Personal Narrative

It Could Have Been Me

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Had my plans, or the jihadists’ plans, been altered just a bit, I could have been up on the WTC tower when it was struck and then fell. I would have been a tourist with my wife and infant daughter stopping in NYC on our way to visit my in-laws in Europe. We could have been part of the death roll. Had my parents rolled out of bed a few hours earlier to take our cousin on a more ambitious tour of Battery Park, they could have been on the death roll, crushed in a subway car passing under the site. I would have been getting a yearly invitation to come to NYC and mourn. How do those who actually get the invitations ever put their lives back together? I can’t imagine the yearly ritual of publicly ripping your emotional scabs off as the world watches.

I suspect that there are tens of thousands just like me. People who visited the area just a bit before or who had been planning to be there but for random chance, fortunate circumstance. Such things change you forever but nothing actually happened to you. Fate hands you the cruelest of brushback pitches and you don’t know what to do with it. It’s deadly chin music but not deadly for you. Do you step back from the batter’s box or crowd in even tighter, daring fate for a repeat? Neither attitude seems right. I claim no special insight or wisdom.

Year after year, people gear up for 9/11 memorials. They’re not for me. They shouldn’t be for me. But they could have been for me. And my heart is still unsettled every year around this time when I look at my older boy who might have been an orphan and my youngest who never would have been.

3,650 Days

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Three thousand, six hundred fifty days, more or less,depending on leap years since the end of the 20th century. Oh, I know, calendar-wise, only a year or two off. But we don’t count strictly by the calendar. Afterwards, we count by events. Myself, I have the feeling that the 19th century didn’t truly end for good and all until 1914. That’s when the 20th century began, in the muddy trenches of WW1. All the previous comfortable understandings and optimistic assumptions of the earlier world were shattered right along with three monarchial dynasties, over the course of four years. When it was over, the world of the time before seemed impossibly far removed, to those who could remember it a number which, as the decades passed, became steadily fewer, until that old world was entirely the stuff of books, paintings and relics, rather than true human recollections. We eventually adjusted and accepted the new reality of things. The old way, and the shattering events in which it passed became a date on a monument, a paragraph in a history text, a book on the shelf.

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Weather Girls

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Every day I get up at Oh Dark Thirty and trudge to the salt mines to make a few kopeks to keep the bill collectors at bay. I usually pick up a sugary soda (real sugar, mind you) and a couple of hard boiled eggs on the way, make my way to work and plunk myself down to blast away at my typically filled inbox. I get more done in the two hours before my employees show up than I do the rest of the day.

Along with my breakfast of champions described above I give myself one other guilty pleasure to start my day off. The Weather Girls. Every day I get my forecast delivered by several cute Asian ladies (I think these are actually Taiwanese). The forecast is always wrong, the cities are out of order and I don’t understand a word of what they say. Like it matters.

Today’s forecast was special. Tell me if you can see anything, well, unusual in this clip.

[youtube Y5AMRNYuqyk Weather Girls]

Felice Benuzzi, No Picnic on Mount Kenya

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Last Sunday I got a few minutes of peace and I finished No Picnic on Mount Kenya by Felice Benuzzi. (Dirt cheap copies at the link.) This is a very good book. It is set in 1943. Benuzzi is an Italian POW in a British prison camp in Kenya, way the Hell out at the butt end of nowhere. He is bored to the edge of psychosis by prison life. In his pre-POW life he had been a mountain climber in the Alps. Off in the distance, he can see the glacier-girt pinnacle of Mount Kenya. Benuzzi falls in love with the mountain. He is overcome with a desire to conquer it, to possess it, to make it his own. He enlists two fellow POWs to assault the mountain. They makes a bunch of mountaineering equipment under the very noses of the askari guards. The three men escape, climb the mountain — or at least one of its peaks — and return to the prison camp. Of course they are punished for this escapade. But, to their credit, the British take a sporting attitude toward it all, and even send a team up to confirm the prisoners’ claim. I am leaving out a lot of important and engrossing details, of course. Benuzzi’s descriptions of the ascent and its hardships, the cold and hunger, the flora and fauna, and POW life, are all very well done. You have to love these Italians. The war was a distraction, an absurdity they were stuck with. They had no interest in it. The flag they plant on the mountain is the monarchy’s flag, not the fascist flag. They are Italian patriots who despise their own stupid, fascist government and the stupid, losing war it had gotten them mixed up in. A very sane attitude, actually.

Recommended.

(I got this book at Powells the previous weekend. I took the kids down there and said, OK, everybody gets ONE reasonably priced book. And this is the one I found that was reasonably priced. I am glad I subjected myself to the same discipline I imposed on them. In this case, it worked out well.)

(I note also that one of my heroes Halford J. Mackinder, in addition to inventing the idea of the Geographical Pivot of History, was also the first guy to make it to the top of Mt. Kenya, in 1899. A most excellent example of Victorian heroics, a fit companion to the mountaineering exploits of Sir Francis Younghusband. Mackinder’s own book on the subject, The First Ascent of Mount Kenya has now come to my attention. I will make it my own, possess it, conquer it.)

Bureaucracy and Business Regulation

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A friend of mine, who is a running enthusiast and lives in a red state, has for the past few years been putting on an annual foot race in a county park. A few hundred people participate. Everyone has fun and it is a successful event that gains participants with each successive year. I don’t think my friend makes any money from his efforts. He is doing it because he himself has participated in many races over the years and gets satisfaction out of giving back, as he put it. It takes a lot of work to organize even a small event of this type.

My friend told me that he is not planning to put on the race after this year. Why? He used to go to the park manager to arrange the necessary permits and so forth, but the County now requires him to arrange everything through a county office that makes event arrangements for the entire system. This leads to a great deal of additional hassle for my friend. Where the park manager was helpful in dealing with issues that are important in organizing a small race, his counterpart in the county office is clueless. The county office has a one-size-fits-all written agreement that is designed for big events and they are unwilling to negotiate on anything. For example, the contract stipulates that my friend must show proof that he carries workman’s comp, even though he has no employees, and that he must obtain from each service provider (portable toilets, race timing services, etc.) a signed statement that they do not do business with the governments of Iran or Sudan. This is crazy and my friend doesn’t think it’s worth the trouble.

My friend doesn’t put on foot races for a living and can simply walk away, but small businesspeople increasingly have to deal with similar issues. The net aggregate cost must be enormous.