On ‘Liking’ Social Media

They left in a huff.  And so did we.  Or, at least I did.

Now I feel badly.  But Friday night, I didn’t.

And it was fairly dumb, too.  A conversation about ‘social media’.  And ‘change’.  Our friends, Jeanne and Ivan, have no interest in any of it.  Facebook.  Twitter.  Even ‘texting’.

I took it as being obtuse, and not very forward-thinking.  “This is how business gets done these days,” I blurted.  And I was not drunk.  For some odd reason, my Great Lakes Conway’s Irish Ale just wasn’t sitting right.

“I don’t want people to know all these things about me,” Jeanne retorted.  “I like talking to my family on the phone.  I don’t need to send them a message about what grocery market I’m in, or where it is I’m eating right now.  Why do they need to know that I’m in this restaurant, right now!”

“We’re just old-fashioned,” Ivan added.  “Nothing wrong with that.”

But I wouldn’t let it go.  I tried to draw parallels between what the world was and what it is now.  As if I had it figured out.  I thought I made perfect sense, though.  “The lines,” I droned, “between business and social are just…blurry.”

Ivan laid his cash down on top of his check.  In addition to not texting, forwarding links to Huffington Post stories via Twitter, or snapping photos of his cat and posting them to his Wall, he also doesn’t use credit cards.  “Jeanne, he doesn’t understand us.”

Driving home, that comment annoyed me.  I defended my argument to Donna, who stared out the window, watching the flurries that were falling.  ‘This is such a no-brainer’, I had convinced myself.  Everyone tells me that I’m doing the right thing by investing time and energy into social media.  “A business that is not out there is going to die out there,” I read, repeatedly.

But it could be similar to ‘working out’ and exercising: am I just doing it because everyone tells me I should?

It’s not that I don’t believe that living the non-sedentary lifestyle is a prudent one.  It’s just that I sometimes don’t see the results.  I’m still fat.  And I probably always will be.  Yet, I find myself persevering, telling myself, while doing awkward-looking burpees and contorting my body into ridiculous poses, that I’m doing the right thing.  Still, my mid-section continues its prominence as the center-piece to my physique.  And not in a good way.

On Facebook, I have 278 ‘friends’.  Over half of those are practically non-existent contributors.  Half of the others rarely make an appearance.  And about half of that half never logged on in 2012, or so it seems.  A few of them prompt me to mumble, “Ok, how do I know this person, again?”

As I scroll through the day’s Timeline, I come across postings from the same people.  With pretty much the same things.  Not that it’s bad.  Truthfully, I rather like looking at photos of weird messes their children have left at the dinner-table, or a strange sign in the parking lot of their local Walmart.  Sure, I could do without the biblical-scripture rammed down my throat or the anti-leftist propaganda, but I take the good with the bad.  Now that the Election is over, it’s mostly non-political, which suits me just fine.

But I don’t know anyone else.  Every family member, or anyone that I’ve come across at a job or as a client, has either already ‘invited’ me or has ‘un-Friend-ed’ me.  So the chances are good that I’m going to add very few additional Friends.  My world, from a ‘social media’ perspective, has been pretty much depleted.

And this blog: very few people read it.  I appreciate those who do, and I keep telling myself that I’m merely doing it ‘to blow off steam’ or ‘practice the craft of writing’.  But I sometimes find myself scrolling through the pictures of my Friends and mumbling, “What?  You don’t like to read?  I thought last Thursday’s entry would surely get you to respond, you of all people!”

Nobody re-Tweets my Tweets, either.  And I think that I’ve been fairly Aristotelian, at times, with my usage of 140 characters.

LinkedIn?  I still haven’t figured out what I’m supposed to do with that.

My hops-infused oratories on how social media will expand my sphere of influence relative to my business, while also expanding my wallet, have floated out into cyberspace, with no discernible influence.  At least so far.

So, if nobody reads my blog, and nobody re-Tweets my Tweets, and I’m not generating millions of dollars in new business, why am I so gung-ho on getting the people who’ve elected to stay in the off-line world, on-line?

Honestly, I’ve never felt more alone.

So, as I work on creating my ‘brand page’ while comparing and contrasting numbers from Google Metrics, I stare at my various status-updates from the past.  My scintillating analysis of the role of the papacy in America received no comments.  My hypotheses about gun-violence and its effect on movies elicited nothing.

But my photo of one remaining box of Twinkies on an empty store shelf spit out 23 responses.  And counting.

Perhaps Ivan is right.  I guess I just don’t understand.

-30-

The Buying and Selling

Everybody’s looking for a deal.

I was trying to explain the concept of ‘Craigslist’ to my mother.  She nodded, but I’m almost certain she didn’t truly understand.

“So, what’s the difference between that and this ‘eBay’ I hear about?”

I tried to explain to her that in most cases, a Craigslist transaction has more of a local flavor.  “Of the things I’ve sold on Craigslist,” I droned, “I’m not sure I’ve ever shipped anything.  We just meet somewhere, or they come over.”

She shook her head.  “You mean, people come over to your house?  Isn’t that dangerous?”

As I attempted to extrapolate the process as I understood it, I admit that it has been fairly dangerous.

A number of people have come over to our house, which, if you over-think it, I suppose, can easily be fodder for a episode of Criminal Minds.  I sold a motorcycle-stand to a guy once during this past summer.  He got out of his car, ignored my extended hand, thrust a wad of bills into my other, and proceeded to walk right over to where the jack lay prostrate inside my garage.  He walked around it, stood there for a second, grabbed the handle, and rolled it over to his car, never so much as uttering a word.  By the time I counted the exact amount in my hand, he was gone.

I bought a used computer-monitor for my mother last year, from a woman who could very well have been a model.  We agreed to meet in a grocery parking-lot in Wadsworth.  It was several days before Christmas, and the lot was packed.  The clock on my phone announced the agreed-upon time, and sure enough a white Escalade sauntered slowly by me.  It suddenly screeched to a stop, and then it pulled along side my car.

A blond woman wearing sunglasses, on one of the most overcast days of the year, hit the button on her power-windows.

“Computer monitor?”  She was drop-dead gorgeous.  And more-than-noticeably drunk.

“Uh, yeah, that’s me,” I stammered.  She thrust her gear-shift into ‘park’.  “It’s in the back.”

We both had to get out on the other side of our cars because she had pulled so close to mine.  We walked to the back of her Escalade.  She lit a cigarette.  Yep, it looked like a monitor.  “Will you take $50.00?” I asked.

She didn’t hesitate.  “Yeah, that’s fine.  I just want it out of my house.  I’m getting rid of all my fucking ex-husband’s shit.  Don’t see why the asshole doesn’t sell it himself.”

Yikes.  The Christmas spirit was out in full-force.

But as I recounted these tales to my mother, I did sense that these were two of the more agreeable transactions.  I’ve encountered a number of less-than-honorable folks.  ‘Scheisters‘ my father used to call them.  Buyers who say one thing in an email and another when you finally meet.  Like the guy who drove up from New Philadelphia to supposedly buy the dining-room table we had for sale, who freaked me out while standing next to him inside the self-storage facility.

He pulled it out of the packing-blanket, staring at it, up-close, like someone with a jeweler’s eyeglass would.  He rubbed his hand over the edge of the table.  Over and over and over again.  I thought for a moment that I had a rare table on my hands, perhaps something that was originally on the Titanic voyage.  Or maybe inside the sitting room at Mount Vernon.

“You’re never gonna get $600.00 for that,” he finally said, standing back with a smirk.  He folded his arms the way Fr. Scharff used to do, right before he bashed you on the head with a Paschal candle.  Or at least the way I envisioned he would do it.  His remark amused me.  I mean, it’s a used dining-room table.  Actually, I was amused and a bit confused, since I was almost certain that we’d already consummated a deal.  At least through email and pictures.

“But…that’s what you already agreed to pay for it.”

He shook his head.  “I don’t like the construction underneath,” he growled.  “Pretty lame, actually.”

I nodded.  “Well, I think the 8 photos that I supplied more than explained its condition and what exactly it is.  So, if you don’t want it, that’s fine.”  I moved towards the door.  But he didn’t.

“No way, man.  You’ll never get $600.00 for that.”  He continued to stand there with his arms crossed.  Now my heart was pounding a little bit.  The humidity hung inside the storage-shed like a cloak.  And there was nobody next door at Handel’s Ice Cream.  On a July evening.  Can you imagine?  It was, indeed, a Criminal Minds episode in the making.

Finally, he turned around and started to get into his car.  Then he stopped.  “You take $300.00?”  I started to stammer, but he interrupted me, waved me off, and started the engine.  “That’s alright, no problem.”  He put the car in ‘drive’ and then glared at me, searing his gaze into my brain-stem.  If this were an episode of The Sopranos, I’d be in the East River by now.  “Long way to drive up from New Philly for that.”  I needed several beers once I arrived back home.

This week, it’s been an iMac.  We’re downsizing, and I can use the money for other studio-gear.  The low-ball offers have been coming fast and furious.  One guy wanted to trade for a stereo.  One wanted to trade for a rare, full-blooded dog.  One simply wanted to know exactly where I lived so that he could “you know, make sure you weren’t gonna rip me off”.  And another offered $400.00 plus a an X-Box system with a “about a thousand dollars in video games.  Stolen video games”.  And a whole bunch of emails with no names, phone numbers, or location-data.  Simply, “Is the iMac still available?”  And never a return-email.

Everybody’s looking for a deal.

-30-

When We Ruled the World

The anxiety was in the pit of my stomach, but I liked it.  I started to feel it as I pulled out of Frank’s Trailer Park, every Saturday evening around 10:30.  I’d stop at Apples grocery store and add a few items to what Donna had already packed for me.  Usually a couple of packs of Winston Lights, if I had the money for them.  And a few Little Debbie snack-cakes, since they were only a quarter-a-piece.

In a little more than an hour, I would have 50,000 watts at my disposal.

I plowed through the evening on old Route 224.  Sometimes the heat in my Accord worked, and sometimes it didn’t.  If it was irritable, I’d put the burning embers of my cigarette next to my fingers and face, for warmth.

The light from the dial lit up the front seats.  It illuminated the briefcase that sat next to me, the old case that used to house graded-papers and student phone-numbers, during my life as a teacher.  The outside of it was covered now in radio-station bumper-stickers.  Inside lived my Koss head phones and blank cassette-tapes.  They’d have one more hour to rest.

I turned up the stereo.  Ken Filler was on before me.  He also worked at the University of Akron station.  He was energetic on-air.  We were in the same boat.  Part-time disc-jockey wannabes who slaved away at regular jobs during the week so that we could devote our existence to the 4 or 5 hours we were given to hone our skills.

I was given the Overnight show, but I didn’t mind.  I liked the long drive to Alliance.  It gave me time to think about what I’d say.  How I would introduce a Madonna song.  Or a Taylor Dane song.  Or a Bon Jovi song.  It gave me time to smoke, drive, and think about, over the next 5 hours, how I would rule the world.

On 183, I’d meet up with the 11:15 train.  We’d race.  I’d lose.  It’s haunting whistle sounded different being so close to me, narrowly drowning out Ken Filer’s patter.  Narrowly.  You’d better bring it if you wanted to dismantle 50,000 watts.

The station was in the middle of a cornfield.  Crickets.  Lots of them.  I had a key.  The glass door opened into an empty lobby.  I wondered what had produced the stacks of papers and folders throughout the week, the ones that littered the empty desks and sales-cubicles.  I had never been on-air before during ‘regular business hours’.  Maybe some day.

Ken had stacked my 5 hours of music for me.  We talked, as he ended his show and I prepared for mine.  He shared contest-giveaway information that I would need throughout the night.  We discussed job openings that we had seen in the trade publications throughout the week.  Chicago.  Portland.  Las Vegas.  We were convinced that we’d get there one day.

We’d share airchecks of other jocks, popular on-air personalities from other cities whose audio we had secured.  We’d break their show down and discuss what we liked and what we didn’t.  We were convinced that we knew how to fix their shows.  How to fix their stations.  Which formats would work in which cities, and which formats wouldn’t.

We knew everything, because we ruled the world.  We had 50,000 watts at our disposal.

Suddenly, Ken would hit the ‘on‘ button, triggering his final song, and he would pull his headphone jack out, an unspoken invitation to put mine in its place.  INXS poured through the studio-monitors, as well as through my Koss headphones.  Ken Filler would tell me that he would see me next week, and I’d watch him through the glass studio-windows as he exited the building, the door locking behind him.

He had timed it out pretty well.  My digital clock said ‘11:58’, giving me just enough time to sign on to the FCC transmitter log and to double-check my first song, in ‘cue’.

INXS was winding down.  A ‘cold‘ ending’.  I wrapped my head phones around my ears and turned them up.  It was loud.  I turned them up more.  I was tapping my foot, and soon my whole body gyrated  as “New Sensation” counted down to its end.  The station’s audio-processing pushed up the few remaining notes, automatically triggering my finger to press down on the brown cartridge wedged inside one of the decks, the cartridge that housed the pre-recorded ‘legal ID’, required to air by the powers that be.

Once it aired, I would click down on the button that fired my first song.  “Breakout”.  Swing Out Sister.  Then in four minutes and 14 seconds, I would get to speak.  Into that microphone.  A large microphone with a huge foam-filter, located in a small room out in the middle of a desolate cornfield.  A microphone connected, somehow, to 50,000 watts.  Enabling me, every Sunday morning, to rule the world.

-30-

Be Here Now

It was a short journey.  Less than 5 miles.  To drop off papers at our accountant’s office.  But without a phone, it seemed like 5 lifetimes.  Or slightly less time than it takes to play the average baseball game.

How did this happen?  I take great pride in my seemingly endless ability to organize my world, at least as far as ‘what’ is supposed to go ‘where’.  My keys are in the same place.  My wallet is in the same place.  My water-cup sits in the same spot in my studio.  My morning routine is more predictable than a Swiss time-piece.

But this is not right.  This can’t be.

I’m less than 5 minutes from my house when I realize my catastrophic error.  The interior of the XTerra is filled with my howls of laughter.  At myself.  “How in the fuck did you forget your phone!?”

But somewhere amidst the behaviors that border on anal-retentive hysteria, those that might be so annoying to some as to prompt potential therapy-sessions, there’s a small sliver of something that prevents me from turning around and going back to get it.  The same something that allows me to not have the most meticulously groomed studio, or that gives me permission to let a half-inch of dust survive on top of the DVR.  (Or, as I look around, a car-interior that looks more appropriate for an episode of Hoarders.)

I like things to be in their place, and I expect them to be there when I need them.  But I don’t think I have a clinical disorder.

So instead of exhibiting panic, I make a decision.  To deal with it.  “I can do this,” I mumble to myself, cruising down Market, past City Hospital.  “I can survive this.”

I stop at the light in front of St. Mary-St. Vincent high school.  I reach down to check email.  But that’s impossible, because I don’t have a phone.  I curse at myself again.

Further up the hill, I’m trapped at a light again.  Normally, I would do one of a half-dozen different things.  All of which are accomplished with a device.  Weekend weather.  Cavs schedule.  ‘Beer Advocate’ review.  Or sneaking a quick glance at Twitter.  Surely the Indians have made another agreeable off-season move.  But below me to the right, in my normally-occupied cubby-hole, all I grasp is air, my fingers slamming into the plastic console.  No phone.

I arrive.  Slightly hyper-ventilating.  I run up on to the porch (the accountant’s office is actually an old colonial home, a huge, gorgeous structure) and bang on the door.  Nobody answers.  The door is kept locked because this area of west Akron is, well, not the most safe area.  I could check the actual crime-statistics.  I could even call the accountant’s number to have someone let me in.  But I can do neither, because my device is sitting in its pre-ordained spot on the kitchen-bar, left side, face-up, next to the rectangular basket where I keep spare change and a partially-used Starbucks gift-card.

“Do you know if Donna left me the info I called about the other day,” Leslie says to me, while we’re finally standing in the lobby.  This would be when I’d say, “Hold on, Les, let me text her real quick.”  But I sheepishly explain my dilemma, and even the usually dour Leslie is a bit amused.  “You…forgot your phone?”  She asks this with the same expression that someone might ask, “You…forgot your name?

I re-trace my route to return home.  Panic bubbles away inside of me.  All of the lights are red for some reason.  And apparently some asshole from the City Services department decided to litter Market Avenue with a plethora of these annoying “25 M.P.H.” signs.  On this of all days.

Has a client tried to call?  Has Donna tried to call?  I race through downtown, past the Ohio Edison building, under a yellow light near the Art Museum.  I inch towards the edge of campus.  I didn’t know the University of Akron had so many students who enjoy taking their time crossing the street.  “Hell, I didn’t even go to class on Friday!” I scream.

And if I hit one of them, how would I call for an ambulance?  Or a lawyer?

Reason takes over, and I slow down.  But it does cross my mind: if my coronary artery becomes suddenly defenseless against all of the plaque that’s surely there, how will I call Donna?

My car’s interior fills up with laughter once again.  “You can’t survive 30 minutes without a phone!”

My end of town is within sight.  ‘Withdrawal’ has been along for the ride back.  To calm myself, I look for pay-phones, just for fun.  I haven’t looked for a pay-phone in a decade or more.  Never needed one.  As I soar over Case Street and up the hill towards Goodyear, I finally spot one!  Or, I should say, I spot the remnants of what used to be a pay-phone.   Gang-tags saturate the outside of it, and a metal cord hangs down to the ground, a wire that was once connected to a receiver.

I’m in Goodyear Heights.  Minutes from my driveway.  The dump-truck in front of me, though, does not sense my irritation.  Nor does it notice the rocks and pebbles that are seeping out of the back end as they dance on the pavement momentarily before they crash into my hood and windshield.  Calling his dispatcher is, of course, impossible.

I slam into the driveway while pushing the button on the garage door-opener.  The dogs bark at me as I sprint up the stairs, diving into the warm, enveloping arms of a Samsung Galaxy III.

But there are no calls.  No important emails.  I didn’t miss anything.  Except the text that Donna sent.  Less than 5 minutes ago, before I narrowly missed pushing the garage door in with the front end of my car.

YOU THERE?

-30-

The Pope and His Butterflies

Saturday afternoon was ‘confession’ time.  The day I normally took part in the sacrament of Reconciliation.

Because my parish sat squarely in the downtown-area, the rush of traffic was literally non-stop.  But I came to expect it, anticipate it.  The constant purr of car-engines racing by didn’t bother me or distract me in the least.  It reminded me, while sitting in a pew, working up enough nerve to enter the wooden box, that real life was out there, moving, without impediment.  But my salvation remained here, inside a stuffy church on a Saturday afternoon.

On the back wall, next to the room marked ‘Ushers’, hung a portrait of the Pope.  Over the years, naturally, it changed.  But as a child, and later as a teenager, I would stare at that portrait as I waited my turn inside the wooden box.  And it occurred to me that it really didn’t matter whose portrait hung on that wall.  I was still going to Hell.

Couldn’t this person in the wooden frame talk to the person inside the wooden box? Tell him to cut me a break?  He was the Pope, for crying out loud.

But Saturday was usually an afternoon reserved for being encased in guilt.  Judgement.  And yet the concept of ‘forgiveness’ seemed remote and vague.  How is it that, on an otherwise pristine Saturday afternoon, I merely interrupt my baseball game with a bi-weekly trip to church, step inside the box, pour out my soul, and both the man listening and the man on the wall give me tacit approval to do the same damned thing that brought me here.

So was I forgiven, or not?

It didn’t seem to matter.  And Sister Elizabeth rarely helped.  “God knows what you’ve done,” she’d say, with a slight raising of the eyebrows.

Great.  I’d stare at that portrait on the wall, remembering her words, and shake my head from side to side.  Sounded like a conspiracy.  A spiritual maze, but with no way out.  I’m absolved, but I keep on paying?

I remember watching an episode of Mannix one night.  A criminal who was close to being caught told his accomplice that “they’re going to get me one way or the other”.  It triggered butterflies in my stomach.  I know how he felt.

And the butterflies were out in full force on Saturday afternoons.  Every Saturday afternoon.  I would be close to entering the box, but those words from that criminal on television reverberated throughout my head, doing battle, it would seem,  with the sounds from car-engines outside on Cleveland Avenue.

I understood.  Just then the door to the box would fling open, and the person ahead of me would emerge, holding it open for me.  Gesturing me towards ‘reconciliation’.  I’d nod at the Pope on the wall, and the butterflies would dance away, into the traffic below.  Because I knew it didn’t matter.  If the Pope doesn’t get me, then God will.  Hell, they’re going to get me one way or the other.

-30-

 

I Call That a Bargain

A monthly payment for health-insurance should not cost more than your mortgage.

Yet, it does.  I stare at all of the hieroglyphics that Donna has in front of her.  She’s a ‘scribbler’.  Somehow, the gibberish that fills up several sheets of notebook-paper coalesce into something coherent, giving her the artillery to do battle against insurance-salespeople.  And there are lots of them.

All you have to do is jot one quick note down inside an empty box on an internet-site and the phone starts ringing.

Extreme downsizing.  It resembled the marathon session of all-night painting that we did in Pittsburgh, where we told ourselves that ‘we’re just going to get it done’.  Same thing.  First ‘room’ this time?  Medical.

As I stare outside at more falling snow, listening to her bat numerical-figures back and forth, I feel ‘extreme naivete’ creep in.  Being a part of the medical community seems like a legal way to print as much money as possible.  “Ok, putting a stent in, should I need it, costs $8000.00,” I mumble, between nibbles of pistachios.  “I get it, that they’re trained surgeons, but who decided on that price?  Why not nine-thousand?  Ten?”

If only I could have somehow manipulated my skill-level to include inserting stents into people with high-cholesterol instead of putting canned-music underneath a voiceover for people who can’t make up their minds.  With my ‘training’, they still moan about paying $125.00 instead of $100.00.  “Tell them I’m eating pistachios!” I yell into her office, while she sits on hold.  “They’re supposed to be good for you!”

‘Extreme downsizing’ is code for ‘we’re not doing so hot’.  It’s been coming.  The last 18 months have been mediocre at best.  Little by little, what remained of any ‘trappings’ we have had are dissolving.  Motorcycle magazines.  Gym memberships.  And our semi-regular ‘Thursday Night Date-Night’ hasn’t happened in some time.  At least at a restaurant.  They seem like small things on the surface, but, like tiny bills, they add up.

So, similar to getting a diagnosis of impending doom, you start to make deals.  Except we make them with ourselves.  Re-working the numbers.  Proposing alternate monthly ‘scenarios’.  Not exactly pleading with insurance-agents, but challenging them to keep us as a customer.  In a strange way, it feels good to at least try to convince yourself that you actually have a modicum of power or control amidst the whole sad situation.

They say that most people are several paychecks away from demise.  But I think it’s something that could happen sooner than that.  Some of the entrepreneurs of the world, like us,  get no warning, much less a severance.  “We are releasing you from our website for lack of orders…” it read.  It’s a termination, but, in my estimation, with even less soul, less tact.  Delivered in an email because it can be.  It’s the name of the game these days.

So, too, is ‘extreme downsizing’.  Making your bargains.  Trimming the fat.  Making do.  And in doing this exercise, it feels infinitely easy to blame yourself, to assign a false sense of ‘worth’ to these acts of capitulation.  And you try not to.  But in the end, the numbers don’t lie.  And neither do you.  To yourself.

The ‘wise sage of Barberton’, Dave Senn, has a saying: “Pick yourself up by your boot-straps, dust off, and move on.”  Oh, and I’ll add ‘be prepared to be on hold for a good amount of time”, too.  These insurance-salespeople are trying to make a living, as well.

-30-

 

 

7 Years of Dirt

It’s the ‘hypocrite’ in me.  It’s the part that sometimes blames those who live here of allowing the ‘present’ to easily dissolve into the ‘past’.  Yet, I’m just as guilty.

We have family members here who still wear the same hairstyle as the one they flashed at picnics and cook-outs in 1990.  Akron was ‘mullet-central’ for many years.  Still is, to a certain extent.  Any trip to one of the few remaining stores in the Lakemore Plaza can be an immediate journey into a time-machine.  The chances are great that you might even come across a Bon Jovi tour-shirt, too.  From the Slippery When Wet days.

But in these cold days of February, with uncertainty lurking, I find myself returning to them.  But I don’t know why.  I was far more in debt then.  My commute to work was a two-hour freeway journey, round-trip.  And it was tough trying to pay a mortgage and pay down debt with a 9-year-old car and a $19,000 annual salary.

Maybe it was simply the act of staring at an empty space, where our home once stood, that prompted a cavalcade of memories.  Our home in the Kenmore area of Akron no longer stands there.  Neither does the house next to it, the one that was occupied by feisty Irene, our neighbor.  Meth-houses, more than likely.  I pulled over next to the curb and surveyed the rest of the neighborhood.  It didn’t look good.

It was the house that most resembled the one I grew up in.  Lots of woodwork, typical of homes in that area.  It had an enclosed sun-porch that we rarely used.  But it had a comfortable dining room, an enormous added-on downstairs bathroom, and a dry basement.

It was a house that we actually move into twice: once when we originally bought it, and then upon our return, the first time, from Washington, DC.  We had several wonderful Holiday dinners in that house, including, one year, my “Italian Thanksgiving”, where I prepared lasagna and garlic bread for Donna’s mother. (I’m not a huge fan of traditional Thanksgiving food.  They ate it, but seemed puzzled throughout the entire meal)

I sat on that beige-carpeted dining room floor on many evenings and weekends, making demo-tapes on the stereo’s dual-cassette deck so that I could search for on-air radio jobs.  We watched the Indians win the ALCS in that living room in 1995.  And we watched them lose the World Series.  I also drank my first Great Lakes beer in that room, with The Ghost of Tom Joad reverberating loudly throughout.

We also had our truck broken into while living in that house.  Someone had also attempted to break through the side-door one evening when we weren’t there.  And not all of the neighbors were friendly.  The police routinely visited the wife-beater across the street, and kids in the duplex beyond our back fence sometimes flung huge rocks into our yard, which I’d find with the lawn mower.

For reasons that escape me, sitting there, staring at that empty space, where a weed-covered pile of dirt fills up what was once a basement, I found myself getting emotional about it.  And then I laughed out loud, because most of the houses on this street have all the earmarks of ending up in the same exact place.  “What am I doing?” I remark to myself, wiping my face and heading down to Kenmore Boulevard, towards the I-76 on-ramp.

This empty space in the air, which once served as our home for 7 years, is really just one in a line of puzzling journeys I’ve taken.  Lately, I find myself thinking back and reminiscing a great deal.  But most of the time, I end up in the same place, muttering to myself, and surprisingly bemused at the fact that I do this not about magnanimous events, but vague memories, thoughts about past occurrences that seem extraordinarily ordinary.

Was sporting a mullet while wearing an Alice in Chains t-shirt such a milestone in my life?

I suspect that they have to do with ‘status’.  ‘Accomplishment’.  (Or lack thereof.)  And perhaps my overall ‘place in the world’.  Things really weren’t more simple then, but they appear, now, as though they were.  Or maybe it’s that back then, I felt better equipped to do battle with whatever was tossed my way.  When it comes to ‘regret’, it turns out that it’s far more difficult to bury it under a pile of dirt.

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