Brazellica

Originally published by The Guy Code on June 28, 2001.

“Ha-ha,” said Eeyore bitterly. “Merriment and what-not. Don’t apologize. It’s just what would happen.” — A.A. Milne

For those who have lost a parent, whether to death or to abandonment, sentimental holidays like Mother’s Day and Father’s Day can seem like personal insults.

The marketing of those days by greeting-card companies, florists, tie salesmen and retailers of all sorts can spark a resentment deeper than that felt by single people on Valentine’s Day.

This doesn’t happen to everyone, of course. Some people have fond memories of celebrating the day with their departed parent, and they dwell on those memories rather than on the absence. Parents may focus on the joy of receiving gifts from their kids.

For others, though, especially the newly bereaved, the anger and sadness sparked by the marketing of these days is even less susceptible to humor than the emotion felt by single people on Valentine’s Day. Otherwise, though, the feelings are similar. Just as on Valentine’s Day, single people tend to notice only happy couples, on Mother’s Day and Father’s Day children who have lost their parents sometimes imagine that all the other children have both parents and love them both, and that all parents love all of their children.

These ideas are not true, of course. We know that, if we stop to think about it for even a moment. But maybe we don’t want to think about it.

So many gifts are given on these days and so many phone calls placed amid so many smiles that it is easy to believe that the happiness we see on other faces is there all the time. The child within us believes it. And even if it is not true, we don’t care that it’s not. We miss the happy, intact family we don’t have, even if we never had it in the first place.

We know that the marketing blitzes are not directed at us personally. We know, if we think about it, that not every member of an intact family is happy to be there. We even know, if we think about it just a little more, that we are not alone – that many thousands all around are just like us – also with absent parents, also feeling insulted and self-conscious. But sometimes we don’t want to think about other people. We just want to feel what we feel.

Have you called your…

We feel it when our friends start to say, “What are you giving your . . .” or “Have you called your . . .” and then stop themselves, feeling embarrassed. Even if they don’t start sentences that way, we are aware of the possibilitythat they want to talk about how their father or mother felt about the gift given, the call made, but that they may stop short to avoid the awkwardness. We may sometimes ask them if they called Mom or Dad, and may even show interest when they discuss it – and may even feel interest, especially if we know their parents or would like to know them. Other times, though, we do not ask. It’s not that we do not care about our friends, just that we do not want to remind ourselves of our pain.

Some of us plan outings on that day, so that we will be out of the house in places where there are likely to be few happy families. Satisfying both goals is not as easy as it sounds. We learn that it’s best to avoid Sunday brunches and church services in May, and red-meat restaurants and sporting events in June.

Others of us go right at the problem. We visit the cemetery for a few moments of silence, and then head back home to figure out what errands we can run or movies we can see to make the day pass.

It’s an amazing thing, really. Before the loss, we had never looked at these holidays as possible sources of pain. Annoyance, maybe — but not pain. In all likelihood, we had never really given the days much thought at all, except as two more days of obligation. We knew we had to give gifts and express gratitude, even if we did not feel particularly generous or grateful. (Even now, generosity and gratitude may not be the first feelings that occur to us when we think of our missing parent or parents. Yet even that does not make us feel better.)

In years past we may have made fun of the days that Hallmark seems to have created, but we did so lightly, unaware of the implications all that marketing had for the many millions of people who had no one to give to.

Then one year, we joined those millions, and the holiday changed for us, just the way our birthday changed and, really, all holidays changed.

A constant reminder

The difference was that this change was specific. Most holidays are general enough that almost anyone can find something to celebrate, even if it’s only the day off from work and a department-store sale. On Mother’s Day and Father’s Day, though, most people would have already had the day off, and there isn’t much to buy – just the constant reminder that you have no one to buy for.

This is especially true for those whose job it is to market to these holidays. Many of the folks at Hallmark writing those sentimental poems, the florists and restaurateurs have lost parents, too – but they know they can benefit from those who haven’t, so they keep selling. Probably most of them wall off the conflicted feelings from awareness as best they can, smiling through the day, getting the job done. At least business is good.

At some point we realize that, although we may come to enjoy other holidays again — the family gathering, the food, and the football games can be at least as fun with new people as they were with the originals — unless we have children of our own, we may never quite enjoy Mother’s Day or Father’s Day again.

And if we do have children of our own, and they give us nice things and treat us well, the day will still remind us that we have no mother or father, and that someday our kids won’t, either.

Oh, well. At least it’s springtime.

Originally published by The Guy Code on February 25, 2002.

We’ve all seen ads and read headlines about the importance of preparing for retirement.

Few of those ads feel the need to spell out what they mean by “prepare.” The ad makers assume that when they say, “Get ready for retirement,” their target audience will hear, “Make sure you have enough money.”

They then tell you that if you follow their system, you’ll have enough. Enough so that you can ‘enjoy retirement.’ To illustrate this, the ad will show good-looking, healthy silver-haired couples laughing together on a cruise ship someplace – the earthly equivalent of heaven.

I wonder if the ads would be more effective if they showed a silver-haired man cavorting with a raven-haired woman, or a gray-haired matron flirting with a young blond buck. Hmmm . . .

Anyway, the point is that if you took all of your cues from ads, you might conclude that the only thing old people worry about is money. (And arthritis.)

I suppose that’s true in some cases. A man who finds himself in a poorly heated Chicago apartment at the age of 79, down to his last few tins of tuna, is likely to be pretty focused on money. On that day, he might really wish he had put more than 1percent of his paycheck into that 401(k).

When you’re running out of money and your joints are too old to let you work, the food isn’t too good. The shelter’s weak, too.

Most Americans won’t end up that way, but the fear hangs in our minds. We know our companies won’t seek us out then in an effort to give us a helpful bundle of dough. We know we may be divorced by then, or widowed, and our kids may live in different states and visit us rarely if at all.

Every country is a hard place to grow old. In others – India, much of Africa – food and basic amenities are a problem. Here, we can probably count on those things. But the threat hovers – and right behind poverty is the threat of loneliness.

As men, we may hope that as long as we have money, our kids and spouse will find us worthwhile. We may wonder if our wallet is really all we’re worth – just as it’s all a john is worth to a prostitute – but we may not want to dwell on that idea.

The commercials for financial institutions do not encourage such thoughts. They focus on the “independence” money supposedly gives. The “freedom.”

In the ads, of course, that freedom is often symbolized by a beautiful woman. Money gives you the freedom to sleep with a beautiful woman. And it gives your kids a reason to stay in touch.

If we buy into the myth of money, we will feel a constant sense of not having enough. After all, no one has “enough” money.

Thus empty, we will continue to work and strive and fight our way to the top of whatever heap we happen to be stuck in.

Value beyond that paycheck

And all our work will ensure that we are not home enough to show our families, or ourselves, that we have any other value beyond that paycheck.

We may think that if the check is big enough, this problem will no longer feel like a problem. And maybe we’ll be right, for a few years. Maybe even all our years. Money can paper over a lot of personality flaws. It can make a boorish man seem witty, just as beauty can make a narcissistic woman seem fun.

But it’s sad to base a life on ads for Merrill Lynch.

I’ve spent a fair amount of time with older folks – folks who get by on small, fixed incomes. And I have to say that while money tends not to disappear as an issue, it’s hardly ever the biggest thing on their minds.

Now, I’m talking about a select group of older folks: The ones who had, when I met them, six months or so to live.

Many of them used to worry a lot about money, just like the rest of us. Then they got the news that almost all of the sand had fallen from their hourglass.

One man in his early fifties put it this way: “Bill, for the last thirty years, all I cared about was working and fucking. Suddenly I got this disease. Now I know I can’t do what I wanted to do.” He started to cry. “I wanted to build a school, you know, down in Mexico. Something that would have my name on it. People would go there, poor kids – kids who couldn’t go to such a school otherwise.”

But it was too late for that now, and he knew it. There is no such school there with his name on it. The kids who live where he wanted to build it pass their days as if my friend had never lived.

There’s something about a terminal diagnosis that lets you know you’ve done just about all the earning and donating you’re going to do. All the fucking, too. Time’s almost up. How do you want to spend your last six months?

Kind of puts a new spin on that Microsoft tagline, doesn’t it? ‘Where do you want to go today – keeping in mind that you don’t have many days left?’

Seems easy

It may seem as though such folks have it easy, in a way. When you know you only have six months or so left, after all, you worry less about money because there isn’t enough time for you to run out of it.

But how do any of us know that we have even one month left – let alone six?

I’m not saying that people should not save for retirement — only that we should always keep in mind that retirement may not be in our cards.

A literary agent I met recently said that in the wake of September 11, he doesn’t work as hard as he used to. “I try to leave by 6 each night now,” he said. “I never used to do that. And when I’m home, I try to be there – not reading, or on the phone, but really there.”

Why does he do that? Because he suddenly realized that his kids won’t be young forever, and neither will he. In fact, he, or they, could be gone before the end of today. Realizing that has snapped him out of his habit of working, working, working, with the idea that someday, he could relax. Once he was “secure.”

There are few ads that stress the importance of relationships. Oh, sometimes you’ll see one from the Mormons, or the Foundation for a Better Life, whatever that is. (What is that organization, by the way? They advertise in movie theaters, but their Web site only adds to the mystery.)

The reason there are few such ads is that there is little money to be made from our personal relationships. Except when you get married, of course. Then there are oodles of money to be made, by photographers, caterers, dressmakers, ministers, banquet halls, hotels, and on and on.

No wonder we so often hear about the glories of wedded bliss.

In general, ads are set up to convince us that we will feel happy if we buy the product advertised. Our fears will vanish in a blissful smile, a peck on the cheek from an attractive loved one.

Life isn’t like that, of course. No amount of money can make us truly secure. That’s just the way it is, and at some level, most of us know that. If Paul McCartney’s money couldn’t save his wife from cancer, then we know that our own pitiful fortunes aren’t going to save us, either.

So what do we do? Pay attention to the people in your life. Listen to them. Get to know them. Appreciate them. Donate money to build them a school. Treat them as though you and they will not always be here. That’s the best way to prepare for the ultimate retirement — yours and theirs.

This message has not been brought to you by Merrill Lynch.

Originally published by The Guy Code on January 22, 2002.

Take a moment now and listen to your insides – the place where your soul may be, in the event that you have one.

Does it seem empty in there?

Does your life, or life in general, sometimes seem hollow – less substantive or fulfilling than you had hoped?

If not, God bless you. You can skip this essay altogether.

If you do feel it, though – and if you suspect that others feel it as well — how do you deal with it?

And while we’re on the subject: Do you think people today are emptier than they used to be?

Jack Finney thought so. The late author of the wonderfully scary “Invasion of the Body-Snatchers” also left behind the sweet, nostalgic “Time and Again” when he shook loose this mortal coil. I just read the latter book, and it got me thinking.

At first Simon Morley, the narrator of “Time and Again,” takes the emptiness in his life for granted. When a man from the government asks Si to consider putting his life on hold in order to join a grand experiment, Si contemplates the friends he has, the woman he’s seeing, the occasional idle evening he spends. He thinks about his work as an illustrator at an ad agency, and concludes that it “wasn’t precisely what I’d had in mind when I went to art school in Buffalo, but I didn’t know either just what I did have in mind then, if anything.”

As he considers the offer further, he decides that, “all in all, there wasn’t anything wrong with my life. Except that, like most everyone else’s I knew about, it had a big gaping hole in it, an enormous emptiness, and I didn’t know how to fill it or even know what belonged there.”

Si finds an unlooked-for cure for all that emptiness in the past – not by dwelling on it, but by actually going there. He travels in time back to the New York of 1882, and he sees faces that are alive with anticipation.

“Today’s faces are different,” he insists, and by “today” he means “New York at the end of the twentieth century.” “They are much more alike and much less alive. On the streets of the [1880s] I saw human misery, as you see it today; and depravity, hopelessness, and greed; and in the faces of small boys on the streets I saw the premature hardness you now see in the faces of boys from Harlem. But there was also an excitement in the streets of New York in 1882 that is gone now.” You could look at people’s eyes, he said, and “see the pleasure they felt at being outdoors, in the winter, in a city they liked.” The men moving along may have been greedy or anxious like the men of today, but “they weren’t bored, for God’s sake! Just looking at them, I’m convinced that those men moved through their lives in unquestioned certainty that there was a reason for being. And that’s something worth having . . . “

Losing the certainty

Have we lost that certainty in our day?

Did we get some of it back when the World Trade Center towers went down? Did that extra layer of terror and grief restore to us a sense of purpose, in addition to patriotism?

I think it probably did. Whether it will last is, of course, not for me to say.

In America we have the luxury of disconnection. We don’t need to be attached to a religion or a group or a leader if we don’t want to be. That’s nice in many ways, but the lack of connection — aka freedom — can also lead to a seemingly endless number of empty moments.

Richard Ford notices them, too. In his novel “The Sporstwriter,” protagonist Frank Bascombe keeps track of empty moments the way gamblers keep track of cards. Toward the end of the novel, Bascombe finds a temporary cure, which is apparently all that he, and we, can hope for.

The cure becomes evident as he waits for a young woman, a stranger, to join him for a sandwich.

Frank’s been married and divorced, lost a son, and just went through a breakup with a woman somewhat older than the young thing for whom he now waits. It’s not at all clear what will happen with this one, but he hopes something will:

“I hear her feet slip-skip down the carpeted corridor . . .” he says. “And there is no nicer time on earth than now – everything in the offing, nothing gone wrong, all potential . . . This is really all life is worth, when you come down to it.”

For her part, Carly Simon complained of too much anticipation. She said that a habit of looking always to the future instead of the present was making her late – that it was keeping her way-ay-ay-ay-yeah-ay-ee-ting.

Finney sought salvation in the past. Ford says we can find it in the future, if we look hard enough and keep our expectations low. Simon is sure that we can escape our emptiness by living in the present — just now, right this moment — if we can just figure out how to do it.

By now it’s probably obvious that this essay isn’t saying much, really. Just trying to fill an empty moment with ruminations about empty moments. Thinking about people who try to beat the emptiness with the past, the future, and the present.

Who’s right? Only time will tell.

And now, back to you.

Originally published by The Guy Code on January 2, 2002.

The U.S. government recently gave final approval to experiments that will help determine whether smoking marijuana can help AIDS patients and people with multiple sclerosis, according to the New York Times.

This marks the first time in nearly 20 years that the federal government has allowed anyone to study the drug’s possible benefits.

About time, isn’t it?

Anecdotal reports about the benefits of marijuana for sick people have been piling up for decades. I heard a few of those anecdotes seven years ago, when I visited Dennis Peron’s Cannabis Buyers’ Club in San Francisco.

Operating like a speakeasy on Church Street, Peron’s club provided fresh, uncut marijuana at a decent price to visitors who carried notes from their doctors. I met men and women with AIDS and cancer, sweet people with sores on their skin, people who were in terrible pain. The pot and the friendly atmosphere – people conversing amid oriental rugs and jazz – gave them a few doses of joy on the way to the grave.

What’s wrong with that?

They told me how grateful they were to Peron, a longtime dealer and political activist, for helping them. They said the pot reduced their nausea, restored their appetite, and just generally helped them feel happier than they had been feeling.

The government’s will to stamp out this sort of thing confused me then, and as time passed it made less and less sense.

If another substance had the ability to provide this much relief, some drug company would have lined the campaign coffers of enough congresspersons to get federal approval for it years ago. By now, the stuff would be available at Walgreen’s.

But noo-oooo – this substance is marijuana. In addition to our history of hysteria about its effects – the government used to tell the public that pot swells the ranks of communists and gays, among other groups that no longer scare most of us – pot comes from a plant no pharmaceutical company can control. If it became legal, there wouldn’t be much money in medicinal marijuana – so there’s no pressure from drug companies or other capitalists.

And so the slippery-slope argument prevails – i.e., “If we allow sick people to use this drug, the next thing you know, they’ll be serving crack in school cafeterias.”

But the tide seems to be turning. Extremist efforts by some conservatives to clamp down on pot by imposing mandatory-minimum sentences on first-time offenders – 10 years in prison for simple possession — have led to a counterreaction that is all to the good.

A little more than a year ago, more than 60% of California voters said yes to Proposition 36, which mandates treatment instead of prison for nonviolent drug offenders until their third conviction.

Californians have watched their state spend more tax money on prisons in recent years than on higher education, and they are apparently ready to try another approach.

Dismissive as usual of California’s efforts to determine its own fate, the federal government continues to classify marijuana as a Schedule 1 drug – the category for potentially addictive drugs with no redeeming value. In other words, the government continues to behave as if marijuana were more dangerous than alcohol.

If only that were true. If only drinking caused less damage than smoking grass – to users and those around them – how much happier would the history of America have been.

The harmful effects of alcohol

Our proud nation would have been spared the carnage of millions of alcohol-related deaths, from auto accidents and cirrhosis, from crimes of passion and ordinary barroom brawls. (These days, the National Council on Alcohol and Drug Dependency attributes 105,000 American deaths to alcohol each year.)

Our families, including a number of my Irish-Catholic relatives, would have escaped the devastating shame and loneliness and anger – the ruined holidays, the disruptions to career and home – that come of living with an alcohol addict.

Yes, it would be lovely if alcohol were less harmful than marijuana. But it’s simply not the case.

When I was a senior in high school an underclassman drank himself nearly to death. A nice kid, possibly depressed, he upended a fifth of vodka down his throat. Fearing punishment, some of his drinking buddies left him passed out on a rock near a bay. Fortunately someone thought to bring him to the hospital in time to have his stomach pumped, or my high school would have lost another son.

In the 15 years since I left that school, alcohol has contributed to a number of similar incidents there, just as it has done at countless other schools across the country.

However paranoid it may have made people over the years – however many bad pizzas it may have induced them to eat – there is no evidence that marijuana has ever, of itself, brought anyone that close to death.

It has occasionally caused people to do a fatally poor job of driving cars or operating other machinery. But even then it has a very long way to go before it can challenge the number of fatal accidents that have been traced to booze.

After college I worked in a psychiatric hospital in New Mexico for three years, during which time I knew a number of patients who smoked more pot than was good for them. While hospitalized, they naturally missed their favorite drug – but not a single one of them needed medication to keep him or her alive in its absence. For alcoholics who checked in, the story was very different, as anyone can attest who has watched someone cope with delirium tremens. Untreated d.t.’s can kill.

Later, in California, I was assigned a hospice patient who was dying of cirrhosis. Alcohol had ruined his liver and kidneys so that he could no longer process the day-to-day toxins that the rest of us hardly notice. Poisons built up in his system, bloating his stomach until he looked like a victim of famine. He vomited a lot and he smelled bad and his skin turned yellowish-green and he tottered when he tried to walk. Mostly he sat in a wheelchair and waited for death. When it finally came he was 37.

A healthy teenager who drinks too much in five minutes can die. An alcoholic who is suddenly deprived of his drug can end up just as dead. An alcoholic who has access to all the alcohol he wants can also die way too young.

None of those outcomes occurs with marijuana. Too much at once does not kill, and neither does sudden deprivation. Nor does chronic use measurably shorten a life. And it need hardly be said that marijuana does not generally incite its users to violence, the way alcohol so easily can.
All things in moderation

Now, I’m no teetotaler. I appreciate the way that alcohol, when used as directed, promotes relaxation. I know what one of America’s greatest psychiatrists, Harry Stack Sullivan, meant when he suggested that without alcohol, Western civilization might have collapsed long ago.

Nor am I an advocate of the recreational use of marijuana. It’s been nearly ten years since I’ve used it. I believe the evidence is solid that chronic use impairs short-term memory, dulls the ambition and in other ways addles the brain. It’s not great for the lungs, either.

Marijuana is not a harmless drug – just one that causes a good deal less harm than alcohol.

Let’s think this through

So let’s be reasonable, shall we? Allowing scientists to study the beneficial effects of marijuana for sick people is a step in the right direction.

We should also look into those mandatory-minimum sentencing laws – the ones that force judges to throw first-time offenders into prison for ten years, regardless of the judge’s assessment of extenuating circumstances. I was lucky not to be caught during my “experimental” years, and so were many of my currently productive friends. It would seem as though our current president was lucky, too.

But our own good fortune should not cause us to simply avert our eyes from those who were less fortunate. Californians have reacted against these excessive laws. The rest of us should, too.

Check out this Web page: http://www.fas.org/drugs/Principles.htm

The signers of this request for a more rational drug policy are not wild-eyed hippies bent on destroying the soul of America. They’re smart, sober people. We should listen to them, and we should support their efforts to bring sanity to our nation’s drug policies.

(Originally published in October 2001.)
On the last day of September I met a woman who lost her 40-year-old niece in the World Trade Center. She described the last phone call the niece made – the way she told her mom that the smoke was everywhere and the walls were collapsing and she didn’t think she would make it.

The woman said that her niece’s funeral had been beautiful. Her niece had never married, so her brother had said, “Let this service stand in for the wedding she never had.” They released a bunch of helium balloons and three white doves. The doves were trained to come back, but only one did.

The woman commented on how nice New Yorkers were being, in the aftermath of the attacks. Many people have noticed that. You hear fewer honked horns, fewer expletives. “This horrible event has really brought us closer together,” she said.

Another woman said, “Yes, but let’s hope nothing else happens that would bring us even closer.”

* * *

Even people who don’t know much about Nietzsche, and don’t like the little that they do know, like at least one of his sayings: “That which does not kill me makes me stronger.”

We say it to each other and to ourselves when things are tough. It’s a nice consolation for suffering. But is it always true?

On September 11 I learned that dealing with old grief does not necessarily make you feel strong in the face of new grief.

More than 17 years ago my father died suddenly, and since then I’ve thought a lot about death and read a lot about death and talked a lot about death. For the past five years I’ve worked on a regular basis with people who are terminally ill. I get to know each one for a few months and then they, too, slip away.

So: Suffering and death are not strange to me.

Nonetheless, in the face of the losses on September 11 my knees went soft, my stomach seemed to want me to cry, and my mind pretended that all it wanted to do was critique the way the networks covered the event.

The losses were so big and close and frightening that I could not feel them all. So shocking that I could not make sense of them. And so ominous that I could not even concentrate on mourning what had just happened – it was already time to worry about what might come next.

Our mayor, Rudy Giuliani, said it well that day: The losses were “more than we can bear.”

That was just right.

Many people liked the way Rudy seemed to be everywhere during those first few days – wherever the need was greatest, there he was.

What I liked most was the way he admitted, during that first day, that the loss was more than we could bear.

George W. Bush’s handlers decided we needed a President who sounded like he was in charge, and they reportedly didn’t want us to see him until he could give a decent impression of being in charge.

Maybe they were right to do that. Maybe that is the President’s role.

But I think we also needed someone in authority to tell us the truth – that this was beyond his coping skills, as it was beyond all of our coping skills.

Pretending that we already knew who had done this damage and how we were going to fix it – the kind of pretending George W. was doing – wasn’t really what most of us needed. We are not fools. We knew there was no way to fix the damage that had just been done to so many thousands of families, and to our collective psyche. You just don’t ‘fix’ stuff like that.

We needed honesty and humility, and we got them from our mayor.

Rudy lost many trusted friends that day, and you could feel it as he spoke. He nearly lost his own life when the first tower collapsed. He was awed by this event, as we all were, and he helped us to admit and express our awe, our horror, our feeling of devastation.

Rudy was a lame duck when he told us this, and that was part of what we liked about his presentation. We couldn’t see how he might benefit from our adulation, so we gave it to him freely.

His ambitions kicked in quickly, of course, convincing him that we need him to stay right where he is for an extra three months – even though we really don’t. Regardless of what he ends up doing next, though, what he did those first few days was great.

* * *

My brother works a few blocks from where the planes hit. It hurts to write, “from where the Trade Center used to be.” So anyway he works a few blocks from where the planes hit, and the shock wave from the impact shook his office hard. Many in his high-rise thought their own building had been hit. He was up near the fiftieth floor, and he ran down the stairs with everyone else.

He sent out a Blackberry pager message saying that he was out of his building and was standing at the end of a pier. He wrote that it was hard to breathe but he was okay. When the smoke cleared he planned to walk uptown to his home.

Not long after he sent that message the towers collapsed. The TV cameras showed black and gray smoke enveloping all of lower Manhattan. I pictured him coughing, unable to get enough good air.

Commentators speculated that a bomb might have caused the buildings to collapse; information was sketchy. No one could be sure that the attacks were over. Maybe other poisons would be released. No one knew.

Even as I felt the massive loss of life from the towers, all I could think of was Colin. I kept telling myself he was okay, but as I watched the coverage it was clear that nothing in that area was okay.

Hours later I spoke with Colin’s wife, Kara. She had just spoken with him. He had walked home and was safe in his apartment. I was so relieved. Now I could focus on the loss of the strangers.

Two days later Colin and I talked about survivor guilt. He said he felt some guilt at the speed with which he had run down the stairs of his building. He wondered why it had not occurred to him that others might need help.

I wanted to take away his guilt – tell him that our brains sometimes crowd out everything but their own survival – but I couldn’t, really. We can’t take away someone’s guilt. We have to just accept them as they feel it, and hope they get over it.

Having watched the footage of all the destruction and seen all the suffering, he said that some part of him felt guilty that he hadn’t been hurt more. I nodded.

“You want to hear something really sick?” I said. “I feel guilty that you weren’t hurt more, too.”

He looked disturbed, and a little hurt. “Why?” he asked.

I hastened to explain. “Don’t get me wrong, Col. I’m so glad that you’re not hurt that I can’t even express it. I was so worried, all that day. But I know that in the days to come I’ll meet people who have lost people very close to them in this disaster. And they may ask me about you, and I’ll say ‘No, he was far enough away, he’s okay.’ And they’ll say, ‘Oh, that’s good, that’s very good.’ And they’ll mean it. But their eyes will show their wish that their own loved one could have been far enough away, too. And I’ll feel lousy because of their loss, the way a rich kid may feel guilty about being rich at a time when his friend can’t afford to buy lunch.”

“Oh,” he said. He still looked a little hurt.

* * *

At first all I wanted to do was spend time with Colin and Kara, talking this thing over and watching CNN.

But after a while I wanted to do something. I didn’t know what. But you could smell this thing everywhere, all over town, and the smell only reinforced the feeling of helplessness. Burning plastic, burning paper and burning bodies. The flames and smoke kept going up, just a short distance away, as we tried to go about our lives.

My mom told Colin that she wanted to see us – just look at us and know that we were okay. And he and Kara thought that was a good idea. They wanted to head up to Schenectady, our hometown.

I didn’t feel ready to go. I wanted to help move rubble, or something. I thought that leaving would feel disloyal. And I didn’t want to let terrorists drive me from my home, etc.

Colin and Kara and I walked to the Red Cross headquarters. They didn’t need any more volunteers. On our way home we passed a firehouse that had lost five firefighters in the collapse. We saw the candles, photos, letters from grateful children and so on. So much sadness, everywhere we turned.

I decided to go with Colin and Kara to Schenectady, after all. I still wanted to do something, but there was nothing to be done.

As our cab pulled up to Penn Station, I suddenly felt a strong urge to leave. Now that I was actually leaving, I felt like I couldn’t get out of the city fast enough. It was as if my fear had agreed to keep quiet as long as I could do nothing about it, and now that I could act on it, it was coming up like bad food.

Anxiety stayed high in me until the train left the station and glided north. The sight of the calm Hudson River out the windows on our left told me I could be calm, too.

Our mom picked us up at the train station. She hugged us and we drove away.

It was nearly 7 pm on Friday evening. Apparently people had planned to light candles everywhere and have a moment of silence at that time. My mom had bought candles for the occasion.

Now she pulled off the road in a poor part of town and we stood near the car and lit the candles. We had nothing that could protect our hands from the dripping wax, so we tilted the candles in various directions and giggled at our clumsiness. Down the street some other people had lit candles and were standing near the flag on their porch. We prayed. It felt so nice and so useless, all at once.

I still felt guilty for leaving. That night I called some friends who live near the Fulton Fish Market. From their apartment, they had seen a number of people jumping from the Twin Towers. My friends’ building had lost electricity and phones that day, and had not yet gotten them back.

I reached them by cell phone. They were doing okay, they said. Not great. But it was clear that I could do nothing for them, either. I wished them well and got off the phone. I told myself I’d visit them more when I got back.

The next morning I walked the fifty minutes it takes to reach my grandmother’s house. The sky was sunny and clear. The suburban streets were quiet and peaceful, the trees looked healthy and comfortable, the grass was neat and pleasant.

Schenectady used to be the home of General Electric, and therefore of GE’s atomic power laboratory. The nuclear threat was real to us there. It seemed likely that Schenectady was the target of at least one Soviet missile.

But GE has moved away, and few people worry about Russian missiles anymore. The only thing most Americans know about Schenectady is that it’s hard for them to pronounce. Consequently, fundamentalist Islamic terrorists would find no symbolic value in destroying it.

I felt so safe there that weekend that I wanted to send an email to Thomas Wolfe. I wanted to tell him that in some cases, you really can go home again.

* * *

Not long after Amtrak took us back to Penn Station, a friend in San Francisco asked me how we’re doing out here.

“Oh, we’re fine,” I said. “Just waiting for anthrax.”

“What makes you think you’ll get hit again?” he said.

“Oh, I don’t know,” I said. “I guess I’m just going on recent history.”

“What makes you guys so special?”

“What, you’re feeling left out?”

“What’s wrong with us?” he said. “What’s wrong with San Francisco? Aren’t we good enough?”

Even as I laughed, I wondered how many Americans might share his feelings.

Our town has certainly gotten a lot of attention these past few weeks. Washington lost 190 people at the Pentagon, more than Timothy McVeigh killed at Oklahoma City. Nonetheless, most of the press coverage I’ve seen has focused on New York.

There are good reasons for that – 6,000 people is a hell of a lot of people – but it makes me wonder if there might be a little resentment brewing out there. The young sisters and brothers of a child with cancer sometimes resent the attention their sibling gets. They know they’re not supposed to feel that way – it makes them feel guilty – but still, they’re human.

Most Americans probably feel glad they don’t live in a likely target. But undoubtedly there are others – residents of L.A., perhaps, or Chicago – who feel insulted that New York and Washington were hit first.

“Why is it always them?” they may ask. “What’s wrong with us?”

Few people admit to such feelings, so they’re hard to prove. But you know how people are.

The corollary of that is that when some New Yorkers talk about the tragedy – particularly those who lost no one in their immediate circle, and who don’t live too close to where the planes hit – you can sense their pride at living in a target.

No one admits to this feeling, of course. But you can sense it, the way you can sense the excitement some TV correspondents feel when they report from a war zone.

Nothing proves your importance like a position at the center of the world’s attention. That’s true even if the only reason the world is paying attention is that your city was attacked.

Of course, if New York does get hit again, many of those proud peripheral people will move. Just as celebrities sometimes crave privacy, even New Yorkers sometimes want to feel safe.

Not completely safe, mind you. Not as safe as they might feel in, say, Schenectady. But just, you know, more safe than they’ve felt recently. Is that so wrong?

Nah. It’s not wrong.

Originally published by The Guy Code on October 18, 2001. 

I wrote this in late September, 2001. I’ve learned a bit more about history since then, and would write it differently today. But some of it still stands, and I can’t see the point in changing it now:

If it’s true that “Only Nixon could go to China,” then maybe only George W. could give this speech:

Mr. Speaker, Mr. President Pro Tempore, Congressmen and women, and my fellow Americans,

The losses this nation experienced on September 11 were incalculable. My heart, as all of our hearts, goes out to the victims, who did nothing to deserve the fate they endured. Nor did their loved ones deserve this horrific loss. I’ve directed a number of people, inside and outside of our government, to help those families every way they can. We’re going to help to educate the victims’ children, feed them and shelter anyone who needs it. We’re going to provide counseling for all who want it, and provide it as well for all of the workers who labored to rescue people from the site of the worst disaster I hope most of us will ever see.

The victims of those vicious attacks did nothing to deserve what happened to them. But I have to tell you the truth, my fellow Americans, and I hope you’re ready to hear it: The victims did not harm the Arabic world, but most of them were citizens of a nation that did. Our nation did not harm the Arabic world out of malice, but some of our actions have led to real pain there, and we need to look at those actions closely now if we ever want to be safe again.

Looking at our own actions does not in any way absolve the terrorists of their guilt. What they did was evil, plain and simple, and we will bring their leaders to justice. You can count on it. America will not be terrorized!

But the evil came out of a context that we must study, with humble hearts, if we are to prevent such tragedies from happening again.

Our military is strong, but our military was unable to prevent what happened on September 11. Obviously, we cannot rely on it to prevent future attacks, either. The existence of chemical and biological weapons means that no one’s military is strong enough to keep its people safe.

And so, as our hearts erupt with shock, sorrow and anger at our losses, we must also keep and use our heads: We must ask ourselves what we may have done, as a nation, in order to incur the wrath of so many of our fellow humans.

In the initial days after the attack, I told you that the people who attacked those buildings did so because they wanted to attack “freedom” and “democracy.” That’s what I really thought, at the time. But I’ve been learning a lot since then, and without getting into too much history, it looks like there’s a little more to it. I’d like to explain a little bit about how we got ourselves into the world we are now in.

I can explain it best by means of an analogy, so I’ll ask you to bear with me until it becomes clear:

In the interest of stability, the National Forest Service used to suppress as many of this country’s forest fires as it could. Seeing the destruction fires cause, our rangers believed that they needed to prevent all such fires, in order to maintain our forests’ overall health.

The rangers did this in good faith. As time passed, though, they began to learn that occasional fires are actually good for a forest. They’re part of nature’s plan. Some plants don’t grow unless a fire makes room for them, and causes their seeds to open. Some animals can’t thrive without the invigoration of a few flames.

Moreover, the rangers learned that if they suppressed a region’s natural fires for too long, then eventually so much dry tinder built up that a tiny spark could make the region explode in a destructive inferno.

As I have been learning recently, the U.S. may have done something similar in some Arabic lands. In an effort to maintain stability, we helped to prop up some repressive governments. We helped to keep down the fire of the people’s will.

Now, America didn’t used to do this sort of thing. Our nation used to mind its own business, more or less. But after the Cold War began in 1945, as we faced the threat of an expanding Soviet Union and possible nuclear annihilation, we began to use new methods to protect ourselves. Whenever it looked as though communism might be gaining a foothold, the U.S. acted to stop it. Sometimes that meant that your government would actively suppress revolutions in parts of Latin America, Africa and Asia.

That policy may have helped save the world from a corrupt and unworkable system. But it’s important for us to recognize that it also led to a lot of damage. And when I say “damage,” I mean that it led to the displacement and killing of a whole lot of innocent people. We need to acknowledge that our government contributed to those things. It accepted those killings as the necessary price of containing what it considered to be a greater evil: communism.

During that fight, in the nation of Afghanistan, the U.S. and Osama bin Laden fought on the same side. Our nation helped him expel the Soviet Union, as it helped Saddam Hussein’s Iraq fight against Iran. In those two cases, at least, our policies of interference led to no gratitude on the part of those we helped. Instead, we helped strengthen our future foes.

By the time the Cold War ended, our nation was in the habit of interfering in affairs far from its borders. And our citizens didn’t want democratic freedom only. They were also hungry for oil.

So our government did a number of things to try to maintain a supply of cheap oil.

Sometimes that meant suppressing movements that might have resulted in unstable governments. When fundamentalist Muslims sought power in a country like Iran, for example, support from the U.S. helped that nation’s ruling class stifle the fundamentalists. As we have seen, stifling them did not make them go away. Instead, their resentment grew, until they overthrew the Shah and took U.S. hostages as punishment.

Now, the action of taking U.S. hostages was obviously wrong. Those hostages, like the victims of the attacks on September 11, were innocent pawns in a larger game. But it’s important for us to understand that the hostages were taken in a context that we did not always explain very well to the American people.

By propping up royal families in Iran, Saudi Arabia, Kuwait and Jordan, we suppressed the will of the people. We discouraged the people of other lands from choosing their own leaders – an ability that we value so highly here at home.

And by suppressing the will of the people – the small fires of democracy – the United States helped to frustrate many, many people. It helped to prevent many, many people from gaining the opportunity to thrive.

Bin Laden, Saddam Hussein and others see those people and want to use them. They want to be the sparks that will set off a fire the world cannot control. They know they have the raw material – thousands upon thousands of Muslims who feel a burning and sometimes justifiable anger toward America. And they have fueled that anger with lies and propaganda that made America’s guilt appear to be much greater than it actually is.

We will not let bin Laden or Hussein or anyone else start that fire.

In the short run, we will continue to work with the world community to isolate bin Laden and Hussein and their immediate followers, because it is toward them that the evidence points. We must isolate them to prevent their sparks from catching.

But we must do this carefully, so that we do not further anger those parts of the Islamic world that some of our policies have inadvertently harmed.

No matter how carefully we do this, though, containing this threat is likely to prove costly. We will probably lose American lives, and we will almost certainly take the lives of some of their followers and maybe of bin Laden or Hussein themselves.

Most of the world recognizes our right to do this. We simply cannot allow anyone to terrorize our people. We will not allow bin Laden or Hussein or anyone else to turn our world into an inferno.

In the long run, though, I’ve instructed my advisors and the State Department and the CIA to allow more small fires of instability to go through oil-producing lands. This nation will no longer suppress democratic or other movements just because they are likely to drive up the price of oil.

My fellow Americans, we will continue to engage and work with the rest of the world. But we will no longer seek to control it.

Sometimes, our new policy will mean that the people of other nations will choose rulers who don’t like Americans very much. Some of those nations will seek to hurt us and enrich themselves by raising the price of oil. In that case the price of oil will go up, and we’ll just have to live with it.

For too long, America has treated cheap gasoline as a fundamental right. It is no such thing. And beginning with my administration, we will no longer sacrifice the rights of other human beings to keep our gasoline cheap. Doing so has already cost too many lives – and it’s ruining the Earth, besides.

This may sound surprising, coming from a Texan who got most of his money from oil — a man whose Vice President used to run an oil company. You might have expected Dick Cheney and I to continue the U.S. policy of putting oil first.

Well, I have to admit, it surprises me, too. But when my advisors explained the connection between U.S. policy and Arabic anger, I saw little choice.

The images of the victims from the September 11 attacks are still fresh in our minds. We must not let them become stale without taking steps to ensure that there are no more victims like them. If that means that the U.S. should stop supporting undemocratic governments, then that’s what the U.S. ought to do. After all, the Cold War is over. Policies of interference that may have helped us then are certainly hurting us now.

I’ve directed the State Department to re-examine our policy on Iraq, as well. It may be time for us to remove the sanctions that have contributed to the deaths of so many thousands of innocent children in Saddam Hussein’s land – while leaving Hussein himself in power. Our sanctions have had ten years to work – yet they have not done so. We need to reassess our strategy there.

We need to stop contributing to the deaths of those children, because America believes in the rights of children. And if the rights of those children are not enough to convince us to stop, then our own self-interest also urges us to stop. After all, if we maintain our current policy, then the brothers and sisters of those dead and dying children will grow up to hate Americans the way so many Americans now hate Osama bin Laden for killing our fellow citizens. The world is too small to make unnecessary enemies.

These words, too, may sound strange, coming from a man whose father once counted the Gulf War as one of his proudest victories. But my conscience compels me to say it. Because as I contemplate the wreckage of the World Trade Center and the Pentagon, I wonder if the U.S. can consider the Gulf War a victory anymore.

What did we win? We killed thousands upon thouands of Iraqis – soldiers and civilians – more than the U.S. lost in all its years in Vietnam. We pushed Iraq back out of Kuwait. And we earned what may be undying enmity on the part of many of our Arab brothers.

Why did we do it? Were we promoting democracy? Containing communism?

No. We were doing neither of those things. Kuwait, the land Iraq sought to reclaim, had never been a democracy in the first place, and is not one now. We put many American soldiers at risk in order to reinstall a royal family. Some of those American soldiers died. Our government told us that they died to stop a new Hitler. It did not tell us that they died for oil.

As a nation we supported our troops, and we thought we had won. Our victory came so quickly and easily that we did not ask ourselves what, exactly, we had won. Nor did we dwell on the many thousands of Iraqis we had killed. We accepted those losses because they were not our own — and because we felt so strong. We didn’t worry that anyone would dare to take revenge.

But others, those related by blood or religion to the dead and injured Iraqis, did not accept those losses. They knew their weapons were no match for ours, but they plotted revenge anyway. Without knowing it, our “victory” had put thousands of American civilians at risk. Now, ten years into the future, we may still be paying for the Gulf War.

And the continued presence of our troops in Saudi Arabia, which began during the Gulf War, has apparently inflamed not only Osama bin Laden but also thousands of his followers – the throng whose hidden existence makes America feel less free now than it has felt in a long, long time.

My administration will take another look at the need for American troops in Saudi Arabia. We will never allow terrorism to push us out of our own land. But neither will we let a misguided machismo keep our troops in lands that are not ours.

I am my father’s loving son. But my responsibilities now go well beyond preserving my father’s image. My primary responsibility as your President is to keep all of America safe. I cannot do that unless I help you understand why the world has become so dangerous for Americans.

Unless we understand how we have contributed to this problem, we cannot begin to solve it. In the days since the attacks I have heard rash proposals to bomb people who may have had nothing to do with the attacks. I have heard people talk as if America were utterly innocent, minding its own business, and then, out of nowhere, we were attacked. I have heard the Rev. Jerry Falwell blame the American Civil Liberties Union for the disaster.

My fellow Americans, America did not get into this trouble because it protected individual liberties here at home. It got into this trouble, in part, because it diminished such liberties in other lands.

We will not withdraw entirely from the Middle East. The U.S. has strong ties to Israel, and those ties will remain strong. Let no one mistake this reassessment for weakness on the question of Israel.

But as America goes forward, even as we devote ourselves to capturing those responsible for these heinous crimes, we will continue to seek ways to bring Palestinians and Iraqis and our other Arabic brethren into the world community. We will provide economic aid to make that happen, and we will ensure that such aid goes to the people, not into the pockets of their undemocratic leaders. By promoting prosperity for others, we will promote safety for ourselves.

We will live in a way that will make us proud, as we defend a country that believes in freedom not only for itself, but also for others.

We will live in a way that will make prospective followers of men like bin Laden and Hussein think twice before signing their lives away. There will always be madmen in the world, and we will always have to guard against their attacks. But by our own behavior, we can minimize the likelihood that others will find common cause with such madmen. That much, at least, is within our control.

The course ahead is uncertain. We do not know what will happen to the Arabic world if the U.S. stops trying to control it. But we are about to find out.

May God, who is also known as Allah, bless us as seek the right path.

Originally published by The Guy Code, September 25, 2001. 

There are a number of aspects to this Earthly existence of which we are aware, at some level, but about which we don’t tend to think too much.

One of the obvious ones is our own personal mortality. A lot of ink’s been spilled on that one, though, and I’m not in the mood for it today anyway. Probably you aren’t, either. So let’s move on, shall we?

I’d rather focus on another tidbit: one that’s equally out of our control, and almost as unsettling: None of us ever really knows how other people feel about us.

We have friends and lovers, parents and spouses and children, co-workers and bosses and therapists of various kinds and distant relatives and acquaintances. And all of those people relate to us the way they do out of a self-interest that may shift over time without our awareness. Or it may turn out never to have been what we thought it was in the first place.

Of all the people we know, only a few value honesty over politeness – and even they don’t say everything that occurs to them. Sometimes those who love us most hold the most back.

We know they probably talk about us sometimes behind our backs. We know this because we sometimes talk about them behind their backs. But we don’t know how often they do it, or what they say. Not really. We get hints sometimes, but those usually come long after the fact. We’re almost never up to date on our own gossip.

Sometimes we learn exactly what people we trusted have said behind our backs, and it stings. We dwell on the injury. We may never quite trust those people again. We may treat them as if they are the only people who have ever had negative thoughts about us. And yet, what are the odds of that?

Gossip from others

Moreover, when someone tells us what a third party said behind our back, we never know what our reporter said back to the speaker. Probably he or she went along with it to a certain extent, the way we have sometimes done, when we’ve heard gossip from others.

After all, agreeing up to a certain point is the only way to get most speakers to keep going. Defend a target too soon, and your well of gossip will dry up, never to be replenished.

“If everyone knew what others said about him, there would not be four friends in the world.” That’s Pascal.

Of course, the population has grown some since he wrote that in the 1600s. If everyone knew what others said about him or her today, maybe there would be 15 friends. I think I’d have three of them; I’ll leave the rest to you folks to sort out. And I’m sure I’d have a few things to discuss with even those three.

It’s possible that this issue is on my mind more than usual because for the past two weeks I’ve been working out of my kitchen. But that doesn’t make it any less true.

I’m working out of my kitchen because the magazine for which I work has filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy protection. I’m part of a skeleton crew. From 180 employees a few weeks ago, we’re down to 16 or so.

None of that matters for the purposes of this essay except that — by working out of my kitchen — I’ve become a little paranoid.

No one to say hello

At first I wasn’t sure why. Now I think it’s because I’ve lost all the people who used to say hello to me in the morning. The people who affirmed that I was not a ghost are now ghosts themselves, reaffirming the existences of strangers somewhere else, and most of my contacts lately come through e-mail and the disembodied voices of the phone.

It’s a weird existence.

Some people enjoy working from home, and seek out ways to make it happen. They like the freedom from oversight, the absence of office politics, the relaxed dress code, the easy commute.

And those things can certainly be nice.

But the oversight I had was generally friendly. Our office politics, such as they were, could be entertaining. Our dress code was already relaxed. And my commute was fifteen minutes on an uncrowded subway train and fifteen minutes of walking, each way. Not so bad, really.

I miss the feedback – the people whose smiles told me I’m not quite as bad a person as I tend to think I am. I don’t even run into the Irish guy who sweeps the sidewalks at the school next to my apartment anymore. I could easily walk to where he is, and talk with him about the Mets as I used to do, but there is no other reason for me to be there. When we finished talking, I’d have to turn around and head back inside. That would feel awkward, even the first time.

How all this relates to the theme at the beginning of this piece – that none of us ever really knows how other people feel about us – is that the usual way we figure out how they feel about us is by seeing them and talking to them.

All we have

It’s not a perfect system – people can deceive us, even then, and for long periods – but it’s all we have. As we look at people, and listen to them and talk to them, we can check out how we seem to be coming across. If they react to us in the usual ways, that tells us something, and if they don’t, that tells us something, too.

If we have to base the whole assessment on how quickly they return a phone call or an e-mail message, then our imaginings fill in the gaps. Someone may simply not be home, or may be busy, but may still like us just fine – or, in any event, about as much as they liked us before – but we are no longer able to tell, because we can’t see them.

Without the cues we get from really seeing people and talking with them face to face, we fall back on our reserves of self-esteem.

Even if our account is in good standing – even if we’ve been careful to diversify our sources of self-esteem – we may miss the regular infusions we used to get from outside. We may wonder how long it will be before our account dwindles, and we turn into one of those guys who writes angry letters to the editor, or picks fights with the neighbors, just to feel alive.

Given the recent layoffs in the technology sector, we’ll probably see an increase in that sort of behavior, as well as a few things we haven’t seen before. So let’s be careful out there.

Originally published by The Guy Code on September 11, 2001.

Under ordinary circumstances, a belief that the TV or radio is aiming messages specifically at you is a symptom of schizophrenia. When I worked in a psychiatric hospital, I knew a number of patients who had that belief, and while I treated them with respect, I never really understood how someone could have that sort of delusion.

Imagine my surprise, then, when I was visiting my mom’s house in upstate New York and the TV sent such a message to me.

I was channel-surfing on Friday morning, August 17, and had paused on CNNfn for only two minutes when the announcer said, “In other news is the collapse of this magazine” — and he held up a copy of The Industry Standard. “Sources say the magazine’s parent company, International Data Group, has decided to stop funding the magazine, which benefited enormously from the boom in dot-com advertising but has suffered from the recent slump. Calls to staffers’ phones reached voice-mail messages saying employees were on a company-wide vacation.”

He moved on to the next story, but I don’t know what it was.

A jolt had gone through me as he spoke, but someone watching me through the window would likely have noticed nothing. I did not yell, did not curse, did not do any of the things I might have thought I would do.

In part, my calmness stemmed from disbelief. I did not trust what I had just heard. I worked for The Standard, and the staff really was on a company-wide vacation; that’s why I was in upstate New York. I wondered if CNNfn had called our offices for some unrelated reason, happened to hear an ominous voice-mail message, and then drew an inappropriate conclusion without checking it.

I called my supervisor.

“Bill,” he said.

“Darren,” I said.

“What’s going on?”

“Not much, man. Hey, Darren, has something happened to The Standard?”

“Yeah, man, a lot has. We went under.”

He told me that the board decided three days earlier to cut us off. The Wall Street Journal got the story on Wednesday afternoon, and the Standard’s managers started trying to reach us to tell us the news before we read it in the papers. Unfortunately, most of us had gone away, so many people learned about it the way I did.

Mandatory vacation

The company’s management told us that we needed to save money, so we shut down from August 13-17, a week during which we had not planned to publish a magazine anyway. People who had accumulated enough vacation time would be paid for that week; people who had not, would not.

Because we cover a number of technology businesses, most of us knew that a number of companies this year had opted for such mandatory time off. It certainly wasn’t a good sign, but it was a sensible week to choose – and they picked it a few weeks in advance, so it didn’t feel like a fiscal emergency. At least, it didn’t feel like the kind of emergency that becomes clear to employees only when they arrive at work to find the door padlocked.

There are people who worked at The Standard who now believe that our leaders sent us away that week on purpose — that they didn’t want us around when the news broke. A number of newspapers reported the story this way.

I have no proof one way or the other — few of us do — but I do not believe that hypothesis. I’ve worked at The Standard for more than three years, and I just don’t believe our managers saw this coming.

Other former staffers are angry for other reasons. Many are looking for someone to blame — irresponsible spending (of which there was plenty), a bottom-line-obsessed board of directors (but show me one that isn’t), and so on.

I’m sure that the responsibility for our downfall can be traced to both of those things, to some extent. And then there were the factors no one could control.

The number of ads a magazine sells is one traditional measure of success, and last year The Standard set an all-time record. Despite a precipitous drop at the end of the year, we ended up selling more ad pages than any other magazine had ever sold. This year, the number of pages we sold dropped more than 70%, and the moves we had made when times were good ended up killing us. We couldn’t even make it to September.

That rapid boom and bust made us an interesting story – but so did our journalism, which was first-rate. So the press has been kind to us in our demise — even as it continues to pore over the wreckage to see what our leaders could have done differently.

I’m sure they’ll find a few things, and I’ll probably read them and shake my head.

The grand run is over

But whatever they find will be too late to help us. Our grand run is over. And my dominant emotion is sadness.

This was a damn good group of people. They were sharp, energetic, witty and friendly. John Battelle, our founder, and Jonathan Weber, our editor in chief, fostered an environment of equal parts fun and hard work. And we did very good work, and had a lot of fun together.

When our fortunes were good, the management treated its underlings extremely well — better than anyplace else I’ve ever worked. They brought in massage therapists to rub our backs in the office every week — something I’m sure I’ll never see again.

A few journalists have used our massages as a “telling detail” — a cheap shot, an easy example of the excessive spending that brought us down. But you know what? As opposed to many of the dot-coms we covered and have often been lumped in with, we used to have excessive income, too. Buckets of it. And I’ve worked at other places that had buckets of income, but they rarely shared those buckets with their employees. Hell, I waited tables at one extremely profitable restaurant that charged its employees for drinks at the lone holiday party.

The atmosphere at The Standard was consistently generous, but it was good for other reasons. Beyond massages, regular parties and free sodas, one of the biggest reasons that the atmosphere stayed good was that Battelle and Weber tolerated an unusual amount of dissent.

Deputy Managing Editor Diane Anderson, who would later graciously give birth to my godchild, gave birth first to a subversive publication called the SubStandard, not long after the magazine itself was born. In the Subbie, anonymous writers felt free to take potshots at the company’s management, all the way up to the top.

Most of the submissions were funny, but some could be downright cold. Few bosses I have had would have allowed such a publication. Most would cite advice from their legal or human resources departments as an excuse to shut it down.

Battelle and Weber not only allowed the SubStandard to live — they encouraged it. At public meetings, they would refer to questions raised in the SubStandard, and answer them if they were able. And when an issue was particularly funny, they laughed with everyone else.

That cannot have been easy, because Battelle and Weber were often the targets of personal barbs, some of which must have stung. They took them well — certainly better than I think I would have. Because they showed such class, the rest of us felt better about being there. We had a place to air our anger and our desires — and to use writing talents that didn’t quite fit the business ethos – and our leaders heard us. Some of the younger employees at The Standard may not have realized just how rare an experience that is. They will.

But I’d worked at a few places, and I could hardly believe what this one was like. That’s largely why I stayed as things started to slide.

Dropping fast

It first became clear last November that our ad revenues were dropping fast. Many of our advertisers had gone out of business, and their surviving competitors were slashing their marketing budgets.

The revenues never did come back. From November onward, the gossip within and without our company intensified, and all of the news was bad. “Grok,” a spinoff magazine, was shut down. The first round of layoffs came in January, and the second round came barely one month later. Those big rounds were followed by smaller, quieter layoffs, as the company sought to reduce its bad press. Then the board killed The Industry Standard Europe — 55 jobs, some of our best people, gone just like that. More layoffs in America followed. And rumors of potentially fatal problems began to swirl.

On Monday, August 20, three days after CNNfn announced our demise, Battelle came to The Standard’s SoHo office. That day, 160 or so of the 180 employees remaining – at a company that had recently employed 400 – were being laid off. The Standard would file for Chapter 11 bankruptcy protection. A skeletal crew would remain to mop up, and to maintain a bare-bones version of the Web site in order to show potential buyers what they’d be getting.

John told us his version of what had gone wrong. No one from our parent company, International Data Group, bothered to add anything. They didn’t even say goodbye to us over a speaker phone; they didn’t say anything at all.

Apparently, IDG had nothing to say to these hard-working, bright, good people who had done so well for them — made them look so brilliant – just 10 months earlier.

John taped an interview for the Jim Lehrer NewsHour, then came back and bought drinks for the office at a nearby bar. We talked and laughed and felt lousy. Afterwards, John walked out into a fierce rain, and eventually the rest of us did, too.

Originally published by The Guy Code, August 27, 2001.

In all the lives I’d seen so far, loneliness had been a persistent theme. I had been lonely as an SS officer, lonely as an Arab girl, alone as a midget, and lonely as a clown. No famous lives, no wealthy lives, and not even a hint of love.

Those who study this stuff say that the past lives that come up tend to relate to your current life. Maybe I was lonely at that time, but it didn’t seem that way. I had a girlfriend I cared for, and many friends at work. I thought I was happy, but these were the lives that showed up.

Some months later, I met a guy named Stanley in the laundry room of my apartment complex. Friendly guy, but tough. He asked me to shoot some pool with him that afternoon. I knew I would lose when I saw that he had his own cue. While we were playing, he decided a guy two tables away was staring at him too long.

“What’s he looking at?” Stanley said, glaring at the guy, who looked, to me, a bit freaked out.

“What do you mean?” I said, laughing nervously. “I think he just happened to glance over here, Stanley. It’s no big deal, I’m sure.”

My explanation did little for Stanley, who wanted to fight the guy and almost did. I did my best to talk him out of it — “Stanley, if he’s looking at you, who cares? What difference does it make?” – and it seemed to help, a little, although it’s possible the other guy would have backed down anyway.

Later, we got stoned together and walked over to see “Cape Fear,” the Juliette Lewis version. He brought a knife with him. Big knife. He laughed at how freaked out I was about the knife, and I laughed at the idea that you have to bring a hunting knife with you when you go to the movies in Albuquerque. It had never occurred to me that I might need to defend myself in a movie theater, but it had certainly occurred to Stanley.

Punch the toughest guy

He’d done time in reform school, and told me what to do if I ever get sent to prison. It was the same advice his dad had given him, and following it had served him well.

“My dad told me, if I get sent to jail, then on the first day there, figure out who the toughest guy is, and go up and hit him as hard as you can. He’ll beat the hell out of you, but he’ll respect your courage. And no one else there will touch you; they’ll think you’re crazy. And that’s just what I did,” he said, showing me how he had stabbed the tough guy’s eyes with his fingers. “And he beat the hell out of me, but no one else messed with me, and he and I got to be friends.”

Stanley, who was in his mid-20s, said he’d slept with “roughly 700” women, although he’d lost count, and even though I never saw him with a woman, I doubted he was exaggerating by much. The way he said it did not sound like boasting, and he had the size, charm and courage for that kind of number. One of the women, he told me, he had really liked; her mom was a hypnotist.

“Really?” I said. I had not told him about my interest in reincarnation.

A noble rogue

“Yeah,” he said. “Once, her mom hypnotized me, and I saw this life where I was walking around a battlefield. I was some sort of Irish nobleman, and my people had just been wiped out in a battle against another king. I had tried to save them, but hadn’t been able to, and I was just walking around, looking at the bodies, feeling hollow.”

“Wow,” I said. Albuquerque was turning out to be quite a place, if guys like Stanley were checking out past lives.

I got the woman’s number, and called her. She confirmed what Stanley had said, which made me feel better — I wanted a little external confirmation. She liked him a lot, in the maternal way that some women like rogues, and she agreed to hypnotize me, too.

I drove out to her house one afternoon when I had the day off, and met her husband, who was working in the yard. Dorothy and I sat in the kitchen and talked a bit. They were very ordinary. Nothing bizarre about the decorations, or anything else. She was a sweet middle-aged woman, and her husband was a gruff but friendly middle-aged guy. In my hometown, people who looked like these folks did not believe in reincarnation. But I was 2,000 miles from my hometown.

I figured their daughter was probably pretty cute, but I never got to find out; she wasn’t home.

This hypnosis experience was different than the first two. For one thing, I wasn’t entirely sure that I was looking for anything. For another, the fact that I was in this woman’s home actually made me feel less comfortable than I had felt in the other guys’ offices. Hearing the sounds of her husband doing yard work was distracting; it kept reminding me of where I was.

Consequently, I didn’t ‘go under’ too far. But there was one new life: I saw myself as a young English girl, no more than 4 years old, walking around with my father above the White Cliffs of Dover. She asked me to describe my house, and I saw a small country place; we seemed to be a middle-class family. My father in this life hit me, while we walked above the White Cliffs, because he wanted to discipline me. I fell down and hit my head on a rock, and died. He hadn’t meant to kill me, only to stop me from some sort of misbehavior — but it hadn’t occurred to him that there might be sharp rocks under the grass on which we were walking. And so I died, with little drama, just sort of checking out early.

Dorothy tried to guide me to other lives, but either I wasn’t hypnotized enough or there was nothing left to find, because nothing came up.

“You seem to be resisting,” Dorothy said. “We should probably stop.”

When she brought me out of the trance, she said kindly, “I’m not sure what you’re looking for, Bill, but I don’t think it’s in a past life.”

Maybe not. But maybe all I had been looking for was the past lives themselves. And maybe I had seen enough.

Originally published by The Guy Code, August 16, 2001. 

The next time I found a coupon for a hypnotist I felt less anxious, but also less focused. I called him and asked if he did past lives. He said he did, but that some people had a hard time finding them right off the bat.

By now I was looking at these hypnosis coupons as the equivalent of oil-change coupons: They lured you in to the garage, and if you liked the work, you came back. But if you didn’t come back, then they really would have given you something for free, and too many instances of that would be bad for business.

The way the oil-change guys handled this, often, was to find something else wrong with your car – something they could charge for. Generally it was the air filter. “See this?” they’d say, holding it out to you as you sat in the waiting room, “It’s dirty” – as if a device that filtered air for your car could ever look clean. The less-scrupulous garages would invent even larger problems.

This ‘past lives are hard to find on the first try’ line may well have been true, just as, sometimes, air filters really do need changing.

But I gave the second hypnotist the impression that if he wouldn’t at least try to help me find a past life, I wouldn’t be coming in. I said I’d been practicing with a tape and already found one past life with a different hypnotist and was it okay if I used the coupon to see if I could find some more. He said that would be all right.

His office looked as if it was dusted more regularly than the office of the first guy, and his personality was less comfortable, too. He had a higher-pitched voice and a brusque manner that made me want to sit a little further away. On the other hand, he was actually using hypnosis to help people therapeutically, he said; he said he did a lot of work with people who had been sexually abused.

I had mixed feelings, hearing that. On the one hand I had seen from my work in the psychiatric hospital that sexual abuse leaves deep scars, and I was glad that someone was doing his best to heal those. On the other hand, I had noticed in the same place that some therapists have what I would consider an unhealthy interest in sexual abuse, seeing it even in places where it may not be. In addition, reports were starting to hit the press then – it was the very early 1990s – about therapists who were implanting false memories of sexual abuse in their patients. Hypnosis, especially, lent itself to this sort of thing – it was possible to suggest to a person that they had been abused and, in so doing, spur that person’s mind to create a memory of abuse that would then seem real.

Suggestion of abuse?

I became worried that this guy, with his interest in sexual abuse, might suggest to me under hypnosis that I had been abused, and in my relaxed state I might be vulnerable to the suggestion. Coming out of the gentle trance, I might believe that I had been abused, and might start to shape my life around my victimhood, as I had seen others do. I didn’t know how to defend against this other than to say something directly, so that’s what I said.

“I think that’s important work that you do,” I said. “I’ve worked with some people who have been damaged by that sort of abuse.”

He nodded, almost smiling; he seemed pleased that he didn’t have to defend his work to me, and flattered that I’d said it was important. I was glad to see this change in his expression; it seemed to me that once he took that expression, he’d be less likely to view me as a subject for experiment.

Now I wanted to seal the deal. “It’s very serious stuff, but I want to let you know that I’ve had a lot of therapy, and I know that I have not been a victim of that sort of abuse. I’m here mostly out of curiosity; I want to see how the world may work, and so I want to see what else may be back there in my past. But I don’t think it includes sexual abuse – at least not in this life.”

He nodded. He looked me in the eye, which I appreciated, and said that he had just wanted to let me know that the work he did with sexual abuse was one of his areas, and that he did not find it every time.

Now that we were square, I was ready to be hypnotized.

My life as an Arabic woman

The first past-life I ran into with this guy was a life as a young Arabic woman. I saw myself living with a father who molested me.

Well, that was okay, I guessed; we had just been discussing the topic, and it would make sense that I had been a victim of such treatment, if I had lived on Earth even a few times before now. As long as he didn’t seem to find such abuse in my current life, I’d give him the benefit of the doubt.

The life as an Arabic woman was lousy. I had seen images of this life a few months before, when I had listened to my own past-life regression tape. At that time, I had not dwelt on them; the whole process had been fairly new to me, and besides, my voice on the tape told me to move on to some other thoughts.

Now, though, with this guy guiding me, I was able to really stay with this life, and really feel its unpleasantness. It wasn’t just the molestation that bothered me, although that was certainly a problem. What got to me was that the molestation was part of an overall helplessness. I had no control over my life whatsoever.

I was not a slave, exactly – my father was a merchant of some sort, and I lived with him – but I felt like a slave, because I was allowed no choices, no movement. I stayed in the tent and kept house; when my father came in looking for me, I could not even run from him. Looking at him, as he approached me with a gleam in his eye, I saw that he did not even believe that what he was doing was wrong. He was a pure narcissist; nothing beyond his desires seemed even to exist to him. I hated living in such a confined way, but did not even have anyone to discuss that with.

The hypnotist asked me to go forward to the day of my death in that life, and describe what was happening to me.

“I’m on the sand,” I said. “I’ve been stabbed. Robbers came, and stabbed me for no good reason. I’m bleeding and sore, and I’m too weak to stand. I feel alone on the sand. I don’t know where my father is. Maybe they got him, too, or maybe he was away. I can’t tell.”

The hypnotist asked me to go forward to the time when I left my body. I saw myself rising up, leaving behind the body of an Arab girl bleeding into the sand.

“What did you learn from that life, that you might be able to take forward into future lives?” he asked.

“That I can survive anything,” I said. I surprised myself with the speed of my answer. It hardly made sense to me, consciously. I had been controlled, and abused, and had died young — a victim all the way through. Nonetheless, having risen out of my body and felt my immortality, I saw that it was true. I had suffered, certainly, but had never given up. Life had been hard and unpleasant, but I had kept trying, and could do so again.

The next life

Exploring that life hadn’t taken long, so he took me to another one. This time, I saw myself as a midget, working in a carnival.

In this life I was not so much a victim as an asshole. I told the hypnotist that I could barely see beyond myself, literally, because at that time I could barely see beyond my own needs. I had been completely self-centered. Rude to others, focused only on what I wanted, I saw myself as a grouchy little man. I had no philosophy to justify my bitterness, and felt no need to justify it; other people mattered very little to me.

So, at some point, I got into a fight with someone, and he shot me in the head. I didn’t even know my enemy enough to know why it had happened, but it didn’t matter. I knew that, unlike in my life as an Arab girl, I had brought this death upon myself.

“What did you learn from that life?” the hypnotist asked.

“I don’t know, to be honest,” I said. “Maybe I learned why it’s bad to be so self-centered?

I felt like I was a very primitive person, and I don’t know why it was necessary to live that way, but maybe it was just part of growing up.”

He tried to show me a few other past lives, but the images were fleeting. The only one that stuck, maybe because it was related to the carnival life of the midget, was when I saw myself as a sad clown — quiet, shy and lonely.

Originally published by The Guy Code, August 3, 2001.