My latest novel, Deadly Deceptions, a Steve Darwood military counterintelligence novel that takes place in Korea, is now available for the Kindle loan program offered by Amazon Prime. So, feel free to take advantage of it, and please review it if you do.
You can find it here.
A few years ago, I was teaching English in South Korea. Unfortunately, during this time, I had very limited access to American television shows. Sure, I could pirate them, but I’m not the kind of person who does that, so I was limited by whatever I could purchase from Seoul entertainment stores. And the selection was awful. However, one thing I kept seeing each and every time I went to the store was the dvd collections for Jennifer Love Hewitt’s Ghost Whisperer. Now, I had never seen the show before, so it didn’t really interest me, but I am a science fiction fanatic, so I kept looking at that package every time I went there. Finally, one day the first season was on sale (this is when they were still making the show, around Season 3). So, I figured it wouldn’t be the worst investment ever, and I bought the first season.
Having lots of free time, I diligently watched through the season, and then I was somewhat hooked, so I bought Season 2. And then I kept going until I came home from Korea and continued watching it until it went off the air.
Now, I should probably make a bit of a disclosure for those who have never watched Ghost Whisperer. It’s a quirky show. It’s not going to get any Emmys (at least I don’t think it did during its run). It’s a show about a woman who can talk to the dead, but basically it’s really a show about the woman with a really strange, charmed life, who just so happens to also talk to the dead. Now, I make this distinction because that distinction is necessary. This woman has the most Barbie-like existence in the history of television. She interacts with people in a way that really seems only important to the character played by Jennifer Love Hewitt, and whenever there’s an important conflict, the only real thought the writers and directors were probably thinking was: “How can we make this come out right while still making Jennifer Love Hewitt look really hot and cute?”
Because that’s what is special about the show. It shows 4 or 5 seasons of the cutest girl on television interacting with everyone else who may or not yet realize she’s the cutest girl on television. There are ghosts, of course, but they really only serve as scenery and distractions, to make you forget that the show is really about the cutest girl on television. And she’ll pout every now and then, which believe it or not, makes her seem even cuter.
What’s fascinating about the show is that it deals with some really heady issues that sometimes go into jump the shark territory of television, like the Buffy-like moments where Jennifer Love Hewitt comes head to head against the evil old guy of evil who seems to want to make all the dead people stay undead instead of go to the happy place that Jennifer Love Hewitt uses her cuteness to send them to. And during that confrontation, instead of just offing her with a big anvil, like any other diabolical evil guy would do, he ends up talking to her, seeing her pout, and then kind of turns into a wishy washy evil genius who then disappears for awhile until rating seasons comes back again.
Essentially, you get the main attributes of Ghost Whisperer. The cute girl wins out all the time.
But I didn’t come to talk about that show itself, but about Jennifer Love Hewitt. You see, during that show, even though (spoiler alert!) her husband dies during the show and comes back as some other guy who dies during the show but is allowed to live as her ex-husband reincarnated until they can find a way to just start using the old actor again (because everyone forgot it was another guy whose body he took over), the whole show manages to be about the angst of the cutest girl on television.
When the show ended, I felt a part of me died, too, because then I realized my cute girl factor of television would be missing input. And then I found out that she had a brand new show, called The Client List. Which surprisingly is about her being a massage therapist who gives happy endings to her customers. You’d think this show would be somewhat gritty, but it’s not. Instead, it ends up being about (surprise) a cute girl who just so happens to be a massage therapist who gives happy endings to her customers. And man, they really push the cuteness factor in this show.
I watched the first episode of the show and found myself laughing out loud because, first, it’s preposterous and, second, it’s equally ridiculous. Her husband left her the day she started a new job at a massage parlour, and instead of moving to cheaper housing, she decides she’s going to keep her kids in the same two parent housing they’ve had by giving handjobs to her customers. Well, I think that’s what she’s doing, as they don’t actually go into detail about what happens after she rubs down the bodies of the male models who serve as her clients. And yes, I did say male models because once she starts giving the “expensive” rub downs, her clientele goes from being ugly old men to being supermodel male models who you’d expect to pop up in a Madonna video. Not exactly sure why these guys would ever need a masseuse like her and in this particular out of the way place, but apparently Hollywood didn’t think the audience really needed realism here.
So, we get to see her pout when things don’t go right, and we get to see her come to work in all sorts of sexy get-ups that you’d expect a female escort to be wearing, if she worked for a high-fashion call girl outfit. But instead, she works for a massage place (that’s next door to a Karate studio) and does the $5000 an hour call girl dressing regardless.
What’s interesting is that they never felt the need to actually point out what she’s doing for this serious bank she’s getting from this job. She’s either giving handjobs (and getting far more money than ANY handjob masseuse EVER got) or she’s having sex with them at the massage parlour, which seems kind of strange as they haven’t made the show out to be “that” kind of show YET.
But in all, what I think really happened was they found another way to bring Jennifer Love Hewitt back to living rooms to exploit that cuteness factor of hers. What’s even funnier is that the hype for the show centered around Hewitt’s interviews where she talks about how it might be about time for her to find a boyfriend, and all I can think to myself is that no man lives in that fantasy world that she has constructed for herself, in which guys are all supermodel guys and all love listening to her and doing things that practically no human is capable of pulling off in a relationship. Her world is constructed just so that Jennifer Love Hewitt fits into it, kind of like that little girl fantasy world of dolls and stuffed animals that someone eventually has to grow out of (or become a real princess in some fantasy land probably located in Eastern Europe somewhere).
In all, I want to thank Jennifer Love Hewitt for letting me explore her world with her again for at least one more hour a week. I mean, it’s not a real world, and the people are never as scripted as they are on this show, but hey, that’s what makes it so much more enjoyable.
I submitted my humorous novel, The Ameriad, to Amazon’s breakthrough novel award contest a few months ago. I was overjoyed today to discover that it made the cut into the second round. Granted, it made the cut with 1000 other authors, but that’s narrowed down from a much LARGER number. Last year I entered and didn’t make the cut.
So, the ride begins….
The other day, I bought a programmable thermostat. You see, this is kind of big thing for me, because you don’t know the half of what I went through to actually get this thing and then to get it installed. A few weeks ago, I honestly didn’t know anything about them. Actually, I really didn’t know they existed.
I should point out that I’m somewhat of a dunce when it comes to heating. I’m from California, and I love hot weather. I’ve tended to live in a lot of very warm climate areas, like Arizona, the desert, the surface of Mars. Until recently. Now, I live in the opposite, a few miles south of the North Pole, in some place called Freezing City, Michigan. Okay, it’s not really Freezing City, but it’s located a few miles west of Freezing City. It’s Grand Rapids, and for someone from California, that means Freezing City or any variation thereof. I think I’m getting the point across. It is cold here sometimes. And I don’t like that.
Sure, it’s not Minnesota, or Canada, or the inside of someone’s walk-in freezer. But it can be cold. When I first moved here, people told me: “Me, you’re not going to believe how cold Michigan can be. You’re leaving warm California for very cold Michigan.” Okay, no one said that exactly, but they could have. However, a lot of people in Michigan when I first moved there said: “Me, do you realize you left a very warm place to come to a very cold place?” Those Michiganders, always filled with great moments of logic.
Anyway, my first Winter here wasn’t that bad. As a matter of fact, it was the mildest Winter Michigan had in decades. I thought immediately, wow, these Michigan people are wimps. This was nothing. I’ve had Winters in San Francisco that were colder than this. And then the next year was one of the worst Michigan had in decades. I immediately bit my words and never uttered such insults again.
Getting back to my subject, I was talking to a co-worker, and she mentioned that perhaps I should get a programmable thermostat after I told her my usual habit of trying to leave my heat on all day so my house was actually warm when I got home. She kind of thought I was wasting a lot of heat (and money) by doing this. When I discovered they made such an item, I immediately decided that I had to have one. So I went to Best Buy to look for one, and of course, they didn’t have any. They could order it and have it delivered to their store in a few days, but they didn’t have any in store. Realizing I can have it shipped to my own freaking house, and not to Best Buy’s store, I walked out of Best Buy pissed off at Best Buy like I usually do whenever I go there to get a specific item that I would figure a stupid brick and mortar store would actually have on its premises (NOT SO I HAVE TO ORDER IT ONLINE).
Then it started to dawn on me that even if I got one, was I going to be able to put it into my apartment? I live in one of those management complexes that does everything for you, except anything you might actually need done. So, I called them and asked them if I was allowed to have a programmable thermostat installed. The response was as follows:
Them: Um, let yeah that should be okay. Let me contact our maintenance guys so they can set up a time to install it.
Me: That would be great.
Them: You do realize that this would have to be after hours because we can’t be held liable for that sort of thing? And I’d have to contact them to see if they could do it.
Me: What exactly does that mean?
Them: He’s not answering the line, so let me investigate this and then get back to you. Can I call you right back?
Me: (realizing where this was going) Um, sure. I’ll await your call.
Then I hung up. That was two weeks ago. Still awaiting his return phone call.
So, I contacted a friend of mine who knew someone who could put one in. Then I decided to buy one so he’d have something he could install when he showed up. That was when I read a great article in the New York Times about a programmable thermostat that was becoming all the rage.
Now, supposedly this thermostat learns as you use it, so it would do all sorts of things that you tend to do and then learns from it. The only problem I saw with it was that it wasn’t all that interested in letting you program it, but it wanted to learn from what you did, which meant instead of setting it for turning off the heat at midnight, it would want me to get up in the middle of the night (at midnight) and turn off the heat and then it would learn from my actions. Not exactly the kind of education I want to teach a thermostat, but I’m sure it has features that work around that.
So, I had the guy install this one, and now I’m working through its minor details, like enabling certain functions that I find to be important, like actual heat. The other day, I pressed buttons over and over, launching two space shuttles, picking up three shows on HBO, relaying something called a “go signal” to some strange group in Iraq called SEAL Team 5, and changing the date from BC to AD at least twice. But “heat” seemed somewhat elusive. So I went back to the manual, read it through twice, realizing that this was the original Rosetta Stone they used to translate English to Sumerian cuniform, and then managed to finally get the heater to start putting out air conditioning, and then finally HEAT.
I’m what you would call a creature of habit. Well, other people have lots of other names for me, but I’m going to go with that one for now.
You see, I kind of like things stabilized and normal. Yet, at the same time I tend to have a habit of picking up and starting over from scratch because I get tired of the same kind of life after awhile. No, it doesn’t make sense to me either.
However, I was getting lunch today, when it dawned on me that I get the same thing for lunch every day. And it didn’t dawn on me because I’m really cognizant over those kinds of things. It dawned on me because the cashier remarked “I’ve noticed you get the same thing every day, except for Fridays. That’s when you switch chicken strips for wings.” And she was right. Come Friday, I will get the exact same lunch at work I get every Friday because I’m what I’ve already called a creature of habit.
On the weekend, I will eat breakfast at Burger King. I don’t even order my meal any more. I walk up to the counter and whoever is working there will charge me $6.87 and eventually someone will bring me EXACTLY the same breakfast I get on Saturday and Sunday. It doesn’t change.
I don’t date, which is why I don’t really have to worry about someone else deciding, “You know, I’d like to eat at some strange restaurant we’ve never tried before.” I’d like to date, but I can’t find anyone interesting in my neck of the woods. And I gave up looking. Besides, someone new might want to eat somewhere other than where I normally eat.
The problem is I’m not sure if it’s a problem or not. I guess it could be, especially because I’m a big fan of making abrupt, huge life-changing changes. But I haven’t changed anything in a long time. Aside from socks and underwear. And a couple of months ago, I changed the oil in my car. But right after I did so, I drove to Burger King and had breakfast.
Something don’t ever change.
I was reading today about how Arnold Schwarzeneger cheated on his wife, Maria Shriver and ended up having a child with one of the members of his staff. Now, I’m not going to get into the pro or cons of Arnold, or any of that. I’m not even really going to comment that much on that affair and the child he had with someone else while married. What I will say is that I always found Maria Shriver to be a beautiful woman who is extremely intelligent, and any man should have been as lucky as he could ever be to have been married to her. I don’t care that he’s Arnold and could have probably any supermodel he wanted. He had the one any man would have killed to have had as a wife, and he threw it away on something stupid. That’s all I’ll say on Arnold. That’s not what I wanted to talk about here.
What I did want to talk about is the very nature of cheating itself. It’s something I just don’t understand. I mean, I understand psychology and all of that, but what I don’t understand is why someone would do it when it serves no purpose other than an immediate, stupid need. Now, I’m not the most experienced individual when it comes to relationships, but when I’ve been in them, they were exclusive for me (at least for me), and while I may have had bad thoughts at the time, especially when someone else who was extremely attractive seemed quite interested in me, I never considered cheating as an actual, viable alternative. Yet, I know without a doubt that I”m a rarity at this. People cheat all of the time.
And that drives me nuts. I’m not married, mainly because I’ve never found anyone that could stand me long enough to ever consider doing so. Okay, there were a few in the past that probably could have made that leap with me, but let’s just say that I’m more of a loner, being a writer and all that, so I’ve never succeeded in making something like that work long term. But not once has a relationship ever ended because I decided I wanted someone else. The logic of that completely baffles me.
Which then brings me to the belief that if I ever do get involved with someone, she’s probably never going to be convinced that I’m legit and not cheating, and my supposition of that falls on the obvious fact that so many guys cheat, especially guys that should have no reason to do so whatsoever. You’ve got people like Hugh Grant, with someone like Elizabeth Hurley, and he goes and cheats with a skanky hooker. I mean, I just don’t understand it. The logic makes absolutely no sense.
There’s an argument that goes that men are only as loyal as their options. I hear this one a lot. At first, I used to hear it from comedians, but then I started to hear every day people using the phrase. And if it’s true, that really says horrific things about the average guy, because it basically means that we aren’t to be trusted AT ALL, EVER. I could understand if you’re in some loveless marriage, or that your wife has suddenly decided to become anti you, but those cases are very specific ones, and for all other logical reasons, the marriage should be ended there anyway. Even in those cases I don’t advocate cheating; I advocate divorce. I figure that if someone is going to be that upset by his current circumstances that he’s going to cheat, he needs to be brutally honest and then just end the relationship completely. Living a lie has to be a horrific experience, and I can’t imagine myself ever doing it. How others could do it is beyond me, yet so many people don’t seem to have that much of a problem with it.
Over the years, I’ve come across a lot of people who have stretched the boundaries of relationships. At one point, I hung with a open marriage crowd, and I was fine with that. I mean, in these situations, no one is cheating on anyone because everyone is aware of what is going on, and everyone is consenting to the relationship dynamics. It’s the sneaking around and deceit that I completely do not understand.
I come across it every now and then in my normal daily life, and from time to time, I find myself getting drawn into circumstances that drive me nuts. I’m talking about where someone is a friend who happens to be cheating on his wife or her husband, and then I’m asked to lie because the spouse might bring up a question that could reveal the dishonest behavior. People don’t seem to understand why I get really upset whenever I’m brought into something like that without my approval and any previous discussion. It’s literally asking me to cheat in a relationship where I get absolutely nothing out of it for doing the bad behavior, which not only goes against every fiber in my being, but also doesn’t get me anything out of the dynamic as well.
But back to the question. Why do mean cheat? Is it because they constantly want something forbidden to them? Is it because of a need to constantly fulfill a sexual desire? Is is because they feel a need to do something immoral, dangerous or wrong? I would hate to think that answer is that it’s because they had the oportunity, which makes us nothing less than Pavlovian beings, capable of being manipulated so easily by any manner of incentive. There’s an old joke where a woman claims she’s not a prostitute, but then some businessman offers her an absurd amount of money to have sex, and she relents. He then asks her to do it for the original offer or some nominal amount of money, and she says, “Sir, what do you take me for?” And he says: “Madame, we already established what you are. Now we’re just negotiating the price.” In other words, it only takes one time to be a cheater, and once you are, you are forever condemned to be one, no matter how much you might tell yourself otherwise.
What bothers me is that there are so many people out there who have no qualms about this. And yes, I understand that gender is not necessarily the distinctive factor either, as women cheat as well. That doesn’t make me feel any better, however.
There’s a brilliant scene in one of the Austin Powers movies where Dr. Evil, played by Mike Meyers, is announcing to the UN, or world council, or whatever fictitious organization was in charge of the world in those movies, that if they do not give him what he wants, he will unleash his viciously evil plan. What he asks for is “a MILLION DOLLARS” and his advisor tells him that a million dollars isn’t a lot of money anymore, so he has to up his demand to “a TRILLION DOLLARS.” They replay that same scene in a subsequent movie where he time travels back to the 1960s and he demands “a TRILLION DOLLARS”, causing the world council people to laugh at him because they recognize there’s not a trillion dollars in existence in that 1960s period.
Fast-forward to today, and the United States is trying to figure out its budget. The Republicans, the Democrats and President Obama are stuck on how to do it, how much to do it with, and what exactly they should be doing in the first place. The architect of the Republican plan, some guy previously unknown to anyone named Ryan, proposed a future budget cut over years of some numbers of trillions of dollars. President Obama, as of today, is announcing a plan to cut the budget by $4 trillion. Currently, we’re trying to head off a government collapse because our debt ceiling needs to be raised beyond its current level of $14.3 trillion, so there’s this request to raise the debt level even higher.
Here’s the problem. It’s not the fact that the government is now spending enough money that we’re currently $14.3 trillion in debt. Okay, that’s a problem. But the real problem is that $14.3 trillion means absolutely nothing to the average American, because the average American is lucky if he or she has $50,000 to access at any one time, and it’s easily arguable that most Americans are lucky to have $20 in their wallets at any one time. So talking about $14.3 trillion in debt is like saying we have a gazillion dollars that we have to cut because we’re already spending a quazillion each year. In other words, the numbers have absolutely no relevance to anyone.
Years ago, when the debt was somewhere around $1.2 billion, the news media used to do really inventive little games like say something along the lines of “if you lined up dollar bills all the way across the planet, you’d still have money left over after crossing the entire globe” or other equally interesting, yet ridiculously ludicrous examples. It would always cause the listener/reader to go, “wow, that’s a lot” but that’s usually all it would do. Then they’d go back to being oblivious to the events of the day because, to be honest, the events of the day didn’t really matter to them. Archie Bunker was on TV, so it was more important to get home and watch that.
Now, we have politicians on all sides of the aisle trying to convince the American people that this outrageous amount of money is important to the average American. But it’s not. Because it’s so much money, and so much out of control, that people just laugh at it and pretend it wasn’t mentioned. I mean, who wants to deal with the some ridiculous amount of debt when you might have debts of your own to deal with? I have a student loan I’m trying to pay off, so that number of thousands of dollars is far more significant to me than $14.3 trillion that was racked up without me ever having a say so whatsoever. Because when it comes down to it, they’re either going to figure out what to do with it, or the country is going to collapse. But no matter what they do, I’m still going to owe thousands of dollars in student loans. NO ONE is going to bail me out. Because no one cares about me like they seem to care about a phantom amount of money that was spent by people who were spending money that was never theirs to begin with.
And that’s the problem right there. The money we’re talking about was spent by people who took it upon themselves to dole it out any way they saw fit because it was never theirs to have to worry about in the first place. It was all fiat money that they imagined, yet they spent it as if it was real, lining the pockets of very rich people and very well-connected corporations. But when it came time to pay the piper, they turned back to us, the people, and said it was our responsibility to pay for what they fucked up because they never gave the implications a second thought when mom and dad went out of town and left them the keys to the liquor cabinet, the car and a credit card with no limit.
So, when the president gets on the horn and tells the rest of us that the debt is out of control, and WE need to do something about fixing it, he should sort of understand that rest of us really don’t give a fuck. We were never involved in the spending of that money, no matter how many arguments are made about how “we” put them in power to abuse the system in the first place. People we didn’t know had access to spending money they never should have spent, and now it’s time to pay up. Well, none of us are all that concerned. As a matter of fact, we see a lot of the bickering going back and forth between politicians as whines about how they don’t have access to more money to blow and spend like there’s no tomorrow. We don’t see the Republicans as the “fiscal conservatives” no matter how many times they try to pretend they are. And we don’t see the Democrats as the keepers of responsible government. All we see are a bunch of kids who had access to mom and dad’s credit card and now that mom and dad are at home, seeing the bill from the credit card company for the first time, there’s not a whole lot of compassion from the American people towards these kids who are now arguing about how we should raise their allowance because they already spent their money on video games.
So, if you’re going to try to convince the American people that they should care, you have a great deal of work in front of you. And so far, not a single politician has ever even attempted to do that.
I’m a college professor who teaches political science to students who generally aren’t interested in the information. It’s a required course, which means you end up with a lot of students who are in the class mainly to fulfill a requirement and then get out. The information is irrelevant to them. It’s not important. It’s information best left to people who deal with that sort of information. Which kind of brings me to an aside. Years ago, I was a counterintelligence agent working in a foreign nation. I was working with some very dedicated people. I had an assistant who was sponging off me, trying to learn everything he could so that one day he could be an agent himself. I remember him asking me one day when we were involved in something that would take a novel to explain (and could have very well qualified for science fiction status) when my assistant turned to me and said: “Aren’t there people in our government who handle these sorts of things?” And my response was, which I’ve never forgotten: “We are those people.” His response was classic: “You really should be getting paid a lot more than you are.”
Which brings me back to teaching college. I was discussing current events of the day, and a student mentioned that we were now attacking Libya and then asked: “I don’t understand why we’re doing it? Why are we attacking?”
This was one of those questions that most people don’t have to deal with because either they’re hip on what’s going on in the world and are more a part of the argument than the reasoning, or they’re part of that group of people who are oblivious to what’s going on in the nation and the world around them, kind of like most college students tend to be. We like to think that college students are the smarter of the young people out there, but quite often they’re clueless, mainly because their interests are still high school interests that have yet to evolve into something more worldly.
So I stood in front of class and tried to bring it back home. We had been talking about the War Powers Act of 1973, that details when a president can and cannot commit troops to war, and as much as I tried to explain it, the questions kept coming up with how a war can actually take place when the resolution basically says that it really shouldn’t. I tried to explain that the War Powers Act was a response to the Vietnam War, where Congress no longer wanted a president to be able to commit the country to war without a resolution of war first, but then also explained that real events in real time were always a test of boundaries, and right now we were going through yet another test of the boundaries set forth by the Act itself. I went through and explained the ramifications of Bush II’s escalation of war from an angered country after 911, and how it had everything to do with the state of the Act today. Little by little, I was able to explain what was going on, but each time I peeled another layer of the political onion, I found yet another raw debate waiting to emerge.
In the end, I was left explaining that events are happening right now in which the future has everything to do with how things play out on a day to day basis, that quite often you couldn’t rely on a textbook or legal definition to reveal what was right and what was wrong. Often, more than sometimes, the events of tomorrow have no predictability because people today are rarely rational, even though political scientists tend to veer towards the rational actor theory (people do what is most natural and, for lack of better word, rational).
It was one student, sitting in the back of the room, texting her friends during the lecture, who offered probably the most poignant question of all. “What will this mean for us in the future?”
And she meant for young people like her, those going through college and trying to create a life for themselves. Realizing the nation was already at war in two other places, the revelation that we might be at war in a third caused a texting student to stop texting long enough to ask what this might mean for her future.
And I had to tell her that I didn’t know. Politics is all about how rational actors respond irrationally to events that often make little sense in a solitary context. It’s why political scientists should never predict, even though they keep trying to do so. All I could respond with was confusion and knowledge of the past, because I realize that nothing in our future is truly new, as we often fulfill the axiom of history repeating itself. What that axiom never points out is that most people don’t have a solid foundation of history to recognize it when it does. You see, most people are like my students in that class, oblivious to the world around them, and equally clueless to the past because they didn’t think it was important enough to study at the time.
Some years ago, I had a pretty unimportant job as an investigator for a major hotel chain. I happened to be in San Francisco, working for one of the properties of that chain, when there was a major political event taking place in the city. The election for mayor was taking place, and this was the evening of the results. The man who was going to be the future Mayor of San Francisco was holding his election rally in the hotel where I was at, so the big convention was taking place in the Grand Ballroom of this hotel.
This meant that everyone that was involved in security needed to be part of the crowd control. As a security investigator, I sort of fell under that umbrella, and while I could have opted out, I figured I’d help out and stood at the top of the escalators where the mayor was holding the big get-together. Well, like most bad television sit-coms, this is where everything sort of fell into place.
It turned out that one of the main advisors to the future mayor was someone I knew. He and I had met at the college where I had gone back to school after getting out of the military. He just so happened to be my physics instructor at the time, and we had gotten along greatly, although that had been a few years ago. Well, he was walking up the escalator with the future mayor, saw me, and immediately steered that future mayor over to me and said: “I wanted you to meet one of the men instrumental in helping you get elected.” And I was then introduced to the future Mayor of San Francisco.
You see, this professor of mine mistook his recognizing of me as a recognition of someone who was actually involved in the campaign. He saw my recognition of him, and his eyes lit up, and he sort of filled in all sorts of false past events because he probably couldn’t remember why he recognized me. I was fine with it, and personally I thought it was kind of funny.
Things sort of escalated from there. The number one man in this mayor’s campaign heard the exchange and immediately looked at this guy in a suit and figured he was important enough to continue a conversation. He pulled me aside and asked me to walk with him into the ballroom, because he wanted to hear my ideas for when the mayor took over the city.
So, not believing this was really happening, I went with him and spent the next half hour outlining what I would do if I was to take over as mayor. The man hung on every singlel word I said.
Then he introduced me to the future mayor to have a small conversation with while we waited for the returns to come in. So I stood there, in front of a lot of very important people, and I outlined what I thought this mayor should do if he became the leader of the city. He listened to every word, asked me a bunch of poignant questions, and then listened to my responses to every one of these questions. I must have spent an hour talking to him before the returns came in, and this man was announced as the next Mayor of San Francisco.
He then turned to me, handed me his business card with his private phone number on it, and then told me to keep in touch, because he valued his friends well.
So, I shook his hand, took a business card from his campaign manager, and then went back to work, helping the security staff take their lunch breaks by filling in for them.
But for that one moment, I was listened to by some of the more important people in the city. They’d never listen to me again, but for a few hours, I was one of them and the one to whom they listened to every word spoken.
I can only hope that I made a difference to the city that one day.
(this is a reprint of one my old articles from last year)
