‘Cause I can tell you know what it’s like,
The long farewell of the hunger strike.

But can you save me?

— Aimee Mann, “Save Me”

Even considering the plethora of mental and physical abberations in my repetoire, I consider myself very fortunate. I may have an obsessive personality, but thankfully so far none of my obsessions have blossomed into addictions.

I’ve come close, though. In my early twenties I was going through my first period of epic relationship failure, so I spent a lot of time relying on my friends for support. Many of my friends were relying on Fort Lauderdale’s Rendezvous Club for their own support; hence I was spending a few nights a week at the bar.

The Rendezvous was a decent enough place, for an ex-biker bar/ex-gay bar/ex-restaurant. They had a pool table, some pinball machines, and a pretty good Jefferson Airplane cover band. But like most people in their early twenties working jobs barely above minimum wage, I couldn’t really afford to hang out at a bar that much, not even one as — shall we say — affordable as the Rendezvous. A friend’s cousin was tending bar and sliding us heavy pours and mixing errors, but hanging out with my friends still had me spending money I couldn’t afford.

Not that the simple matter of money stopped me from going, though, or from developing a taste for cocktails. Fortunately, I made two discoveries before things got out of hand. The first was the miracle of the package store, allowing me to get a bottle for the price of a couple of drinks. The second was that if I wasn’t around other people, I paid more attention to the taste than to the buzz.

Unfortunately, I also discovered that if the rum is good, I really, really like the taste. I didn’t have any problem enjoying the taste all the way through a fifth of Barbancourt every couple of days. Well, no problem other than the money. I never reached the point of borrowing from my friends, or cadging drinks from strangers, but there were a few occasions where my bills weren’t exactly paid on time.

I got lucky, though. A my epic relationship failure was replaced by a somewhat less epic but still satisfying relationship success. This gave me someone else to blow my paychecks on, and something else to do at night other than marvel at how good an aged rum tastes, even down to the bottom of the bottle. Amazingly I stopped drinking entirely, probably a matter of a couple of weeks before it became a life-long problem for me. I am thankful every day for the auspicious entry of that girl in my life, even if that eventually ended in another epic failure.

Today there are almost two dozen bottles of liquor in my house. They stand on a shelf, arranged into neat ranks and files, a tray of shot glasses and swizzle sticks and mixology guides beside them, waiting for guests to come. Sometimes I am tempted to pour myself a couple of drinks, just to help me relax; occasionally I do. However, awareness of the bullet I dodged has soaked through my brain, and I rarely enjoy it. It’s probably a silly concern, but I’d rather err on caution’s side. Dodging one bullet doesn’t make you bullet proof.

Everyone — even if they aren’t aware of it — knows a few people who didn’t dodge, people with serious addictions. I know quite a few, and sometimes it feels as though I know more than my share, but that’s just my perception. Still, the self-mutilators, the depressives, the alcoholics, the addicts: I’m compelled to help them in whatever ways I can. I’ve held friends’ hair out of the way while they vomited out a fifth of Absolut. I’ve answered the phone at 3:00am and then listened to the wordless sobbing long past sunrise. I’ve watched infomercials in the emergency room while doctors stitched up the thigh of a woman who cut a little too deeply this time. I’ve held on to heirloom jewelry for a friend who was afraid she would pawn it to feed her habit. I’ve given away my own inheritance to keep friends from being evicted. And I could go on for pages telling these stories, but to what purpose?

I’m not a professionally trained counselor, and even among professionals there is debate as to the proper course of action when dealing with someone with deeply rooted problems. So I worry: Do my ham-fisted attempts at helping people in pain cause more damage, or does knowing that someone who has seen them at a very low point still cares about them give them a little more strength, a little more hope? Is it better to try to give comfort and fail than to look away and let them go it alone? For me, it is.

And there is my shame: “for me”. How often am I helping someone because it lets me feel like I have some purpose in the world? I’m trying to help people find their ways out of desperate situations, but I’m also trying to repay the universe for my own narrow escape from alcoholism, and to return the kindnesses shown me by others during my own dark days. But while I can easily indulge in pages of self-analysis and psychobabble, I admit that in large part I am motivated by one of my own obsessions. In my optimism I see so much potential in people, yet so few ever get a chance to develop it. Whenever the opportunity arises, I have to try to fix things, to redress wrongs. I’m obsessed with solving problems, but do the problems always have solutions?

I want to save the world, but sometimes the world doesn’t want to be saved.

I want to save my friends, but sometimes my friends don’t want to be saved.

I shouldn’t argue. Sometimes I don’t want to be saved, either.

According to WordPress I have saved 887 draft articles so far. No doubt at this point many of these have passed their sell-by date, and are now just idle ruminations on subjects long since out of public consciousness. The world moves quickly, and attention spans move still faster. Well, they move faster than my ability to crank out a few hundred words that meet my criteria for publication, anyway.

Perhaps I could save time by limiting the number of words I use per post, effectively Twitterizing (which is delightfully consonant with trivializing) some entries. How would that look?.

• Special Report: If you send out a “breaking news” alert via e-mail, text message, or Twitter, it had damned well better educate me on a major threat to the health and safety of a significant percentage of the local population. If the urgency relates to a c-list celebrity addict’s latest drunken escapade, or a multimillionaire sports star’s contract, then you’ve just informed the world that your organization no longer understands the concept of news at all, and deserves all the credibility of toilet stall graffiti.
• Digg-Dug: Major new link site Digg was (once again) gamed, this time by a conservative group looking to keep stories with a liberal or progressive angle from being seen. This is my surprised face. The increasing importance of the Internet for decision making by the general public comes with a corresponding increase in manipulation. This is why there are virtually no ranking sites of any real value, particularly since the creation of an industry devoted to insuring that search engines don’t return the most relevant or authoritative resource, but the best financed. And if you think for a moment that there is a web-based poll with any merit whatsoever, you probably also believe that Obama was born in Kenya.
• Fish Food: Miami’s baseball franchise brazenly lied to grandstanding politicians to get out of paying for their own stadium, but since the truth came out after the contracts are signed, nothing will happen. This is my surprised face. Does anyone still believe that a major league team gives anything to a community besides an extortion letter invoice? I would point out that begging for public funds to support a private enterprise fails the capitalism smell test, but then I would have to roll my own eyes at myself.
• Two Thumbs: Somewhat to my surprise, both Despicable Me and Scott Pilgrim vs the World are pretty good films. The former is actually a wholesome kids movie that still manages to be funny for adults, and without much of the wink-wink innuendo that grabs for the parents’ attention in a kiddie film. The latter is based on an award-winning series of graphic novels, and is a clever and ironic — no, those are not mutually exclusive terms — film about a really rather stupid and unlikeable twenty-something guy stumbling through his video-game and indie-rock obsessed life: Portrait of the Loser as a Young Pixel.

I have more to say about all those bullet points, but eh, whatever. ‘Tis better to puke up quick notes than to take the time to consider your words. Besides, I’m sure I lost most of the readers as soon as they saw four bullets. For modern audiences, Twitter is too wordy. I mean, c’mon. A fake Twitter account has been turned into a sitcom.

When I was a child my grandfather had a rock tumbler. It was a small, rotating drum similar to a clothes dryer. You put in some polishing agent, like jeweler’s rouge or grit, add a few rough stones, power it on, and wait. After an hour or so of listening to the clatter of the stones tumbling around the moving drum, you would open the door and find that the constant motion and abrasion had sanded away the rough edges, leaving your rocks smooth, and often exposing a beauty you hadn’t seen beneath the coarse exterior.

During a visit one summer day I decided to tumble some interesting rocks I had collected up on the farm, jagged chunks of varicolored granite the size of peach pits. I went out to the back porch and plugged in the tumbler, and did a pretty good job of following the instructions my grandfather had given me on its use. In went the grit, in went the rocks, and I flipped the switch to start the process of changing the plain stone into something smooth and interesting. I sat and waited, watched the birds in the backyard, poked the spiderwebs behind the old refrigerator, and was generally a bored pre-teen boy.

The tedium was broken when my mother called from inside the house: lunchtime. I ate a tuna sandwich and some potato chips and drank a root beer and then — bored by the adult conversation — wandered off into the bedroom to read comic books. At some point I went outside with my brother and we tried unsuccessfully to find something to do until supper.

At twilight we headed into the backyard to catch fireflies. Suddenly, I remembered the rock tumbler. It had been patiently rotating all day, bouncing my chunks of stone around, chipping the rough edges away. I rushed to the porch and switched it off, eager to see what was inside the unremarkable chunks of stone.

It was empty, save for the grit. I was furious that someone had stolen my rocks, and — predictably — accused my brother of having taken them. His denial seemed sincere, even after some judicious arm twisting. The arm-twisting attracted the adults, too, so I had to explain what had happened.

My grandfather asked how long I’d left the rocks in the tumbler. Since this morning, I said, so they would be extra-smooth. He sighed, and opened the little door again. “Your rocks are in there,” he explained, “but you left them in too long. They were ground away to nothing. There’s nothing left but rock dust.”

I peered into the drum, hoping to recognize a fragment of the stones I’d tried to polish, but I couldn’t see anything beyond the fine black grit. My grandfather said something about finding me some new rocks to tumble tomorrow, but I wasn’t really paying attention; I had wanted those rocks, and now they were gone.

…

One year ago today I walked out of my corporate office for the final time; for twelve months I’ve endured the daily humiliations and disappointments and frustrations of unemployment. But as a result of all that grinding I’m now clearer in character, my strengths more noticeable, my skills more refined; I am truer to myself than I was a year ago, and for that alone I am grateful.

Still, I think of the rocks that vanished, and I wonder what will be left once the tumbling stops.

Was there ever a time in American history when employers were honest about their offerings, and candidates were honest about their skills?

Over the years I’ve had quite a few friends who work in human resources*, and most of them have confirmed that employers assume that people lie on their resumes, so they assume that people have fewer skills than they’ve listed. Knowing that HR doesn’t trust them anyway, many people — particularly those new to professional employment — exaggerate their skills, titles, and accomplishments to compensate for this downgrade. Everyone alters their perceptions based on the assumption that the other party is not dealing with them fairly, with the end result that no one is being honest at all.

The current economy, oddly enough, has led to a different kind of deception. Payroll budgets have been slashed, eliminating many management positions. As a result, human resource departments are largely uninterested in people with management experience, particularly those applying for non-managerial jobs; candidates with leadership experience who have been unemployed for any length of time are then downplaying or completely removing their prior management experience, just to get an interview.

Here’s an example. Through years of hard work and patience, a friend rose to a high-level position in information technology, receiving many citations for his leadership and innovation. Nonetheless, when his employer decided to outsource their IT role, he was laid off. For months he couldn’t even get a call-back from a potential employer, even working through a headhunter. He eventually gave up on the headhunter and started applying for pure programming positions. (He’d managed to keep his skills up to date in spite of his years of management.) Still no calls.

Finally, he revised his resume, changing his title to “senior programmer,” and removing any mention of his management experience. Immediately he started getting calls for interviews, and quickly landed a job as a database administrator. There’s no way of knowing if he’d have gotten the interview with a straight resume, but the evidence indicates that he might not.

This isn’t something I’m comfortable with doing. I’m not a complete idiot, so I do tailor my resume to the offering. So far I haven’t changed my titles, though, or removed anything to indicate that I may be overqualified for a position. Maybe that’s hindering me in my job search, but I don’t know that I’d want to work for a company that expected and encouraged deceit in its hiring process.

I do understand the reasons given as to why companies shy away from someone clearly overqualified for a position. A very high percentage of the cost of hiring is the orientation and training of the new employee, and if you suspect that they are going to jump ship when the economy improves then it makes little sense to invest on a questionable return. When the economy improves, though, a good company will rise on that same tide, and may have need of employees with a larger skill set than that expressly required by the position. It would seem to make sense to already have those skills available, thereby removing the additional expense of hiring yet another employee to fill those needs. But I am not a human resources professional, so perhaps there are additional considerations which support keeping a less-skilled workforce, rather than encouraging the loyalty of a superior candidate.

Then again, maybe deceit is simply too tightly woven into the fabric of corporate America. In the business world there is a tacit understanding that everyone around you is always lying, is always trying to cheat you. For many this mindset provides a perfect rationalization for their own deceptive practices: do unto others before they do unto you. Pessimists (or “realists,” as they like to call themselves) will say that’s just the way people are, so deal with it. Optimists (or “losers,” as pessimists like to call them) prefer to think this is a temporary aberration of human nature, and one that social change will cure. I’m somewhere between the two. I’m enough of an optimist to hope that someday the employment process will become honest again, but I’ve been in the workforce long enough to harbor doubts.

It isn’t a question likely to be resolved any time soon. For now I’ll just keep sending out resumes, and hope that even if it doesn’t get me a job, that honesty will still count for something in the cosmic sense.

—

*”Human resources” is a term I find personally odious. The industry’s move to it from “personnel,” I suspect, signaled a philosophical shift from treating an employee as a person, to treating them as a consumable object, like cardboard boxes or toilet paper. Sure, it’s just a word, but words carry weight far beyond their concise denotation. Nonetheless, at this point it’s unlikely to change.

Gordon was born just about a year ago, one of three kittens born beside my porch to a neighborhood stray. After getting them neutered and vaccinated (with the help of the good people at The Cat Network) I set about finding them homes. The two girls were adopted by an out of state friend, while Gordon was adopted by a family down the street.

I had my doubts about the neighbors’ ability to take care of him. The boys who asked were genuine in their desire to take care of him, stopping by almost every day to see him while he was still nursing, and playing with him once he got a bit bigger. I told them in no uncertain terms, though, that cats are not outdoor pets, particularly in a neighborhood with packs of feral dogs like mine. They understood and accepted my terms, so I let them take him away.

Unfortunately, kids have better intentions than execution, and it wasn’t long before the boys started to drop by, asking if I could give them some cat food or a bag of litter. They would bring Gordon with them, and while he was always clean and well-behaved, he was starting to show a bit of a wild edge. When I asked them, they admitted that their parents insisted that he stay outside all the time, except for a couple of hours in the evening. This really bothered me, and I couldn’t shake the ominous feelings.

Last December there was a knock on my door. It was the older boy, and he had Gordon under his arm. He explained that he thought Gordon had gotten into a fight because he was growling a lot, and kept one eye closed. Could I look at his eye and see if he was okay? I did, and didn’t see anything immediately wrong, but told them to take him to the vet to be sure. One look at the boy’s face settled that, but I asked for confirmation. No, he couldn’t take him to the vet because he didn’t have any money, and his parents didn’t want to spend money on a cat.

That trip to the vet cost me a couple of hundred dollars, and Gordon spent a week convalescing with me so I could put drops in his eye twice a day while the scratch healed. By the end of that week, though, the wildness was gone, and he was back to climbing into my lap while I worked. He could have stayed, but I already have six cats; a seventh would be purely stupid.

Around midnight one Friday night a couple of months ago I heard a horrible wailing outside my house, growling and screaming. I grabbed an eight-cell Maglite and headed around the corner. As I feared, two of the roaming feral dogs had caught a stray cat and were trying to rip it in two. I yelled at the dogs to no response, so I started to beat them with the flashlight. After one good crack on the skull the bigger dog let go and ran off, with the other following close behind. I scooped up the poor cat and rushed off to the emergency animal hospital, but he died before we got there.

The next day I saw one of Gordon’s owners. I told him about what happened, and did not spare the details. I asked him how he would feel if Gordon just never came home, if a dog got him and ripped him apart. It was harsh, and I felt a little guilty, but the boy’s expression told me that he got the message. He said he would talk to his parents again, and that he would try to keep Gordon inside as much as he could. I crossed my fingers and hoped for the best. What else could I do?

Finally, two weeks ago the boy knocked on my door, once again needing my help. Gordon was hurt, but he didn’t know how badly. The boy’s mother had told him she’d seen Gordon covered in blood the day before, and now he was in the neighbor’s yard, and wouldn’t allow anyone near him. I grabbed a cat carrier and headed down the street, afraid of what I would find.

He was hiding under under a pile of lumber, and hissed when I came close. I tried to coerce him out with treats, but it wasn’t going to be that easy; with the boy’s help I started to move the two-by-fours, sweat pouring off us in the late afternoon heat. When we almost had enough of them moved to reach him, he darted out and under the house’s water heater, wedging himself between two cinder blocks and the wall.

Eventually, with patience, tactics, and a can of compressed air, we were able to get him to run out and into the carrier. Other than the hissing and growling he didn’t appear to be in terrible shape. He was able to run reasonably well, his eyes were still bright, and once I had him out of the sun and in my dark office he even let up on the growling. When the vet’s office opened and we got him on the examining table the assistant agreed, saying that it looked like he just had a couple of bites, and that I could pick him up in a few hours.

Unfortunately, when they sedated him and started to treat him they found several deep punctures that had become badly infected. There was an abscess and even the start of gangrene under his fur. The doctor said that this wasn’t a recent injury, but had probably been left like this for a few days, if not a week. They would have to remove the dead tissue, put him on heavy antibiotics, and keep him in their care for some time to make up for it. Not coincidentally, as I was leaving the doctor asked if I’d found a job yet. It was going to one of those kind of bills.

Gordon stayed in the vet’s care for almost ten days before I could take him home. They did a good job; he is healthy, friendly, and active. Unfortunately, the skin is not growing back as quickly as it should, leaving him with several square inches of raw flesh near his tail. Twice a day I have to apply a sterile ointment to the area to assist in the healing. Gordon does not approve of this, but he tolerates it, albeit with the help of a cone to keep him from licking the red, ugly wound.

I did take a few pictures of it, though, and when the boy came by to ask how Gordon was doing with his recovery, I showed them to him. He recoiled.

“I’m not going to get to take him home, am I?”

“No. He’ll probably have to stay with me at least a month, just to have time to heal. After that, I think it would be better if he found a new home, don’t you?”

“But, what if we keep him in the backyard, and don’t let him out? I didn’t want him to go out, but there’s seven of us at home. Every time someone would open the door he’d run outside. And my dad says cats need to be outside.”

Seven people in a two-bedroom house. I understand why Gordon wanted to go out.

“No, I’m sorry. You can visit him here, if you want to, once he’s better. But he can’t go out on the street any more.”

He accepted that. His little brother came by later to ask me again, but by then I was even more resolute. Gordon was staying with me.

Later, I wondered if I had a right to interfere like this.  Once I had given Gordon to them he was their cat, and they weren’t deliberately hurting him; it’s obvious both boys really love this cat. It’s also true, as I’ve heard from a few friends, that nature is “red in tooth and claw.” While that is certainly true in the wild, I don’t believe that nature’s savagery needs to be pointlessly extended to suburbia. I worried, too, that I crossed a line by realistically describing what had happened, and by shocking the older boy with the photo of Gordon’s injury. These aren’t my kids, so what gives me the right to try and teach them that their actions have consequences? Yes, the “tough love” seems to have worked in this instance, but was I wrong to have done it?

Gordon Whitefoot, wearing the cone of shame.

I don’t know. I don’t think so. I hope not. I really, truly hope not.

At least I know I did the right thing for Gordon.

Epilogue: A few minutes ago the older boy knocked on my door and asked, eyes downcast, if he could see Gordon. I told him to wait, and then brought the cat to the door. The boy’s face lit up when he saw Gordon, and turned to horror when Gordon twisted around in my arms to get away from the door, exposing the gruesome wound. I put the cat back in my office and returned to the door.

“Wow, that’s really bad! I didn’t think he was that hurt.”

“Yes, and that’s better than a couple of days ago.”

“I saw him trying to get away. He doesn’t want to go outside any more, does he?”

“Would you, after what happened?”

“Yeah. So he’s going to live here with you now?”

“It looks that way. Are you okay with that? Do you understand why?”

“Yeah. I can still come and see him though, right?”

“Sure you can, once he’s healed.”

“I guess that’s good, then.”

“Yeah, that’s good.”

A short time ago WordPress released their biggest revision in a while, making the whole number leap to version 3.0. This posed a challenge to me. I know that they’ve been working to make WP more secure, so upgrading is important. To further complicate matters, a couple of new features I’d like to add here are only available once I upgrade. And then there’s the incessantly nagging “WordPress 3.0 is available! Please update now.” at the top of my editing window. On the other hand, only a fool installs the “dot-zero” release of anything.

Yeah, clothe me in motley. I went with the fool’s hand.

Needless to say, it didn’t go well, in spite of meticulously following the WordPress-given instructions. While the site still loaded — missing only some small features and cosmetic elements — the administrative interface decided to take a quick vacation to the islands, possibly to escape the heat. After a couple of hours trying the solutions suggested in various WordPress forums I threw in the towel and started the process of restoring the site from backups.

I may be a fool, but at least I know I’m a fool. Of course I have backups.

After a couple of hours’ delay as I waited for the nice people at hosting.com to restore my database we are back in business. Of course, accidents like this can leave scars, and this is not an exception. Now my old posts have been liberally peppered with arcane symbols* and characters. I’ve fixed up the most recent posts, but since WordPress doesn’t give me a convenient search-and-replace tool the remaining mistakes will have to wait for someone to bring them to my attention. It’s as annoying as all hell, but so it goes.

Some days, it feels as though I’d be better off going back to the days of hand-coding each story individually, and dumping content management software altogether. I may yet do it.

*I’m deliberately avoiding the technical terms to avoid scaring people away. If you’re a WP guru with a suggestion I’m all ears. Leave me a comment.

Please forgive a brief ramble. I just want to wave and say hello and mention a few things which are not intrinsically worth an entry, but which may be worth something in aggregate.

I'm not unemployed, I'm NSFW. (T-shirt by Diesel Sweeties.)

Well, okay, I really am unemployed. Still. I’m using my (alleged) retirement fund to pay the bills and hold on to the remaining scraps of my sanity, i.e., burning my old-age to pay for my middle-age. It could be worse; at least I had accumulated some money before Ragnarok. There are plenty of people in situations far more dire than my own.

Those people in worse situations would include everyone in the Gulf. According to some estimates the BP adventure has already passed the event horizon, and while it will take a while for the full effect to blossom, the Gulf as we know it is ancient history. Whether you feel the ecological loss was worth the oil and corporate profit is a matter of opinion and politics; to me it’s not, and never will be. But on the positive side, maybe the enormous methane deposit sitting under the oil will bubble up into a megacyclone of fiery death that will strip Florida down to the oolitic limestone.

Speaking of megacyclones, the National Hurricane Center is predicting busy year, with a likelihood of more than five major storms and a 51% probability of one striking the Florida coast. While I know some people don’t have much use for the NHC’s predictions, they are interesting from statistical and sociological perspectives. If we get hit, it’s going to hurt. I don’t know anyone who has made any preparations for hurricane season, and my own stocks haven’t been fully replenished. It doesn’t take a rocket scientist (or a meteorological probability analyst) to know that going a few years without a major Florida landfall will lead to locals ignoring hurricane season like they do the homeless guys standing in 96° heat by the I-95 ramps.

Speaking of the poor, destitute, and potentially crazy: If I haven’t returned your phone calls it isn’t because I’m living in a refrigerator box, nor do I hate you, nor have my extra-dimensional handlers decided to recall me to my native reality. It’s only a mild resurgence of my naturally antisocial tendencies (endemic among writers), brought on by a combination of the subconscious pressure of continued unemployment, the research I’m doing for my writing, general heat-related irritability, and my shifting circadian rhythms. I talk to everyone sooner or later, even people who don’t exist. I’ll get back to you eventually.

At least this godawful heat has reduced mosquito population on my porch a little. I was getting tired of the constant annoyance of the little bastards sitting out there in their tiny guayaberas all day, slapping down tiny dominoes and bitching about Fidel. C’mon, guys, you’ve got a lifespan of less than two months. There’s no way you know anything about Cuba, and certainly not as much as the stray cat that keeps wandering through my yard with a Cohiba in his mouth. He seems to have a line to what’s going on. At the very least, his stories are more interesting.

Yeah, okay, maybe the heat is getting to me. I should push the big red button to fire off this smoke signal and get back to real writing. I have a couple of dozen essays almost finished, any one of which is likely to be more interesting than this.

In honor of Fathers Day — and more specifically, in honor of my own wonderful father — here are two stories about him. Both have been previously published, but they will be new to many of you.

Slow learner:

But so much of who we become originates with our parents, for good or ill. My mother taught me to use my imagination and be creative, to have a vision, to reach, and to make the best use of what I was given; these are essential parts of my creative nature, and I wouldn’t have any of it without her influence. It was obvious that her goal was to mold me into an artist of some sort. My father, though, shaped who I became without me ever noticing it.

Chief Paduke’s Revenge:

Several years ago my brother and I were talking about practical jokes we had played, stupid pranks and whatnot. My dad was around, and was laughing at the stories he hadn’t heard before, and pointing out the times we hadn’t been nearly as clever as we had thought. Now, my dad has a prankster’s heart, and we were fairly sure he had pulled off some good ones in his day, so we asked him about it. He laughed, and regaled us with the following tale.

Being a parent isn’t easy. It takes a special commitment to raise a child, a commitment many people aren’t willing to make. And for those of you who aren’t making that effort, it isn’t too late. Be a part of the lives of your kids. It will make a difference to them, and to you.

But to all the fathers out there — male or female; young or old; born to the role, deliberately choosing it, or forced into it by circumstances — who are making the effort and taking the time to be part of the lives of your children, may your day be filled with warmth and joy and love.

There’s been much made of Facebook’s privacy policy, in recent days. Perhaps it would be more appropriate to refer to their privacy policies in the plural, since they seem to be a bit of a moving target, changing at the whim of their customers. (What, their customers are the users? Nonsense. Facebook’s customers are marketing firms.) Last week the Social Media Club of South Florida even held a forum called Facebook: The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly. Of course, the overall opinion of the panel wasn’t too difficult to anticipate, given that it was primarily promoted on Facebook itself, and that their Facebook page is updated more frequently than their web site. Nonetheless, there were some bright people on the panel, and some interesting points were made.

There were two primary camps:

• “If people are too stupid to check their settings it’s their own fault.”
• “If you are posting private information on-line you are an idiot.”

Other positions were occasionally sounded, but they were barely heard over the contempt shown toward ordinary, non-technical people, the kind of people struggling with assimilation into the new American (and global) culture. This attitude is not merely wrong-headed and insensitive, but it is likely to hurt the future growth of the connected society.

From the time my parents were young through until my childhood our telephones were party lines. For those of you who have never heard the phrase, party lines meant that your telephone shared the same connection to the phone company as your neighbors, and often the entire block. If you picked up the phone to make a call you would often hear other people talking, in the midst of a conversation. You couldn’t make a call until they disconnected, giving you a dial tone. (For those of you who have never used a wired telephone, a “dial tone” was a buzzing sound indicating that you could now enter the number of the person you were trying to call.) Etiquette required that if you interrupted the call you just hang up immediately; the other parties would almost always hear a click on the line, giving a clue that someone was now eavesdropping, but it was possible that you might miss it. The very nature of party lines made the telephone a non-secure communication system, and everyone knew it. Hell, in rural areas you often had to speak to an operator and ask her to place the call for you, with no guarantee that she’d hang up after doing so. There was no expectation of privacy when using the telephone.

Once the phone company (only one, back in those prehistoric times) started offering private lines, the expectations changed. Your conversations were assumed to be private, as long as you were certain your little brother hadn’t picked up the extension in the bedroom. Instead of “Hey, meet me for coffee, I’ve got some juicy news,” the juicy news was shared directly. Of course, law enforcement wanted to hear the juicy news, too, and so we got wiretapping laws. The expectations changed again, but only a little, since it was made clear that the police needed to convince a judge that they had a legitimate reason to invade your privacy. When wireless phones came into vogue audio voyeurs and criminals (and some police) turned to frequency scanners to listen in, as well, but people still assumed their conversations were reasonably private. After all, society was treating it that way.

On the web front the early Internet users were actively encouraged to use a nom du web, allowing a reasonable level of anonymity and privacy. This helped give the early web its culture of free speech and flamboyant rhetoric, even though those pioneers — having a higher than standard level of technical expertise — knew that methods existed for tracking down the person behind the pseudonym. The involved parties also understood that e-mail was somewhat secure, if only via the unreliable method of “security through obscurity.” However, this anonymity and privacy was seen as anathema to the commercial and political interests moving on-line. More people started to use the Internet, most of whom had at best a vague understanding of the principals involved, and little to no sense at all of “netiquette,” as the early culture was called. Between the commercial interest in eliminating anonymity and the general decline of respect through the erosion of its value system, the Internet became a place where everyone expected to know your name.

In an extension of this trend, and in parallel to the increase in social media services, the web’s next big battlefield is in the field of identity management. A few years ago — during the worst of the post-9/11 hysteria — there was half-hearted legislation proposed which would create an Internet ID card, possibly tied to the National ID card. It eventually failed, but now the concept has been picked up by corporate entities. Companies like Facebook, Google, and Twitter all want to become the official arbiters of personal identity. In the near future, if you want to leave a comment on a site, or possibly make a purchase, you’ll need to prove you are the person you claim to be by verifying it with the database at one of these companies, or another of their ilk.

This will have interesting repercussions as it becomes mandatory, either through actual regulation, or through cultural acceptance. For years people have lost their jobs or potential jobs due to corporate investigation of employees’ private lives, and this trend is only growing. Previously it was illegal and/or cost prohibitive to dig that deeply into the background of a sales clerk in a department store. Now it’s a routine practice. People still did the same (potentially scandalous) things they did before the advent of the Internet culture, but they did them in localized — if still public — settings. Companies don’t need to hire an investigator to find out their potential VP likes to drink if her friends are posting pictures of her showing off lampshade couture on Facebook.

And this brings us back, once again, to Facebook. It has effectively managed to recreate the AOL of the ’90s, combining chat, e-mail, games, blogging, and link-sharing into a single portal. When I taught a corporate “How to use the Internet” class in the early ’90s, the most common question I had was “Isn’t the Internet the same thing as AOL?” For an increasing number of users, Facebook is now the Internet. At this point it has no competition, and has reached such a high level of cultural acceptance that most regular Internet users — even the computer illiterate — feel they must have an account, just to keep up with their friends.

Currently many young people — having grown up connected — assume they have a limited amount of privacy at best. Therefore to keep from blowing up their future with some ill-chosen remarks, they create multiple identities. They will have a Facebook page under their real name, one in which they are studious, only “like” socially responsible activities, and keep their noses clean. Then, in complete violation of Facebook’s policy, they create secondary accounts with fake names, fake e-mail addresses, and only allow their friends to see them: a self-contained culture reflecting the true reality. Now they can use the media they’ve grown up with for fun, and for learning about the world, while still painting the right picture to college recruiters and potential employers (not to mention the police).

But those less computer savvy are in for a tough time. When they originally signed up for Facebook they were told their information would stay private, and would only be shared with their self-selected and approved friends. This gave the users a reasonable expectation of privacy when using the service, and thus created a culture based on that expectation. Unfortunately, Facebook continues to switch users from private lines to party lines, in a seemingly random fashion. Their “improved privacy policy” is still so labyrinthine as to seem at home in Terry Gilliam’s Brazil: it’s a joke to think that anyone unfamiliar with the intricacies of the connected world will be able to figure it out. This has brought us to a place where some people expose their lives to the world, completely unaware that they have done so, and also one where others simply choose to lie.

Why force people to act as if Big Brother is watching their every move on-line, and treat them as idiots if they don’t understand deliberately obscure policies? While creating a fake account is simple and effective, do we want to foster a culture that further undermines authenticity? Is it really in our best interests to allow digital privacy to reach a level of outrage similar to e-mail spam, and bring in government regulation?

This is a complex issue, and one for which there aren’t any easy answers. However, stating “If you don’t like it don’t use it” or suggesting that “If you put pictures of your kids on-line you deserve whatever happens” is the kind of simple-minded arrogance that aggravates the problem, rather than solves it. Sadly, this dismissive and short-sighted attitude is what I hear most often from social media’s self-appointed gurus and experts, many of whom have forgotten the sensation of being lost in an unfamiliar world, and few of whom have mastered the basics of social interaction. I can only hope that minds more sensitive to the actual needs of ordinary people will be addressing this growing problem.

Many years ago I was in love with a woman who took a “don’t ask, don’t tell” approach to paying her bills. The mail would be delivered, and she’d take her student loan envelopes and put them, unopened, in the kitchen drawer. This way she didn’t have to see them piling up on the counter, and could pretend they didn’t exist. No bills, no stress. But obviously she was simply delaying the inevitable.

When she moved to Florida we needed to try to fix this, but she couldn’t bring herself to even address the issue. We would talk about her calling to make arrangements with the creditors, but it would end in tears. So I decided to see what I could do. While she was out shopping I put on my most pleasant demeanor, called the loan company, and asked for a supervisor right off the bat.

I politely explained that I was inquiring about this woman’s past due loan, and wanted to see how we could straighten things out. I had her name, her social security number, a copy of the statement, and an account number. No, I didn’t have her past address. No, I didn’t know her mother’s maiden name. Yes, I knew what state she used to live in, but told them she had recently moved here. No, we were not married, but we planning to do so. (That was a lie; it had never been discussed.) All I wanted was for them to reverse all late payment fees, remove all the interest to date, and let me set up a payment plan.

They did it. I changed her address to mine, got several thousand dollars of interest and penalties removed, set up a new PIN for her account, and did it all without even giving them my name. When my girlfriend got home and I told her what I’d done, she was both relieved at the solution, and terrified at the ease with which it all took place.

(For what it is worth, we paid off that loan just a couple of years later.)

That, my friends, is a basic example of social engineering from twenty-five years ago. I doubt I could get away with it now, given the increased scrutiny of account information and slow-dawning awareness of identity theft. Unfortunately, the switch to a digital life has happened too quickly for many people to keep up.

As an example, most people know — or think they know — that they should have an e-mail address. Sadly, they don’t necessarily know why, or what to do with it, or how to get one. And some people, to my chagrin, don’t bother to write it down once they do get one, choosing instead to just guess when they need to fill out a form.

Being an early adopter with Gmail, I got a six-letter name: mkhall. Apparently many, many other people think they have that same address, such as a certain Marcia Hall of Ohio. Marcia is going through some financial difficulty, it seems, and filled out a scammer’s “Get money now!” form using my e-mail address. Consequently I am now getting over a hundred messages per day from (ahem) “financial support groups” who just want to help ol’ Marcia out. Fortunately, Gmail catches most of them and tosses them straight into the spam bin, but a few get through. Incidentally, Marcia has a Facebook page, so I sent her a message asking her if she realized she was using my address. She never responded.

Then there’s Mark and Pamela, who gave their school the wrong e-mail address, resulting in their child’s psychiatric evaluations and report cards coming to me, as well as PTA-related stuff, medical reports, and similar items I’m sure they’d rather not have an absolute strange knowing about their son. I know a lot about Michael, too, who joined a Mormon singles group in Indiana. There’s a pilot in New Zealand who keeps signing up for forums and mailing lists using my address. (Maybe it’s supposed to be gmail.co.nz or something.) There is also a couple in the Midwest that are doing their damnedest to give me full access to their financial identity by signing up for credit cards and Redbox accounts giving out my e-mail address. There’s nothing like using the “forgot my password” link to get access to someone’s account information including home address, phone number, account number, et cetera.

I’ve done my best to contact the appropriate parties when these mistakes have been made. I managed to reach one fellow by phone a while back, and told him of the mistake. He admitted he didn’t know anything about the Internet, and that his brother in Colorado set up the e-mail address for him, along with an automatic login on his new computer that takes him right to his e-mail. The other people, though, are seemingly oblivious to the problem, not even noticing that they aren’t receiving their e-mail.

I’m not unsympathetic to their plight. In short order the Internet has gone from a playground for geeks to a utility more necessary than cable, and as important as a telephone. For many people this is as frightening as if they got up this morning and were expected to do their jobs speaking only Esperanto. It’s a matter of cultural assimilation, and some people just adapt more easily than others. You may prefer the old country, and long for the simpler days of your analog life, but that’s no longer an option. If you want to live in the modern world, you need learn the language and assimilate.

Where some people will see your hesitancy and fear and try to help you find your way, others will see another recent immigrant fumbling along, and an illicit opportunity to be seized.