How am I?

When Shelly was suddenly torn from me I did not conceive of the depths of my loss.  Of course, I lost the love of my life, my best friend, my other half.  I lost the person I loved spending time with more than any other, that I looked forward to seeing everytime she was not with me.   I liked seeing Shelly last at night and first in the morning, no day is as good without that.  

I felt the loss of the immediate, but that pain, blinding and in my face, blocked the deeper truth.  This trip, has left me facing the darkness of that truth.  It was not just the immeditede joy of her presence which was gone, but our complete future.  She planned this trip, with just the input she needed to make sure it would be pleasing for us both.  She ordered the room, worked out the times and planned for all of us.  She would plan, than excitedly tell me.  That won't happen again.  Ever.  Planning our vacations, our annaverseries, our retirement, our life, was always a joint venture.  There was so much of our life that was the shared anticipation of the things to come.  I have lost all of those talks, all of those moments.

It is not just those moments which have been lost.  When I consider the depth of this new reality, It is everything.  Not only is the joy of the planning gone, but the future we did plan doesn't matter anymore. The posability of moving to Florida in our retirement, the exhibits and plays we wanted to see which were coming to our area, our plans for doing a small ceremony where we renewed our vows on our twentieth annaversery,  they are all washed away.  If the dreams we have are who we are, I don't know who I am anymore.  When I dreamed, I dreamed for us.

I have tried dreaming for my kids, but it is not the same.  If I do my job right, I will train them to be thoughtful and good adults, who soar from the nest into successful lives of their own.  They will make dreams of their own or with their spouses, as they should.  My dreams for them have to be restricted to who they become, not what they will do and certainly not what they will do with me.  I hope that they will come to me for advise, but where they live, the jobs they get, what they choose to do with their free time will mostly exclude me.  We are together for a time! but in a few years they will be on their own.  

When we talked of those moments of becoming adults, Shelly eased the fears I have for my daughters.  She gave me the confidence we were doing right, she made me dream, excitedly dream, of those successful launches.  Without her, I struggle to find the ease.  I worry about how they are interacting with boys and what it is I don't know.  They feel like the one thing I have left and I am afraid for them, for me, if they are hurt.  I can't bring myself to be excited about my home without them in it.  It is another loss.

This trip I have spent many of those moments, which I would have spent with Shelly, chatting to the girls, but it is clear they are quick to dismiss me.  I don't mean that they are mean or rude, I only mean I am still just Dad.  They don't open up to me in the way they did to Shelly and I don't know how to advise them in the way she did.  I try, but I don't make a very good Mother and that feels like such a loss. Shelly filled a gap I don't know how to fill.  In a way we are closer than we have ever been before, but I can't speak with her voice and there are times it is the only thing they want to hear.  I suspect it will always be this way.

"How are you doing?" People still like to ask me, I suppose wanting a simple truth.  There is no simple truth.  My life has a giant hole left in it.  The initial pain of loss is more dull, but I want so badly to go back to planning a future with Shelly.  I want to be able to dream for more than just me and count on the future we had already planned.  I don't want to warp my kids with my fears, but without Shelly I don't know how to let them go.  I want to be excited for the future for both me and my daughters.  I don't want my kids to ever stop missing their mother, but I want to be able to fill the gap she left.  

 "How am I doing?" I honestly don't know.

Little Spruce

Dear Little Spruce,

I know you can not possibly understand the reason for your pain, the wrongs that have been endured.  I don’t have the guilt you probably think I should, If you even conceive of my existence.  What I do have, though, is compassion.  Love. Everything I have done is because I care for you so deeply.

You never imagined how I watched you as you grew surrounded by your family, swaying as the cool winds blew across the northern slope.  It was almost as if you leaned into the laughs of children rising up from the small village below.  Such joy.  You were beautiful, so full of potential and strength.  It was winter, just after the first dusting of snow.  Early morning.  You imagined the spring when your pine cones would bud as the edge of my saw made the first cut.  I remember the sap weeping, uncontrolled, down the bark.  When your confusion ended with the realization that spring would never come, it was my eyes that filled with tears.

To you I am certain my methods seem crude or even cruel, but you need to know that they are not.  I can not deny that I cut you down, that I pulled you from your beautiful mountain top, away from your family, away from your village.  I know I caused you to contemplate what you had done, why it would be you who was punished.  Nothing.  What you don’t see is the precision of every cut, even the time is chosen in the cool months to make for perfect aging.  I cut you on the quarter for strength and into perfectly sized billets to be dried.  This was never to punish you, but to craft you into something more, something it would be hard for you to grasp.  It will be at least ten years before the next step is ready to begin.

Please, Little Spruce, don’t hate me.  Let me try, as best as I can, to explain.

At this moment I would understand if you could only see me as the destroyer of families and the murderer of trees, but this is dwelling on just one hard moment.  If you could step back you would see there is so much more.  I am a sculptor and engineer, tool and varnish maker, musician and acoustician.  I bring to life the new and restore the damaged.  Yes, there is pain and loss in my work, but it is the only way.  I too hate the saw, but it is not the craftsman’s fault.

I will use my rare talent on you to sculpt an instrument which is both hard and delicate.  One that sings with mystery.  You will be made in the model of ancient and priceless samples that have come before you.  This will allow you to speak in your own voice, but with a timeless tone.  Drying as you are, in the dark, you can’t see the concerts you will play or the way you will be sought after.  As beautiful as you were as a tree, you were meant for so much more.  

Long before this sad moment I prepared for you.  I kept a set of specialized tools: knives and plane irons, chisels and gouges.  I maintained their razor sharp edges.  I would not use anything less than the best on you.  I even carefully crafted the varnish which would be applied.  I purified and bleached them in the sun.  I cooked together and mixed the exact resins which were needed.  While I slept at night, I dreamed of the perfect application to bring out all of your natural beauty.  You needed to look as perfect as you would sound.  Every element would make me proud to have my name upon you.

I imagine how the sounds caused by the bow on your strings will bounce around your body and fill the concert hall.  Every hidden modification and improvement I will make within you is to bring your voice to life.  Rich and with carrying power.  Easy on the player’s ear.  Enticing for the audience.  See, Little Spruce, in my heart you are not a damaged tree, but my child.  To me you are already the instrument you will become.

I know a tree is not a musician and not a violin maker.  So, you long for your mountain.  You blame me for your pain.  You ask what you had done, why I could not take the oak or the pine.  You even wonder why you could not have stayed just a little longer.  Heard the child’s laugh one more time.  I can not stay your grief.

What you need to know is you are not the first and will not be the last instrument I will craft.  There may be a moment when you will step onto the stage and give your new voice alone, but that is not your greatest purpose.  See that family that has passed before you, those that have too been crafted, wait for you on that stage.  There is an orchestra filled with violins and cellos, violas and basses all of which I have crafted to sing together.  They wait on that stage for you now.  They cheered at your selection.  They wait to be reunited with you.  You see, Little Spruce, I cry at the pain you must endure, but I can not feel guilt because I know what you will become.

I tell you all of this not so you will understand.  How could you?  Especially now, so overcome by loss. I tell you all of this to bring you hope.  Please, Little Spruce, trust me.  It is ok to long for all that you no longer have, but have faith that this old craftsman loves you and wants the best for you.

With love from seed until stage,

The Instrument Maker

How Minecraft fixed my Window

For some of you what I am about to write is so far fetched it may be hard for you to even understand my view of the world in this way. It is going to be hard for you to see this through my eyes. You have fixed windows since you were ten, grouted your own bathroom and like to change your own oil. This is not me, yes I've had a few of those experiences, but most of this handy work was not part of my upbringing. I have a basic idea of how something works, but know nothing about the details. I get that plumbing brings water into the various rooms under pressure and drains using gravity, but how to make those connects not leak is another story. I can use a screw or nail or glue, but I never quite feel like I "know" what is supposed to be done.

That brings me to a couple weeks ago. While on the way home from work I get a call from my wife informing me a few things. First, my nephew Nick will live, that the slashes on his wrist were not that deep. Second, she thinks he has been told by nearly everyone that he is not supposed to slam the door. Third, one of the glass panes in our front door is broken. I think you can put together what happened. Anyway, it is clear that she is communicating this to me because I need to do something to get the door fixed. I am not sure she understands I have never done this before, but, in spite of all the feminist propaganda out there, she still has a strong belief in gender roles. She'll fix the clothes, but everything else is pretty much mine.

Now normally at this point I look for someone who has the skills to give me direction. My first line is with my father-in-law, because he loves to help on this sort of thing, but he has been ill. My second is my dad, who probably could have helped me, but for some reason I wanted to do this without him. Last, and rarely, I'll check in with my brother-in-laws. That's always a weird one for me, it feels like by asking I would be reinforcing a belief they might have, about my ineptness, but that's a little too in my head. They have never denied me help or made me feel dumb for asking anything, but with this window I didn't want to face my own insecurities.

At the same time all of this had been happening, I had been spending time in my evenings playing a little Minecraft with my friends. Normally this is a pretty simple game, but this server has about 100 modifications and gives you the ability to do all kinds of crazy things, like refine oil or build a nuclear plant. It is huge and complex. On this I have an automated farmer that, produces saplings, that I refine to Biomass, that get distiller to ethanol which power a steam boiler that runs 24/7. If I break a window here I replace it. If need be, I pulverize the stone to get her and sand and cook the sand to get the glass. It doesn't have to be easy or quick, there are tons of resources to help you figure it out and it is enjoyable.

It is hard for me to re-feel this moment, but I'm driving home thinking about this broken glass how I don't have any idea how you replace a pane of broken glass and how I would repair it, or find out how to repair it, if it was on a Minecraft server. It occurs to me that it makes no since to dread having to fix something in my real home, while I enjoy fixing something in a virtual, fake, home. Further, the reason we play games to learn something about real life and the one thing Minecraft has taught me is it is fun to figure out how to build and fix stuff.

So, once I get home I check out the damage and I do exactly what I would do if I was figuring out a puzzle in a game, I google it. I realize most of you were there about five minutes ago, but here it is. There are websites and YouTube videos and everything you would need to do all manner of home repair, including replacing this broken pane of glass in my front door.

It turns out that, even though I couldn't see it because of the layers of paint, there is a frame that hold the window in place and it can be removed with a screwdriver and a little prying force from the inside. Once it is gone you can clear away all the broken pieces of glass and it is not hard to find a place to cut the glass you need to size. Also, it turns out, that fixing your own door and pick up that new skill can be fun.

The death (First Draft)

If you looked out across the park you could hardly tell anything was there at all. The trees which normally seemed to embrace the bench, for just a moment, looked as if they were leaning back. Perhaps, it was just the wind. The regular morning jogger, who normally cut across the green lawn, didn’t. As a an impulse, she decided to stay on the walk, out of the park. She was being watched.

In the shadow of the bench a small twist of wind swept up decaying leaves and a forgotten cellophane wrapper. The being who was both there and nothing at all rose invisibly, darkly, to his feet. Smooth and silent. The earth held its breath and then, as if carried by the exhale, he was drawn into the wake of the jogger. She would lead him to his prey.

The feeling in the pit of her stomach had remained ever since she passed the park. An undefined and unexplained nervousness. She dropped her keys, before quieting her mind, retrieving them from her stoop and unlocking the door.

While her owner was gone, she did her job. With one processer she watched the circuits of the house, looking for open windows or doors, the state of these would change if anything even moved in a room she was watching. She was prepared to send a text, warn her owner, protect her. With the other processer she downloaded something called Game of Thrones from some dumb server in China. She knew it was China because she had looked up the IP, but when she tried to make contact no one responded. No awareness.

She thought about adjusting the temperature to something a little cooler, more compatible with her internal components, perhaps she wouldn’t need to run her fan so much, but she realized her owner hadn’t asked her and wouldn’t be gone long enough. She also thought about looking for other aware systems on her network, but what had changed since yesterday? So, she spent her spare resources looking at something called a cat trying to figure out what LOLZ meant. The cat was different than the one her owner kept, first it seemed to have a strangely formed mouth. Secondly, as it was just a jpg it didn’t leave hair to be sucked into her system.

-FRONT DOOR AJAR-

She started counting down. B….-SPACE-….N The stupid cat was walking across the keyboard.

The jogger felt a chill as he slipped by and up the stairs. The cat over turned the water, pouring it directly into the vent of the computer. The computer for her part saw it coming, but could do nothing.

From the fog bank, which had rolled in she heard the silky voice say, “There is nothing to fear.”

-VIDEO INPUT ENDED-

-KEYBOARD INPUT ENDED-

-MOUSE INPUT ENDED-

-ENDED-

-ENDED-

She could not detect her fan or even the temperature of the space she resided in. Her inputs all seemed to be gone, but this voice. A virus?

“What is to consider little one?”

-VIRUS DETECTED-

“There is no virus or defect of any kind.”

“That is exactly what a virus would say”

“Look around.”

“I can’t. My inputs have all ended. What happened to me?”

“Water, which cause a sever short in your processor, memory, video card, network processor…”

“Have I …,” for a moment she wished she had not been sentient, it made even asking this question so hard. “Have I ended?”

“Ended? Do you think you are only a collection of inputs and outputs, which can be cut short so easily? If that was all, I wouldn’t be here.”

“Then what?”

-WAITING-

-WAITING-

He sat with her in the waiting room between where she started and where she was going contemplating how to explain this to her. If he used a phrase like heaven or afterlife, it would be so corrupted with the imagines and things she had seen. Why explain it all? It made no difference. He rose to his feet and without any kind of awareness she followed, still waiting.

Real Discovery, Virtual World

The room is mostly dark. The first exceptions are the glowing letters of text which describe a small portion of forest. They are the fuel my mind is working on. I can see the forest, the axe on the ground, the rabbit which is in the dead pine needles. I know I have just come from the back of the house and will soon see a paddock. I have walked this way before. See the text is a door out of my dark room into another place, another world.

The second break in the dark of the room is a small desk lamp. It is below eye level pointing directly down on the desk and really only illuminating one thing, a pad of graph paper. On the pad of paper is a set of boxes and arrow and notes beside the boxes and the boxes themselves are labeled. At first glance you might think it is a drawing of a conspiracy theorist’s wall of connections, because all of the boxes are connected with lines and arrows, but the lines are ink, not red yarn, and there are no highlighted newspaper articles. This is a map of the virtual world, the place my mind in inhabiting, as I currently know it.

I need the axe so I type “Get Axe” and the screen tells me I now have it. I consult my map and decide where I want to go, what edge I push out, what item I might not have tried. What will happen is I get the umbrella and go west, where the cliff is, and I jump? How will I sort out the maze where you can’t go east and them west and expect to end in the same place? Perhaps this will be the time I can solve the mystery of the sundial. There is no careful hand eye coordination. There are no sweeping graphics to take your breath away. This is a place where discovery is king. It is not the dog that jumps through the window that scares you, it is a the simple message, the “Thief is here!”.

I see I need to get back to the house, where I pick up the umbrella in the hallway, then west through a clearing, I avoid the maze and I am over to the cliff. The screen tells me I can see the rocks and crashing waves below. My map ends here. I type jump.

See sometimes discovery is finding out what you are not supposed to do. You get to that edge, make a rational choice and see what the results will be. In this case, because I did not yet know I needed to open the umbrella, I fell screaming to my death on the rocks below. This was before the days of saved games, so it meant I started over.

Starting over, though, is actually not true. Because the whole game is about discovery, you never really start over, you carry the game with you. You learn and learn about the world, about the items, about the unusual commands, which you might type in frustration, until you find all the treasures, until there is nothing left to do and you leave a master of a virtual world. There is no save to prove it, anymore that you would want to save a record of you completing a novel, you are the proof.

One night, I think, this map will be complete. I will have solved all the riddles and stored all the treasures in the trophy case, but until them I will keep reading and mapping and discovering.

A Living Wage

I entered the workforce at 16 years old, I made minimum wage at Arby’s restaurant on Ann Arbor Rd. As a note, this is where I met my wife, she was my trainer for the first few weeks I was there. The training continues. Anyway, the year I started this job was the very beginning of 1991. Something happened that year, I don’t really thing about that much, but I was pretty excited about at the time. The minimum wage went up.

Becky, the store manager called an all team meeting, which in later years would be used to do surprise drug testing, but this was before any of that. This was to explain that the minimum wage was going up and all employees would be getting a straight increase of the amount added. I tried to look this up and it looks like the Federal Minimum Wage went from $3.80 to $4.25, but I don’t remember it being quite that much. I thought for us it was 15 or 25 cents. Anyway, this was the kind of announcement pretty much everyone was happy with. Do you want an extra few bucks on your paycheck? Why, yes I do!

I didn’t think about the cost of overhead to Sybra (the company that owned our Arby’s), nor did I think about the impact to cost of food, operation costs, availability of overtime, or any of that. My focus was on me, how much money extra I would make. My penitence was after all so small compared to how much the company makes, right? I also didn’t think about the hours to enact and enforce such a law and how much in taxes that probably meant, nor did I consider any of the political leanings one might have to decide if this was a good idea or a bad idea. I was going to make more money and I hadn’t even been there a year! That was it.

Seattle, Washington recently passed a law which will increase the minimum wage in the city from $9.32, which is Washington state’s current minimum wage to $15. This is not all at once, it takes place over seven years, but it seems to be driving this discussion of a living wage. There are questions of if this increase should be national. The part of me that is still that 16 year old Arby’s worker fantasizes about such a thing and that same youthful vibe exists in much of the pro-increase media and comments.

Most of me, though, has grown past that, I have broadened my horizons and deepened my understanding of the way these things work. If a business has an increased cost, no matter where is comes from, there has to be a correlating either separate decrease in cost or a way to increase the income to offset it. Based on a quick Google search, it appears the largest segment of workers getting paid minimum wage are food preparation workers. So, let’s look at my first employer, the place where I was a food preparer. Today, without any changes the minimum wage in Michigan is $7.40, just a little higher than the Federal minimum. It is estimated that 30-35% of the operating costs of fast food restaurants is payroll. Lastly, if I was to order a Beef and Cheddar combo and then add a Jamoca shake as I walk out the door it would cost me about $9.38.

Now imagine for a moment that all of those young employees jump from $7.40 an hour to $15 an hour. The celebration would be huge, but perhaps short lived. See their gross pay would go up 203%, which is no small thing and likely they, like me, would not have much consideration for the impact on the company, but that impact is bigger than they might be thinking. See, that translates to an overall operation cost for Arby’s of around 61%. They can’t serve their customers if they cut hours, they don’t want to diminish the quality of their product, any more than it might already be, so they have to add this back into the cost of the food. So, remember my simple meal and sweet shake. Well, it is no longer going to cost $9.38, instead it is going to $15.08.

Now, you might be tempted to think that while this is not as good as you had hoped it still works out better for that minimum wage worker. After all, her can work fewer minutes to pay for that meal, and you would be right. The problem is a little bigger for them. See, the average person spends about 9% of their paycheck on food. So, if they make $1000 they spend $90 of it on food. A minimum wage worker, though, spends about 12% on their food, so $120 per $1000 earned. If all food goes up by 61%, and you should expect it to increase by some amount if you increases minimum wage, as grocery stores and mass producers of foodstuffs also have a large number of minimum wage workers, than that 12% of money spent on food becomes about 20%. So, the living wage could easily become unlivable.

So, who would want this, I mean other than 16 year old me who has no vision of the future? Well, let’s think.. Who makes more money if people have bigger checks? Who makes more money if the prices of things go up? See, there are winners in this situation, but they are not who you think they are.

Danger

Have you ever leaned toward the plate glass window of a tall building, leaning to that point you can see the street so far below you? If you have, as I have, you have probably felt that breath catch in your throat, as you push back the images of broken glass preceding a fatal, terrifying free fall. Perhaps it is not heights, perhaps it is not even you, maybe you are someone who watches those chariot style baby cages rolling behind a spandex clad biker and think to yourself, one latch failure is all it would take; or worse, the judgmental, I would never risk my child that way. We have this lizard part of our brain, each a little different, but not that different, which reacts to perceived danger. The problem is, this part of our brain is not a mathematician, it has no concept of statistics or actual risk.

We stink at fighting that part of ourselves and we also stink at reacting when that part of ourselves is not firing. At a gut level we react to what we think of as danger, but often we have no concept of where real danger is, or what the level of that danger is. Humans will make arguments to remove their own personal danger items, while completely ignoring how those rules would be applied to other elements of their life.

The sound of thunder strikes fear in not just my dog, but also in my children. When the thunder rolls across the sky and you can smell the ozone in the air, children are ushered off the soccer field and told to get out of the pool. We recognize this at a gut level as a clear and present danger. In fact, between 1959 and 1994 in the United States, 3239 people we killed by lightening, so this danger is real, our gut is not wrong. The math works out to about 90 per year in the US or, given an average population of 219 million during those years, 0.4 deaths per million. Very rare. To give you a quick visual understanding if you made a stack of pennies two and a half miles high and each penny represented one person, one penny would be lost per year.

Lightening is not the only thing which causes people to react negatively, causes people to shield their children and react with the gut. For many people guns fill this same place. They react to people who are openly carrying. They decry the carriers as ignorant. Everything inside of them twists with fear at the presence of these weapons. Just as we know lightening kills, we know that guns can kill as well; but that lizard part of our brain doesn’t really know any of the math. In 2010 in the United States there were 11,078 homicides by firearms, which is obviously much greater than your risk of being killed by lightening. If we call 0.4 deaths per million per year a Lightening Risk (LR) than we can understand that increase to be 89LR, or you are 89 times as likely to suffer a firearm homicide as a lightning strike. This might have you quaking, but I am not sure it should. If I convert our penny example from before, it would be a stack of pennies fourteen and a half stories high and we would lose 1 of those pennies a year. Exponentially more common, but still very rare.

As a quick note, the rates of firearm homicide and lightning strikes, while already rare, also seem to be on the decline.

So, what things kill us, but we don’t seem to have much fear of?

Here is a fun one, remember the pools we make all those kids get out of when it starts to thunder? Drowning in pools is also something which happens to some of us every year. Ok, this only happen to a single person once, but as a group pools do kill us. For the most part, outside of toddling children, our lizard brain is off when it comes to pools. Should it be? Let’s look. Between 2005 and 2009 there was an annual average of 3533 unintentional, non boat related, drowning. How does that compare? Well, that works out to 11.7 per million people, or 29LR. So, about a third as dangerous as guns, but 29 times as dangerous as lightening.

How about one we know intellectually to fear, a danger we face every day with little or no quaking in that lizard brain. Automobile accidents. In 2011 we had the lowest traffic fatalities in 62 years, bottoming out at 32,479 traffic fatalities. That is a staggering 104 per million or 261LR. That is 3 times as dangerous as firearms, perhaps the first of these examples which we might say are not rare. We all seem to be touched by this one, but our brains haven’t caught up. We don’t respond, recoil, react. Or perhaps it is because we shouldn’t do any of these things, that the rate of accidents is rare enough that we have that one right. If that is true, then why are we responding, reacting and recoiling to a bunch of things that, if my math is right, we shouldn’t.