who wants pudding?

I've wanted, and needed, to write about this for a long time. I kept taking the high road, and didn't. But I think it's time.

I waffled, as I have on many mornings, then decided that today, I would ride my bike to work.

The air was unusually cool and fresh for mid-May, mid-rush hour.

My heart was still heavy, as it's been lately, but there was the promise of the two-mile downhill ride on Lamar Boulevard, the feel of speed and wind and release, and I felt it there waiting to comfort me, like my girlfriend had when she hugged me goodbye earlier this morning.

I cranked up the short hill out of the back of my apartment complex, up to the street that would take me to Lamar. As I crested the hill, a silver Toyota pickup swept past. Cones in the bed, and that logo on the back.

You've got to be kidding me. Here? Now?

It was the leader of the group I once coached for. A group I had loved, given almost unblinking loyalty to, and worked hard for, a group that quickly and unceremoniously fired me a year and a month ago, for a mistake I had made. It was a bad mistake, a moment's ethical failure that had consequences for another person. I had done everything I could to lessen that burden, to make up for what I had done. It had consequences and a burden for me, in remorse and a deep need to be better and do far more good than I had tried to do before.

Notably, it was a mistake in my personal life, that didn't impact my role as a coach, except this group, and this woman in the silver Toyota truck, decided it was their business, decided it required that they fire me, in the middle of a training group I coached, days before another group was set to continue with a new class, because the runners had asked to continue training with me, specifically, and in the middle of a group I myself was training with.

There was an appeal. There was a polite refusal. A week later, I was laid off my job. A week after that, I was told that I would not be coaching for a great group that trained cancer patients and survivors.

People turned their backs on me. Notably, people who rallied around one person and his odd little cult of personality. Someone I had stuck up for, tried to be a friend to, who wouldn't ever answer me when I asked if he was the one who had said something, that had set the wheels in motion to get me fired.

Only a couple of people had the respect to ask me for my side. Some may have felt they chose against someone who had made a mistake. But I know that many felt they were faced with a choice between the group they loved so much, that was such a tremendous part of their running and social lives, and me.

There was a slide, and a long, dark time. It was with me every day.

For so much of my life, when I had little other self-esteem to hold on to, I had the comfort of knowing that I tried to be a good person, and essentially was. I knew that other people knew that, and believed in me at least to that extent.

Suddenly, I didn't have that. I had failed, and nothing can ever erase that failure. And there seemed to be nothing I could do to make up for it. I was cast out, and that was it.

It all makes me feel like I'm right back in the days when bullies ruled my world, inflicting wounds inside and out, with no repercussions, no consequences for their themselves. I know, in some larger sense, in a very essential way, they're losing, not winning. I know that now. But then, and now, the worst of it is, I know they think that they're winning.

There were months and months of not being able to run without feeling the hurt and anger. The impact of bottom, the hands of friends, and the drive to coach and run again finally pulled me up. But I could never forget, and it continues to burn in me.

It doesn't help that their running group is huge, and growing, and loud, and everywhere in this town. Good for them. Bad for me. I see them around the races and the streets. Many of the coaches continue to be friends, really good ones, even. I get fake hellos from just a few, if they don't have the option of completely ignoring me.

The rep that helped us get shirts for our new running group even said the other day she can't do it anymore, because she was told I had split off from this other group, and she doesn't want to risk the connection. I don't blame her at all, and I don't know that it's a real action by the other group. But it's just another intrusion.

And now here she is, in my neighborhood, right in front of me on a ride to work that I'd hoped would make me feel a bit better today.

I'm sitting right behind her at the light. There aren't any options, and while I don't have to engage a bully, I'm not going to run from them, either. I know she sees me. Her dog is hanging out the passenger window, I focus on it, and the light. I turn onto Lamar behind her, and all thoughts of a leisurely ride and arriving at work not completely bathed in sweat are overwhelmed by this surge of... everything.

I fall back initially. Then it's quickly 20, 25, 30mph. A succession of lights and traffic slow-downs, and I'm just a couple of cars back again.

They expect me to forget and move on, and they seem befuddled by my failure to do so. But it's easy for them, isn't it? They hadn't lost anything. They got their way, and expect to continue getting their way.

I lost a lot. As a friend, they and some of their followers turned their backs on me. As a person who developed strong relationships and friendships with my runners, they gave me only the option of inexplicably quitting on them in the middle of their training, of a mysterious As a coach, they gave me nowhere to move on to. Two different parties place the blame on each other for it, but whichever of them is telling the truth, the bottom line is, I was prevented from coaching for another group.

When I sent an email to my runners telling them I had to quit "for personal reasons", but encouraging them to continue running with that establishment, they were upset that runners came to them with questions about why and requests that I continue.

When some of my runners who had become and still are my friends rallied around me and didn't want to see me slide into a hole, when they wanted to continue running with me, I first said yes, then decided it wasn't a good thing. I disclosed to the woman in the silver Toyota about it, and was met with anger.

When people came and ran with me anyway, she was infuriated. Attempts to talk, attempts at reconciliation, went unanswered. Finally, the other owner of the running group wanted to talk to me about concerns they had about my coaching a group and for my impact "on the running community in general". He did say some nice things. I want to believe some part of him was genuine and wanted to be helpful. But there was also arrogance, challenge. In the spirit of appeasement, I gave things up. They gave nothing.

They lay claim to workouts that other coaches tell me far predate them. They lay claim to anyone I met as a coach. They lay claim to my ability to coach.

After all this, they expect me to let go. They expect me to go away. They don't understand why I'm still angry. Sometimes, I don't, either. It's 8:10am on an unusually cool, mid-May Friday morning, and I'm pounding away at 35 miles an hour chasing... what? 

I've ended up with some of the best friends and runners I've ever had, all of whom know the truth, and made their own choices. One of them became someone I love. Of the runners that stuck with me, and the friends they brought into the new group, a couple were sidelined by injury. Everyone else made it to the marathon and half marathon, and I'm proud of playing a role in that as their coach. More and more people are coming to me wanting me to coach them to run.

So why do I still feel the sadness and anger?

Trailing her truck down Lamar this morning, out of breathing and the smooth motion of leg pushing bike, reasons began to rise up out of the murkiness in my heart and head, taking on a new sharpness in the grey morning light.

I am sad, I am angry, I am devoid of resolution, because for these people I'm beyond forgiveness or redemption. My mistakes, my flaws, regardless of my willingness to acknowledge them, repent for them, or change them, make me forever less to them. And this means one, or both, of two things: either I'm not worth it to them, and never really was, or they don't have the capacity or general willingness.

It would be easy, me being who I am, with my history of being told I wasn't good enough, that I was something less, to believe that. But I believe in the quality of the friends and the people who have stuck by me, through this and so much else. They're good people, true people, who, when I might have disappointed or failed them or someone else, or even myself, trusted the person they believed me to be. They ask me for the truth. They trust that the person I am wants to be good, and will try to do the right things. They reward faith with faith, the heart of true and meaningful loyalty and friendship. And not only because I need that faith from time, that ability in them is part of what makes them the greatest friends, and the greatest people.

These great people believe I'm worthwhile. They believe I'm worth their faith and their friendship. That's enough for me.

So, I've known it's not that. Zipping downhill on Lamar, trailing my past in the silver Toyota truck, I realized that it is the other thing, that on top of the fact that I failed them, it's the fact that these people failed me, and themselves, and their ideals.

We both failed. We all failed. Unfortunately, having their company on the way down just makes me feel worse. The question at this point, is... what will we do now? Who will we be today, tomorrow? Will we both continue to fail?

She split off to the right at Mary Street. I thought of following. It would be shorter, there'd be less traffic, and yes, I wanted to hang on, I wanted to be there in her rear view mirror, I wanted to see a smile and forgiveness, or I wanted her to see me - I am still here, I am still good. I am still worth a damn. I will not run from you.

I paused, fingers on the shifter. Then I pushed the small lever in, urged my legs on a bit, and stayed to the left. The air was unusually cool and fresh for mid-May and mid-rush hour. The drivers around me were understanding and accomodating. And there was a smooth, fast downhill ahead, waiting.

Despite sustaining sizeable losses in North Carolina and an inconsequentially marginal win in Indiana last night, Democratic presidential candidate Hillary Clinton is vowing to fight on, extending the campaign for as long as 100 years, if necessary.

Clinton addressed her campaign troops after taking the stick of a Navy A-4 on its final approach to the aircraft carrier "Hubert Humphrey". Clad in a margarine-colored G-pantsuit, Clinton appeared under a banner proclaiming "Mission Accomplished".

Citing the success of the surge she experienced in the Ohio and Texas primaries, a win in Michigan where her opponents did not appear on the ballot, and a double-digit victory in Pennsylvania (if you round up), Clinton claims that victory is still entirely possible, decrying pundits, party officials, and arithmetic as it is commonly understood in this universe.

Early on, Clinton's staffers had predicted that she would secure the nomination in a campaign that would last "several months, max," and that caucus goers would welcome her with open arms. Instead, she has met resistance in some states in a seemingly unending and increasingly unpopular war campaign that many say has destabilized the region party.

OK, so I am not flagging on my commitment to writing, not at all.

Any time I get where I could be writing something new, I'm mostly using to pound and mangle "The View From Above" to get it into better shape, so I can send it out.

I've sought the advice of a handful of friends whose literary opinions I trust. They've been helpful, but I also feel like it's the first time someone else is seeing why I haven't done this before.

For one thing, there is no right answer in the editing process. Three different reviewers, three radically different opinions. The new intro is good... the new intro robs the piece of a lot of it's immediacy and feel. Present tense is weird... changing it to the past tense weakened it.

One even suggested removing what I think is the punch line to the whole thing, the story of the employee whose wife has the brain tumors.

I have no idea how many revisions it's seen now. It's back in the present tense, where it'll stay. The intro bits keep flashing in and out of existence. I may have to lose my line about commercial-grade weevil poison, acoustic ceiling tile and urinal cakes, which pains me.

It's also hard because every iteration becomes a new piece in my mind, and with every change, something is lost. I write largely because since I was a kid, I've always hated the idea that so many moments and thoughts are just lost. So, editing... yeah, kinda sucks.

But however it turns out, it's hitting the mail this week, and others won't be far behind. Time to step up and see if anyone other than the four or five of you (that's optimistic, and I'm counting myself) have any interest in what I have to say...

Mmm... recycled pudding... the date on the cup says "March 23, 2005". It smells OK...

I'm in supercuts. 7:00pm on a Friday night. La vida loca, you know.

I couldn't stand it anymore, the whole hair thing. I let it go, sort of a graphic representation of everything else I've let go in the past month or so. It's gotten long, which, paradoxically (and again, symbolically), only makes the scalp yamulke on my head that much more noticeable.

A week ago, I plugged in the clippers to get them nice and fully charged. I was ready to do it, to just shave it all off. There would be a certain practicality to it, and possibly even a new and intriguing look for me.

Oh, please don't let me get the mean-looking asian lady. She just grabbed that nine or ten year-old kid by the skull and said, "You don't move!" Yikes.

But there's a little bit of fear, and a bit of sadness involved in the whole idea of shaving my head. I could very well look horrendous, my noggin lumpy and misshapen. I remember finding my baby book, and seeing recorded there "Mother's First Words on Seeing Baby: 'Ugly, pointed head.'" Apparently, I was a fat little kid with a citrus juicer for a brainbox.

There's also the issue that over the years, my steadfast declaration that I'd just shave my head once hair loss reached a certain point has lent the act a sort of never-go-back finality. It seems like growing it back later would be a sort of pitiful act of nostalgia-fueled hopeful desperation. Kind of like going back to the ex you just broke up with last week, just because no better options have appeared, and some things were good, like, well, the sex and the briefly shared love of Nutella before I began to find it sort of creepy, and home improvement shows. Never mind the incessant squabbles and her damnedly bizarre hatred of oatmeal, Pearl Jam's later works, and the color red.

Mean-looking asian woman's done with the kid. he looks weirdly pleased with himself. Now his dad is getting his cut. He's swanky late 70's hair model guy with a moustache, hair swept back in layers. He stares at himself in the mirror while she works, his head down, just the slightest hint of a smirk on his lips. I keep expecting him to give himself the point and shoot with a wink - "looking gooood, baby." He's definitely doing it in his head, just refraining from doing it so we all can see. I saw the kid watching his own haircut with the same expression. History will repeat itself. Women will fall. They should know better.

I know I'm more conscious of the spot than other people. I see it in photos and in the mirror, which causes me to see myself as a slightly younger, barely less bitter version of Purdue Coach Gene Keady, whose meticulous, massive, shellaqued comb-over was once named one of the Fifty Ugliest Things in Sports, along with the Cincinatti Bengals' uniforms and Shaq's free throws.

But fortunately, I'm right at six feet tall, despite a coworker's claim that I'm 5'11", made largely because he's uncomfortable with his own height, and was drunk at the time, as he pretty much always is. Anyway, having the bald spot six feet up means that few will ever see it, unless I: bow; drop something; or am sitting, like in a restaurant. This just means I am unlikely to get dates with royalty or waitresses who demand a full head of hair. It does also make eye contact and not dropping things that much more important.

"Lob? Lob?" Crap. Sure enough, I've got the mean-looking Asian lady.

OK, she's not so bad, as long as I'm compliant with her demands to stay perfectly rigor-mortis-still. I don't think she understands a word I'm saying. She keeps asking "2, 3, 4?" I think she's talking about clipper guard lengths. She also seems to know "short" and "not short."

Actually, the mean-looking Asian lady, despite the linguistic impasse, knew what she was doing. My head feels better. The spot is actually less obvious, looking like it's just an area with slightly less foliage, rather than a region of slash-and-burn agriculture in a rainforest.

I get home, and the clippers are waiting, the green light indicating a full charge.

I eye the spot warily in the mirror. I turn, try to catch it by surprise. I give the suave smile and slight bow to the lovely Princess of Propecia, swathed stunningly in scarlet as I pick her up for a dinner of waffles and Nutella before the Pearl Jam concert. Acceptable. I look up charmingly from my plate of imaginary molé enchiladas to smile at the cute waitress. Not bad.

I hunker my shoulders and scowl like Coach Keady. No, not there yet. Not yet.

I unplug the clippers and put them back in the drawer with the unopened box of condoms and the expired hair gel.

So, the other day, My Annoying Coworker was arguing against spending money on injured animals (it started with a mention of doggie wheelchairs), that extended to people providing for the care of their pets in their wills, giving money to animal aid organizations, rescuing animals... her answer to all of the above? "Euthanize them. They're just animals."

The discussion continued. I went to the headphones, loud. This American Life was suddenly an inefficient barrier, like the doors of a HUMVEE. I pulled out the iPod, plugged in, and began looking. I wanted to pick something I wanted to listen to, but there was the added criteria of finding something that really would form a reliable sonic barricade. I got as far as the "C's" in the artist list, and had to just bail out into Crowded House. Loud. Louder. 

Somewhere in the quieter portion of "Private Universe", I did hear her say something about people having pets instead of kids, and that she didn't want kids, that she can't even take care of herself.
 
I reentered the conversation long enough to suggest euthanasia as an option for her...

She sputtered a bit. Said, "Good comeback" with significantly less bravado and fanfare than anything else she ever says. I said, "Thanks. It was easy."

The conversation ended shortly after that, dissipating slowly like the fizz settling on a freshly poured Coke. For the rest of the afternoon, in the slight, unfocused picture I got from the corner of my eye, she looked deflated.

Maybe she feels a bit lonely. Maybe a bit unwanted. Maybe a little bit like a dog abandoned, maybe something like a lost cat, suddenly without a home and friends. Maybe she even feels a bit abused. I'm OK with that, because she has a choice, and, much though I hate to admit it, something of a capacity for higher reasoning. If she's lost, abandoned, abused right now, it's by her own choice. And unlike the animals she doesn't care enough about, she can always choose to go home.

Lots of dreams lately, like dream overload, really. They're full of people. I think Cactus Pryor was even in one last night.

One in particular struck me a couple of days ago.

It was nighttime, and the skies were clear. I was standing outside with someone, and I think we were moving with all these people to some destination. I looked up to the sky, towards the south, and the world was spread out before us, projected against the night sky, the stars burning through across the planet's face. Countries and oceans were distorted. Malawi became an empire, dwarfing China.

I explained why everything looked funny and unfamiliar - because the earth is round, when you try to flatten it out, bits stretch and compact, as if it were never really meant to be mapped and reduced to flat sheets of paper.

Last night was a bit odd. I was walking with my girlfriend through a neighborhood, in Dallas, I think, and as we approached a Whataburger, she announced that she was going to "get her karaoke on," which is not something she would ever be inclined to say, to the best of my knowledge, understanding, and hope.

I woke up to her alarm going off. She awoke, as well, and immediately said, "I dreamed I was singing karaoke. I did 'Hallelujah', and kept forgetting the damned lyrics."

Weird.

I'm going deaf, sort of by choice. I'm sitting here at my job, and I'm testing the volume output of a Dell Dimension desktop computer's built-in sound card over a pair of iPod earbuds. The output I'm testing with is a stream of an old episode of "This American Life". I know music would probably be more effective, but the familiarity of Ira Glass' voice is soothing, and the stories are distracting, even if neither rises loudly enough to drown out the prattling of my new coworker.

I got in at 8:00, the first one here. I'm on the 20th floor, facing east, the river out the window to my right, the freeway ahead of me to the left, and through both windows, enough of the morning sun is coming in that I don't turn on the creepy flourescent lights.

It's quiet. I eat my oatmeal. I've reduced my oatmeal intake from two packets a day to one. Nature's Path, in the "Optimum Power" flavor. Brown sugar. Walnuts. Raisins. A dash of sea salt. Yum.

I start up the episode of This American Life, and set about eating and working. I have a good 30 minutes of peace before the first coworker comes in. She's cool, though. We say hello, she settles in, and I return to work and listening to the story of one woman's battle against MCI Customer Service. I can relate. Sprint.

Then she comes in, a whirlwind of immediate inane jabbering. It's not just talking, either. It's loud. It begs for attention. It's about things that people may care about, but not when they're talked about in the peculiarly self-centered way she talks about them. Through the steadily increasing volume in my headphones, I hear snippets of complaints about eye shadow, the dearth of sausage in whatever she's having for breakfast (I don't dare take my eyes from my screen after the initial "good morning" smile and nod), despite her declaration yesterday that everything in her house is fat-free.

She puts her on headphones on. This doesn't help. She sings, hums, mumbles, dances, rocks manically in her squeaky chair in ways that would make an autistic five year-old want to slap the crap out of her.

To be clear, there are six of us in a 20 by 15-foot room. The annoyance is three feet to my left, and another coworker sits three feet to my right, spending a good deal of time glaring past me. The other three sit facing the wall behind me.

Her phone rings - Queen's "Fat-Bottomed Girls" - and she answers it. She's prone to taking calls from clients at her desk. She turns partially in her chair, drapes an arm across its back, and faces the center of the room, putting herself on display, because she's certain we're all fascinated by the smart-alecky and condescending way she talks to her clients. When she's done with the call, there's the inevitable explosion of exasperated breath, followed by a loud recap of the conversation for everyone in the room.

She's starting to remind me of the character on "Lost" that I couldn't stand from her first appearance. She's neither a trigger-happy angry ex-cop, nor someone I want to see in a bikini. No, she mainly just makes me wish for a similar ending to her story.

Last night, I finally got to the episode from two seasons ago where they killed off the one character in question. I had accidentally seen the death foretold in a Wikipedia entry, I saw the episode was coming up, and I have to admit, I was excited about it. There's a theory the character was killed off because the actress was a problem, and that a drunk driving conviciton was the final straw. Like we need more good reasons to have stiffer drunk driving enforcement. I watched her get summarily shot last night, and went to bed with a warm and satisfied feeling, completely unconflicted and remorseless, knowing that her scowl and inexplicable behavior will no longer plague either the other characters or my future viewing marathons.

I should be clear that it's not that I'm hoping for my coworker's death, at least not all of the time. I don't even want her fired, because maybe she does her job well. But my total immersion into hours and hours of a television series has disconnected me just enough from reality to believe that maybe, just maybe, some writer will get a call from the producers, and just... write her out of this series. Maybe The Others could be encouraged to come abduct her. Maybe she'll build a raft and float out to try to find shipping lanes. Or, maybe she'll wander off into the jungle, get lost(er?) and take up residence with a howler monkey that won't mind her so much. Maybe when she gets really annoying, he'll put a couple of seashells over his ears and wish they could put out just a little more volume.

Years ago, I ran my first marathon, and days later, announced on my blog that I was quitting my job, and indeed, the law altogether. My boss, a regular reader of both my blog and my waning interest in my work, accepted my apparently pending resignation.

In the early sunmer months after that, I gave both landscaping and unemployment a try, but found both occupations tiring and dehydrating. Eventually, a friend connected me to a job on the fringe of the legal industry, and I took it. People would ask what I did in my new job, and I would try to tell them, but invariably, most of them had to ask me again every time they talked to me, because my new station in life was so wonderfully non-descript and unmemorable.

What I did was this: I worked as a temporary contract employee for a public relations firm that did not only PR work, but litigation support for, a law firm engaged in a certain major lawsuit.

That description, of course, really explained very little, but is still more than most people really wanted to know.

Modern companies and bureaucracies, the type that tend to get sued a lot, produce tremendous amounts of documents. Sue one of them, and many of those documents become legally discoverable. Discovery is the nasty, brutish lead-in to the sort of finer, highly intellectual combat people mistakenly think attorneys engage in. Each side asks for just about everything possible from the other side, largely to increase the annoyance value. And the other side is often happy to oblige, also largely for the annoyance value, handing over enough material to fill the offices of opposing counsel, to line the walls and cover the fine mahogany tables in once-stately and pristine conference rooms, and sometimes, enough to fill warehouses.

In the days of L.A. Law and the lawsuits against Joe Camel, legal discovery became almost medieval in its scale, tactics, and absurdity. Thirty-pound bankers boxes of memoranda were hurled great distances into the midst of opposing counsel by catapults and trebuchets. Filing cabinets of boiling, sticky records were poured over the ramparts of law firm to burn and vex the advancing hordes of lawyers.

Things changed, of course. Younger attorneys stopped wearing pleated pants in favor of flat fronts, tassels began disappearing from loafers in favor of squared toes, a Lexus in the hand became as good as a Benz in the bush, and emails and their attachments began to exponentially overwhelm paper in volume. Disk drives and terabytes largely replaced boxes and paper.

A whole weird branch of the legal industry has developed to accomodate this new electronic reality, like yet another underbelly on a multi-bellied snake, and a new lawyer subculture has been spawned. $375 an hour attorneys don't want to waste time looking for needles in mind-numbingly dull haystacks. There are, however, masses of attorneys flooding the world that are sliding below the industry's radar: new lawyers waiting for their bar exam results; transplants not licensed to practice in their new home state; attorneys lacking the common sense or personality to hold a job; and, of course, lawyers that burned out on a profession they never wanted in the first place, who decided to quit without the benefit of "having another job lined up" or "savings."

So, falling into at least two of those categories, I fell into the the world of legal document review. In that first job, there were thousands and thousands of emails, electronic, and scanned documents managed by a piece of popular litigation document management software. I say "popular" in the same way I would use the word to describe a heavily-used brand of commercial-grade weevil poison, acoustic ceiling tile, or urinal cakes.

I sat at a computer, read each document, and checked one of four boxes to indicate that a document was: irrelevant; relevant; legally privileged but irrelevant; or legally privileged and relevant.

That's pretty much it. Well, I did other things.

I looked out the huge window I sat in front of. It was like sitting in the nose of an old bomber, with the world panoramic around me. It looked south down Congress Avenue, the asphalt emotional center of Austin - I could sense the big, pink granite capitol building just north of us, out of sight, and I could feel the lake glimmering just out of sight to the south of us.

I watched clouds move behind the big chocolate-brown building across from me, and I often wondered how tall the giant, unnecessarily-generic-looking white address numbers on the top are. My best guess was 12 to 15 feet.

I watched bike messengers pedal down the middle of the street, talking to each other before peeling off down side streets. I would recognize some of them - Ben, temporarily on his classic Bianchi road bike (in "Celeste" green, of course), while his single-speed bike was out of commission. I'd see the one guy with the nice unlabeled red track bike. From my glass Olympus, they moved below in complete smoothness and silence, like birds gliding in a slight breeze that I often thought I could hear, only to discover it was the air conditioning that kept the office like a meat locker.

I would chat with my three officemates. At times, we had group activities. One week, Tricia discovered my middle name was Earl, and the others decided that we all needed trailer-park names. Jolene, Lurlene, and I couldn't come up with one for Lee, though "Lee" itself almost worked, so Lurlene got on the department of corrections website to look at the names of women on death row. We didn't find a good, really unique name, but it kept us occupied for a while.

The documents we reviewed were entirely emails produced by a high-tech company. They were a mix of dull and arcane babbling about hardware and code and cost centers, co-mingled with forwarded inspirational crapmail, urban legends, tasteless jokes, and pornography.

We had every email generated, sent, and received by this company, over a terabyte of information. Reading it all sometimes went beyond a mere voyeurism. A person only shares so much with another, maybe just this piece of information, but there will always be someone else that gets another piece. The entire web of communication, business and personal, played across my monitor, and I knew far more than any one of the emailers does. Eventually, I began to feel sort of omniscient, looking down on this little universe as a god would.

The thing is, as a god, I would never create a world like this, unless I was doing it merely to have something to test plagues and floods and massive meteor strikes on.

It's largely a world of nonsense, a complete sham.

The first thing I noticed was the persistent and frequent use and abuse of the word "leverage." I've always thought the word itself is nothing more than a bit of MBA-generated gibberish. But, if it's to be used at all, it should convey the idea of using one thing in such a way that gaining an advantage is an indirect consequence. For example, I could say that I am going to leverage my friend's relationship with the bartender to get myself a free beer.

At this company, however, "leverage" had simply supplanted the word "use." I actually saw emails where someone suggested they leverage an assistant to bring in some lunch. Again, if the suggestion was that making a sacrifice of an assistant might please the lunch god in such a way to make tacos appear, then I'd give them a pass. But this is not what they meant, not at all.

Unfortunately, the word appears to be the hot buzzword of this early millennium, much like "monotheistic" was in the previous one. It was not uncommon to see it levera... used as many as four to five times in a single paragraph.

Nouns were routinely transformed alchemically into verbs, continuing a trend that started innocuously enough with words like "access". Now, apparently, people do "costing," and other vile nouns to each other.

It doesn't seem to matter that a perfectly good, often shorter word already exists in the english language. It is apparently more important to exhibit proactive wordification than to leverage existing language, so the perfectly good words are discarded in favor of stupid new ones, much to the chagrin of observers - or rather, "observants" - like myself.

People are no longer hired, but rather they're "onboarded," clearly intended to convey a much more Love Boat-ey Big Happy Family vibe, at least until someone comes in with a gun and lots of ammunition.

This sort of spin must be fooling someone, if only the people doing the spinning, because it's obviously the only way these people can communicate. There was an awful lot of nurturing and advancing, enhancing and empowering. I have to assume stuff wouldn't seem like such nonsense if i had a marketing degree, or a substantial lobotomy:

"From an expectation perspective, it is not realistic that i will have it to you by Monday..."

"The key is what is under the hood and gaining traction with significant partners that can fully leverage your professional services resources so your software model can quickly scale."

"I am not suggesting plagiarism, only creative, thought-provoking use."

Yet, for all of this hideous linguistic creativity, many of these people were clearly incapable of forming complete, sensical sentences. The words "their" and "there" followed some sort of strangely relativistic laws. Meanwhile, apostrophes are a matter of quantum mechanics, governed by a grammatical uncertainty principle, always popping in and out of time and space without any real predictability, rhyme, or reason. You could only believe that there was a universe where they were all properly situated and living happy, unabused apostrophic lives.

I always felt it was to easy and oversimplistic to demonize corporate America, but reading its emails convinced me that corporate america is indeed a demon universe that is constantly creating itself in its own image. The serfs in the particular corporate city-state I was looking in on were apparently encouraged to identify themselves by the role they play in their little society, "messaging" cryptic, if not nonsensical, taglines (all typos are copyright of the original authors):

"I integrate promotional strategies to generate awareness for our product."

"I passionately communicate the value of our enterprise to empower our clients to revolutionize their customers experience."

"I apply technology to our solutions because your Customers Really Matter."

"I apply the verve that helps my clients and colleagues visualize our enterprise's empowerment solutions."

"I enable a transparent and responsive structure of communication between my clients and their projects."

"I help my clients realize [our company's] full potential in helping them to compete in their market space by delivering World Class Professional Service."

"I engage the demands of the market place to deliver an empowered experience that benefits the client through increased profitability and customer delight."

The thing is, these identities and this language really seemed to point to some worldview in which an MBA textbook on total quality management was the Bible.

"I have failed to execute on my personal objective. I had promised to hold public praise for those who go above and beyond the call. My apologies to everyone, for allowing external factors to affect my commitment to you," from a "client advocate" whose mission in life is to "passionately create and nurture dynamic, scalable technologies that empower our clients to succeed."

It got to the point that I was starting to become really despondent about the state of not only the english language, but of humanity itself. Then, in a batch of emails from one employee, I found a trend of personal emails mixed in. Emails to and from the kids in college. They enjoyed the visit. Another lost his credit card - was he supposed to, like, call the company or something? His wife was suffering from severe headaches.

Then, around Christmas a few years ago, there were emails to friends, to coworkers, letting them know in varying tones and with varying degrees of formality, that his wife had been diagnosed with a pair of brain tumors.

When I finished a batch of five thousand documents, I'd be assigned a new one, and they were not always consecutive. I'd watch the numbers creep upwards towards the end of one batch, like watching the clock approach the hour during an episode of a television show, and I would hope that each email would be the one to tell the end of the story - if his wife recovered, if she lived or died.

But at document #140,000, the very last of a batch, she was still in chemo, though stepping down from a more aggressive phase of it. The next batch pulled me thousands of documents away, threw me backwards several years, to a time when his two kids weren't in college yet, before his mother went into assisted living, and when his wife was healthy, and he was primarily focused on coming up with an inane little motto that would uniquely identify him in his email signature block.

I moved on to another document review project at a different employer before I ever found how his story ended. But for a while, in a time when my own future was so uncertain, it was as if I knew his future, or a good piece of it, in my electronic omniscience. I wanted to warn that 2002 version of him, to reply to one of the old emails and reach who he was then, but I didn't know what I would say.

So, I would sit, and work, and stare out into the world moving quietly around me. I would see what was then my now, the present, constantly becoming the past, stretching out towards the river before me. A flight of motorcycle cops guiding a truck with a car on a flatbed trailer down Congress Avenue, filming a scene from the Quentin Tarantino movie I would see a year later. I could see the actors in the car, the interior lit by fake sunlight that was brighter than the daylight outside. A couple of bike messengers sitting on a bench in the shade. Hundreds of lives moving up and down the sidewalks. People in the building across from me, under the big white numbers, working, chatting, flipping through the Internet, talking on the phone, all those lives on view like fish in an aquarium.

I sat, in my godlike omniscience and impotence, and I saw futures past in black and white, the endings just as unknown to me, but all in there somewhere, and I clicked, clicked, clicked - irrelevant, irrelevant, irrelevant.

this is not something i intend to try to get published. but playing pool again last week, i thought of it, and ran across it today. so... yeah.

sometimes, i feel like we're so close.

granted, i tend to feel this late at night, with some drink in me, with foolish hope dashed and reality sharp in my ears and burning in my stomach.

but i see it, I do, soberly, and I remember it clearly when I wake in the morning. i move, I remember moving, down the streets, and I may sway, slightly, but i see the vectors, the forces and the inertias and momentums in the world around me, not just in its bodies, but in the hearts and minds, as well.

sometimes, i see it in a game of pool, especially with just that bit of drink calming my mind so it can let loose a bit. i watch shots lined up, balls colliding, missing, the sequences of causality two, three, four or more collisions removed from original intent.

the game begins with our intentions, how accurately they're delivered on impact with the cue ball, how smoothly we follow through, how far past the break we see.

every time we hit the ball, there's the one true path, the right spin, the right english, the right amount of force in the right vector. but there are so many variables, so many flaws in our humanity. our muscles aren't perfectly responsive, our skeletons aren't perfectly geometrical. and more importantly, our wills aren't perfect. i want to show off. i want her to see something of my own will and strength in the way i sink this shot. i want this shot to be as good as the last. i want this shot to be better than the last.

some people can hit the ball almost perfectly, can subjugate all those emotions and character flaws to the precision of biomechanics.

but then, the universe itself isn't the perfect table. it's not so smooth. there is a nap to its surface, that affects the way the balls roll; debris, imposed by random chance, disposed of by history, that changes the roll, negates intention and will just slightly enough for the shot to go awry.

and for as well as you might hit the ball initially, for as much as you might overcome the vagaries of the table, there's where you leave the ball. you hit a shot perfectly, but where have you left yourself for the next stroke?

anne sexton writes of playing poker with god, and how he cheats. god doesn't have to cheat at pool, because he's smarter. he knows the insecurities and doubts and flaws that pull at our shots, cause us to see angles incorrectly, cause us to miss shots out of arrogance, put too much faith in our intellect, too much faith in our instinct. he knows the nap of the table. he knows, after it all, maybe not exactly where the balls will and won't fall, but simply when we will, and that we will, miss.

sometimes we hit the shot well, we run a few balls, to a shot we can't or don't make. then, it's god's turn. few of us think to play good defense against god. and it's pointless, anyway, because he can make all the trick shots, all the time.

we so overcomplicate and oversimplify god and love, our lives. it's all there before us, on the table. simple in design, complex in its unpredictability, in its reliance on all the pulls on our hearts. we can control much less than we believe. we can control much more than we believe.

some nights, I play in the zone. i seem to see so clearly. the ball sinks, and I move smoothly around the table, with confidence, and more fall home. but everyone, eventually, misses. and on this night, as on so many nights, hardly any fell at all.

I feel the pain in every miss. it makes me a sore loser. the losing is bad enough. but every time I miss, I know that once again, I've just failed to grasp the obvious, to capture a moment, to reveal my best, to find, in control and the luck of a shot made on a poor table, hope.

OK, so there's even more excitement here on the tech geek/iPhone junkie/writing front.

I could access the blog on my old phone, but of course, with a regular phone pad and a two-inch screen, I'd only have done that if I had five minutes to live, had to communicate to all three members of my annual readership my really strong feelings about what was about to kill me, and could do it in four words or less.

The iPhone gave me a better physical interface, but the MovableType entry screens were still hard to deal with, even with the significantly larger display. But the wonderful folks that produce the Movable Type software I use (and then give it away for free to since users like me) have come up with a plug-in just for the iPhone. The plug-in recognizes when you're logging on via Jesus Phone, and pops up an easy interface.

So now, there is even less excuse to write. I can do it anywhere I can get a phone signal, anytime. Even, theoretically, while, say, using the restroom... Not that I'd ever do that, of course, though it would lend a whole new meaning to the term "web log"...