From The Narrative Of John Smith by Arthur Conan Doyle:

The want of money is the sun which shines on the needy genius and warms the latent powers into life. I consider the possession of a competence to be one of the greatest curses which can befall a young man of talent. How many a promising lad I have known from my student days, who had it in him to rise to the highest honors of his profession. Yet the possession of a miserable hundred or two hundred a year has removed the chief incentive to work and caused him to dawdle along in an ignoble dolce far niente, while penniless youths with half his brains, driven by the sharp spur of necessity, passed over his head and soon bade fair to have a yearly income which equaled his capital. The best and most successful writers seem to find the undertaking of a new book to be a painful effort. Carlyle talks of returning to his writing “not as a warrior going to a battlefield, but like a slave lashed before his task.” A man with brains and a competence my fail, but a man with brains and poverty must succeed. – Dr. Turner to Mr. Smith. p. 13

[Update 1031: I just go back from my bike ride and, Scout’s Honor, there was a Metroparks employee weed-whacking the edge of the woods WHERE NO ONE WALKS, EVER!]

Looking at my backyard from my desk, I see a doe browsing in a, mostly untouched, bit of clearing. I mow my front yard, but not my back. I enjoy the naturalness of this wee meadow’s tall grasses, milkweed, blackberry brambles and wild flowers, I also enjoy not spending an hour or so a week wrecking the rural ambiance with my mower’s hammering and exhaust.

On my walk this morning with Buster I saw that the Metroparks crews had mown their bit of meadow and done so way beyond reason. With the exception of those rare patches where little white balls fly about, we shouldn’t spend tax dollars transforming open fields into fairways.

Some mowing, perhaps 10 or 20 feet left and right of the roadway and multi-purpose paths, is fine, but cutting whole commons where no one picnics or plays sports is wasteful. I don’t know how many mowers groom what portion of the more than 21,000 Metroparks acres but I did some quick research online this morning and found that commercial riding mowers burn about a gallon of gasoline an hour.

Allow me a back-of-the envelope calculation. If one mower cuts six hours a day, five days a week, for six months, that’s a total of 4,056 mowing hours. Gas prices are hard to peg, so I’ll be generous and say gasoline can be purchased for $3.50 per gallon; that’s $14,196 per season for that one mower. Multiply that by the number of mowers in the Metroparks fleet chopping away and we’re easily in seven figures.

Mowing 10 percent less would help, but that’s just a start. I think cutting 20 or 30 percent less is possible, and healthier.

You?

Yesterday was the last day of the school year and this morning I officially begin my summer. So far, keeping my fingers crossed, I’ve managed to fit all five of my summer students into a Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday schedule that keeps me busy from 0715 to 1800, but leaves me free the other four days of the week.

With the exception of Father’s Day, a few dentist appointments and a wedding in August, I don’t have any travel plans to work around and for the first time in months, I’m focusing on my writing, a little blogging and catching up on my reading.

First the reading. I have a stack of books next to my desk that I am committed to finishing before I return to school in mid-August.

On the list (in no particular order) are:

Kurt Vonnegut’s Wampeters, Foma and Granfalloons;

James Joyce’s Ulysses;

Edgar Alan Poe’s Selected Writings, edited by Edward H. Davidson;

Francis Flaherty’s The Elements Of Story: Field Notes On Nonfiction Writing;

W.E.B. Du Bois’ Black Reconstruction In America: 1860-1880;

Arthur Conan Doyle’s The Narrative Of John Smith;

Alice Walker’s The Cushion In The Road: Meditation And Wandering As The Whole World Awakens To Being In Harm’s Way;

Lawrence Block’s The Liar’s Bible;

Eric Foner’s Reconstruction: America’s Unfinished Revolution, 1863-1877;

Dan Savage’s American Savage;

Ron Larson’s Algebra 2;

Joseph James’ Ratification of the Fourteenth Amendment;

Michael Kelley’s Complete Idiot’s Guide To Precalculus;

Mark Twain’s The Innocents Abroad;

Danica McKellar’s Girls Get Curves: Geometry Takes Shape; and, finally a quartet from

Walter Dean Myers: Riot, Journal of Biddy Owens, the Negro Leagues, Birmingham, Alabama, 1948, Handbook For Boys — A Novel and Just Write: Here’s How!

That’s a lot of reading, but I’m also committing to a lot of writing. On Fridays, Saturdays, Sundays and Mondays I’ve effected the following morning ritual:

I’ve set my CD alarm for 0425 with Enya’s Anywhere Is and I rise to sit my morning meditation. walk Buster (my junkyard Shar Pei-Alsatian), brew my morning coffee from Phoenix (I now live in a coffee desert so I have to stock up every time I’m in Cleveland Heights) make breakfast for myself and the other dogs and then by 0620, be sitting here in front of the computer to write for three hours.

My primary goal is to finish writing and editing Absent Son by the end of the summer but I’ll be do a bit of blogging (both here and at The Writing On The Wal) and essay writing in the gaps.

When I finish writing for the morning, I’ll be on my bike to crank out a ride in the Brecksville Reservation Metropark that abuts my backyard.

I’ve gotten a slow start this year, what with my workload and the weird weather, but I’m beginning with five miles of flat and planning on adding hill climbs and longer distances in the coming weeks. I’ve been fighting my weight again (I’m at 209.4 this morning; that’s 25 pounds over my ideal of 185 pounds, but still down significantly from the 265 I weighed 18 months ago) and I expect the riding will help significantly.

On those days when I’m teaching, I’ll modify the writing bit to get in as much time as possible between breakfast and my first student.

Bike rides on those off days will be unlikely since I go until 1800 and then have a 40-minute drive home. I’m pretty whacked when I park the car (although Gilligan, the puppy in the pack, won’t let me sit down until I’ve thrown Wilson (his volleyball-sized ball-on-a-rope) a few times for him to chase down and triumphantly run around the yard, smacking himself in the head as he flings the ball violently left and right on the rope to demonstrate who’s in charge of the duo. (Buster is satisfied with a bit of stick play).

[Update at 1840: I’ve been thinking about this all day and here’s my bottom line. There is no good security reason to be doing what the federal government is doing unless the people at the top are so feckin’ clueless that they actually believe all the people who hate America are total idiots (like themselves) and don’t have the sense of the average American drug dealer who only makes calls using an untraceable burner phone.]

OK, President Barack Hussein Obama has officially jumped the shark…

From Salon this morning:

Last night, The Guardian’s Glenn Greenwald, Ewen MacAskill and Spencer Ackerman reported that the NSA ordered Verizon to provide them with information on every call made in the United States for a three-month period ending in July. Yes, every call.*

The NSA got a FISA judge to order Verizon to turn over “all call detail records or ‘telephony metadata’ created by Verizon for communications between the United States and abroad” or “wholly within the United States, including local telephone calls.” The records include “metadata,” meaning the records show the phone numbers, call length and possibly location the calls were made, among lots of other helpful identifying information.

This news, like most modern news regarding our national security state and government surveillance programs, is equal parts shocking and unsurprising. We already knew (or, more accurately, “we” already “knew”) this was happening, or at least that it had the potential to happen. Oregon Democratic Senator Ron Wyden has repeatedly said as much. The NSA’s authority to demand this information comes from the Patriot Act. (Their request rests on a very broad reading of a provision of the Patriot Act but we should be used to intelligence agencies interpreting the law in the most permissive possible way.)

And the first person who shuffles out the “if you’re not doing anything wrong, then you have nothing to fear” bullshit gets slapped.

*I’m seriously considering a subscription (at $181/year) to the Guardian Weekly.

Roldo Bartimole writes:

In sports we keep records to see who is ahead and who is behind. It’s simple. Get the scores. It tells the story.

I thought it was time to put up a scoreboard that gives us some feel for what the tally is on downtown public subsidies. Where the dough goes. It can’t be a precise record. There’s simply too much public money involved.

It is a tale of two cities. Downtown vs. neighborhoods. It is true some neighborhoods are experiencing resurgence. Others are suffering further decline. Where resources go is crucial to urban life.

This is a journalistic effort. What’s needed is a true academic study to track all this funding. As a reporter, I have followed the bouncing ball and made as thorough an accounting as possible. However, I don’t have a full accounting. No one does.

And just as this is being prepared, County Executive Ed FitzGerald and Mayor Frank Jackson at the Plain Dealer offices tell us they have a little cash – some $350 million – sloshing around to give – where – downtown. Total pie-in-the-sky nonsense for PD headlines. So predictable.

Cleveland is a city with 32 percent poverty, according to the American Community Survey, U. S. Census Bureau, 5-year estimate 2006-2010. I suspect it is worse now. Certainly for minority communities. But who cares about them?

While the subsidies were being doled out to multi-millionaires and billionaires, much of the city where ordinary Clevelanders lived was being destroyed by other money-making forces. Housing was being destroyed in too many ways to account here.

We have experienced decades of binge subsidizing of our rich while ignoring – and billing – the people who most need help. The shame is written in dollar signs.

Although I haven’t been close to city hall or the county administration for some years I have some indication of what’s been going on. Continue Reading »

Roldo Bartimole writes:

Two subjects highlighted by and in the Plain Dealer reveal clearly how established desires become the conventional wisdom of supposed journalism and civic responsibility.

The first involves Alexander Cutler, the CEO of Eaton Corp. He wants austerity from the federal government. You know, cut the food stamps and extra goodies for poor babies. Belt-tightening stuff. Character building.

Easy for Cutler to say. He was paid $20.4 million in executive compensation in 2012. One year’s take, people. That’s up from $13.5 million the previous year. (Eaton executives took home $43.6 million in 2012, up 34 percent. No complaints there I guess.) Some people keep expanding their belts.

I guess he and they got some extra room. But what he advises is for the rest of us to pull the strap tighter. Breathe in. Now hold it.

What gets me is that he is provided the speakers platform at the Cleveland City Club, that establishment that likes to call itself the Citadel of Free Speech. Cheap speech that week.

The elites who sell the type stuff Cutler’s peddling under the “Fix the Debt” banner get easy entrée at the City Club. Never doubt they will.

Cutler, of course, got big headlines in the Plain Dealer. He was Continue Reading »

I’ve long argued that what we call racism in America masks the deeper, darker, evil of classim; that we simply don’t care about those whose class status is benetah our own. Joan Walsh makes her case:

We still don’t know how much police are culpable for failing to find Berry, Gina DeJesus and Michelle Knight. Multiple neighbors say they called 911 to report seeing women in distress; the police deny getting their calls. Confronted with those police claims, neighbor Israel Lugo told MSNBC: “It’s a bunch of BS.”

Eventually, we may find out the truth. But it’s clear that Ramsey, at least, took a risk and acted to help Berry escape. Neighbors say it was left to the girls’ mothers and community activists to keep the spotlight on the missing young women when police and authorities gave up in this forgotten working-class neighborhood in the shadow of I-90. A third of families live below the poverty line, and average household income is under $24,000. Still, people go to work – Ramsey has a job as a dishwasher. Amanda Berry herself was abducted on her way home from a job at Burger King. They take care of themselves, or try to. And sometimes they’re able to take care of one another.

I find myself thinking about Ramsey’s most memorable line: “I knew something was wrong when a little, pretty white girl ran into a black man’s arms. Something is wrong here. Dead giveaway.” Ramsey spoke from the heart of his experience as a black man in segregated Cleveland, and segregated America. Still, I wonder if any of the missing girls were considered “white” by authorities — or at least white enough to be part of the “missing white woman syndrome,” in which the disappearance of pretty, upper-middle-class white girls and women becomes a police priority and a national scandal. Think Chandra Levy, Natalee Holloway or Laci Peterson.

If you’re one of us, you’re one of them, and that make you one of the Invisible People.

Tim Russo writes:

The smearing of Charles Ramsey begins.

From the fevered swamps of right wing talk radio. Where else?

Gee, I can’t imagine why anyone would be reluctant to do what Charles Ramsey did this week. Who knows what could happen if you try to act like a human being and, you know, help other human beings?

Perhaps they’ll look into your criminal record. Why wouldn’t they?

That’s where the money is.

Joan Walsh agrees…

Roldo Bartimole writes:

Add them up: The Imperial Avenue atrocity of 11 women raped and murdered by Anthony Sowell; The gunning down of Timothy Russell and Melissa Williams by out-of-control Cleveland police; and now the revelation that three young women have been held captive for years in a home on the city’s near West Side right under our noses. And who knows how many other failures?

What does this tell us?

It tells us a version of what Atty. Gen. Mike DeWine reported about the recent police chase and gunning down with 137 bullets of two unarmed suspects, Timothy Russell and Melissa Williams.

DeWine said that the police chase of some 62 police cars – 59 without permission – racing at very high speeds through the city streets of Cleveland to capture and kill two unarmed suspects was a “systemic failure” of command and communications. It was more than that.

It goes a lot farther, doesn’t it?

The revelation that these three women were held captive, no matter what the circumstances get revealed, shows that the SYSTEMIC FAILURE Continue Reading »

Love is grand!!
Divorce is a hundred grand.

From my dad, of course…

OK. So Fergusen’s six killer apps are:

1. Competition.
2. The Scientific Revolution.
3. Property Rights.
4. Modern Medicine.
5. The Consumer Society. And,
6. The Work Ethic.

I’ll take nos. 2 through 6, but where we fall down in 2013 is No. 1. Our economies have become skewed by wealth concentration in a tiny (way less than 1 percent) sector of the population that has zero interest in fostering honest competition.

In fact, the über-haves benefit most by squashing competition (see Bill Gates and MicroSoft) wherever the green monster rises up.

Yes?

But the First Noble Truth suggest that we should stay and acknowledge our suffering. If we don’t understand suffering, we can’t understand happiness. p. 28

From Good Citizens: Creating Enlightened Society by Thich Nhat Hanh

Previously…

Found in my electronic chapbook.

From page 1 of The Anything Journal:

Hi there stranger!

I am an anonymous donor of this notebook to the Phoenix Coffee/Coffee Phix coffee shop!

What’s on your mind?

Write it in this journal.

This is meant to be an anonymous way to get your feelings out, write poetry, doodle, draw, write short stories. You could sign it if you want, but it is by no means required.

Write/draw whatever you want in this journal, but please, no profanities!

Please make your contribution to this coffee shop doodle journal.

But have fun! :)

What I’m reading write now…

Happy Earth Day…