Flame On!, Inc.

Bridge: A structure built over a river, railroad, highway, etc. to provide a way across for vehicles or pedestrians.


Burn one's bridges: To cut off all of one's ways to retreat.

I am not an expert in many things, but I do have a lot of experience in burning bridges. I once owned a company that was called "Flame On!" I thought the exclamation point was a nice touch. Not only did I burn bridges I made sure that everyone knew I was responsible. I was not modest in my bridge burning escapades. I didn't dress in camouflage fatigues and burn the bridge under cover of darkness. I showed up in a motorcade with The Ohio State University marching band and a bunch of those big inflatable balloons that you see in the Macy's New Year's Day parade, like Woody Woodpecker and Smokey the Fire-Setting Bear. I burned those bridges good. If I didn't get the credit and attention that I thought I deserved, sometimes I went back, built a pontoon bridge on the smoldering embers of the original structure, and burned down that fucking thing, too.


SuperK and I were having a discussion this morning about a meeting she was going to attend with someone who isn't behaving very well. SuperK is quite the bridge burner herself. She doesn't have my flair and overwhelming shock and awe techniques, but she burns bridges quick-like. She doesn't always burn them down completely, but there are a lot of fire damaged bridges in her wake. She has a portable flame-thrower she uses for quick scorchings. I have to get the equipment prepped and staff the operation and coordinate schedules -- it's a whole operation. With her, bridge builders don't know what hit them. "You didn't say that!" I comment all of the time, a little afraid.


I was a little worried about her meeting. I opened the window as she trudged off to catch the bus, leaving me to do whatever it is that I do. I don't waste time any more suggesting prayers or calling of sponsors. I usually get a quick taste of hot, hot flame when I do that.

"Remember," I said. "If people think that you are stupid, open your mouth and remove all doubt."

"Yeah, yeah," she replied.

Major Tom to Ground Control

Have you ever watched one of those nature documentaries that show some huge, ungainly bird trying to land? I don't know which birds I'm talking about. I can make some names up if it makes the story better. Arctic geese? The Falklands albatross? The blue-footed booby? These animals are so majestic in flight, traveling thousands of miles to summer in a warmer climate, flying, flying, always flying. Then they try to land. The nature film makers obviously have a bit of a mean streak so they show the landing process in slow motion: the birds come crashing in, falling on their faces . . . er, beaks or whatever . . . bouncing in before coming to a stop. Then they try to wander off nonchalantly like everything went according to plan. What are you laughing at? I meant to do that.

I feel like that most of the time. I'm flying in, I'm tired and I have to eat and I know it's time to land, but I have never really mastered the art of face-free landing. I'm always surprised when my face hits the ground, even when I know my face is going to hit the ground, like it does every time. I guess the growth is that I try to land, and that I don't just fly into the cliff at full speed or try to take out a whole bunch of my fellow Falklands boobies when I crash. "If I'm going to hit my face, I'm taking you sons-of-a-bitch with me!" That kind of thing.

I want to be in control of the process, whatever the process is. That's the First Step in code: YOU ARE NOT IN CONTROL OF THE PROCESS. I think a good slogan for my life might be DON'T MAKE IT WORSE. My life would go better if I didn't make things more complicated. Some times I have to move forward when I don't know what the outcome is gong to be or when I see that some pain might be involved or I might be denied some pleasure that I have come to expect as my birthright.

It's scary moving forward.

With Friends Like These . . .

This is how wonderful The Program is:

Willie listened patiently today while I dramatically retold my tale of woe about work. I could hear him stifling guffaws and chortles as he pretended to be sympathetic. But when I told him that I did manage to calm down before I torched any bridges, he yelled: "Oh, c'mon! I was looking forward to the big ending. You mean The Program worked? You asshole!"

Ah, yes.

So, So Very Humble

Humility: The state or quality of being humble of mind or spirit; absence of pride or self-assertion.

I'm one of those rare people who have a lot of humility. In fact, I have the most humility of anyone I know. I'm just that humble. No doubt about it. Sometimes I wonder if I have more humility than anyone else in the world. I think that if you spent some time with me you'd see that this is indeed true. Get to know me. My humility will hit you in the face like an icy blast of Celtic wind.

I got upset at work again yesterday, which is happening with a frequency that I'm beginning to find distressing. I don't think I'm being treated very well -- imagine that -- and I don't like it. Compounding the issue is that, in reality, I am actually not being treated very well. I think this happens in corporations pretty often. Things start to swirl out of control, people are saddled with more and more responsibility and not enough time to do it, and they become less likely to do anything but look out for their own interests. I'm sure I'm doing it, too. I'm humble enough to admit that. Not change my behavior, of course, but at least admit it.

When I get upset about something I can almost always trace it to the Big Three: Sex, Society, or Security. It's pretty clear when I get bent around the axle if someone messes with my money or my sexual appetites. The ego thing is a little more subtle for me. I'm not a dominant personality that way, in the clashing of egos. I prefer to sit quietly in the shadows and judge everyone. I'm better than you are and I know it so I don't have to prove it.

Someone that I don't like asked me to do something that I don't want to do. It involved a lot of work and scant possibility of making any money to justify my efforts. So I said no, and this guy (the BLOWHARD of past fame) went and tattled to the area manager, who called me and left a voice mail to the effect of, yes, you will be doing this thing. I work for myself so technically I don't have to do it. However, he has the ability to fire my ass back into the stone age so technically, I damn well better do it. I knew this intellectually but couldn't connect my mouth to my intellect. Damn thing goes off like a firecracker sometimes.

I made the mistake of listening to the VM at 10PM last night right before hopping into bed. Generally a bad time to get riled up. I had to go sit on the porch, in the dark, in my jammies for 20 minutes to reduce my heart rate to below coronary level.

Pausing really works. I got up this morning and did the right thing with no major damage done.

Check In -- Check Out.

Vacation: Freedom from any activity; rest; respite; intermission.

The bad thing about work is that it interferes so much with my time off of work. I like vacations very much and find work tedious and time-consuming, especially when I'm comparing it to vacations. I can feel the pressure of the real world slithering up my spine my very first morning back. All of that adult responsibility and all of those things that have to be done. Yeech.

I have such great quiet times when I'm on vacation. No place I have to go, no rigid schedules, nothing that has to be accomplished at some specific time. It's easier to let my mind empty and wander pleasantly when no one is asking me to pretend that I'm an adult, which is not an insignificant feat for me, I can assure you that. I do, however, have to brush my teeth and floss regularly even on vacation. I can't let myself relax into poor dental hygiene. I have big teeth and the stray piece of lettuce or bangers and mash can make a big impression on any one that I smile at, especially any young women that I hope might think I'm anything more than a failing old man, which is none of them.


I wonder if the pressures of real life make the vacation experience more pleasant? The fact that I have some semblance of a real life might make the time off sweeter. Not that I do that much even when I'm under the pressures of a real life, whatever that might look like. Still, I kind of get my mind around the concept of walking into a day and seeing what might happen when I'm on vacation. The great thing about travel is that you don't know what you might find. A lot of the time the best experiences are the ones that you stumble into blindly.

Stumbling Blindly. That would be a good name for a rock band.

IRE-land

The only thing worse than the first day back from vacation is listening to someone who has just come back from vacation complain about how much it sucks trying to get back into the swing of things after being on vacation.


My favorite road sign from Ireland read: "No Verge." I don't think that I verged. Maybe I did. I really don't know.

There were a lot of drunks in Ireland. It was apparently perfectly acceptable to drink in the morning there based on what I saw in the pubs. Pubs, I was told, were more like community centers than places to drink. You could order meals, coffee, and the like. Yeah, well, how about feeding me some more bullshit with my toast? Any small, dark, low-ceilinged room lined with liquor bottles and featuring beers, stouts, ales, and more beers on tap would appear to be bars in my opinion. I'm not criticizing pubs, mind you, merely suggesting that I wasn't comfortable hanging out in them, preferring the driving rain and howling winds that pass for summers in Ireland.

I best get myself to a meeting tonight.

Derry Air

I'm getting ready to toodle off to Ireland for a bit of a vacation.

"What do you need a vacation for?" SuperK asked. "You don't do anything now. What, are you busy down at the office, which you don't have one to go to?"


As vacations go this one shouldn't be too stressful vis-a-vis the planning department. Exotic enough but manageably so. Still I find myself struggling to contain the fear that creeps into every crack and crevice of my being whenever I do something new. I'm always surprised at how the anxiety starts to build as I get ready to go somewhere I've never been before. Something is sure to go HORRIBLY WRONG. SuperK worries she isn't taking the right clothes, which perplexes me.

"It's Ireland," I said. "They have stuff there, too. It's not like we are going to Tajikistan." Which was the first place I suggested for our summer vacation this year


"What are you anxious about?" she wonders.

"Murderers. A bad seat on the airplane. Getting screwed by a devious taxi driver. Something happening to MY STUFF when I'm gone."

"No wonder you drank," she says, a comment I hear a lot.


I love to travel and I aways enjoy the experience. I get all riled up before I go but I go anyhow. There is some fear that is worth walking through.

Basically, I'm uncomfortable trying anything new. I might do it wrong. I might not like it. The fact is that I lose control with new experiences and that makes me uncomfortable. But I get bored at the drop of a hat so I bitch about that. This is why I go places. It's scary but I move through the scary part and find it very rewarding and enriching. Things almost never go wrong and when they do it makes for great stories. And I start to recognize the difference between real fear (dark alley at 3 AM) and bullshit fear ("something" going horribly, horribly wrong).

I wonder how many of my posts are about fear. Most of them? All of them?

Everything Is Always Changing

Kick: Pleasurable excitement; thrill.

I get a big kick out of life most of the time. Sometimes it's a kick in the teeth. Sometimes it's a kick in the ass. Most of the time it's a kick like a charge, a stimulating or intoxicating thrill. A lot of the time I'm just laughing at the irony of the whole glorious mess.

I think a lot about the story of the farmer with a horse. I won't bore you with the details because I've probably already written about this guy. Truthfully, I can't remember and I'm too lazy to go back through and reread my back posts. Suffice it to say that some stuff happens that, at first glance, appears to be bad and some stuff happens that would seem to be fortuitous. Our stolid farmer maintains each and every time that all he knows is that something happened. And, of course, the good stuff blows up in his face and the bad stuff is a sheep in wolf's clothing.

I don't have any idea what's going on anymore. I like the idea of getting up each day and moving forward. In my heart of hearts, I prefer either hiding under the covers or racing off at maximum velocity. Today I realize that I have to get up and move, but with some care and caution. I can't sit immobile but I should try to avoid immovable obstacles (concrete, brick, rock, cement, stucco, or stone) and anything that is whirring, churning, splitting, ripping, or crushing. Burning is bad, too. Vaporizing doesn't seem like a good thing, either.

Recently the news at work hasn't been good. This news has come in two big waves. I let loose the famous B-Man temper in the midst of wave one. I had to make some amends and rebuild some bridges, which I dearly hate doing. In round two, at least I kept my mouth shut although what I was thinking was not printable. No amends and fully functional bridges. I find that when I imagine that things are going to get really bad I spend some time living in the worst case scenario. For a privileged guy like me, this usually isn't all that bad. I come to grips with it, in my mind. I imagine what it would be like to live in this brave new world. It all becomes OK.

This is why I never give advice.

Imaginary Reality

Imaginary: Existing only in the imagination; fanciful; unreal.

Sometimes I find myself under assault by fears, anxieties, worries, angst, foreboding, uneasiness, agitation, concern, or the cankerworms of care. They say that Eskimos have many ways to say snow and that Bedouins can explain the differences between all kinds of sandstorms that just seem like the wind blowing to someone like me. Alcoholics can do that with fear.

Sponsor: "Are you afraid?"
The B-Man: "No, it's more of a suspenseful apprehension leading to vexatious misgivings. I'm not quite on pins and needles. It's more like I'm on the hot seat. Could be that I'm just in a pucker."
Sponsor: "Buh-Bye."

Fair disclosure: I'm giving my thesaurus quite the workout this morning.

It's been an interesting exercise for me in my recovery to try to discern what is real and what is not. It's not as easy as it sounds for someone who lives in his own head so much of the time. A lot of drugs, a lot of alcohol, and many years of turning one's mind inward can result in a tenuous grasp of reality.

Fear is with all of us for very good reasons. It prevents us from doing stupid things. When I got sober I thought about some of my escapades and broke out in a cold sweat -- and I'm not sure that an Eskimo or a Bedouin could understand that reference. That's because I did stupid, dangerous things. I was supposed to be afraid. I managed my fear with drugs and alcohol. It made it go away. Buh-Bye, fear, I'm going to get into this two tons of glass and metal and propel it down one of the two roads that I am currently perceiving at 75 miles an hour.

Just say no to dark alleys.

Now What?

When I was finally finishing up with my drinking I was living in Indianapolis. I was working for a home health care company at the time. And by "working" I mean "bitching, backstabbing, and generally being a nightmare to everyone around me." I can only imagine at this point how unpleasant I must have been to associate with, or especially to manage as an employee. Behind my back, this company hired someone to replace me and then transferred me to Chicago. I see today that they were hoping that I would be offended and go away. I don't believe they actually wanted me to go to Chicago. I was a troublemaker and bad employee and they would have vaporized me with a ray gun if they thought they could do this and not risk prison time.




I decided to show them. I'd get another job and refuse the reassignment. How dare they treat me like this. If I had only worked as hard at the job I already had as I did trying to find another one, I would have received a very impressive merit badge. I really went at it with both six guns blazing. Apparently, I didn't make a very good impression on people who weren't currently saddled with my toxic assets because I received approximately zero job offers. I was definitely not weighing the relative merits of different positions.




So off I went to Chicago. I can imagine what the reaction was in some corporate office. Probably something along the lines of: "What the fuck?!?" I arrived in The Windy City the first week of January, with all of the crap I owned in the back of a frozen U-Haul. It was roughly 100 degrees below zero with a 100 foot snow pack. I didn't know anyone. I didn't have a support network. I was sober but regretting being alive. "Hell must not be a lake of fire," I thought. "It must be a frozen lake so cold it has quenched all fire in existence."

Everything Is A Tragedy

One of the things I do in A.A. is to make an effort at looking at my part in things. I wasn't born with the ability, I can tell you that much. It's something that I've learned how to do over the years. It's not pleasant but it yields results.


It frees me from all of the pressure of finding fault with other people, places, and things. It's very frustrating to give someone or something else control of my feelings. I have a big part in most things, and it's the only part that I have any power over.

So I lose most of my territory which is going to cost me most of my income. My gut reaction is to hate the people who did this to me. And at the risk of moralizing I see a lot of big companies chasing short term profits at the expense of people and customers, which means I'm not the only person that something like this has happened to. It's just that when it happens to someone else I'm not quite as interested as when it happens to me. Business is all faster, faster, faster. It's a race to the bottom and then on to something else that is going to be more profitable in the short run.

The result is that a lot of employees start to lose interest in anyone but themselves. I think that is a natural thing to do when you're afraid. There's no sense of camaraderie or group purpose. Everyone circles their own little wagon train and fends off attackers. It becomes "how does this affect me?" personified.

When I don't like something that is happening to me I try to twist things around to my liking. I try to show other people the error of their ways. Most people aren't grateful when I try to show them where they're wrong. Often, they don't' think they're wrong at all. Corporations and institutions seem particularly uninterested. I made my case and they were still unimpressed. They were not swayed. The only way that I even knew they were listening is that they seemed annoyed that I was mouthing off. Guys with MBAs in business running large corporations don't generally care to hear from hipster doofuses.

The truth of the matter is that things have changed over the last few years. My product is becoming less expensive and simpler to use, so the technical prowess that I provide isn't as highly valued as it once was. If there are a handful of opportunities for a very expensive product one guy can cover a large area. Otherwise a good case can be made for using a whole ton of people to cover smaller areas. If someone fucks up an opportunity, so be it. Losing a small sale doesn't sting like losing a large one.

What's my part in all of this? I wasn't working very hard and I wasn't enjoying it when I did. I wasn't traveling to the far reaches of my territory because an inexpensive product produces a small commission. I couldn't justify it. It has become unpleasant and tedious and not very profitable. So were the people who terminated most of my responsibilities being unreasonable? Doesn't seem like it to me, when I look at what I've written. Does it feel unreasonable? It feels very unreasonable.

Then I have to start looking at the flip side. All of us have things that we wish we had more time to do. Maybe god was answering my prayers. Maybe god just provided me with the free time I wanted.

See how he does things? He's an impish pixie, that god.

In-Ven-Tory!

Inventory: An itemized list or catalogue of goods, property, etc.; especially, such a list of the stock of a business, taken annually.

"In dealing with resentments, we set them on paper. We listed people, institutions or principles with whom we were angry."

Here's the thing about writing stuff down: it really works. Most of us find it sort of a waste of time to lie when we are writing for our own personal review. Sure, I'm more than happy to lie to other people but it's increasingly hard to justify making the time to lie to myself. It's very time consuming. I'm a busy guy. Today at least I don't willfully write down stuff that I know to be crap. I still bambozzle myself which is why I spend a lot of time on the phone, talking to actual people.

Also, if I do an inventory properly it allows me to compare the pros and the cons. If I just think things then I'm really great at seeing the pros from my side of the fence and the cons from yours. I don't see where I'm at fault when I'm getting singed or burned somehow -- I perceive that I'm being mistreated. This would assume that I don't make mistakes or behave badly, or that I'm never going to be on the receiving end of the whims and follies of life. Sometimes bad stuff happens to all of us. It's not always a case of right or wrong. Sometimes it rains on picnic day.

I'm burned up about work and it's Sunday.