, as he always did, and the man took comfort in knowing that the dog knew the ritual and found not a little joy in it.

He drove to a neighborhood that the dog liked, that was also near the vet's office. He knew the dog would recognize where he was, but it couldn't be helped. He took the dog to certain favorite spots, a tree-lined street, a playground where they would sometimes sit and simply watch the people and their kids, a vacant lot where rats and squirrels left their fascinating scents.

The dog took his time, investigating, sniffing at his leisure. And the man watched attentively. He wished that, instead of often being impatient on the way, he had paid closer attention to his friend's spirit of exploration, how he trotted from place to place, how he carefully sniffed, as if ruminating over the clues left him. How his friend stopped and watched the world with a calm that he himself would never know.

He wondered why he had never before put aside his fretting, busy thoughts to pause and observe life so.

After investigating a certain doorstep, his friend suddenly lay down beside the stoop and looked at him, panting slowly and deliberately but not whimpering or showing any pain. The man was seized with panic. Was this the sign? He simply wasn't ready. Then he justified himself with the sudden conviction that in this condition the dog couldn't possibly walk to the vet's office.

The man sat on the stoop and petted the dog for a while--it didn't seem long--and suddenly the dog stood up and tugged at the leash. The man was encouraged, and decided that they should go home, since this was obviously not the day. Perhaps he had jumped the gun. Yes, he should wait and see, take care of this tomorrow, or another day, for after all, the dog could become better unexpectedly--the vet had said himself that there was no predicting how it might go.

He stood up and tried to lead the dog back to the car, but the dog strained against the leash, wanting to continue the walk to its end--but that direction also led toward the vet. He gently urged the dog in the opposite direction. The dog headed stubbornly the other way. He didn't want to force his friend, not in his condition, and he felt that he should not interfere with the dog's wishes, not on this walk of all walks, so he allowed the dog to move on.

The man became anxious as they drifted further away from the car, and closer to the vet. To his relief, the dog took a detour, a right turn, and they headed off in yet another direction. Now as they were getting farther from both the car and the office, the man worried that a longer walk back might be too much for his friend--and further, that they'd also be too far from the office should his friend worsen. Or too close--he wasn't sure.

They came to a corner park, no more than a small, shady garden with a bench. He sat on the bench and his companion lay near his feet. The dog looked up at him again, panting soundlessly, happy to rest there for the moment.

The man too felt content. For a moment he forgot why he they were there, and it was once more just another of their walks, the usual routine that they both loved. He gazed round absently and enjoyed this one moment together. He felt he almost understood the way his dog gazed at the world: contentedly, serenely, but also intently observing.

He had accepted where the dog wanted to go, and was now ready to continue. He stood up and asked, are you ready? The dog remained where he lay, quiet and motionless. At first the man almost laughed, for he thought that the dog had fallen asleep, then a cold numbness ran through his veins. He crouched down, put his hand on the dog's head. He'd miss their walks, he thought, but he also felt grateful for the burden that had been lifted from him.

He gently took up his friend in his arms, and carried him on the long walk home.

The End of an Era

Our loyal friend and companion, Fritz, died peacefully today. A few weeks ago, we discovered that he had pervasive liver cancer; he declined rapidly, but went easily.

He brought joy to our lives every day for almost 15 years. We'll forever be grateful for him.

Resquiat In Pacem † Fritz Trenton 1996-2011

( )

A long time ago, when I was in college, I liked to take long walks in the woods. I was very fortunate that the college I attended was situated in the midst of miles of thick forest; one of the trails followed a creek running through a long ravine terraced by many waterfalls. In the Autumn of my freshman year, I had seen shoeprints in the muddy trail, and the imprints were very distinctive--Bass brand shoes, the slender print of a girl's shoe. I followed the steps as far as I could, past the waterfalls, until they disappeared somewhere up the ravine. I had a strange notion that I'd find that girl eventually.

Not too much later, I did meet a girl whom I dated for years and eventually married. I discovered that she had a pair Bass shoes with soles in the exact pattern I'd seen. Over the years I forgot about this juvenile fancy I'd had... a whimsical aside hardly worth mentioning parenthetically. Maybe I'm hopelessly sentimental, but I've always been convinced that I found the girl who made those footprints.

We met in April, the time of year when the polliwogs hatch out and leave the water as young frogs. The peepers make their first feeble croaking sounds in the early Spring, and they multiply until it seems their cries are numbered as the leaves.

It's early April now. I live up the side of Cougar Mountain, and there are streams all around. The reedy croaking has been growing stronger every night. That sound brought with it all these memories--because, inside us, sound isn't just sound. An entire world is waiting to spring to life, and certain sounds are a song, bringing past moments back to life.

Now the parentheses have closed. I lost her recently, and it took me quite some time to realize all the stupid and vain things I'd done to poison the relationship and alienate her. I shouldn't be surprised that it suddenly closed shut on me. Parts of our lives pass into subsequent phases, and we usually don't pay attention, so it doesn't seem like anything has ended. We have an illusion of continuity when really, our world is ending every day, a gentle apocalypse unfolding like cherry blossoms. We don't think of it as death, but we live with a kind of ongoing death, which is part of life itself. Not until life ultimately reaches an irrevocable end do we even start to consider that our part might be over, and we ourselves must make an exit somehow.

At the end, we're tempted to say "I wish" or "if only," but I won't say that. I got my wish. It took decades, but my "if only" happened, over a very long time. I'm grateful for that. I write this today because we met on this day, April 19, 1980.

A long, frustrating, sweet, difficult, passionate, and devoted history lay between those parentheses--quarrels picked, hot, messy afternoons painting rooms, roads explored, conversations far into the night, apartments chosen, clothes tried on then worn till threadbare, groceries shopped and brought home in brown bags, writing projects ending not in publication but only in ellipsis... but it would take 30 years to tell the whole story.

How Deep Is Grief, How Far Is God?

As I previously commisserated on Lent in last April's Can't Wait to Sin, I must be the world's worst Lent participant.

Especially this year, when the commitments are things like thinking positively and staying focused and clear of distractions. (On reaching out to help others, perhaps I haven't done as badly.) But in falling down, I learn about my deeply held beliefs and where I stand with respect to them. For example, I believe that God wants the best for each of us. He wants us to be happy and fulfilled according to our potentials.

When I stop thinking positively and indulge in nostalgia, I learn something about the purpose of memory, and I've made the following observations:

I wonder whether God, being perfect and not being able to act incorrectly, created us so that he could understand free will and failure. And He incarnated in order to understand our struggle and suffering.

God also needed a way to record events. Living things record events, whether consciously or not. Trees record fires and volcanic eruptions in the rings of their trunks. And we have a superb ability to store far more complex memories. We record through our senses, and God helps us bumble our way through, with all the attendant messy emotions.

I have been working through a family crisis, where many memories come crashing over me, and do not allow much respite. It is hard not to be overwhelmed by grief. Certainly, God is silent. The work of His hand may be apparent in all things, but God often seems very distant.

We have to accept that bad things are going to happen, terrible things. It has been asked over and over again why this continues, and the answer is that God doesn't break his own rules. The universe was created as an ordered system; like Dharma, if a physical law were violated, there would be no law, and chaos would reign.

This is not to say that we simply accept tragedy and misfortune--this is why we struggle--we're expected to work through our travails. I'm working through my own. Elie Wiesel said that human problems are like an ideal gas that expands to fill each person's psychic space. This is why each person's problems seem to be the greatest problem in the world--for that person. Keeping this absurdity in mind, I look around and wonder at the grand scale of disaster, economic and geologic, of the recent past. Why it is all happening now, we don't know. We do know that catastrophes tend to cluster. Whatever the reason, I cannot fathom the depth of suffering--I only perceive that I don't have real problems. Everything I have and love was not wiped out by a tsunami, for example. I simply have challenges.

Even though I keep saying it, I keep forgetting that God ultimately wants us to turn to joy, and probably wonders why we don't seize on His compassion when it's offered freely. Though I believe in it, I have to say, the compassion is a silent one. It often seems indifferent and severe. The silence is a great mystery; it can break one's heart.

Nuclear Poop

Say what you will, the Japanese explain nuclear accidents better than any other culture on the planet:

Nuclear Boy うんち・おならで
例える原発解説

Nuclear Boy unchi - onara de tatoeru genpatsu kaisetsu
Nuclear Boy's poop - a commentary of farts likened to nuclear power


The really disturbing part is when they talk about Chernobyl and banjos start to play. Then the understatement: "Yes, it was quite an incident." Don't we always have a banjo soundtrack in our minds when we recall nuclear accidents?

Tsunami Inu

津波犬   Tsunami inu, tsunami dog (lit. "harbor wave dog")

"There is another dog right next to the one sitting down. He is not moving. I wonder.... I wonder if he is alright. The dog is protecting him. Yes. He is protecting the dog. That is why he did not want us to approach them. He was trying to keep us at bay. I can't watch this. This is very difficult to watch. Oh. Look. He is moving. He is alive."

After the video was shot, the dogs were both taken into care of the local animal shelter.

Vietnamese Dog Tree

I dreamed that Vietnamese people tied tiny toy dogs, or puppies, to the branches of small ash trees. They considered them to be holiday decorations, much like Christmas tree trimmings. But the little dogs kept slipping off the branches and had to scramble back up on their unnatural perches, lest they hang. The Vietnamese thought this was cute, but I felt very badly for the dogs. It felt similar to the tenuous struggle of my present financial and career situation.

Don't Grow Old Quietly

The Dead Weather...

...and the most politically incorrect video of all time, which serves as an adequate metaphor for romance.



Of course, I wouldn't want my little girl to watch this, because, you know, cigarettes are bad for you (viz. 3:17).

Guns are yummy

Cigarettes are bad

Catastrophe Theory

Every so often, a metaphor supremely descriptive of the current Zeitgeist unexpectedly bubbles up from divers sources all at once. The current one is the concept of the tipping point, popularized by a book of that title published in 2000 by Malcolm Gladwell. Gladwell defined a tipping point as "the moment of critical mass, the threshold, the boiling point."

Conservative commentators such as Glenn Beck and Bill O'Reilly have applied the metaphor to the recent 2010 elections. A cogent article by James Gannon summarized this idea nicely in The American Spectator. It is probably only a matter of time before it is applied as well to the unexpectedly nascent Tunisian and Egyptian popular uprisings.

There might be a larger scope to the concept, though. I've been giving a lot of thought to the broad sweep of change that has occurred in our society in the past few years. While not as sever as the Great Depression, we call it the Great Recession--but it is no more limited to economic machinations, as it is limited to the vagaries of political football.

I confess I haven't gotten my head around it yet. I can only speak to my poor singleton's perception of it. A few surrealistic motifs of my youth come to mind. The rapid, precipitous changes in social economic and political structures I call the Wave of Mutilation.

As to causes and mechanics of the tectonic changes we've seen, I can't help going back to a memory from graduate school, when in the engineering library I found a curiously titled book: Catastrophe Theory. In short, this is the study of how built structures fail. The most interesting thing I discovered about such failures is that almost always, the integrity of the structure holds within normal variances until stress brings it to a catastrophic and irreversible failure point.

In other words, things look peachy until they suddenly go pear-shaped.

To Hell with New Year's Resolutions

Several years ago I replaced the idea of "resolutions" with "principles." So rather than saying I have this or that goal, which is often thwarted, and at the end of the year I feel even more worthless than the previous year, I generally commit to changing my daily or weekly habits and attitudes according to key guiding priciples, and then evaluate my progress at the end of the year. To Hell with New Year's resolutions, I say!

Now, this is not to say that goals aren't useful--but only if you break them down into discrete tasks and focus on executing the plan. This is because plans "gang aft aglay." In other words, I tend to measure success by performance on the whole process--how adaptive and resourceful was I?

Here were the guiding principles I set for 2010:

• Stop following paths to nowhere and behaviors that don't meet your needs. For example, work toward getting a job in a new career path, whatever it may be, though it may be tempting to take a nice gig that you're comfortable with.
• Identify essential or blocking tasks and follow through on each until done.
• Focus on real experiences toward real goals in the real world.
  I've cut way down on TV viewing. I've set limits on time online, and replaced it with more book reading and writing ON PAPER. Usually the low-tech approach is more rooted in the real world. Recently I've decided not walk around plugged into my MP3 player--it renders you essentially deaf, and puts you in what self-defense experts term "condition white," a lack of awareness that renders you vulnerable to accidents or assault.

So, what are my new priciples for 2011? In addition to the above, which are ongoing, I'm working toward these:

• Plan weekly, prepare daily.
• Learn how to think and act entrepreneurially; don't think like a consumer. That is, the mindset with which we're unremittingly programmed, that buying stuff will solve all our problems and make us feel better about ourselves.
• With respect to writing projects, act rather than plan.

That last item merits some discussion. Blogging over the past two years has been much more rewarding than I expected. It has given me a chance to experiment with my ideas, and how to form content as well as the medium (design and images). Why does it work? For one thing, it's a low pressure situation--you write only little at a time--and over time you learn what works and what doesn't. It teaches another valuable lesson that you can take to other ventures--what I call the Amazon approach vs the Microsoft approach.

In the old days, software companies developed a product and tested it iteratively until they were reasonably certain that it worked. After remaining bugs were documented as "features," it was copied onto media such as floppy disk, or later, CD-ROM. This gave rise to phrases such as "burning the golden bits onto disk" as if the disk were some sacred calendar chiseled in stone.

But Microsoft still uses this model for products distrbuted via the Web. If the product or service isn't perfect, the entire process has to be re-evaluated until they can work out the problems, and usually several features are cut in order to make the deadline. Any improvements that developers come up with during this cycle must be pushed off until the next release. In other words, the product can only be as good as the original plan, which often goes back a few years. An apropos marketing slogan might be "Here's last year's technology today."

By comparison, if Amazon puts a widget on their website, and the widget isn't popular, or doesn't work as expected, or they think of something better the next day, they simply pull it or replace it. They absolutely do not worry about "publicly testing" a feature, because people expect the Web (like Life) to be constantly changing.

This was an immense revelation to me, and I've learned that I can effectively apply it to ongoing efforts in Life.