One Word That

Confident People Say

        Apr 13, 2015

• 
  
  By Brian De Haafd

                   https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/one-word-confident-people-always-say-brian-de-haaff

It often happens like this. 

A co-worker comes strolling down the hallway and peers around the corner at you. You look up, annoyed by the interruption. She then quickly asks, "I was not able to finish my report for the boss. Can you finish it for me tonight?"

I know this happens, because it happened a lot to me earlier in my career. 

Time slows after the "ask." You are now thinking about how to respond, but nothing feels quite right. So, as always, you say, "Sure."

You might say "Sure" because you really should help. But most often, this is not the case. "Sure" often comes from a place of defense -- a need to please and be liked by the right people. 

But let me share a secret. We often say "Sure" because we lack confidence to say and do what we know is right. When it comes to confidence, those who have it always seem to shine, while those who are meek and afraid are taken advantage of.

I am referring to the type of confidence that gives us internal fortitude, not the outlandish bravado that some show to mask deep fears. 

Confidence is easier said than internalized; it usually develops over time, with practice, patience, and perseverance. But there is no doubt that to succeed in life, it is a must.

So, do you know the one word that confident people say most? 

It's obvious when you think about it -- that word is, "No" 

Here are a few reasons that saying, "No" can help you be your best and those around achieve as well. It's also why confident people are not afraid of the word.

Reaffirms your priorities

The most confident people plan ahead. They have clearly defined goals and know what it takes to get there. This helps them prioritize what is important in their lives -- and ignore what does not align with their goals. Every "Yes" should align with these goals; if something does not, the answer is "No."

Sets clear expectations

The word "Yes" is often said out of obligation. The problem is that "Yes (wo)men" tend to make promises that they can not always deliver on. Frequently, they fail to get every job done. If you do this, it damages the confidence and trust that your team will start to place in you. And when real chances to shine arise, you will be passed over.

Broadcasts your value

We all know the stars whom we can count on to produce great work with a positive attitude. We rely on them. Saying, "No" to irrelevant requests reminds people that you are important, have clear priorities, and your work matters. You do not have time to focus on less important efforts.

The most confident people know who they are and how they add value. They don't need to prove their self worth by saying yes to every request that is made of them.

We all get paid to set boundaries and clearly communicate what we should work on. This is what confident people do best. The next time someone asks you for a favor, do not blindly accept it without questioning its value.

Habits Are Caught, Not Taught

Over time, this habit will make you more confidentt and increase your professional identity since every day you will be getting better.

So -- has saying, "No" ever boosted your confidence? How? When? 

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The Hypocrisy -- Ted Cruz Signs Up for Obamacare

Senator Ted Cruz on Monday announced his bid for the White House to a live audience in Virginia. 

Full of ugly hubris, Cruz (the all-Canadian, Cubano legislator) said, "Imagine in 2017, a new president signing legislation repealing every word of Obamacare."

If successful, that "new president" will be Ted Cruz, and the moment he signs that bill into law, he and his family will have zero health care insurance. The Tea Party Republican – just 24 hours after once again calling for the repeal of the President's health care plan that has delivered affordable health care to literally millions of Americans, and extended the age students, like those at Liberty, can be under their parents' plan – confessed to CNN's Dana Bash this afternoon he just signed up for Obamacare.

"We'll be getting new health insurance and we'll presumably do it through my job with the Senate, and so we'll be on the federal exchange with millions of others on the federal exchange," Cruz said. He called it "transitioning." Hypocritically, he did not call it Obamacare but "the federal exchange."

Why?

Cruz's wife, Heidi Cruz, a managing director at Goldman Sachs' Houston office, is taking an unpaid leave of absence from her job, presumably to avoid any appearance of impropriety. The Cruz family has been getting its health care insurance from Mrs. Cruz's employer, but now they are no longer eligible while she is on leave.

So Senator Cruz signed up for Obamacare, and sees absolutely no hypocrisy, or even irony, with taking that action.

Cruz, it should be noted, has every right to buy health care insurance privately, like many Americans do, but chose to sign up for Obamacare and to accept the federal government subsidy that he is entitled to as a sitting U.S. Senator.

"I believe we should follow the text of every law, even (a) law I disagree with," Cruz told CNN. "It's one of the real differences -- if you look at President Obama and the lawlessness, if he disagrees with a law he simply refuses to follow it or claims the authority to unilaterally change."

CNN's Dana Bash was shocked and looked incredulous as she asked, "That means you are going to take a government subsidy?"  She noted, "The irony is kind of unbelievable."

Source Blog:  David Badash  (3-24-15)

http://www.thenewcivilrightsmovement.com/davidbadash/ted_cruz_sees_absolutely_no_irony_or_hypocrisy_now_that_he_s_signed_up_for_obamacare_video

XXX  XXX  XXX

Cyberloafing, Skiving, and Other Workday Amusements

A Guide to Skiving

or Thrive at Work with a Minimum of Effort

Blogger Says: The source here is The Economist (Issue 24 Oct 2014). This humorous article makes key points about cyber-loafing dodging responsibilities while on the job, among other salient topics. ------ Yours as always, Butch Ekstrom

The best way to understand a system is to look at it from the point of view of people who want to subvert it. 

Sensible bosses try to view their companies through the eyes of corporate raiders. Serious-minded politicians make a point of putting themselves in opponents’ shoes. The same is true of the world of work in general: the best way to understand a company’s “human resources” is . . . to study the basic principles of skiving.

(A) The first principle of skiving (or shirking, as Americans call it) is always to appear hard at work. 

This is the ancient jacket-on-the-back-of-the-chair trick: leave a coat permanently on display so that a casual observer — a CEO practising “managing by walking around”, for example — will assume that you are the first to arrive and the last to leave. 

The skill of skiving is subtle: ensure you are somewhere else when the work is being allocated. 

Successful skivers never visibly shy away from work: confronted with the inevitable they make a point of looking extremely eager. This “theater of enthusiasm” has fooled almost everyone. Policymakers bemoan the epidemic of overwork. But . . . studies suggest that the average worker devotes between one-and-a-half and three hours a day to loafing.

(B) The second principle is that information technology is both the slacker’s best friend and deadliest enemy. 

The PC is custom-made for the indolent: you can give every impression of being hard at work when in fact you are shopping, booking a holiday or otherwise frolicking in the cyber-waves. And thanks to mobile technology you can now continue to frolic while putting in face time in meetings. There is also a high-tech version of the jacket trick: program your e-mails to send themselves at half past midnight or 5:30 a.m. to give managers the impression that you are a Stakhanovite.

But, wait, there is a dark side to IT: one estimate suggests that 27 million employees around the world have their internet use monitored. Dealing with this threat requires vigilance: do everything you can to hide your browsing history. It may also require something that does not come naturally to skivers: political activism. Make a huge fuss about how even the smallest concessions on the principle of absolute data privacy will create a slippery slope to a totalitarian society. Skiving is like liberty: it can flourish only if Big Brother is kept at bay.

(C) The third principle is that you should always try to get a job where there is no clear relation between input and output. The public sector is obviously a skiver’s paradise. In 2004 it took two days for anyone to notice that a Finnish tax inspector had died at his desk. In 2009 the Swedish Civil Aviation Administration discovered that some of its employees had spent three-quarters of their working hours watching internet pornography. In 2012 a German civil servant wrote a farewell message to his colleagues, on his retirement, confessing that he had not done a stroke of work for the past 14 years. And it is almost impossible to sack (people like this).

Big private-sector organisations can be almost as fertile skiving grounds as government ones. 

In “The Living Dead” (2005), his memoir of life as an office worker, David Bolchover says that the amount of work he had to do was inversely related to the size of the company that he worked for. He started his career in a small firm where he had to work hard for no title and low pay. He ended working for a big company where he had a grand title and a fat pay packet but did almost nothing. But millions are perfectly happy to devote their lives to firm-financed leisure.

Hitherto skivers have focused on old-line companies where aging managers can be bamboozled with the claim that it is quite impossible to build an Excel spreadsheet in anything less than two weeks. But . . . the likes of Google and Facebook make the adult equivalent of children’s playgrounds . . . to provide their employees with an opportunity for relaxation between intense bursts of toil. But now that these companies are becoming bloated monopolists there is a perfect opportunity for canny skivers to take advantage of the nap pods without bothering with the frantic work. 

Cyber-loaf your way to the top ?     

(D) The final principle of skiving is that you should not allow your preference for leisure to limit your ambition. Too many skivers are still bewitched by the old myth that there is a connection between effort and reward. 

There are . . . studies of skiving -- it is most prevalent at the very top and bottom of the pay scale. 

The trick is to be brimming over with clever ideas for other people to execute! 

And when you become a manager your problems are solved: you can simply delegate all your work to other people while you spend all of your 'busy' days attending international conferences or “cultivating relationships with investors."

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St. Patty's Day -- Hardly Do We Know Ye

Lift your glasses high and let's share a toast to 

'getting real' about the yearly Day of the Green.

Source: National Catholic Reporter

http://ncronline.org/blogs/ncr-today/st-patricks-day-we-hardly-need-ye

Author: Ken Briggs
Date: March 18, 2015

It's time for St. Patrick's Day to go private. As a public hoo-haa it's lost whatever relevance it once had. 

If churches and community groups carry it on, fine. But let's not continue singling it out as the only ethnic veneration day on our broad civic calendar.

First, a disclaimer. I bow to no one in my gratitude for every bit of worthy character, courage and artistry that has flowed from the riches of Irish culture. Those have been inestimable gifts to me and my society.

However, the practice of celebrating that culture with the customary gusto and chauvinism, at least where those things are manifest, has gone far beyond the need to hail a once downtrodden people who suffered centuries of injustice at the hands of the British. Many other ethnic groups that have suffered similarly and worse have climbed out of their misery to occupy solid places in American life. While there is nothing wrong with extolling the virtues of any group, something untoward has crept into the special attention conferred on St. Patrick's Day.

We are too torn by race, class and ethnicity to risk inciting tensions further by seeming to play favorites. "Difference" doesn't have to imply "better" but human nature inclines it toward that. Though "better" can have an objective basis, it usually doesn't. So let's let it go to help foster that elusive "sense of community" we talk about. It had its place as a remembrance of liberation and an enactment of genuine Irish camaraderie, but the neighborhood watering holes where much of that emerged are disappearing fast and the parades no longer go through Irish precincts of large cities. For the most part, they're in the suburbs.

It also seems to me that our Irish friends aren't any longer attached to the dynamics and emotions that once gave the day relevance. The tale of St. Patrick has been sufficiently demystified to render the gallant Christian evangelist something less than a champion of a people mired in paganism. There is indisputably less of the kind of spiritual reverence around these days to shower on any outstanding figure, let alone one blurred by layers of legend. 

  St. Patrick: Pass that Jameson Please

Neither are the joys of drinking so widely promoted in an age of tragic autobiography and 12 Step programs. And the bank of political grievance, while not empty, is depleted to the point where co-existence has become possible and the flag need not be vigorously waved in defiance.

My unscientific sampling of Irish people found almost no excitement or meaning attached to the day. Not to say they wouldn't wear green or feel a streak of justifiable pride that it brings along with it. It's more that the socio-economic success of European Catholics, and the Irish in particular, have weakened the kind of bonding that immigrant strivers longed for and the freedom to be Catholic even though anti-Catholicism was still lurking. Meanwhile, waves of Latino Catholics arrive with no such ties.

What would St. Patrick say? A festive day to all of you to whom it is festive.

St. Patrick's Day, therefore, serves no significant purpose in its present form, except for profits, whether or not gays and lesbians march in the big New York and other parades. 

Keep it where there is real passion for things Irish, where it may still have meaning as something other than superiority, but let it become an ordinary occasion for leveling the playing field.

10 Life Lessons of Striking Rock Bottom

10 Life Lessons of Hitting Rock Bottom! 

Good reminders and some good counsel here. Click the link. -- Butch Ekstrom

http://huff.to/1yCZVEA

The Last Progress of Hyrum Craver (In Progress)

By  Butch Ekstrom

           During his final and most crazed days, whenever the decrepit Hyrum Craver  beheld his grown and beguiled son, Michael, who thought himself resplendent in his once gleaming and pliant, now stained and tacky, white suit, the old man concluded that a spanking bright archangel had come from some dark and foul corner of heaven in a counterfeit plot to deceive him with pity and assuagement. Like many dry drunks and violence-driven men who have aged nigh unto oblivion, Hyrum felt like the world and its hordes of lousy inhabitants owed him, owed him a lot, for his mischances and god-forsaken adversities without end, particularly his marriage to a dastardly, dumbed down, and achromic spouse named Winnie for forty odd years (who passed years back while snoozing in the bony embrace of a sicklied dark force), not to mention his ill-conceived brood of screwball, outright loony, adult children. Immobilized and left wheezing in his disintegrating mind and body, before he subsided in full, old Hyrum schemed to stick it out in his clapboard cabin through the decisive throes and malaise, in the company of his three bachelor boys, through thick and thin, because these children owed him a great debt for their provided-for lives and, being poor, near destitute and illiterate to the core, and no longer durable enough to fist bash his way out of any conundrum, Hyrum acceded that there was no one, and nowhere else, on the planet to which he could turn, not even his obstinate and churlish pair of baby girls, one of them with whom Hy had fathered his elder grandson who seemed to decline in body mass and drift more off base in the head every day.

          "The white angel might still save me," Hyrum thought as he wobbled in and out of feeble stages. But he had known little and had not conserved any Faith during his exhausting hard luck and strings of grinding setbacks, mostly the ones he could squarely and violently blame on his insufferable bosses, spouse Winnie, and his laggard offspring. 

          Agonizing and breath-burgling emphysema attacks wracked the father's aged constitution. Once Hyrum convinced the boys, Allen and Darren, that he would never, never tolerate imprisonment in a money-grubbing hospital or Medicaid pit -- like the relegation of an infirm senior hound dog to those cut-throats in a rescues' kennel -- shadowy and fouled by age old moans and groans, and incessantly smelling of amber, acidic body discharges lying wet in scattered bedpans. Allen and Darren at last ceased their sensible, if not purely affectionate and sacrificial pleadings, with Daddy, while Michael knelt in a corner to pray and contributed little to conversations. The challenged pair of siblings knew that there was a tawdry chunk of life insurance money, not that many dollars, but in vain fantasies it augured like a million bucks glimmering on a threadbare horizon; a paltry Social Security death benefit from the government; and maybe some other valuable pluses, presents under an undernourished and mottled holiday tree, which they could only imagine: perhaps an astonishing inheritance of goods or currency from unknown family straight out of God's mysterious bounty and goodness, or a stash of money long bagged and secreted that only Winnie or Hyrum could reveal and release, or such as eternal relief from the undodgeable burden of parental caretaking, Kentucky albatross-like -- so, life without Daddy anymore.  

         "Daddy, you hold on. You gonna make it, if you hold on," Allen and Darren repeated over Hyrum's sick bed several times a day. They sometimes patted his hands that folded together on top of the soiled, yellowed sheet and odorous ancient military blanket. They sought to sound convincing. 

         During early morning and late each afternoon, in the dimness of his emotional state, the father would watch the white-suited archangel rise from his kneeling post, brush particles off the knees of his pants, with a shaky hand straighten the elastic band over the right bicep of his suit jacket, lean over Hyrum, make the sign of the cross on himself, and and then rub a small circle with his pulsing thumb slathered with oil on his father's forehead. 

         This felt, each time it happened, like an affront. But would God's messenger, a pure archangel, cause him any harm?, Hyrum wondered.

         The earnest but creepy interloper, who invariably needed a close shave, whose otherworldly right hand smeared with the chrism shook with palsy, whose eyeglasses shrouded his dark and inset eyeballs, whispered to Hyrum conspiratorially, "Go be with God, old man."

          Hyrum gasped for oxygen. Lord, bring me peace, for I am a dying servant, and I have served you without fail and without complaint, you know that to be the truth, he prayed. Hyrum feared his dying breath, knew it would commence soon, and the old man replayed the inevitable and morose pantomimicry.

          "Daddy, you gonna need anything?," Darren would blurt late every evening. 

          These were the invariable, last words uttered among the assembly of Cravers just before the final lamp in the clapboard cabin, its mute glow illumining patches of the tamped down dirt under their sock feet and the deteriorated, meager furnishings that had not been dusted or polished since Winnie passed, got extinguished. 

          No answer came forth. Hyrum was off to the land of nod once the night's food got picked up and put away in the old icebox. Michael felt his way to his silent, little room, and would remain unassailed in his coveted retreat, even if he had to climb out his cracked window to relieve himself in the yard, during the night. Allen and Darren hastily closeted themselves in their beds so they could talk far into the night amidst their littered roomette, every inch of its coarse space overwhelmed by thick and accreting layers of repellent detritus from their childhood and adolescence and recent acquisitions, or plug in their separate pearl iPods with earplugs, before snorting and snoring in tandem, bodies side by side, faces bent toward each other, until another day in the Commonwealth dawned. 

+++   +++   +++

         Second thing in the ramshackle cabin every morning -- since Michael, the soundless creeper, the white-bedecked spirit, emerged first from his dark-of-night withdrawal, a spiritual stealth artist still a bit mussed and bleary from a long sleep, or like a penniless mime roughed up while rectifying sinful street spectacles and do-gooder despairing, in from the shadows of some big city, would pray over his parent, at whom he would stare with intensity -- two displeasing and unbridled howls sounded inside the main room. 

         Allen and Darren, resembling two overused and chunky sleeping bags stuffed and bumpy with over-ripe and castoff fruits from local fields, rushed hand in hand into the main cabin space, and disrupted everyone. The mop top boys, in their sick humor rudeness, pretended to be burnished fire trucks -- with their sirens blaring at 10 out of 10 volume settings -- to set the scene for the breaking of another Kentucky morn. 

         Yet on this occasion Michael who had knelt by Hyrum's pallet looked pale and stricken. Michael had placedhis hands on the edge of his father's bed, a hesitant outreach to check on and perhaps comfort one abrasive parent who had always been there but now was starved for breath, rigid, still as the deepest nighttime, and thus missing. 

__________________________

To Be Continued
__________________________




I'm still here, but yet I'm gone
I don't play guitar or sing my songs
They never defined who I am
The man that loves you 'til the end
You're the last person I will love
You're the last face I will recall
And best of all, I'm not gonna miss you.
Not gonna miss you.
I'm never gonna hold you like I did
Or say I love you to the kids
You're never gonna see it in my eyes
It's not gonna hurt me when you cry
I'm never gonna know what you go through
All the things I say or do
All the hurt and all the pain
One thing selfishly remains
I'm not gonna miss you
I'm not gonna miss you

             By  Glen Campbell, "I'm Not Gonna Miss You"

The Elevation of Conscience Over "Authority"

A midpoint report, from this month's headline making Synod of Bishops (in Rome), reveals that Catholic leaders are considering conciliatory language toward gays and lesbians, divorced and remarried Catholics, and couples who live together before getting married.

. . .  Pope Francis has deliberately engineered a lively discussion of issues. It will help shape the pontiff's legacy.

Reporters and commentators are producing a flurry of analyses mostly centered on the question of whether the synod portends a change in substance or merely a change in tone. Such is the abiding question of Francis' papacy.

 The Role of Individual Conscience

Conscience (versus) authority is the pre-eminent battle underlying the synod's debates. Even the dramatic turn from language such as "living in sin" and "intrinsically disordered" is a tacit nod to conscience over authority.

. . . Evangelicals have mostly accommodated birth control and divorce, but not premarital or gay sex. Mainline Protestants rarely enforce what weak prohibitions on premarital sex remain, and are more rapidly accepting gays and lesbians in the life and ministry of their churches.

The Catholic church, of course, is against all these things . . . But even the church's significant authority (in the sense of teaching, legislating, and ruling) is insufficient to bind its adherents' consciences to the fullness of its teaching.

. . . even for Catholics (who) put them in a perpetual state of mortal sin, individual conscience and church authority are often in fierce tension. 

Enforcement of sacramental exclusion tends to fall most frequently and publicly on divorced Catholics who have remarried without seeking an annulment. It seems uneven that perpetrators of heinous crimes -- including Catholic inmates on death row -- may receive Communion in prison (so long as they are not divorced and remarried) while civilly remarried Catholics are deemed unworthy to receive Communion for the rest of their lives regardless of how decently and ethically they live.

An Elevation of Conscience?

While homosexuality and remarriage are grabbing headlines, it is actually contraception that may be most relevant. Non-acceptance of teachings about contraception was decisive with most Catholics. . . . It largely explains the slow-but-sure Christian elevation of conscience over authority.

As a Protestant, I can live in the tensions.  . . . The Catholic church is a humane bulwark against a destructively permissive and pornographic culture where everything is commodified and nothing is sacred. To that end, perhaps it would be better if more Catholics submitted to church teaching.

But on some level, I remain grateful that Rome has no authority over my conscience. The trouble for the church is that a lot of Catholics think like I do.

Original article:  

http://ncronline.org/news/vatican/conscience-vs-authority-pope-francis-synod-family

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Book -- Table of Contents (10-1-14 Update)

Novellas and Stories:

Yellow Light Means Prepare to Stop

It's Senior Day -- Let's Go Krogering! 

The Time I Met the Real P.F. Chang

A Dark Star    (Novella)

Leaving Normal: A Family Fable    (Novella)

Nica's Selfie

The Emperor's Bloody Valentine

Constant Companions    (Novella)


The Last March of Hiram Craver  (In Progress)

The Deconstruction of Molly

Blackwood Timbers    (In Progress)

Yellow Light Means Prepare to Stop

Yellow Light Means Prepare to Stop

A New Story by Butch Ekstrom

The grouping of sounds . . . said something comforting to Inman about the rule of creation. What the music said was that there is a right way for things to be ordered so that life might not always be just a tangle and drift but have a shape, an aim. It was a powerful argument against the notion that things just happen.
                                                                                 -- Charles Frazier, Cold Mountain

Hello, hello, baby -- You called? I can't hear a thing. I have got no service in the club, you see see. What, what did you say? Oh, you're breaking up on me! Sorry, I cannot hear you, cuz I'm kinda busy. Kinda busy. Kinda busy. Sorry, I cannot hear you, cuz I'm kinda busy.

                                                                                  -- Lady Gaga, "Telephone”

  Because I try to balance my vulnerable senses and maintain my equilibrium during difficult times, I have been re-reading a book called Cold Mountain. It's about the chaos of battle, panic and loss, perseverance, and ultimately the hope for redemption in the old South during those bleak, defeating days after the Confederacy fell to the Union. Inman is the protagonist of the book. Yes, that's right -- Inman.

Struggling back up the slopes of Cold Mountain seemed the right thing to do since lately I have experienced (in my troubled mind), unwillingly and incessantly, patterns of four -- thoughts, phantoms, memories, fears, questions, or some combination thereof -- that collide and become jumbled up in that hidden but conscious part of myself that I call Me. Each package of four always I experience as a mysterious and discordant nexus. I know what I imagine is not real. But yesterday I believe I saw four jagged and stony pieces of meteorites, aimed at me like brutal, fleeing convicts scarily blowing in from the four corners of our minimum security galaxy, borne on perpendicular shafts of gray interstellar winds. Like the raw ingredients of an unholy zia, the four racing rocks seemed to have emanated from a secretive otherworldly desert. As yesterday gave way to nightfall, my thoughts became fixed on a collection of daring, logo-covered stock cars -- each was coming relentlessly toward me from north, south, east, west -- grill toward grill, bright and flashy headlights merging into a blazing white and blinding spotlight, as if a chicken at the crossroads battle had been green-flagged by an unseen and evil-minded mastermind. Goofy. Troubling. Unstoppable. As each of these episodes recedes in my imagination, with the postmodern and symbolic ambiguity of a David Lynch movie, I hear this song, Into the Great Wide Open, as unseen credits roll,

     They moved into a place they both could afford,
     He found a night club he could work at the door,
     She had a guitar and she taught him some chords,
     The sky was the limit -- Into the great wide open,
     Under them skies of blue. Out in the great wide open.
     Rebels without a clue.

So what will this day bring? I have a premonition that it might be my last. But that's probably just my paranoia at work. Why do I say so? Because here in the darkness before dawn . .  .
I am staring transfixed, sensing a hotness in me, at a strangely alluring piece of photo-art. It is a stylish picture made with a classy Nikon camera on a sizzling desert day near the Four Corners of the Southwest. It decorates the front panel of a CD jewel-case by a local rock 'n roll band. The group is called Dark-Eyed Juncos -- desert-dusty, sharp billed, and relentless scavenger birds of prey. They (the musicians) remind me of hardened, blue collar power trios like Cream, Rush, the James Gang, and other music legends.

This stylish picture's hues are primarily black, white, gray, and a color that makes me whisper (to myself) fuchsia, a lush pinkish hue. It depicts my friend -- and current stylist at a place called Dream in Color -- named June (who plays a dedicated-to-rock bass guitar for the Juncos in local clubs) and her two middle-aged male bandmates. She is perched in the middle. These men have crept close to her and appear to be whispering secrets into her left ear and the right. ('Here we go again. I feel the chemicals kickin' in. It's getting heavy and I wanna run. I wanna run and hide. -- So, what are you waitin' for? Take a bite of my heart tonight!) One man is dressed in a spotless and glimmering white linen suit, topped by a tilted white fedora. The other is clothed in a diabolical black frock coat, with a pirate-style do-rag (all black with white diamonds) tied over his skull and an equally black gentleman's stylish top hat over it all. 

June wears a stylish, but reasonably modest, gray dress, an enveloping shawl with long strands of fringe, and high cut gray-leather boots sharply decorated by straps and buckles. She sits outdoors whimsically (reminiscent of the mythical Alice, in a granny rocker, anxiously making her way back from Wonderland) on a fiery hot, improbably overstuffed easy chair of fuchsia out in the  burning Mesa Arts Center park. June has a 'curious girl' -- or is it perplexed and frustrated? -- maybe surprised but heart-aching -- expression on her face. Her finely etched eyebrows are arched high. For the moment, she seems pinned tight to her perch, like an avian corpse stuck on the board of a science experiment. The entire photo backdrop is a mysterious blend of pink and gray, like an airborne cloud tinted by a flaring sunset. In the middle, at the top of the photo, is a prominent number 928 (which seems harmless enough) on a plain black panel. Ambiguity and ambivalence drip like liquid drugs from this CD cover. What secretive temptations, what salacious thoughts, which indecent proposals, what hurtful assertions are being whispered into June's ears? What does she hear? (Does she hear anything?) Will that linen white or distrusting black one turn her head? I begin to imagine that June is, what now?, what?, shaking, rattling like an angry desert snake's tail, now coming apart while lurching back and forth hard -- a desert bird, a junco, ensnared, pinned, pulled, then ripped by the wings while anxiously attempting to take flight. -- I blink and everything goes white. In my thoughts, I fear that I have gotten lost somehow, not knowing where, on a vast and sunny expanse of Death Valley desert.

But somehow and for some clouded reason I suddenly stand erect and gaze blankly, feeling alone -- there is no searing heat, no numbing cold, no physical sensations at all -- outside the glass door of the cramped little hair salon of Cheri Casio (a stylist of mine from another lifetime -- but not that long ago . . . ), which I visited almost monthly for twenty years. I am looking through the wide pane of glass that holds the swinging door-frame and spreads out to effectively form most of Cheryl's storefront wall. It is a sultry and cloudy afternoon during the month of June. It is the year 2006. Forgettable days. Summer in the South is really coming on. A sense of irony wells up in me. The building that holds Cheri's cramped quarters is growing steadily warmer because the Louisiana humidity (a phenomenon constant and oppressive in the old South during deep Summer months) is beginning to build up like a radioactive cloud. Many of the little hair and fingernail shops surrounding Cheri's are dark and abandoned, haunted by the irrevocable loss of their lease-holders who fled the tornadic violence of Hurricanes Katrina and Rita, then the horrific flooding aftermaths those troublemaking ladies brought to town.
I notice that my in-glass reflection looks forlorn, I am shaggy and unkempt, dark half-moon circles of depression underline my eyes, my shirt is wrinkled. I read the name of Cheri's business painted in green and gold just above eye-level -- A Cutting Remark -- on the illuminated pane. I hesitate. I can't bring myself to push inside just like old times. I am leaving. Soon. It's going to come too soon! Is this the last time? "Probably," I whisper wistfully, to myself and gaze down. No one overhears me.

Cheri has been a kind and loyal (but fundamentally lonely and husband-hungry) friend, month after month, year after year (for almost 20 years, over 200 styling trips in, I told you). -- She's a Catholic girl raised on a Mississippi riverbank across from New Orleans. She exhibits great pride, precision and perfectionism in her work. Once a thriving business, she has now lost much of her clientele to the powerful storms that have come and gone. Cheri would invariably ask for my Dear Abby opinions, as we waited for her hair-dyes to seep into my roots and before she would go swinging her scissors around my head, about her recurring troubles with men both single and married.

That forlorn aspect I see in my reflection is beginning to feel like an anvil of guilt pulling down on my neck. Okay, I will not tell her that this is the last time before I leave. No farewell. No 'thanks a lot,' my dear. I have decided. Sorrow will rule the day. (Sadly I know this is the wrong thing to do.) I hold a tattered, paperback copy of the novel Cold Mountain, which I thought I was going to re-read as we waited in uncomfortable chairs for the hair color to take effect. -- Why? . . . Seven long months have passed in this damaged and reeling area, as it struggles back toward wholeness from being hurled into a barely civilized, medieval state by ferocious winds and deluges, still reeking with the acrid and messy smells of hurricane floods rising up from the bayou turfs. Each stressful day (all through 2006) devolved slowly into a long wake in an unsanitary civic funeral parlor, yes, a wake that refused to end at sunset, like a nightmare and unfunny parody the film Groundhog Day.  I tell myself:  Not one more painful utterance of  'So-long, pal. Thank you and goodbye. You've been great.' No more daylong wakes. Not one more clingy handshakes. No more awkward hugs and teary endings. So I turn my back wordlessly, regretfully, to A Cutting Remark. I feel sad beyond words. Walking toward my car, head down, like a preoccupied pall-bearer carrying a corpse toward a gaping hole that's already been dug. I know this is wrong, an immoral choice, a sorry turn of the screw. Perspiration drops trace from my neck down my guilty spine. I wonder if Cheri will forgive me for my disappearing act. I will try whisper an emotional 'I'm sorry,' ever the conman at work, into her ear someday.

Stop thinking this, I command. Then my imagination heats up, working hard, and I let slip to the ground the worn paperback of Cold Mountain -- as if I am stroke victim gone horrifically numb on the left side -- but I am not standing in the raggedy parking lot anymore. No, I standing upright again in a place far (perhaps very far?) away, inexplicably, that I have never encountered before . . .

but . . . a strong feeling of disbelief overwhelms me. I feel dizzy and claustrophobic. I have been been lurking motionless -- on a hard, gray industrial carpet -- in the dim and poorly finished-basement hallway of an indistinct office building. The walls need to be washed, having turned iron-gray mixed with urine yellow, an unattractive and cloudy tableau. I sense anger and disbelief. This basement smells like an ancient library. Well, in fact, it is an old library I notice. A high-tech office telephone with a complicated panel of buttons and lights sits archly on a thin white shelf by my side, a waist-high protrusion on the bottom half of an old dutch door. The message-waiting light on the phone flashes red brightly. -- On (red). Off. On (red). Off. On (red). Flash. Flash. Red. Flash. Off. Red (on) . . . Persistent. Unflagging. You've got mail are the disembodied words that echo through the hallway. Tirelessly the blinking continues. Eight voice messages have been captured in the terminus. Eight lights a flashin' . . . Seven calls a waitin' . . . Six words unheeded, I hum spontaneously, stupidly, to myself. The phone flashing red, off, red, off, red, off has been ignored for six months, perhaps more. This I somehow know. I judge it to be an evil sign.

Anger swells anew in my heart. This phone extension apparently belongs to any staff member. A catchy song -- Hello, hello baby. You called? I can't hear a thing! -- about telephoning pops into my head. Then, a nameless, faceless aged co-worker stands with me, seemingly oblivious to the fact that this situation is all wrong. Callous inattention and disrespect are words that preoccupy me.

I ask her, why did these calls come in? What did the callers want? Does anyone care?
In a hushed tone, the old woman worker tells me, ' . . . Well, you see, sir, the secret password was not retained. No one has it. Can't do anything about it. Not now.' 

Then, she shrugs. I feel like bursting because I am so mad. Liquid and toxic disdain floods my body and soul.

And who's gonna fix this? Who's gonna this mess clean up?, I demand to know, like a charging bull in small pen. Get I.T. pronto. No excuses. Fix it. -- Who's in charge here?

I appear to myself like the hollow shell of a court-martialed officer, clothed disgracefully in a tattered uniform, a failed leader with no conscripts, bereft of his battalion of Misfit Toys, sent back to an empty barrack. Big winds issue from empty caves, I remember, as an old saying goes.
The bland co-worker replies like a dispassionate junior officer, 'Why, you are, sir. You're in charge."

I blanch, my hands fly up, and I lean back quickly as if shocked by an electrical current. Here it comes again, I tell myself. There is a tingle creeping up my neck, then I get a rush of vertigo and quickly I feel turned upside down by an unknown force.

Then rapidly, incongruously, I go slip-sliding down a steep metal chute that has just opened, straight into the driver's seat of my frigid automobile, slamming down hard on my butt but seated upright, at the chute's bottom. I hear a bone-crunching sound. My tailbone area crackles in pain. After a single nervous breath, immersed in the green glow of my illuminated dashboard, a strange fantasy swirls to life –

I am driving my car to the New Orleans airport, block after urban block in the famed Garden District. It is a wickedly frigid and deeply dark winter morning. The neighborhood is enveloped by a pure blackness, an unexplored and underground cave. Silence reigns. Houses are dark inside and out. Many are abandoned, boarded up, water-scarred; some are tagged with painted-on graffiti, courtesy of post-Katrina search and rescue squads. Many tags are shaped like a cross (with a variety cryptic symbols around it -- these denote clues like 'empty house,' use caution, or 'abandoned animal on these grounds)' There are still bodies of people and animals lying, decomposing, in some of these places. But search teams have gone home and must be sleeping now in warm encampments of their own. A great many street signs are utterly useless. They lay face down, their poles flat on the easements by the sidewalks or wedged in messy gutters, toppled by the ravaging winds and floods those big, hurricane girls brought by.

My headlights shine like the eyes of a wild beast in this deep, unnatural darkness. On the deadly day of August 29, 2005, thousands of streetlights all over the city of New Orleans malfunctioned catastrophically. Their cycle of lights -- red-green-yellow-red -- disappeared. Traffic lights began to blink either yellow or red incessantly as the Hurricane Katrina headwinds at last relented. The maddening and incessant flashing for months upon months, most of the lights in the Garden District were yellow, lacked clarity and finality, hurled caution into the wind. It symbolized a taunting message from the inscrutable gods: 'Heads-up, trouble abounds. There be no safe passage during this life.' The taunting, like trash talk on the basketball court, went on month after month unremitting throughout the city streets. 'Fragile is life, vulnerable is humanity, we hold your fate in our hands, so vulnerable are you! At times the taunt went: 'Make your own rules. No more black and white, no more red and green. Nothing clear. Or make a break for it. Dare you, you loser.'

At a very slow speed under the morning darkness, worried about who or what might be approaching, I roll the car carefully to the storied intersection of Broadway and Freret, near historic but hurricane-ravaged Tulane University. On Broadway I am heading toward the airport. A shiny dark red Suburban emerges oversized, from darkness, to my right. It comes toward Broadway on Freret Street. It is on a right angle to me. Its brakes whine as it halts for the yellow light. I look over. The whole scene goes bright yellow, then dark, then . . . on each of the four street corners sheets of cold mists -- like an amber cloud of airborne illness -- settle down and seem to spread like paint over all.
I think I see Cheri sitting the Suburban's driver-seat, a thick black coat with a high collar is pulled up around her neck and dark hair. Her stare is red-eyed, menacing ungodly. I am very alarmed. The woman looks right through me. Her lips are closed tight but I sense her angry sentiment "Get away!"  She shakes her head back and forth, violently, to emphasize her bitter indictment. I spy an animal in the Suburban with her. Dark-tempered, black, and furry -- a big dog?, a gorilla?, a black wolf?, a unidentifiable predator from an untamed wilderness? The beast stalks around the interior of her SUV with menace, its full furry tail swishing madly. Momentarily I think of piney, Tennessee forests swaying in stiff winds in the story of Cold Mountain. A horrific sense of resignation wells up in me. I sigh -- but the whiny sound of my cold breath redounds to me, from the green glow dashboard, doleful and stale. The cold pinpricks my face like a spray of ice pellets. Heartbreak takes me. I feel lost. Alone in the dark. Freezing and lost.

A song springs up on my car radio -- "Animal" (In a millisecond, I fall into a confused and questioning state. This cannot be, not in truth! The properties of time, sound, and place bend precariously right before me. This recording will not be heard by anyone, anywhere, on any radio, until 2010. -- Yet, here it plays in the deeply dark winter cloud, an up-tempo departure anthem, much too uptempo for this deep, misty cold, and soulful pre-dawn –

     Here we go again, I feel the chemicals kickin' in
     It's getting heavy, and I wanna run
     And hide -- I wanna run and hide,
     I do it every time, you're killin' me now
     And I won't be denied by you
     The animal inside of you. Oh oh,
     I want some more. Oh oh
     What are you waiting for? 
     Say goodbye to my heart tonight.

I grunt a utter an Ugh. --I whisper more lyrics just heard: 'Hush, hush. It's us that's made this mess. So what are we gonna do?'

The unbidden song ends with an eerie fade, not a cold, definitive endstop. No music follows. Radio static buzzes around my ears as if the station has suddenly signed off. I reach for the FM buttons. I remind myself reprovingly that the radio in my vehicle no longer works.
The scratchy static dies away. Silence prevails. The distressing yellow lights keep blinking. Momentarily, (like a fool) I worry needlessly that a runaway Amtrak train, it's exhausted conductor catnapping at the controls, will come crashing through this intersection to mash me senseless, just as Cheri's fiery Suburban runs into me. A four-corner, four-direction disaster is what I imagine, I gasp and look away. I wish it would . . . No . . . I don't, I don't, I won't. Moments of inaction slip by. No other vehicles materialize. Silence reigns. This stupid shit is just never going to end, I shrug. Dejection pricks me. S.S.D.D., I tell myself -- same stuff, different day. 

(Time’s passage brings other prickly and unsuspected changes. Months after, my mind has cleared somewhat. I become aware that I am in a crowded lecture hall. I see a professor with a confident bearing standing behind a podium. I sit on the left hand margin among hushed classmates. She begins in a measured way to pose questions, matters deep to ponder, about post-traumatic stress disorder, as if it were a clinical disease. In her smooth and experienced voice, she develops a thesis. PTSD is a condition wherein someone victimized by a real life experience, which proves lastingly painful and horrific, is burdened, perhaps in an unalterable manner, by . . .

What? I say to myself. Confusion nips at my mind. I guess I fell asleep. Or my pitiful attention must have been wandering again, I surmise deceptively . . .

Yet I have undeniably heard certain words by the teacher behind the polished wood podium. What was it she said? The professor skims hastily over her prepared text toward a poignant endpoint, then glances at her wristwatch. Suddenly she seems pressed for time. I am still stuck on her previous point. She said – think about a Netflix movie that boots up time after time deep in someone's unlucky cortex in washed out colors. Purely there On-Demand, typically triggered by the pulsation of a hidden command button.

The lecturer asks them all to listen up. She is about to deliver her last, key point.

She peers down through a set of half-moon eyeglasses with shiny black rims, a very academic look. She holds her note pages steadily. She contends, 'Often an innocuous moment of sensation can be the tripwire, that hidden command that reignites the painful and life-changing experience one has had. Post-traumatic and disordered – p.t.s.d. to spell it out, a re-living of something one has suffered. It can come from the smoky odor of a house fire that turned a family's life into fear, despair, and cinders. It can be traced to an innocuous pinewood smell in a wardrobe or a piece of clothing steeped in dry cleaning fluid on a hanger deep inside a backroom closet. Or, as you all have no doubt heard, for many survivors locally of Hurricanes Katrina and Rita, it could be the storm-soaked reek -- just a whiff or two of some most putrid smell -- in a flooded home long abandoned or a motor car’s once flooded trunk now crammed with junk salvaged from a maelstrom. Finally, it could issue from sidewalk piles of ruined and discarded personal items: personal photos, kids' toys, broken knick knacks, decimated X-Box units, music collections, and stained castoff clothing, situated on easements in front of former family dwellings during the heat of a summertime.

The professor closes her notebook. She looks pale, grim, fretful. She looks up, lights glare across her half-moon glasses, and scans the lecture hall briefly. Silently she tucks her precise notes under an arm and strides out of the room without looking back. I notice one phrase -- author unknown -- scrawled onto a dry erase board behind the wood lecturn. It reads: 'Let us learn the lesson of the The Great Deluge and its rainbow. God will be with us. We've come too far to turn back now.'

I sit, in a dead-stop, at the nexus of Freret and Broadway, a crossroads, a zia some would think. It seems like time to fly. Gotta go, bro, I tell myself. Delta is ready when you are! 'We love to fly, and it shows!' -- The amber street lights caution against rash action; they flash without sentiment: Go. Don't! Go. Don't! Go? Don't! . . . . Sick stuff. Survival. Just doing their job. It's all too confusing. Prepare to stop, or prepare to fly?

Like in a poorly plotted horror movie, the false image of Cheri with the red eyes fades into the deep black mist. On all 4 corners, the absurd yellow blinking will go on for months more.

I think, ‘Can't anybody in this effing town repair anything? Can't anybody tell me clearly what I should do? How in the world. . .?’

Suddenly, I flinch. My cellphone vibrates somewhere deep inside an interior pocket in my hefty overcoat. Phone call? Text message?

      Hello, hello, baby. You called? I can't hear a thing.
     What, what did you say? Oh no, you're breaking up on me,
     So sorry I cannot hear you, I'm kinda busy . . . –

A message at 4 in the morning? No. Impossible. It couldn’t be . . . My heart thuds. My stomach rolls. I feel that dizzying vertigo again, deeply spooked. I feel certain that I know who's trying to reach me. Yes, in fact, I'm sure of it. Here in the depths of darkness, with the promise of a possible dawn not far away, with my smartphone at my service, this cannot end well. In my mind I hear the twitchy trill of the future song again:

     Here it comes again
     I feel the chemicals kicking in
     And I wanna run and hide
     I wanna run and hide:
     Say goodbye to my heart to-night 

And then -- without warning -- once more I find that I have been placed transfixed, a hotness rising like a cloudy mist in me, at a strangely-alluring piece of photo-art on a CD cover. The number 829 looms at the top of a black-slate panel, as do the ominous words A Dreamer's Remarks. I recall that this scene at some other time seemed harmless enough. But now, with alterations, it feels like the foretelling of a cruel coincidence, or a secret code? I ponder. Is this supposed to be funny, some kind of joke? I feel anger and resentment. But I smile in resignation because reality can be stone cold, unforgiving, unyielding. In my mind I hear the tinny echo of  Tom Petty’s tune The Great Wide Open spark sickly to life. It’s coming from some cavernous space -- an empty house or deep cave shaft, I wonder -- that seems far away.

In an entrancing photo on the CD cover (the one which I am studying), there is an oddly appealing scene of three people, obviously a trio of rock 'n roll band mates. One man is in spotless linen white, with a spotless white fedora; one man is cloaked in a black frock coat with a black do-rag (covered with white diamonds) tied over the top of his head, and the last figure, a pretty female, named June, dead-centered in the picture, a Summer girl, wears big silver hoops for earrings, stylish gray clothing and high boots. She appears to be tight-lipped, perhaps curious, perhaps alarmed or perhaps grateful, as she heeds the words that one male companion whispers secretly in her ear. Yes, what is that secret, June? What do you hear?

I wait anxiously for clues: a whisper, a knowing glance, a receptacle into which meaning might be poured. But no one says anything. Perhaps things do just happen.

                                                            

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Soundtrack.  Click to listen:  "Animal," by Neon Trees

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