Xark!

Perfect Things

The Opinel No. 10 wooden-handled lock-ring pocket knife.

There is nothing fancy about an Opinel. It doesn't hold its edge, offer any special features, or do anything slick. It's just a functional, cheap, light-weight pocket knife with a nice wooden handle that you use and sharpen and use and sharpen and eventually lose somewhere. And then you get another one. 

Its secret is that little pressed-metal collar just below the blade. It rotates, and has a slot in it that's just big enough to let the blade pass through it. Twist it, and the blade can't close. Which is a nice feature for people who enjoy having fingers.

If you've never plucked a wild green apple from an ancient tree and gazed out over a mountain meadow while cutting yourself a slice with a weathered old Opinel, you've missed one of life's greatest pleasures. 

 

Zippo lighters.

It's a portable candle. A hand-warmer.  It's something to fiddle with when you're waiting for a ride. A flashlight. It's a bar trick and a practical tool. It's fully serviceable and while you'll likely lose it someday, it will never, ever die. Just the feel of a Zippo in your hand will give you a sense of completeness and well-being.

These things have been around forever. Hell, they practically won World War II singlehandedly. And millions of people probably started smoking just so they'd have an excuse to carry one.

Engrave your name on it. Preferably with your Opinel. Just don't buy one with an expensive bullshit case.

 

 

Satya Sai Baba Nag Champa incense.

Trying to get some work done and need to clear your headspace and timing? Or at least change your perspective? You grab the blue box and burn a stick. 

You don't need any other varieties of incense, or aroma therapy, or whatever. Keep a box around the house at all times.

Wiha 153 series square-handled screwdrivers. 

I've used a lot of tools over the years, but after picking up one of these 2012, the rest of my collection of mechanical screwdrivers felt like rubbish. They're not particularly expensive, either. 

 

Moleskine ruled soft-cover pocket notebook. 

The story of my life, regrets and adventures over the past decade is largely contained in a collection of about a dozen Moleskine pocket notebooks on the bookshelf here by my computer. The early volumes have smashed spines thanks to the original hard covers, but I've been toting soft-cover Moleskines around for years and even the full ones are remarkably intact. 

A writer thinks way too much about notebooks, and I have different notebooks for particular purposes. I carry proper reporter's notebooks for assignments and interviews -- they're spiral-bound at the top, cut to fit a back pocket, and perfect for taking fast, loopy notes. You trash these when you're done with them. Over the years I've also taken to using cheap, small (48-page), cardboard-bound pocket notebooks (typically Moleskine, but sometimes other brands) for particular projects, particularly when I'm multitasking and want to keep things separate and organized. And for conceptual creative work at home, I tend to keep grid-lined, stich-bound black Moleskine 7.5-inch notebooks around my desk (you can buy them in three-packs).

But there's no pocket notebook quite like the Moleskine soft-cover lined pocket notebook.The paper is top-quality. The cover lasts forever.It a has a ribbon sewn into the binding to mark a place, or just to make it easy to open to your last used page. There's a folder at the back that's meant to hold loose notes, and the simple truth is it always fails, but there's an elastic band that holds the whole thing together, and so that doesn't really matter. 

Why love it? Because it's a fundamentally intimate technology. Because It becomes part of your "kit" as a writer. Because you can doodle in it, rant into, copy down phone numbers and scraps of dialog. Because you stuff receipts and found art into your Moleskine. Because mine are filled with folded bits of things I need that I staple to relevant pages, and poems written on airplanes, and plans for things that fell apart, and all sorts of aspirations. And once they're filled, I get a new one, write the dates in the old one, fill it with yellow Post-Its for quick future reference, and move on. 

I've also carried unlined Moleskines with art-grade paper with the thought that I'd paint or draw in them... but that's just not the way I work.

 

 

Olympus WS-802 digital audio recorder

So yes, my new phone as an audio recorder app, but ever since I wore out my old Sony MP3 recorder, this has been my go-to for interviews, ideas that pop up while I'm driving alone, even writing dialog for books when I'm away from the computer. 

The sound quality is good enough, and it's got all sorts of features I never use, and don't intend to ever explore. The main thing is that it's light, fits in my pocket, operates simply and reliably, and plugs directly into my computer via a built-in USB drive. The USB not only transfers my interview audio files, it also recharges the unit for the next interview. I hope it lasts for years.

SRAM Avid BB7 disc brakes

My Fisher Cobia mountain bike has a nice frame and solid components -- a good value-point bike for a guy who just likes getting out on the trail. But the original set-up featured entry-level off-brand hydraulic disc brakes. And that just wouldn't do. 

In the bike world, hydraulic discs are generally considered a step-up from mechanical (cable-operated) discs. That means that hydraulics are where the elegant engineering takes place.

The cable-operated BB7 is the exception to that rule. Ask your bike mechanic. He'll know what I'm talking about. 

These things just work. They're lightweight and super easy to adjust. They deliver great feel and control, and mine have been practically maintenance-free. So yeah, you'll notice a lot of expensive hydraulic brake sets around the trailhead, but pay attention to what your mechanic rides. There's an excellent chance he sold his original hydraulics on eBay and replaced them with these.

The Park PW-4 Professional Pedal Wrench.

Park Tool up in Minnesota makes some great stuff for bike mechanics, but this tool is so perfect for what it does that it's practically in a class by itself. 

It's got leverage. Angles. Power. Gravitas. It's designed for the way bikes are, not the way they should be, a great big beast of a pedal wrench that will blow up even the most horribly cross-threaded, jammed-on, fucked-up platforms anybody ever shoves your way. 

You know when I felt like I'd finally arrived as a professional mechanic? The day when I decided my mobile repair service had earned enough money to upgrade my toolbox to include the PW-4. It's the luxury of professionalism.

 

The M1911A Colt semi-automatic.

You know why they named this thing the 1911? Because that's the year it officially entered service in the U.S. Army. 

As a tanker in the mid-1980s, this 45-caliber automatic was my first service weapon. It was heavy, ancient, loosely constructed and had a maximum effective range of 50 meters. And we loved them. Even after I gave mine up for the new Army-issue Baretta 9 mm in 1988, I missed the old Colt, and apparently I wasn't the only one. There are Special Forces units that still use this weapon today. Because it works.

It breaks down easy, cleans easy, reassembles easy. That loosely engineered standard makes it relatively quiet (because the gas escapes in lots of places instead of one) and surprisingly easy to keep on target (because it kicks less than many smaller-caliber guns) if you're trying to put a bunch of bullets onto something in a hurry.

And while there are people who will tell you this guy isn't as accurate as newer designs, I say, who cares? I qualified expert with this pistol multiple times, and twice earned perfect scores. It's accurate enough.

If the world fell apart tomorrow and I could take only one weapon with me on my way out the door, I'd take a Kalishnikov. Duh. But along with that Kalishnikov I'd pack an M1911A1.It's the perfect blend of reliability, simplicity and effectiveness.

 

What are your perfect things?

The 7 Worst Ideas in History

The other day someone I follow pointed to a post on Digital Tonto called "The 7 Greatest Ideas in History." And I thought, well, that's kind of a gimme. There are a lot more bad ideas out there than good ones. 

Here's my list...

No. 7: Bombing London in September 1940

In the summer of 1940, the British were the last of the Allies standing and the Nazis pretty much had England by the short hairs. In preparation for its cross-channel invasion of the British Isles, the German air force began ruthlessly attacking radar stations and British interceptor air fields on Aug. 12. By early September, the Royal Air Force had reached the breaking point.

But in late August the Germans accidentally bombed the London docks, which gave Churchill an excuse to launch a token bombing raid on Berlin two nights later. More little raids followed, and though the results were insignificant, the damage to Nazi pride wound up being catastrophic. On Sept. 7, with the RAF on the verge of collapse, Hitler ordered his bombers to stop attacking air fields and start attacking British cities as punishment. And as good as those Nazi bombers were at attacking air fields, they were hopelessly ill-equpped for attacking cities.

Given a respite, the British figther squadrons recovered, and by the end of the month they'd kicked the Luftwaffe's ass. Hitler had to call off the invasion, and, with nobody else to conquer in Western Europe, wound up invading his ally, the Soviet Union, instead.

Whoops. 

No. 6: New Coke

Nobody liked New Coke.

No. 5: President George W. Bush

What people tend to forget about the Bush era was that the Republican Party engineered the disaster. After the Bob Dole debacle in 1996, G.O.P. kingmakers decided the nomination was too important to leave to the voters, and so the party set out to find a candidate before the 2000 primaries and get everyone important behind him. This ill-fated expedition led them to the popular governor of Texas.

After beating back an early challenge from John McCain, Bush cruised to the nomination, and though he couldn't win the election, there was a Republican majority on the U.S. Supreme Court. 

Bush proved unqiuely unqualified for anything resembling presidential leadership. Eight years later, with America's economy in shambles and our reputation in tatters, you have to wonder whether those smug GOP kingmakers wished for a do-over. 

No. 4: Windows Explorer

There are other Microsoft disasters, but Windows Explorer is the poster child of ineptitude. Why is it so bad? Nobody really knows. 

But here's how bad it is: Almost every website in the world has a section in its code called the "Explorer Hack." It's a series of work-arounds designed to make standards-compliant, quality web code actually work with the buggy mess that is Windows Explorer. 

Fortunately, the only people who still use IE are Microsoft employees and your grandmother.

No. 3: American Psycho

Brett Easton Ellis was an annoying literary golden boy in 1985 after the success of his first novel, Less Than Zero. Fortunately, Ellis is also a douchebag, and the praise went to his head. 

In 1991 he published American Psycho, which was both a really bad novel and totally offensive. But when you're "the voice of your generation," you think you can get away with anything. The controversy sold a bunch of books, but it wiped out Ellis as an American literary figure. Thank goodness.

No. 2: The Boulton-Paul Defiant

Sorry about doubling down on the RAF, but I've got a thing for historical aircraft, and this one is just deliciously stupid. The idea was to build a two-seat interceptor with no forward-firing guns, but four backward-firing machine guns in a turret behind the pilot, because... wait for it... 

Well, actually, there just isn't a good explanation. In theory one could fly the Defiant under and kinda to the front of a German bomber and shoot sorta up and back at it, but that requires the cooperation of the enemy. So Defiant crews just sort of flew around, unable to shoot at bombers and forced to run away from approaching fighters. Must have been lonely, not to mention nerve-wracking.

And yet the British built more than a thousand of them. In the end, only the Canadians could be persuaded to take them, and that's only because Canadians suffer from congenital politeness.

And No. 1:

 

 

The Unauthorized Life

The World being the terrifying, beautiful mess that is, we make our way through its mazes less like wandering, wondering, free adults, and more like children hurrying through a bad neighborhood on their way to the store with a shopping list from mother: fearfully, avoiding eye contact, with tangled senses of purpose and possibility and dread. We seek happiness and abundance and approval, but mostly we're avoiding trouble.

Given enough successful errands to the store, eventually we learn the Grants and Limits of our Authorization.

This One is authorized Work and granted the presumed nobility of his daily sacrifice. So Working Man receives his ration of respect in the abstract aggregate, but it never comes addressed with his name on it. Politicians compose hymns to his sainted martyrdom, but Working Man is authorized neither an individual face nor a privately owned voice. He is prohibited the joys and risks of freedom but granted songs that celebrate such notions on FM radio.

This One is authorized Poetry and may Wander Lonely As A Cloud, but Poetry Girl may not exhibit hard edges nor stand solid in the lovely flowing stream of This-and-That citing gear ratios and irrefutable measurements. That's not why the system authorizes poets. Your poetry license authorizes you one, but never the other.

And This One... well, you get the point. This One is mentioned only because Essayists are authorized to process Controversial Thoughts, but required by Convention to list three examples of each.

And so on.

We don't "find ourselves." We receive our authorized roles and then trim away all the bits of Self that lie beyond the edges of the cookie cutter.

If we're lucky, we eventually acquire enough perspective to see Ourselves within the System, with all its rules and enforcers and limits and inevitable gravity.

And then, without any authorization whatsoever, we walk through the walls.

Apologies to Colbert

Me with Doc Searls at FutureWeb 2010.

Feeling better all the time

In 2007 our family attended the Lake Edens Arts Festival and everyone avoided me because I was so grouchy. There were multiple theories as to why I was in such a bad mood, but the answer was surprisingly simple. Though I didn't know it at the time, I had pretty severe plantar fasciitis, so my feet hurt all the time, and my swollen knees were causing me so much pain that I had taken to tying bandannas just under my kneecaps to remove some of the pressure. I had turned into an immobile, miserable, lurching bear who just wanted the people I loved to decide where they wanted to go so I could get there and sit down.

This is me from December 2008, with my college friends Melissa James and John Sloop, enjoying a reunion in Asheville, NC. I'm the old-looking fat guy on the left with the pained expression. John and I had been hiking with our wives earlier that day, and my feet were hurting so much in this picture that I couldn't keep them both on the ground simultaneously, switching off alternately because standing on them felt like perching on ice picks.

I weighed 275 pounds in this picture, the highest weight I ever recorded. I had gone from an active, happy person to a sedentary, stoic grouch who thought not talking about what was wrong with me was doing my family a favor. I had given up on running, then basketball, then everything but cycling.

The nadir represented in this photo was also a turning point. I came home convinced that if there was some way I could fix what was wrong with my feet, knees and ankles, I was going to do it. Period. 

The good news? Plantar Fasciitis is simple and inexpensive to treat. In January 2009 my doctor prescribed a twice-daily program of stretching and icing. For most cases, she said, the treatment would work in three month or less. My case was so pathetic that despite disciplined adherence, seven months later I was back in the doctor's office to discuss surgical options. She suggested I stick it out a bit longer, and she was right. By fall both my feet were normal again for the first time in more years than I could remember. 

And just as a person can get on a vicious cycle, so too can a cycle spin in the other direction. As my feet improved and my weight dropped, the burden on knees began to lift. Each little thing that improved improved all the other little things. And so on.

By March of 2009 I had the doctor's approval to begin walk-running. That is to say: Go on a walk, and occasionally break into a short trot. I had Janet there to walk with me keep my mind off my still-aching-but-not-quite-so-bad feet, and occasionally I would lurch along for maybe a quarter of a mile, tops. By steamy summer I was grinding out one and two miles at a time on the fitness trail at Hampton Park, but in early spring that was still just a dream.

So when I listened to friends talking about running the Cooper River Bridge Run in April 2009, I decided to make that my goal. I'd run it only once before, in 1995, and running it again in 2010 would make for an even 15 years.

My training was sporadic, interrupted by multiple trips to other cities, but by September I was finally running 10k distances. My schedule got worse, though, and there were entire snowbound weeks in December and January when I didn't run even once. To make matters worse, I put on 15 pounds of holiday and winter weight and was able to run off only about five of those pounds in February and March.

Yet on Saturday morning, I weaved my way through a crowded field to finish the CRBR in just under 63 minutes. I was thoroughly disappointed with my time (I'd been training at a 55- to 57-minute pace), and the best thing I can say for myself is that I managed to pass the guy in the gorilla suit in the final five yards (the guy in the Elvis jumpsuit dusted me at Mile Marker 3).

But if you saw me on the course, you might have noticed that I smiled much of the way. Just being there again, after 15 eventful years and all that stupid, self-inflicted, chronic pain, was, well... just a joy. 

I know there are millions of stories more inspiring than this one, so all I'm really trying to do here is deliver a simple message via my mistakes and epiphanies. Here goes. When given a choice between happiness and misery, choose happiness. When given a choice between health and pain, choose health. 

Oh, and this one: Sometimes the price of feeling better is looking foolish. Consider it an investment.

The Cult of Done

 

I missed this the first time around, but just saw it hanging on a departed employee's cube wall and had to find the source. The Cult of Done Manifesto came from Bre Pettis and Kio Stark. The posters are from Joshua Rothaas and Jim Provost.

Taking a play off.

(Shorter version of this post.)

'I love the game just as much as anybody else. But at the same time, I also understand that life is more than football, too. People might get that misconstrued sometimes, too, that I don't care because I'm not die-hard football, eat, sleep and drink it all day and all night.

You shouldn't be that way, anyway. You need a certain type of balance in life and I know where to put football in its proper place. But my love for the game, I have it just like everybody else. If you don't, you're going to get yourself hurt out there.'

This is what former UNC / Carolina Panthers DE Julius Peppers had to say upon his arrival in Chicago. I quote it here because for such a young man (30 is old in football years, but a mere babe in life), Julius appears to have earned himself some advanced wisdom. 

It's also sure to get him criticized.

Sports-talk-radio fans love the guy who "goes all-out on every play," or at least the media image of such a player. It's a narrative that matches a common story people tell themselves about their lives: That while they may lack this or that, they make the most of what they've got. They work hard. They don't complain. They "play the game the way it's supposed to be played."

Ask the average male sports fan what people would say about him if he were a professional athlete, and 90 percent would answer "They'd say I played with heart." And then they'll go back to lying around on the couch and complaining about the government.

Good writing, good thinking

Non-professional-writer friends who ask me to read behind them tend to be surprised -- perhaps even disappointed -- by my minimalist response to their prose. This is when I wind up explaining what I consider to be a simple truth: Good writing is clear, effective writing. If you've clearly communicated what you're trying to say, and you've done so in a way that's appropriate to your medium and audience, then you've done your job.

This is not to confuse good writing with great writing, but I would argue that great writing isn't a valuable goal for most projects. Cormac McCarthy is a great writer, but if the job at hand was explaining a group workflow in a new software platform, Cormac's MFA English would flat piss me off.

So while good writing isn't exactly common, neither is it all that rare. Good thinking is the commodity we lack, and clearly communicated but fundamentally shallow thoughts aren't improved by tweaking a preposition here and there. This is a problem for many classically trained wordsmiths (of which there is a sudden glut), because they're basically selling the proposition that a professional writer/editor is worth the investment. That's generally true, but good writing is a lousy deodorant for weak bullshit.

Fortunately, there is a corollary at work here. Clear thinkers tend to produce relatively clear communication, regardless of their ability to write standard English, but poor thinkers can be identified rapidly by the intellectual-dwarf-on-stilts quality of their writing. A few buzz terms, a lot of jargon, big words inserted where small ones would do.

Which brings us to a special case: What happens when the goal of communication is not to illuminate, but to motivate? I come from a tradition that admires the ability to speak plainly, yet plain truth is often bad business. Writing that reveals, that explains, that communicates the core truth of a given subject can hurt stock value, undermine sales, even lead to lawsuits. Before you jump on this statement with booted feet, remember that the context here is a competitive one. Would we admire a football coach for telling a pre-game TV interviewer that his quarterback's shoulder is so sore that they've had to remove all the "out-routes" from their playbook? Of course not.

But pumping perfume over a big smelly truth only inspires skepticism, and no amount of copy editing will change that. The solution is better thinking -- focus on what you want to communicate rather than what you're trying to hide -- and a willingness to speak directly and openly about whatever your situation allows (here's a hint: If your situation is so dire that you really can't speak openly about anything, your image problem should be the least of your worries).

This, then, is the value of the voice I hope to preserve in my friends' entirely adequate prose. There are a thousand right ways to communicate a good idea, and the best one is the one that expresses your identity as well. Character is destiny, and voice is one of the ways character is revealed. For better or for worse.

... and what-have-you...

Via these dudes.

Light in the darkness

There are more pleasurable stops on The Wheel of the Year, but the day that always gives me the greatest private joy is this one: The Winter Solstice.

Tonight is the longest night of the year, and the coldest months still lie ahead of us. Yet our ancient grandmothers and grandfathers found hope in this darkness, telling stories that recognized that when things seem to be at their worst, hope is stirring. The days will just keep getting longer from tomorrow until Midsummer, six months from today. 

In pagan mythology, the god is conceived tonight, in the middle of the longest darkness. He will grow in the womb until his birth at the spring equinox. He reaches sexual maturity in May (with the often-bawdy observance of Beltane) and the full power of adulthood at the summer solstice. We'll celebrate the abundance of the god's mature life with distinctly different harvest festivals in August and September, the latter marking the start of his final decline into death (a third harvest festival, remembered by moderns as Halloween).

In the two months since this year's god expired, the earth has recharged itself, preparing for the next cycle of growth. The weather will get colder before it gets warmer -- but the ancients call on us to remember that this is the way hope works. The sun hits the comeback trail tomorrow, and the god grows in the hidden belly of the earth.

It's been a hard year for a lot of people.

Let's celebrate.