Who's the real Taker

There is a great debate going on now in this country about how much the elites "make" in this country versus the rest of us "takers"  who are deemed dependent on the elites. A major American retailer is under fire from the organized portions of their workforce demanding fairer wages, full-time hours and benefits. The retailer defends it's practices with the suggestion that to extend those benefits to all their employees would put them at a competitive disadvantage forcing the cost onto their customers. Independent surveys have looked at the workers demands and determined that the costs would only be an increase of 15 cents on the the total bill of the average customer. At the same time the retailer proudly trumpets its best holiday shopping profits in many years. The retailer would claim the titles "self-made" and "job creator" but the title self made denies the benefits they derive from a low-payed workforce that is forced to take government subsidies for their basic survival. So if you do the math the pennies you save at the cash register are more than erased by the taxes you pay to keep the cashier alive. Almost any corporation in America depends on the infrastructure we as taxpayers subsidize. While they may have a claim at the title job creators they don't create jobs out of a pure sense or motive of altruism. They create jobs that benefit their own bottom line and when the business no longer benefits them the business disappears and so do the jobs. When the central Florida economy was booming in the mid 1990's and growth seemed out of control there were many in local politics calling for "concurrency" which says that if you're a developer adding thousands of new homes and presumably thousands of new demands on the local infrastructure that you the developer would have to offset that new demand by paying for the new schools, roads, and fire services. That to me is a more responsible model for how we move in the future. 

Time Elastic

I have been thinking about the speed by which time passes for me lately. It's prompted by reconnecting with friends after years of neglecting familiar ties. Some of those friendships were made with only a couple of years of actual contact and yet in mining the memory bank seem like they were a far greater part of my adolescence. I wonder if it's the power or impact of shared experiences or is it a sentimentality for a certain time period that make these friendships more vivid.

There are plenty of theories about time passing quicker as you age. That it's an actual physiological change in the brain's perception of time. It's seems rather obvious that as the end approaches time seems a high speed train out of control. What I have trouble understanding is how when I reflect on the distant past there seems a stretching out of time. That a couple of years seem like all of my childhood. When I put myself back in the moment I do remember the "clock watching effect", that impatience for the freedom to be doing something else, that seemed to stretch time. But I also remember the times that the clock ran out before I was done having fun.

I subscribe to the ideal of living in the moment. Savoring every minute of the day so at the end I'm not left with the "where did all the time go?" feeling. Recollecting the past would seem a discarding of that ideal and yet I find a similar zen in going back as I do in being here. That reminding myself of where I've been helps me focus on where I am.

Thinking about the past is...safer? Healthier than the future. The future is uncontrollable. Cause for worry. Uncertain.

Contemplating a bike commute.

How do you overcome the lethargy of fear? Peel yourself from the couch slap yourself awake from the anesthetic effect of the television? Give up the safety that's made you lazy? I used to bike commute all the time. It was out of necessity, I had no money, but I had a great bike. It was a city, I think, far less suited for bike commuting than the city I live in now. Of course thirty years have passed and who knows attitudes of drivers may have improved since then. So why am I so hesitant to hop on and ride again? Fear is a great paralyzer.
  I'm less afraid of the aggressive or angry driver than the distracted one. I drive everyday for work and I know how distracted I can become and I have to re-focus my attention on the road at times. But this has been realized many times over by all who take to the roads in anything less than an armored personnel carrier. Drivers are far more distracted it seems than when I was a bike commuter. A phone call during travel required a stop at a pay phone. Text messages were carried by the postal service. More kids rode to and from school so drivers may have been more aware of cyclists. Maybe the world was a safer place or it just seemed so because I was younger and invincible.
 So recognizing my own failings of attention span behind the wheel I think therein lies the crux of my fear. I need to and I would argue everyone needs to live more in the moment. To be where they are, to meditate on the thing they are doing at any given moment. I'm not talking about a dream-like meditative state where you leave your body on the way to some nirvana enlightenment, though that has it's place, I'm speaking of the zen of hyper-focus.  I'm a much better driver when at the end of the trip I can recall details of the trip.  Even the seemingly irrelevant details like the water stains on the Merita building, the butterfly dancing over the dead tree branch, the red car inching closer to my lane. Writing this it sounds like distractions but when I'm experiencing it I think I was absolutely in the moment. Malcolm Gladwell, in his book Blink, defines it as "thin slicing," or the ability of the brain to receive multiple external stimuli and in the blink of an eye pare it down to only what you need to react. It's something that can be improved with practice.
   None of this helps overcome the fear of taking on the roads. But it is what would attract me to bike commuting. It'll force me to be more in the moment. Whether it's a slower pace, the physical exertion, or the fear of a painful death, I would have the "hyper focus" needed for survival. The thin slicing: bike lane, dog on the loose, birds overhead, that's a nice house, cars too close, exit strategy.  Focusing on the present can actually help prepare you for the future. Confidence comes with practice as does improved focus. Demonstrating that confidence has the power to affect not just yourself but can affect the behavior of drivers around you. I say this with a bit of blind faith, but if I mine my memory banks there was a time when I had that confidence and I survived. 

What am I doing with these hands?

I've often wonderered about how people use their hands when communicating verbally. It's mostly involuntary I suspect. Ingrained like accent, speech patterns,favorite pause fillers. Magicians on the other hand are quite purposeful in how they use their hands. Drawing the eye in one direction with the motion of their two hands while their third hand is putting a rabbit in the hat. At least I think that's how they do it.
It's a scary thing to see a driver talking on a cellphone, speeding along 45+, one hand holding the phone, the other hand gesturing, underlining salient points, no hands visible on the wheel. Maybe they're magicians.
I was once hired to videotape a woman who trained corporate suits on public speaking. She was big on the hands and what they should do with them while speaking. It was her theory that the hands working in concert, like a conductor, were a distraction from the thoughts they were trying to convey verbally. One hand gesturing at a time was best practice in her book. The dormant hand was best left hanging at their side being seen but not heard. It seemed a tall order to break someone of something so instinctual. Like trying to eliminate the " ahhs" and "umms" and "you knows" from a conversation. It was complete folly to think anyone would learn this from the tape I was shooting.
I do believe she has a point about the hands being a distraction or causing the listener to misinterpret what your trying to say. I was once on a roadtrip from Orlando to Tampa. It was in '95 and the Orlando Magic were in the playoffs. I had stopped at a Cracker Barrel to grab dinner about halfway through the trip. While waiting to order dinner I was playing with one of those triangle peg games. The object of the game is to eliminate pegs by jumping one peg over the other. When the waitress brought our drinks I asked if she thought anyone in the kitchen might know the Magic score. She responded "There's no magic score you just try to remove as many pegs as you can." I thanked her and made my dinner order.
Of course with little effort I found this is the subject of serious research. By lots of bigger brained people than myself. Korlei Mensah wrote a whole term paper on it with research and observation of test groups and citations. She cited someone named Weitz who said: "Gesturing is nothing more than movements of expression." I also found a study out of the University of Chicago where they found directed or instructed gesturing helped third and fourth graders solve math problems. I immediately thought of counting on my fingers but the study quickly pointed out it wasn't that kind of gesturing but more of a grouping of the equation by making a "v" under the first two numbers. Then my attention span waned and I came back to write.
Certainly hand gestures can help the listener visualize concepts like shape or direction or even emotion. A clenched fist or extended middle finger speaks volumes as does a wave or a peace symbol. Once while I was paired up for golf with three Japanese citizens verbal communication was impossible. Lots of smiling and nodding. I don't remember exactly where in the round I started but I found myself giving the "happy thumbs-up" gesture after they would make a shot. It was a genuine good-will gesture on my part but I started to notice their reaction was more perplexed than a smile and nod. I realized I had even given them a few "double thumbs-ups" and I thought; "What if that is the equivalent of a middle finger?" If so I had been insulting them for a good part of the round. I decided to keep my hands to myself the rest of the round.
All in all I prefer people who animate their conversations with their hands. When I shoot interviews I would rather include the persons whole self in the shot. The best is if you can catch someone in the act of doing something with their hands. Washing dishes, potting plants, carving cigar-store indian statues. If they can converse while continuing to work that makes a far more interesting and revealing interview. Forget the eyes being a window to the soul I think it's the hands.

Monitor Lizard vs. Feral Cats Part 2

So a quick recap: Hungry Lizard, Victimized Cats, Mysterious Cat Lady, Mims that about covers it. This was an unlikely collision of two pet species forced into a death struggle by irresponsible pet keepers. The cats were probably many generations past ever being considered pets. I have to admit I don't know the life span of a monitor lizard but felt pretty sure he was out there on his own, no mate, no community, just surviving. Kind of like the last Mohican.
So the feed store folks had entertaining stories but no info to help me in my mission. The ladies in the Holy Spirit Thrift Store seemed the most interested in helping me find this woman. Without any hint of passing judgment on lizard, feral cat colonies, or cat ladies they did an informal poll of all the volunteers in the store. Amy did indeed know of a regular customer who had a large number of cats in her care. She knew her by first name only Beth, but once again, no address no phone number. A glimmer of hope though this was her regular day for shopping there. Amy told me I should check back in the afternoon. Another volunteer knew of a colony of cats near the public library and suggested I check there.
Mims has a fine public library that it shares with the town of Scottsmor. I love the very idea of public libraries "socialized literacy." In whispered tones I recounted the story I was by now well rehearsed in but I was also beginning to recognize non-recognition in the faces of my audience before I finished telling the story. So to hopefully bring up to speed I felt it needed more description. Hard to do in a whisper. Komodo dragon-like, but smaller, hiding in a culvert ambushing unsuspecting kitties. Of course I should have remembered from my days working in a public library that whispering was not necessary. When I finished explaining myself to the woman at the circulation desk, she turned and in a full-throated voice, bellowed to the periodicals clerk. "You know of any cats being eaten by a big lizard?" Nope. But they thought the house on the hill behind the library had a large cat population.
The house on the hill did have all the signs, fenced carport, with lots of carpet covered climbing structures. The yard outside that enclosure was littered with a variety of plates presumably for cat food. Drat! Nobody home. I was starting to get desperate. Standing in the street in front of the house I resorted to stopping motorists. Some were frightened to learn of a lizard on the loose "Oh my god, how big?" Some were amused, "It doesn't stand a chance against my rottweilers." One woman said her son had a lizard that escaped. His name was Psycho, the lizard not her son, this had promise the name certainly fit the profile of a cat marauding monitor. Then she informed me the escape happened five years earlier. As strange as this all was to me five years with no report of cats being harmed seemed implausible.
The only grocery store in town was a language barrier that once overcome proved fruitless. The post office was too bureaucratic, protecting privacy, blah, blah,blah. I finally got a call back from the ladies of Holy Spirit they had an address for Beth but didn't think from their conversation with her that she was who I wanted. I went anyway. Very kind, she must be to care for strays, but she also had a big dog that would run interference between any lizard and her cats.
I was now completely out of time. I had succeeded in nothing more than alarming the whole community of Mims about the presence of a monitor lizard on the loose. It was time to move on and find another community living peacefully until I had a chance to stir things up.

Monitor Lizards vs. Feral Cats

So right away it sounds like a uneven match-up no matter which camp your in right? For the reptologist nothing beats the prehistoric, dragon-like, monitor and for the cat fancier there is no more formidable opponent than the wily, street smart, feral cat especially if his posse has his back.
One day recently I found myself with the mission: "Tim, go to Mims, there's a woman with a colony of feral cats; she says they are being preyed upon by a monitor lizard." There is a catch; no address, no name, no phone number, just the town of Mims. A town I would soon find out has nine feral cat colonies. How do I know this interesting factoid about Mims? Seems Fish and Game keeps a registry of "Feral Cat Colonies". Just the term colonies when used with feral cats was a new one to me, like one day they would develop into civilized societies. Rules of law, by-laws, boring council meetings, interesting scandals.
Being mister can-do I set out to find this particular colony. Feeling a little like the guy searching for Col. Kurtz in Conrads' "Heart of Darkness", understand the town of Mims can be a scary place and there was the rumor of a Monitor Lizard. Where do you start with so little to work with? Figuring any "feral cat colony aid worker" worth their salt would have to frequent the local hardware store; they would certainly need materials for enclosures, lots of bowls for food and water, this particular aid worker might be in the market for a large trap for say a...lizard maybe? Fortunately the town is small, only one hardware store, so the labor of explaining my dilemma, at least to the hardware set, was short. But also provided no new clues.
Feral cat colonies have not developed to the point that there is any signage or demarcated boundaries yet. So where to next? The feed store folks knew of several keepers of large cat populations which they had colorful commentary on, but had heard nothing of a hungry lizard with a taste for feline.
I had started the search at the northern border of town; so why not go right to the south end? The bait and tackle shop. I know what you're thinking. "What the... why a bait shop?" It was the last business headed south, cats love fish, maybe someone trying to lure a large lizard would search there. The people in the bait shop were amazingly adept at hiding any interest in or even surprise at the story I had for them. They seemed to be all about the live bait and dead fish. They also provided no clues. They did suggest however I give up the search and grab some live wild shiners and go hunt for something I'd be more likely to find.
The mission remained and now I was past feeling foolish in recounting to strangers the particulars of my search. I'd even pared down my opening mission statement to: " I'm (insert name here) I'm looking for a woman here in town who takes care of alot of cats, some of which are, being eaten by a large lizard." I had variations on that statement like mentioning the lizard first as that would stick out more in peoples minds. So I started hitting businesses in short order convenience stores, the auto repair shop, the used furniture store. No luck....more later.