Thanks Dad.

Over the years, my wife has picked up all sorts of odds and ends at bargain prices in post-Christmas sales. She stuffs them various places in the house, often losing track of them for years, then pulls them out for housewarming gifts, etc.

This morning, Christmas morning, she produced a collection of 25-or-so round, cardboard Christmas coasters, each with a tree on one side and a conversation-starter question on the other side. One of the questions was, “What’s the most important thing your parents taught you?”

After a moment's reflection, my wife described being taught by her quiet-spoken, hard-working, tender-hearted father that, even though she was a girl, she could do anything in life she wanted to do. That was a breakthrough message in early 50s.

The coaster question reminded me of an old saying: Most of the values parents pass on to their kids are “caught, not taught.” We get told all sorts of things, but are more deeply influenced by the way the people around us live than the way they talk.

Two lessons I learned from my folks come to mind.

One was to be careful — I’m plagued with that one. They never stated it overtly, but I got it, got it bad.

The other was a good one, probably best stated by my dad in a sermon I remember.

Important context: Dad was a Baptist minister in a time when smoking was sophisticated, way before health warnings began to get traction. And for the people of my childhood church, smoking — along with movies, cards, dancing, etc. — were glaring and sinful examples of the big W, worldliness.

So it was edging up on radical when Dad said, “I’d rather have a man who smokes a big black cigar and loves people than someone who acts righteous but doesn’t love people.” They taught me that. In that case I caught something very good.

Of course, I also caught something subversive. That would eventually edge me out of the world where I grew up. But we all have to leave home sometime. If we don’t do that, well, that’s another subject.

I miss my mom and dad today — in the best possible way. Hope you’re having a good “season.”

Respect now. Hold the hell 'till later.

When I saw the name Sarah Vowell on one of my audio book offerings, I picked it up. I’d seen some of her stuff, but knew virtually nothing about her.

The book, The Wordy Shipmates, is about the Massachusetts Bay Colony and the persistent thorn in its side, Roger Williams, who they finally ran out of town. You may remember he ended up living with the Indians in Rhode Island, founded Providence and is often credited with introducing a serious reading of separation of church and state into the colonists' thinking.

Reading history and social commentary should always be this much fun.

But that’s all background. Tracking down more of Sarah Vowell's stuff, I watched a video of her on the Daily Show, talking about the book. She said Roger William was a problem for the Puritans in Massachusetts Bay Colony because he was more serious about his religion than they were, not an easy feat.

But the line I liked most was her description of Williams’ basic religious approach, “He thought most of the people he met should be damned to the fires of hell after their death because they were so sinful, but until they died, you had a duty to treat them all well.”

That’s not exactly what she said, but it’s close. And I was thinking it's pretty intriguing. Because it generally works the other way around. We treat most of the people we bump into with indifference while they’re living, then say, “He was a really nice guy,” after they’re dead.

Reversing that — the more I think about it, the more I like it. Although I don’t think I’d like to have a long dinner with Roger Williams.

It looks like an ad, but it isn't.

It strikes me that some companies think they want to do advertising, when what they really want to do is PR.

PR, done right, serves a company extremely well. It spreads the word about the company's goals, accomplishments, aspirations and values. It clearly describes their products' features and benefits. It talks to world in a very clean and direct way.

Advertising, done right, interests customers, draws them in, chats with them about needs and dreams and troubles and feeling, and suggests, in some charming way, that they try the product. It might be good for them. It's clear about what it's doing, but it says a lot less than PR and implies a lot more. And does it all in a befriending way.

So when I see a PR piece in an ad formate, I wonder if someone knew the difference and, if they did, why not just do a great PR piece in that space. I think it would have a more authentic voice, maybe even be more effective.

A superior product.

I just saw it again in some sales materials that drifted across my desk. Doesn’t it seem to you that the phrase “superior product” really says, “Do not pay attention to this, it’s just marketing”?

I’m not sure I ever see either of those two words outside of an overreaching sales presentation or PR piece.

Flip on the TV at any 2 a.m. and catch the infomercials. You’ll hear “product” over and over again. This product, the product, our product; that’s where you hear it. And the guy with the badly produced, 30-second spots for his computer-learning DVDs constantly calls them “my product.”

And “superior” — that’s a rating bubble you blacken with a number 2 pencil, right? When do you ever, in an authentic conversation — which is what advertising is supposed to be having with viewers, readers, target markets, etc. — hear someone say anything is superior? Possibly, “Your child is a superior student.”

Anywhere else, it’s just one of an unfortunately long list of expressions that are meant to sell me, but instead signal me.

They say, “The following is a paid announcement which no one outside of the marketing department and a group of sadly needy 2 a.m. shoppers pay serious attention to.”

I’ll bet you could list a dozen of those words and phrases. Yet there they are. They survive.

You've got to write it wrong.

I was just telling my boss that I don’t like to write and he said, “Nobody does.” The only thing interesting about this exchange is that he’s the Chief Creative Officer here and I’m one of his senior (make that old) writers.

I mention this because (watch out, whiny confession coming) I haven’t been living up to my end of the blogging contract.

As a pledge of faith, here’s the saying I developed to explain successful writing to my kids: You’ve got to write it wrong before you can write it right.

When people say, “I don’t understand how you can write,” it's usually a case of misunderstanding how writing really works for writers. If you see something that’s well written, it’s never — well, hardly ever — the first draft.

Another of my deeply wise sayings: writing is rewriting. You just put something on the page, dump it all out, then rewrite it. And rewrite it. And rewrite it. Until it’s presentable.

That’s why I don’t like to write. I like to think great thoughts. (The inside of my head is a wonder to behold.) But I don’t like to write them down. Not a good stance for a blogger. I’ll do better.

Shake it off.

Unless you’re a pro football fan, you may not have noticed the attention finally being paid to players’ concussions. We can all remember when it was gospel that any competitor worthy of the name would “shake it off and get back in there.” Headline stories praised weekend heroes who threw the winning pass but couldn’t remember the entire last half.

Despite being hit in the head few times, I remember when I played small-college basketball, back in the dark ages, when the accepted rule was “never take water during practice or during a game — it will slow you down.” Hydration, what a concept.

It’s a reminder of the value of questions when someone says, “Everybody knows.”

Don't count on the right-of-way.

An NPR conversation this morning reminded me of something I’ve been mulling ever since I had my first driving-in-Italy experience a few years ago.

Back there again a few weeks ago, I wondered whether it might be safer driving in Italy, where you have to pay attention to the aggressive drivers and twisting roads, than driving here in the U.S., where a lot more elbow room and traffic controls give the illusion of safety.

I recently read about a town in England (I think it was England) where they're experimenting with fewer traffic controls. First they tried removing the signs from a round-about and found the number of accidents plummeted, seemingly because drivers had to pay attention to each other rather than to the traffic signs. They’re now removing stop signs from a large section of town to see how that works.

The guest on NPR this morning was saying that the worst accidents are those horrific broadsides that take place in a marked intersection, when two drivers think they have the right of way: “I’ve got the green. Go for it.”

This traffic control thing reminds me of something else I notice every time we go to Europe. That's are very few watch-your-step warnings. I suppose that's because many of the streets and walkways are uneven ground, especially in the historic areas. You have to watch out for yourself. There's no signs by the Seine that say, "Hey fool, don't fall in."

(A bias: I hate the word signage. They’re signs, call them signs.)

There may even be a conservative-liberal argument embedded in this. When is it better to put controls in place and when is it more productive to emphasize individual responsibility? (Who was it that said, “Everything, in the end, is political”?)

Back now, I think.

I’m surfacing — the bionic man. After getting a second titanium knee a couple of weeks ago, I now have a matched set. I mention it only as an explanation for my failure to write much the last few weeks.

The last couple weeks have been a reminder of how hard it becomes to tend your duties when you don’t really feel “there” (or "here") for a while. I tumbled a few steps down Maslow’s Hierarchy of Needs. I’ve had a lot of interesting stuff going on in my head. I just haven’t wanted to sit down at the computer and tell you about them.

It’s reminded me of a weekend my wife and I once spend with our youngest son at his college. He was going through difficult times. (I remember those sorts of days well.) And his characteristic way of dealing with the outside world back then was wonderfully Scandinavian — he'd simply stop talking entirely.

My wife and I recognized the pattern immediately because her dad, a wonderful guy, was famous for not speaking for days at a time. And my wife … let’s just say conflict manage was not very creative early in our marriage. Here was I, compulsively needy about getting things settled and there was she up in bed, head under a comforter, trying to find some safe harbor from my anxiety. It was wonderful.

After a few years of that, I learned to stop pushing a bit which let her shorten the absences. We still run the same circle, but much more quickly. You can even be with us and not notice we've just had a brief tiff -- faster than a speeding bullet.

Getting back to that college weekend, after a day or so of “the great silence,” I threw one of those unhelpful, parental hissy fits (does anyone still use that idiom?). I remember yelling at him, actually just speaking quite firmly -- that really helps, ya know. The gist was, I know you’re feeling lost right now, but if you would just surface for a moment and say, “I’m hurting, is it OK if I don’t talk much right now?” you’d have us immediately on your side.

I imagine that speech crossed my wife’s mind a few times in the last couple weeks. But she lovingly restrained herself. And I’m coming back.

Minimally Invasive, my foot. (Actually, my knee.)

If you’ve been wondering, where’s Phil? I’m in the middle of a seldom-available hiatus from the working world. My wife and I had long ago scheduled two weeks in Europe. Then my friendly neighborhood orthopod said, “It’s time to replace those aching knees with titanium.”

(That’s right, I’ve joined the growing throng of bionics. I’m also close personal friends with a variety of airport security people. All those odd positions they want you take? I’ve got them down pat. And, yes, there is some patting involved.)

So I got one new knee in March and the other was scheduled for six months later, which ran us right up against our already-ticketed two weeks in Europe. When I asked the folks at work how they’d prefer I handle that, they said it was easier to deal with one longer absence than two shorter ones. Be gone.

So, we've just done a week in Malta — an ancient and fascinating island seldom visited by Americans, and a week in overwhelming, extraordinary and overrun-by-tourists Florence, Italy. (Imagine what it’s like to live in a town of about 350,000 that’s visited by 11 million tourists every year.)

That means we went from a place where we were the only Americans in sight to a week where we couldn’t get away from them, no matter how badly we wanted to. (The wild-eyed woman in the lovely plaza-side restaurant in Florence, waving both of her arms over her head and shouting, "Hey, waiter, over here! over here!" made everyone want to hide, no matter what language they were speaking.)

Then the day after we got back, I, as my dad used to say, “went under the knife.” I’m doing great, but then everything looks pretty good when you’re still on Percocet.

There’s still a bit over a week before I’m due back at work, and I’m starting to sit down and sift through what has been an incredibly experience-rich sort-of-sabbatical. As you might guess, many of the following entries will probably reflect my five weeks away from daily schedules. (You may now take a moment to envy me.)

One generalization about all of the above — it’s a theme my wife often plays back to me, and one of the reasons I value her so much: we are incredibly privileged.

In this case, first, to have the time and money to bop off to Europe. And, second, to have the sort of healthcare coverage that lets me exchange aching, old parts for shiny new ones. 

Talk about an oxymoron, the surgeries I just had are officially called Minimally Invasive Total Knee Replacement. That sounds as if my doctor sawed of my legs, inserted new parts and put me back together again, and there was nothing to it. That’s a wow.

Impressions, re-impressions from travel

After a week and a half in Europe, here's the top line.

1. We love being here, watching and talking with all sorts of people, relaxing over long meals with a lot of inexpensive wine in out-of-the-way sidewalk restaurants. We sat down next to a young couple from Scotland at lunch the other day and ended up spending two and a half hours talking, getting a look at each others' worlds, promising to stay in touch. You can't beat that.

2. Don't try to find a hotel in Rome after dark ... especially driving. Two times, once in Rome, the other in Florence, we were pretty sure we'd never get there. We were totally lost. On the other hand, if you're willing to ask -- and believe me, I do desperate American very well -- everyone seems willing to help, even when you have no language in common except the language of humanity. And you have an adventure to store away.

In some ways, the sites give you good reason spend a week in Malta and a week in Florence, but all the experiences along the way are the reason you go.

More soon.

Sometimes it feels crazy because it is.

I took in a writers’ seminar last weekend. Not writer as in, “There’s one great book in everyone and I’m about to write mine.” But as in, “We’ve invited a bunch of great writers to come and speak.” It was a wonderfully stimulating day.

The featured speaker was Anne Lamott. If you haven’t read her “Bird by Bird,” it’s a classic blend of how to write and what you learn about yourself in the process. You don’t have to be a writer to read it. Put it on your list.

If you’ve read any of her stuff, Anne Lamott is very open about how crazy she is — OCD, addiction and general weirdness. (Yes, she’d say that.) She’s bright, talented, funny and an unreconstructed hippie.

Hearing her reminded me why I value my wife so much — not the only reason, but one of the reasons. My wife is wired concrete and practical while I’m wired conceptual and, if you’ve read earlier blog entries, usually anxious.

While I love a lot of the stuff Anne Lamott writes — she’s got a remarkably robust grasp of reality — if I’d married someone like her, they’d have both of us locked up by now.

It reminded me that a lot of what we think and feel is shaped by the emotive atmosphere and how we interact with it.

One of my children ran away from school one day in the third or fourth grade. (I never get the details right.) We were relieved when he was found hiding in field just a block from the school, yet alarmed by the entire episode. It was only later, when we heard that his teacher was edging up on a major manic-depressive episode (difficult and sad), that we realized the runaway was actually an escape of sorts.

A lot of life’s craziness is not so crazy when you can get some perspective.

The point? Or points?

1. I’m very fortunate to have married a complementary personality. We sure didn’t know what we were doing at the time. Or maybe we did, intuitively. (A friend of ours from West Virginia likes to say, “Even a blind hog finds an acorn once in while.”)

2. Sometimes the emotive atmosphere virtually precludes success. Or it becomes such a big part of what's going on, success is difficult. Projects, relationships, businesses, events … things sometimes fail because, with the people in the room at the time, the odds of a productive outcome are greatly reduced. We've all been there.

3. Anne Lamott’s “Bird by Bird” — you must read it.

The undeserving poor.

Our church is associated with the overnight homeless shelter in our town. Giving financial support and, one month a year, taking the overflow from the shelter. Families who need a place to spend the night and can’t fit in the shelter spend the evening and sleep in a place we’ve set up in the youth room at church. We staff it with volunteers.

I did that one night this week. It’s really no sacrifice on my part. The way it tends to work out, I spend the evening playing with the littlest kids, trying to give tired moms and dads a little relief, reading stories and just doing whatever the kids want to do.

I don’t mention this because there’s anything heroic about what I add to the process. I mention it because it’s a humbling experience and a bit of reality I usually avoid.

I can’t imagine trying to keep your life together in that situation. There were a few teenagers this time. They headed off to a side room to work on homework — life goes on whether or not you have a place to live.

While I understand not everyone can be rescued from some of their own decisions, these folks seem more like victims of a lot of circumstances that severely limit their choices.

I was reading recently about a political struggle going on in California, I think it was, about whether or not to extend unemployment benefits again for people who simply aren’t finding jobs. Someone was arguing that further extending already extended benefits would take away the incentive to look for work.

I understand the crunch we’re in. But that sounded a bit like something I mention a few entries back, about watching out for people who say they’re doing something “for your own good.”

I have nothing profound to add here. It was a sobering night, one I'd rather avoid, but need to keep doing. "The undeserving poor," as they were described in Dickens' day, don't look as undeserving when they're four years old and sitting in your lap.

Not now, I'm busy.

Our California daughter has been great at posting pictures and updates, keeping us abreast of our 22-month-old granddaughter’s unfolding life.

Last night, our granddaughter was plunked down in front of the computer watching something. When called to dinner, she, who was barely understandable a few weeks ago, calmly told her mom, “Not now, I’m busy.”

Somehow the image of the little child, the computer and the cool comment captures something about generational change.

We’re headed off on a brief European trip in a few weeks, and I was remembering the first time we traveled there. I was 26 on that first trip and remember clearly the shocking discovery that there was a whole world out there that didn’t know me or anyone I knew or the way I lived or what I believed was important—and didn’t care.

Somehow I don’t think it will take my granddaughter that many years to make that discovery. In fact she’s busy finding it out already.

When you're sure.

A great warning from a new book:

When you’re sure of what you’re looking at, look harder.
- from GENEROSITY by RICHARD POWERS

I'm looking forward to reading it.

Warning: bike-rage

Some of my best friends are bicyclists, but ….

(You’ve got to watch out for that kind of start. It’s like when someone offering you advice starts with, “I’m only thinking of your own good.” You know they’re probably not.)

This newspaper headline caught my eye Saturday morning, “Driver who hit cyclist is sought.”

First, two important facts: 1. No one was injured; it was a dispute that got out of hand. 2. I wish no one any injury, or even near injury — ever.

But I’ve got this thing about cyclists. Many of them outrage my sense of … I don’t know, I’m not rational about this subject.

How not-rational am I?

I finally had to have a “this must stop” conversation with myself last year when I found myself driving down West River Road screaming through my open window at a bicyclist who had just zipped past me, running a stop sign — of course. Don’t they always!

Honestly, I was deep into biker-rage (as in road-rage) and it had to stop.

There’s something about bikers’ constant complaint about drivers and the way it contrasts with their absolute disregard for every rule of the road that really ticks me off!

I probably should have sent this screed to the newspaper that carried the story. But I know it would make no difference.

A couple times a year some poor soul complains about bikers’ total distain for the law in the letters to the editor only to be deluged by, it seem to me, self-righteous cyclists all claiming purity and light, telling their near-death-on-the-streets stories and damming all drivers to hell. It’s like the Hatfields and the McCoys.

Ok. So here’s my final statement on the subject (probably not). I will continue to be careful around bikers and have many friends among them. But I will also continue to resent their lawless behavior.

OBEY THE LAW!!

Ok, I feel better.

The anxious mind

The lead article in next Sunday’s New York Times Magazine is entitled, Understanding the Anxious Mind.

They always run the lead article early. Here’s the web address for this one: nytimes.com/2009/10/04/magazine/04anxiety-t.html?_r=1&em.

In the most general sense, it’s an exploration of the old nature-nurture dialog. With the rapid advances in brain biology, there’s a lot of research going on concerning the question of inherited traits. We know physical traits are inherited. It’s accepted that I’m 6’ 4” because I’ve got tall uncles. Does that mean some personality traits are hardwired too?

This became fascinating for me when we had our children. Virtually from the womb we thought we saw inherited psychological traits. Was that fact or merely over-interpreted projection? That’s what this area of research is about.

And for me, this particular article is very personal. That's because it focuses on one aspect of trait inheritance: anxiety.

One of the key discoveries of my life was that I, unlike most other people around me, wake up afraid every morning. It doesn’t matter what’s going on in the day, the first waking experience is fear.

Isolating that fact allowed me to explore, understand and create strategies to deal with a lot of other factors in my life — and understand why I feel that way so much of the time. This was a central piece of information for me.

That’s what this article is about. For those of you who find compulsive anxiety foreign territory, this article may help you get some insight into a friend or loved-one's behavior. For those of you wired more like me, this research is fascinating — and perhaps invaluable.

I love you — theoretically.

I've always loved cats. Almost every house I’ve lived in has had them, except for a few years when my allergies kicked up. And even then, my children insisted on adopting every stray that came by.

Right now we have two cats my daughter brought home from a barn but, after a move or two, couldn’t keep in her apartment.

Then there were the two Siamese I adopted from the woman I met at the unemployment office a few years ago. Maybe the location should have warned me, but she seemed so nice. She had these two “friends” she needed to “place,” and we’d had Siamese.

By the time it was over, one of them had taken a sizable chunk out of my hand, and our town’s animal control officer had to come over with a big cage to get the second one out of our house.

There’s a bigger truth here: life’s always easier in theory.

If you need the answer to a difficult problem, just ask someone who hasn’t got the problem. They’ll have the answer — in theory.

As a person of faith, I love everybody — in theory. It’s just a lot of the people I meet that I don’t like.

That leads to a much bigger topic: living life according to theory or, to put it more plainly, living life according to beliefs. Because isn't that what belief really is: a set of theory's about reality?

In some way, that question is more dangerous than out-of-control-cats. Of course, that's only my theory.

What makes me mad (or not really)

All the discussion of explosive anger in the last few days — why a congressman yelled at the president, why two normally classy tennis champions blew up at the U.S. Open, why a bunch of people who oppose the current administration are doing it so ferociously — leads me to this wandering rumination.

I get irritated fairly regularly. I work at looking cool — and it works pretty well. I am impatient with lots of things, but it only gets loose occasionally.

However, when I do step over the boundaries, when I give myself permission to treat other people as if they are totally wrong and I am totally right (as in righteous), the explanations I give myself for that level of anger aren’t, I suspect, the real reasons for the explosion. When I go over the top, I pretty quickly notice that it's more deeply fueled than that.

Psychologists say our reasons for unrestrained anger are more often about pain, loss, fear and powerlessness than a momentary irritant. And that seems about right.

When I was younger, many of us believed everyone needed to “get their anger out,” express it, hit things, shout and scream. It was a common opinion at the time. In fact, an entire theory of therapy was built around a concept called primal scream. The stuff I read more recently seems to indicate that expressing anger on a regular basis leads, unsurprisingly, to more anger.

There have been times in my life when I decided I needed to get angry. It’s important to emphasize the “I” here. No one “had it coming.” It was more about breaking out of a habit of emotional carefulness I tend to fall into. (Ever feel like you’ve been holding your breath for a long time. I do that.)

It’s important to point out that, what I’m talking about here are emotional outbursts. That different than being deeply distraught over the destruction that greed and ego bring into our world.

Maybe that’s my point. I think most of the outrage I’m seeing in the news these day is self serving, childish and, to a sad level, strategic. It’s about “me.” It’s about "my way of taking control." It needs to grow up into something much more meaningful. Or calm down.

If you feel the need to rage, make sure you’re raging at the right stuff.

It doen't matter how you feel

Whenever work gets as busy as it’s been the last few weeks, I think about the situation I hate most: having the responsibility without the power. Not power as in power-hungry. Power as in having the critical resources to get the job done right.

There are all sorts of things that can make you feel powerless in that way. True, it may be because you don't have the ability. But often it’s just as much about not having enough time, the right resources, the right information, etc. Few of these situations are perfect. (It may come down to having the right amount of fortitude.)

I mention this because it took me a lot of years to realize that some failures, sometimes, weren't comments on my inadequacy. (Many were, but not always.) And that discovery felt pretty good. Still does.

Of course, it didn't change the fact that things still have to get done--whether or not I have everything I need. Or how I feel about that.

Which leads to another thing I think about in busy times: sometimes feelings don’t matter.

I remember a February night when I was in college. It was about 2 am and 10 degree below zero in St. Paul. I was trying get my frozen Volkswagen started by having my Dad, who was visiting from our home in Des Moines, push my VW with his big Chevy. It was actually pretty easy back then to get a VW bug started, if you could just get it rolling a little. Anyway, after accidentally hooking our bumpers for the second time, having to get out the jack again and crawl around under the cars on the ice again, it occurred to me that feeling frozen and exhausted, and desperately wanting the whole thing to be over didn't matter. It wouldn’t get my car started.

Sometimes it doesn’t matter how you feel.

Those are the sorts of things that slide into the back of my head and make me a little crazy when the responsibilities begin to pile up. And my over-responsibility neurosis begins to kick up. But that's another story.

Length of view

A graphic phrase describing a valuable commodity: length of view.

On the NPR the other day they were talking about the 40th anniversary of what’s come to be called the Tate/Labianca murders. It came up because one of the women who “did it” is dying of cancer and coming up for parole, much like the recently released Libyan Lockerbie inmate.

If you’re too young to remember the murders, google Charles Manson and Helter Skelter. In the middle of the Summer of Love (’69), a Los Angles sociopath convinced some of his followers that murdering important people in the LA area, in a particularly brutal fashion, would spark of a race war that would change the world.

Looking back, you wonder how it could happen. But I remember that summer, and it wasn’t as hard to imagine in that context.

When you’re in the middle of something, it looks and feels very different. Getting to a sane outcome may depend on finding a way to lengthen the view.

Another example: I got angry at someone in my office last week and stomped off—I was totally inappropriate. But in that moment, I couldn’t find a way to think or feel that was not a bit unhinged.

Now there’s nothing unusual about getting irritated, happens all the time for the best of reasons and worst. But throwing a mini-tantrum is, when you look back on it the next morning, kind of humiliating. I called and apologized.

I only bring it up because it took until the next day for me get far enough away to see that I didn’t like what I’d done.

Length of view: we really could use some right now in the healthcare debate. Heat seems to be beating light.

Perhaps the health and humanity of a time, culture, group, family, personality ... whatever, can be partially measured by how rapidly it/they typically create and apply length of view.

(Slap your forehead!)

I pulled a pair white socks out of my drawer yesterday and they fit really well. That's big news because all my socks are just slightly too small for me.

Then I realized they must fit well because they're my son’s socks.

He’s in his early 30s, but still has some clothes in the house. Somehow, I got hold of a pair of his socks. Probably because our cats dragged them out of his old bedroom. They do stuff like that all the time.

But why did his socks fit me so well when we have about the same sized feet? And all of my socks are a bit too small.

(Slap your forehead!)

Then the light dawned. Because I’m 11 ½, I've have spent my entire life buying socks marked 9-12 and, because I'm notoriously tight, continued wearing them even after they had shrunk.

How stupid is that?

I’ve been wearing undersized socks my entire life -- self consciously pulling them up to keep bare skin from showing -- because I’ve followed the labels. Then they shrank. While my son, obviously, simply bought the next size up.

From now on I buy extra large instead of large.

But there's still the question: why on earth didn’t I do that before?

And what do I do with all my oh-so-wearable, slightly-too-small socks?

Maybe child-like, certainly not childish

I ran across Baudelaire's definition of genius: the ability to recapture childhood at will.

I like it: There's something refreshingly, freeingly French about it.

I don't like it: Growing up, getting some of the childishness out of my life, has been a long journey and worthwhile task.

Putting your mouth where your money is

Paul Krugman’s Monday column in the New York Times had two great quotes. (He was hot.)

1. Upton Sinclair: “It is difficult to get a man to understand something when his salary depends upon his not understanding it.”

Some of the arguments being sold and brought in the current civic debate are comically bizarre. (In fact, The Comedy Channel’s Daily Show has become a huge success just by showing what's being said so viewers can laugh at it.)

And yet people who should know better continue to participate in this foolishness. Or, worse yet, refuse to call their fellows on the insanity of it all. Smart, respected people who are in a position to do a lot of good.

To paraphrase Upton Sinclair, “It is difficult to get people to understand something when their power or position or, yes, their money too depends upon their not understanding it.”


2. Franklin Delano Roosevelt, reflecting on the stock market crash and Great Depression: “We have always known that heedless self-interest was bad morals; we know now that it is bad economics.”

In this case, it’s a radical reversal of that quote that seems to apply: We should known by now that headless self-interest is bad economics but, in these days, we seem to have forgotten that headless self-interest is bad morals too.

See, I'm not accusing these people merely of political posturing or insincerity. No, I'm talking about something much worse.

We’re missing men and women of candor and courage in our national dialog. And we badly need them right now.

A learning about blogs

Someone asked me for my blog’s URL last night and I couldn’t remember it. I think that’s because the URL is different from the name.

While I know every word I write is unforgettable, if I hope to attract and maintain any followers at all, it makes sense to remove that barrier. So welcome to “Usually, For The Most Part.”

When I started blogging a couple of months ago, I came here to blogspot.com because they make it so easy. The only downside: my blog name (Generalizations) wasn’t available as a URL. And I really liked “Generalizations.” It fit what I wanted to do with the blog. It looked cool on the masthead. And it fits me.

Watch out, here comes the digression.

Twenty-five years ago (way back), when I was a minister for a few years, one of the people who sat through my Sunday morning ramblings made me a T-shirt with the letters MOTNFTMP on it. It stood for “more often than not for the most part.” After listening to me for a while, she spotted my inclination to generalization. She was right and it became a joke between us.

Another digression: This tendency to generalize is symptomatic of my mind’s geography. I’m so far out on the conceptual end of the conceptual-concrete continuum, I’m almost learning disabled. (Another story for another blog entry.) Hand me some facts and my head automatically digresses and generalizes. I lose details almost immediately — ask my wife — but retain conceptual frameworks forever.

Enough of that.

This blogging thing is a learn-as-you-go experience. So out with “Generalizations.” Welcome to the new and wonderful “Usually, For The Most Part.”

And a huge welcome to the millions of new followers who will undoubtedly join my current seven.

That's my strongest area

I’m working on a presentation that involves talking about my love of new ideas, and how typical it is for me to run down the hall and tell someone whenever I have one.

Which reminds me of an old axiom: your greatest weaknesses are often found in the same area as your greatest strengths.

In this case, you’d be correct in saying that I have strong verbal skills. And I talk too much.

Ring any axiomatic bells?

Point weak — shout!

All the shouting in the health care debate got me thinking about values formation. (I bet that's what jumped into your head too.) That’s the part of developmental psychology I studied way back when.

I remember the stuff about adolescents grouping up. How they dress like their group, talk like their group and absorb all their group's values as a way of dealing with the scary on-your-own-ness of those years.

When they head out into a larger world and sense fissures forming in the group-think, they face some hard decisions. Will they let their closed system open up and re-form in a broader, more resonant way? Or will they turn back. Will they erect elaborate defenses for a rulebook that doesn’t quite work anymore.

We cycle through those choices many time in our lives. And it’s not always easy to decide whether to move ahead or hang on.

After my pastor-father died, I inherited his library — a lot of great stuff there. I found one book dated from the 1940s. I won’t get the number in the title right, but it was something like, “472 Bible Problems Solved.” I remember thinking, if you’ve got to twist and turn that much, you may be approaching the Bible the wrong way.

Dad also used to tell a story about a preacher who wrote in the margin of his sermon notes: “Point weak — shout!”

A lot of the shouting we’re hearing right now sounds to me like the unconvincing lines of defense we erect when we’re standing in an indefensible place.

Update on "not true."

I mentioned earlier the extreme reluctance of reporters to say, "This is what is being said, but it's not true."

Today the Minneapolis StarTrib carries an AP and LA Times "Health Care Reform Q&A" that breaks the rule. It says, "There's been a big uproar over the health care overhaul bill. Critics ... say the bill would set up a 'death panel' .... They are wrong."

I know it falls in the area of comment--it's not strictly a news story. But still, I'm amazed. And delighted.

Not really.

Myth: everyone has a right to speak and, if you listen carefully, everyone has something valuable to contribute.

No. Some people have spent their right. You don’t have to respect stupid or dishonest.

Ok, Ok, I'm happy.

Emmy Award-winning film producer, screenwriter and director Judd Apatow has produced a string of fairly successful comedies: Anchorman, The 40-Year-Old Virgin, Talladega Nights, Knocked Up, Superbad, Walk Hard: The Dewey Cox Story, Forgetting Sarah Marshall, Step Brothers, Pineapple Express, and Funny People.

Whether they're your taste or not, he's doing well.

When he was asked in a recent interview whether or not he was happy, he said, “If I’m not happy, I should be punched in the face.”

As a compulsively careful person, there's something I really like about that. I'm also guessing that's true for me too.

Accept their premise and you’ve got no chance.

It’s virtually impossible to have a conversation with someone whose going-in premise is not true.

For instance:

Being a politician means maintaining certain uniform positions—you are always for or against certain things and that never changes. The reason it never changes is because your positions are highly principled, so when you have changed them, you really haven’t. If, on the other hand, your opponent changes his or her position, it’s a disastrous flip-flop.

Reporting the news is not about getting the facts right; it’s about fairness. And fairness is based on letting people on each side of the issue speak for the same amount of time. Both must be given the same weight. You must not make judgments; that's not being a good reporter. And reporting is what you do. You never say, “that’s not true.”

Christianity is about obeying the Bible. You don’t interpret; you obey. Interpreting is putting your word above God’s word. And all real Christians have understood and obeyed the same Bible since the beginning of time. That's how we know it's true and has got to be obeyed.

Normal is what your family and friends believe, do, love, hate or dress like. That’s why they call it common sense. And you know it’s right because the only ones who question it are people who think they’re smarter than you, which automatically makes them wrong, and probably dangerous to our way of life, because they’re not normal and don’t have common sense.

None of this is true, of course. But thinking like it, in all sorts of areas, forms the basis of much of what you read and hear.

You’ve got no chance with these people.

I don't think we're there yet

Garrison Keillor returned to one of his favorite themes in his Minneapolis Star-Trib column today: oh, the suffering we go through for our art.

It’s true.

I write advertising and, oh, the suffering. Well, maybe not. But there’s no sure way to package the creative process or make it easy.

Extra hours don’t guarantee great stuff, but you usually need to put them in to find an elegant idea. Even then it may be the first idea or the last one. And I always have the feeling that there’s something else out there that’s better, if I just had more time.

No one can see what’s going on in your head and, in advertising, everything you create gets changed by somebody, usually by several somebodies. The best learning is to take pleasure in the pure idea when it comes to you. Enjoy the delight. Because when you tell someone about it, there’s every chance you’ll hear the dreaded: “I don’t get it.”

I’ve got a temporary boss right now and, to get to know everyone quickly, he asked us to bring examples of work we’re proud of. I found that hard because I’m seldom satisfied and virtually nothing, in its final form, is the way I envisioned it. Of course, some of it is much better because I work with talented people. But it’s never a straight line.

You know the changing-a-light-bulb jokes? I love the one about designers and art directors.

Q: “How many designers does it take to change a light bulb?

A: “Does it have to be a light bulb?”

So the rest of you just have to get used to it. We who create for a living always have to come at it from all sorts of strange angles. We need to see it differently to succeed.

But, oh, the pain.

It’s too hard! It’s too hard!

Healthcare reform is rife with difficult problems. But not impossible problems.

While many politicians and media types are running about throwing dirt in the air screaming, “It’s too complicated! It’s too difficult!” the New York Times yesterday described what’s in the bills currently being considered in congress and I actually understood them.

Of course, those trying to scare off healthcare reform are very good at fear and confusion.

One of the stock fears is that rickety old meme: we must never raise taxes (another subject) because, despite extraordinary examples to the contrary, the government always does things badly while the private sector does them much better.

I’m a preacher’s kid. I spent half my life hiding out in the non-profit world: my father worked there and I started out there. Until I got my first secular job, I projected all sorts of wisdom and effectiveness onto corporate people. (Of course, when you spend half your life in deadly dull church committee meetings, it’s easy to think that someone, somewhere must be more effective than this.)

It didn’t take long after my emergence from the cloister to have my faith in the effectiveness of the corporate world utterly eradicated. I was stunned by the self-destructive instincts of the first big company I worked for. The way they splashed around money and wasted time and creative energy was appalling.

Watching the recent meltdown of supposedly smart companies, I find the belief that the private sector is always the right answer laughable.

Plus, it seems to me one of government’s unique advantages is its ability to occasionally make choices that benefit those lest able to benefit themselves.

Corporations, no matter how many melodic commercials they roll out on public television, are by their very nature inhuman. They’re built to make money and protect themselves. I don’t blame them for that. That’s why they were created. It’s takes real dedication for them to care about you and me when that's unprofitable.

So healthcare reform is hard because it's complex and it threatens moneymaking businesses — and we all depend on moneymaking businesses. But it’s not impossible.

Is anyone in the news business?

Last week reminded me that, even during a national crisis, the news media goes for the heat, not the light.

That’s no great insight.

But, I was set off by the specials about Walter Cronkite quickly followed by the uproar over President Obama’s comments about the arrest of Harvard African-American scholar Henry Louis Gates Jr.

About 20 years ago I was put on a discussion panel about the news media (totally sans credentials) simply because I had written a letter to the editor that said, in essence, way back when TV news started running teasers about what they were going to tell us later, they weren’t really in the news business anymore.

If you come on the air and say, “Somebody died, but we’re not going to tell who it was until 10 pm” — when you have live air and know the news, but won’t report it — what you’re doing for a living has changed.

What can I say? I was brought up a news purist.

That’s because Walter Cronkite, along with Chet Huntley, David Brinkley and others, were in the news business.

On his latest HBO show, Bill Maher reminded me that news used to be a loss-leader. It was produced as a matter of personal pride and civic duty. No one's in that business anymore.

Treat them like a cat

People are complicated. Relationships are complicated. I want to be helpful and caring, but there are times when it’s hard to know how involved to get with some folks.

There’s a phrase my wife and I use to summarize our approach to certain people. We say, “treat them like a cat”.

We’ve had cats all our lives. Some of them like to talk at you — they mew and yowl and pace around as if something important is being said.

It’s fun to jump into the conversation with them. You nod and act interested because it seems important to the cat: “Oh yah?” “Is that right?” “Uh-hah.” “Well that may be.” You hold up your end of the conversation, and it makes them happy. But you’re not really emotionally involved because … it’s a cat.

At certain times, that’s good strategy with people. Be polite. Stay in the conversation, but don’t become part of their turmoil.

“Treat them like a cat” developed during our child-raising years, one of the strategies we stumbled on trying to maintain our mental balance.

We have three great children, now in their 30s. But, growing up, there were times when they were going through stuff that either: 

- We couldn’t effect — they were going to do what they were going to do, and we knew it.

- Or there was something difficult they needed do and more talk wouldn’t help. They needed to act.

As parents, you’re always emotionally involved — it’s wired in. Then you discover that there are times when staying involved leaves you crazy and them no better off. It’s dysfunctional. It may make you feel valuable, but it’s no help to add your upset to their upset.

So “treat them like a cat” became a shorthand we understood, an easy-to-grasp metaphor for “be kind and loving, but the best thing to do right now is make sure you don’t make their problem into your problem.”

My wife and I will be reporting on our day and one of us will say, “I decided to treat them like a cat.” Or we'll be talking with someone about a troubling relationship and we’ll suggest, “You might want to try treating them like a cat.”

It’s not the only answer, but it may help.

Not normal

Monday morning.

In today’s newspaper — I’ve got to have a newspaper every morning to feel normal — it says that more people are now committing suicide on Wednesdays than on Mondays. It's a story, I guess, because Mondays has always been number one for surfacing neuroses.

It’s normal to feel depressed on Monday, right?

Depends on what you mean by normal.

It’s not hard to imagine what’s normal for the only child of a Baptist minister from Des Moines whose values were formed in the middle of the 1950s. All I have to do is roll out of bed in the morning, any morning, to feel like someone’s probably already disappointed in me for not being as good as I should be.

Normal is like sprinkling seasoning on food to make it taste “right". So fear has been one of my normal ways of seasoning reality. I can see myself sprinkling a little of it onto all sorts of happy situations to make them feel “normal.”

And that’s crazy.

Thank goodness, that’s not all that’s normal for me. There are many other ways I bend reality to make it more of what I’m used to.

Sociologists and psychologists tell us normal is an artificial pattern we impose on the quirkiness of humanity to give us some safe places to stand.

I saw an outstanding new musical in New York a couple of weeks ago called Next to Normal. It suggested that going for normal can keep you crazy, that next to normal is better. That sounds right to me.

Small wars

This blog’s name is a warning label; generalizations are never true in a fullest sense of the word. Hopefully, they catch enough of the plate (watch out, baseball metaphor) to be of some value.

Back in college, when I had a paper due Monday morning, I’d sit down at my typewriter Sunday night (you may have heard of typewriters) and write what I called a Billy Graham special. I’d wave my arms a lot and try to sell passionate generalizations as well-researched insight.

Ok, so here’s one of those:  

We shouldn’t allow any more little wars.

Watching the violence in Iraq, Afghanistan and Pakistan, I heard someone say that wars like Viet Nam and Iraq II (two) would never be allowed to dribble on, draining resources, thousands of lives and large chunks of moral energy, if they required a total national commitment like World War II.

I believe that.

When only a few of us have skin in the game—what a cruel phrase, in this situation—it’s too easy to prolong the game.

If it’s mostly the lest powerful who are putting their loved ones’ lives on the line, if we can contract out a good portion of the killing and mayhem, if the devastation can actually begin to get boring, slip out of the big print and onto page two or three, become background noise—I’m now waving my arms—we shouldn’t be going to those kinds of wars.

What do you do with a regional conflict? What about a small time tyrant who's got to be stopped? Good questions. But whatever the answers, it should cost all of us something important, so we think more carefully, watch more closely and act more responsibly.

There is no such thing as minor surgery when it’s happening to you. 

There's intimacy. Then there's sex.

I’m back from a long July 4th weekend in New York. We had a great time seeing shows and soaking up the energy of the city.

While I was away, South Carolina Governor Mark Sandford’s public meltdown continued only to be overrun by Michael Jackson’s death and Sarah Palin’s ... well ... what was that?

There was one piece of the Sandford story that caught my eye, probably caught yours too.

Heaping injury on insult, he first divulged a history of liaisons with other women, then, as if it somehow made it all o.k., pleaded that he'd never actually “crossed the line” with any of them. Incredible.

He meant sexual intimacy, of course. But he surely knows he crossed an infinitely more important line than sexuality intimacy. He thoughtlessly squandered his emotional intimacy.

Anyone who’s been married or in a committed relationship knows the subtle interaction between sexual intimacy and emotional intimacy. You can have sex without coming close to touching each other. And you don’t have to be in a relationship long to notice:
- The days when you’re emotionally available to each other and the ones when you’re not.
- The times you choose to hang on to your emotional distance -- for any number of reasons.
- How emotional distance can become a habit, and the impact if you let it continue too long.

Start playing fast and loose with emotional intimacy, overlooking it in your primary relationship or scattering it around like Sandford and ... well ... scattering your seed becomes a secondary issue.

Poor God

A shopkeeper in Tehran told a reporter she wasn’t a religious person and hadn’t voted in the recent presidential elections, but after watching the beatings in the street first-hand, she was disgusted.  They were “beyond belief,” she said (ironic, the words she chose). “They do this under the name of religion," she said. "Which religion allows this?”

When my wife sees something like this she sighs and says, “Poor God. It must make him sad.” And putting aside all the cultural and theological arm wrestling about how you describe your ultimate reality, she’s right.

It’s incredible how subtly I find myself moving people I don’t understand or who make me uncomfortable into a “there’s something wrong with them” category. How uncritically behavior that creeps me out begins to look to me like behavior that “isn’t right,” perhaps even that “should be stopped.”

The Monty Python guys always said, “No one ever expects the Spanish Inquisition.” But in big and small ways, it keeps happening anyway and, most maddeningly, way too often in some god’s name. 

Poor God.

No protection

“Against such frankness, there is no protection.”

British spy novelist John le Carré writes incredibly intriguing and complex stories of personal duplicity and disillusionment. He’s one of my favorites.

The line above comes from his book Absolute Friends. Two spies with lives drenched in deception, are spinning their tales when one of them unexpectedly speaks the truth, completely unsettling the other guy: “Against such frankness, there is no protection.”

I was never a hippie. But I got as close as a Baptist preacher’s kid could in the middle and late 60s. I hate to say this – it looks so un-cool now in print, but “let it all hang out” was one of my most dearly held values. I really believed if we could get the entire world in a big circle and “say it all,” we’d be magically redeemed by the honesty. (Love is all you need.)

It didn’t take many years to find out:
- It doesn’t work that way.
- I don’t want to know that much about most people.
- And I wasn’t really honest back then, only needy. I was holding my life out on a tray, wanting someone to, as we used to say, affirm me. (That looks strange in print too.)

Stan Freberg, a wildly inventive comedian and recording artist back when there were records, worked in advertising for a while. One of his airline campaigns – maybe it was for Pacific Airlines – tried to calm nervous flyers with honesty. Since their fleet had the fewest accidents, he did some wonderfully wacky commercials with the tag line: You won’t crash. It was true, but it turned out most customers didn’t want to think about it.

Still, I’m with le Carré. Speaking truth can be powerfully, breathtakingly clarifying. I often find myself wanting to say to someone, “That’s a powerful statement, I'm convinced you believe it and it's very well said. Unfortunately, it’s not true.” It’s the frustrated hippie coming out.

Trapped by the narrative

I was enjoying the sports page out on the deck Saturday morning when I noticed, once again, the difference between what’s happening and the story that gets told.

The U.S. Open golf tournament was being played in difficult weather. Tiger Woods played half of Thursday's first round in a rainstorm before play was suspended for the day. He finished the round in good weather on Friday but missed some short putts that left him well behind. I was off on Friday. I saw him miss them.

The Saturday sports page reported that Tiger was behind because he had the bad luck to play in Thursday’s rain. In fact, he was behind because he missed very makeable putts in Friday's sunshine. But that didn’t fit the weather story as well.

This is not a big deal, but it reminded me how much of our lives are driven, not by realities, but by the interpretations, the narratives, the stories that get woven around them. We organize complex happenings into simpler, easier-to-tell (or sell) tales.

Those narratives give us a place to stand. They become the substance of our perspectives,
the filters of our decisions, the basis of our expectations.

Did I really choose what I did today, or was it a product of my stories?

There’s more to talk about here, but … I’ve got to go watch the U.S. Open. It’s Father’s Day and ever since my dad began taking me to play golf, it’s part of my story.

Danger, talkers ahead

That brings me to the second reason why beginning to blog is dangerous. 

If you’ve got a blog, you’ve got to blog. And anyone who talks a lot will say a lot of dumb stuff.

Very few of us have enough quality content to justify much exposure. That’s why people who have jobs that require them to speak regularly eventually get caught sounding stupid.

Have sympathy for those required babblers on talk radio and cable news. Yes, I know many of them are busy meeting their own performance needs and they’re well paid. But seriously, they’ve really got no chance. Just on the principle of the thing, the 24 hour news cycle breeds nonsense. 

Politicians, pundits, sports figures, corporate figureheads, hired talking heads, even the most articulate President is memory, no one escapes. Say enough often enough and listening to you becomes a grim task.

I found this out firsthand 30 years ago, in another lifetime, when I pastored churches for a while. When the finger of God points at you every Sunday and says say a least something worthwhile, few of us are profound for long. That’s why sermonizing has a bad name. 

Beyond a few notable exceptions, open your mouth often enough – or hit the Publish It button often enough – and you’ll say a lot of dumb stuff.

 So now I’m blogging. Duh.

Impressive

I just saw a fascinating old interview with British doctor, director, sculptor, author and really funny guy Jonathan Miller. Incredibly impressive.

A couple of decades ago, Phil Donahue said that, from his experience as an interviewer, women tend to have conversations while men make speeches.

The dangers inherent in beginning a blog are by themselves impressive, so lets begin with number one: boring everyone because I’m trying hard to be impressive.

My youngest son says when I tell jokes, really set them up and expect the laugh, I’m not as funny. Maybe most kids are appalled when dads tell jokes. I don’t think that’s what he meant.

I’m guessing that whatever is inherently valuable in my voice and viewpoint appears only occasionally and when I don’t try too hard.

So there it is, danger number 1.

More to come.