Tips for Road Warriors

Business travelers and salespeople who spend a lot of time on the road all know that despite some of the exotic locations and events they attend, traveling is no piece of cake. The hilarious Planes, Trains & Automobiles, starring Steve Martin and the late John Candy, gives a pretty good glimpse, albeit over-the-top, of the kinds of situations you have to be prepared for when you travel. Missed connections and lost luggage being just the tip of the iceberg.

Because I’m on the road today, attending the NSRA Street Rod Nationals in Louisville, I woke up thinking I could offer a few of my own tips for travelling.

Efficiency
Travel is all about efficiency, since you cannot carry your whole office with you. You’ll have to make decisions that encompass what you pack and what to leave behind. It’s a bit like editing. You may wish to amplify all your ideas, but there’s just not enough space. Movie directors, too, shoot far more footage than what appears in the film. There are some pretty good shots that end up on the cutting room floor. So it is with packing for a trip. Bring along only what you need. For sure, don’t leave behind your cell phone recharger.

Purpose
I always keep the purpose of the trip in the forefront of my mind. Everything else, from how I spend my time to what I bring along, ties in directly to this.

Airline Security
Please stop complaining about the way we are treated like cattle by the TSA. Yes, many of them could use some basic customer service training, but when all is said and done it doesn’t change anything to get red-faced and agitated. Keep the sage wisdom of St. Francis in mind: Accept what you can’t change. One more tip: wear slip on shoes and socks that don’t have holes in the toes. Sometimes, though, I have to wear lace up shoes. I always carry the bottom half of a broken plastic shoehorn in my back pocket to more easily get my shoes back.

Sleep
It is very important that you get the sleep you need, especially if you are going to a week long event like SEMA in Las Vegas. Be sure to plan in your down time ahead of time. If you need to bring sleeping pills, do it.

Shoes
The SEMA Show has somewhere between ten and fifteen miles of aisles. Even the parking lots offer miles of trekking, I recommend a second pair of shoes. I rotate my shoes every day so that any rubbing that occurs happens to be in a different place each day. I have seen people get blisters on their feet from all the walking and it is definitely not something you want to experience, not with two more days of walking ahead of you.

Trip Reports
Make notes on the business cards you receive so you remember follow up items. Take time each day to record your notes from the day before. It is the detail that makes the report interesting and gives it value. Assuming that the details are relevant to the purpose of your trip in some way. And personally, I like to finish writing it before my plane touches down at home because my next day in the office will already have a backlog of work awaiting me. Getting that trip report out of the way is one less thing to worry about so that you can hit the ground (office) running.

Bring a Little of Home with You
I like to bring a few CDs to play in the rental car while I am travelling. Today I have Dylan’s Time Out Of Mind CD in the car along with his Blood On The Tracks. I often have a card or something sentimental from my wife or kids in my briefcase... or something related to home on the wallpaper of my desktop.

Here’s a link to some other tips from a real road warrior. This guy is obviously a veteran and his notes are practical.

Any tips you wish to share?

Delta Sky

Well, it’s official. Northwest Airlines has been swallowed by Delta. I know this because today’s in-flight mag offering is no longer the Northwest version. Today I am being introduced to Delta Sky.

Frankly, I've always thought in-flight magazines to be a pretty lame form of distraction. But maybe that’s because I've never flown Delta. I’ve done Eastern and Allegheny, but my primary transportation vehicle has been NWA, simply because no other airline wanted to have anything to do with these tiny airports ringing the outskirts of civilization known as "Up North."

So there it was, in the sleeve behind the seat in front of me, waiting for my curiosity to be aroused.

When I was a young wanna be freelance writer, I remember interviewing at a publishing house in St. Paul that produced some of these magazines. While sitting with my modest portfolio in a waiting room I talked with a woman who was on retainer to write for the company. She was paid six hundred dollars a piece, she said, which I thought was pretty good money considering my best paying gig had been about fifty bucks. (Do the math and you quickly see why I wasn’t quitting my day job painting apartments.)

The thing is, I wanted to write for these in-flight mags because they paid real bucks, but honestly found them so dry you could dip them into the Mississippi and they would still come out dry. Why is this? I’m sure the writers are trying to be interesting. I mean, some of those pieces I'd written for peanuts had lingo that really sang.

So I was on the plane this morning sliding my August Wired magazine into the pocket and there it was, Delta Sky. A smiling Serena Williams, tennis superchamp, graced the cover next to a large headline, “Got Game?” The subhead explains, “The Extra Mental Edge It Takes To Win.” OK, an article with celebrity sports stars telling their secrets.

After the plane is filled and we’re doing the runway thing I reach for my reading material, but instead choose SKY. First impressions can say a lot sometimes. I well remember my first impressions of the very first Wired magazine I purchased back in 1994. I’d attended a class at UMD on The Internet, and the instructor recommended it. So, like a dutiful student who was in awe of that first introduction to all things wired, I picked up a copy at Barnes & Noble…. And… whoa, wow, way cool. I mean, the ads were just so strikingly original. This was an incredible magazine. I hadn’t even reached the content yet, but had reached a conclusion. I was determined to linger on every page.

It think it was the sense of style that hooked me. To this day Wired strives for that occasionally elusive but hip stance. Elusive because styles have cycles and can you really hit the bulls-eye with every burst?

And as the first pages glide past, I immediately sense that Sky is not Wired. The ads have no continuity and are uneven in quality. Feeling a little ho hum already I stumble past pages of print ads that must be either selling the wrong products or just have become too cliche to bother stopping at. I realize it takes a little work to come up with a compelling concept and a little more to bring eyeballs to a standstill. My goal is usually to attempt cardiac arrest. At least I'm aiming high.

OK, we're reaching the real magazine now, and the first section, after the clutter of introductions, is called Wheels Up. It is a section with articles related to travel, business and lifestyles. At least the title has a little panache. The section has that USA Today feel of little entertaining snippets and infobriefs. Sports stars and their paychecks. A Guide to the new "Freeconomics". Getting your point across in a foreign country. Five minutes with..

Here's a page about Brussels for Road Warriors. And something about Bernadette Peters speaking out for the animals. (Not the rock band. Sorry.) Followed by a half page on how to craft the perfect cocktail.

On and on. Too cluttered for my taste. And it still feels so much like an in-flight magazine. I dunno how they do that.

OK, here's an interesting page. It's called August Citylicious. It's actually attractive enough that one could theoretically enlarge it, and frame it as art. Or make it into a poster. It lists cities all over the world and cool things that are happening there, like the Guy Expo in St. Paul this weekend, or the World Water Week symposium in Stockholm. I wonder if Woodstock would have made this list forty years ago. Alas...

The rest of the mag has features and ads, most of them so cliche I am zoning out and paging through to the end of the book. As is the custom, the very last section is airport terminal maps to help you get oriented when you finally get your feet on the ground again.

As for this month's Wired, I will have to savor it on my return flight this weekend. That cover shot of Brad Pitt alone is worth the price of my subscription. Cover stories include Unintelligent Design and Is Google A Monopoly? Is Google a monopoly? I'll find out Saturday.

Five Minutes With Silviu Pop

So many times in history we read of ordinary people who do extraordinary things. It can be very exhilarating to discover the modest roots of these many great enterprises. The flip side, we often don't know whether a big dream or vision will come to pass for certain because there is always risk involved and we really cannot see tomorrow very well. One thing we do know is that he who tries nothing achieves exactly that.

For this reason I am always impressed by people who are passionate about their dreams, especially when it comes to making sacrifices to help make others' lives better. These are people who do not link risks to the cost, but to the potential rewards.

A couple weeks ago I wrote about the fund raising dinner we went to for Romanian Hope Springs Eternal. I did a quick follow up interview with

ennyman: How old are you, Silviu?
Silviu: I just turned 29 on July 16th.

enny: How did you and Tirzah meet?

Silviu: We met through a common friend attending Grace Baptist Church in Dublin Ireland. The church had an active young adult group that we were both involved in. I was in Ireland working and Tirzah was in Ireland completing her Veterinary degree.

enny: Why is music such a part of your lives?

Silviu: I used to sing Romanian Folk music as a child. My teacher, Florica Bradu, is a famous folk music singer in Oradea. I also sang in the Romanian church in a youth group. I coordinated 2 groups while I was in "high school". Our singing group traveled around Romania on mission trips from the bottom of the Black Sea to the top of the Carpathian Mountains..

Tirzah started playing trombone in 6th grade as they didn’t want her in the choir. Her music career took off during her senior year in High School when she was involved in Jazz Band and Wind Ensemble at East High School. She continued to play while attending UMD and her trombone went with her to Ireland.

enny: Why are there so many orphans in Romania?
Silviu: Ceausescu Nicolaie had a rule enforced demanding every women to have at least 5 children in order to increase the population of Romania. He didn’t worry about how the families would feed and support their children. A lot of the families when they found they couldn’t support their kids they would leave them in blankets in the garbage, in boxes by the garbage containers or by the apartment building doors. These homeless children were put in orphanages. Romania is still struggling economically thus children are still being put into orphanages.

enny: What is the biggest need of the ministry at this time?
Silviu: We are at the very start of raising money so that we can fix up the facility in order to have our first camp with children from the orphanage next summer. We need to raise around $50,000 in order to have the facility usable.

enny: Are gifts to your ministry tax deductible? What's the easiest way to send support?
Silviu: We are working on our Federal Tax ID in the next few months we should have it. The easiest way to send support would be checks written to Romanian Hope Springs International or PayPal on our (soon to be available) web site. Artists can send art to our address for silent auction at or dinner events. Thank you for interviewing us and coming to our dinner. We really enjoyed the blog and sent out the website to a number of other people. Most of the artwork was sold which was very exciting.

For more information contact romanianhopesprings@yahoo.com

To all you dreamers and world-changers, today is a good day to move your dream one step further toward reality.

Let's Dance

"Those who danced were thought to be quite insane by those who could not hear the music." ~Angela Monet

It began with my mother. I was in junior high school and was about to go to my first dance. My mom thus took it upon herself to teach me how to dance. By this, I mean slow dance.

She'd bought a Tom Jones 45 rpm single and planned to have me learn the steps thereby. We were in the family room downstairs in our New Jersey home. Naturally I was self-conscious, but simultaneously interested in learning a few things about this all-important life skill. The very first thing is knowing where the hands go. For the guy, the left hand takes the girl's right hand, and the other goes to the side of the waist, or if a bit more friendly, wraps around the lower back.

The next part is the stepping about, which I really never mastered. I just move my weight from side to side a little, taking little steps forward and back. There are some guys who really know how to move them feet. But I never quite got that far in my lesson, because as I was shuffling back and forth next to my mom, my brother Ron and friend Tom walked into the room. I already mentioned being self-conscious and sure enough this was too much. I leaped back away from her in embarrassment (I was but a thirteen year old kid) and rammed the black and white television set so as to knock it off the TV stand to the floor, thus cracking the monitor. Can you believe it? That TV still worked, even with the crack, which became a perpetual reminder of my first dance lesson.

The dance itself consisted of the playing of 45s in the auditorium, which was also used for basketball and gym class activities. The area outlined by the basketball court is where the dancing took place, the entire perimeter lined with little boys in suits and girls in their finest, as well as a number of teachers holding rulers. The rulers were present as a measuring instrument because one of the rules was that we had to maintain a distance of six or twelve inches. (My recollection here lacks exactitude, though the rulers were very definitely present.)

That night, the first girl I asked to dance with me was Nancy Black. She said yes, and was nice about it. So I probably asked her a bunch of times to dance whenever the slow songs played. I still hadn't learned how to move on the fast stuff. That probably began in high school.

I don't recall who taught me the basic steps for dancing to rock 'n roll, but I never missed a dance. If you're guy the odds are in your favor because most of the other guys are too cool to dance, for fear of making a fool of themselves. The girls, on the other hands, though often found dancing with one another would prefer to have a guy step up and share the moment. In most settings where there's music, and people dancing, you will see someone tapping their feet and longing to be out there, but not really wanting to dance with themselves.

The key thing in dance is not being a great dancer, but simply enjoying yourself as you lose yourself in the music, the rhythms, and the social interactions with the one you are dancing with.
My dancing days are pretty limited now, but weddings provide occasions for getting up on one's feet. And for many years I have enjoyed dancing with my daughter at the father-daughter ball each year here in Duluth.

Dancing, of course, isn't limited to this modern era free form style, which some people associate solely with mating and lasciviousness. All kinds of ethnic cultures have their folk dances. In fact, the genres of dance are legion, from tangos, waltzes and salsa to jigs, ballet and disco. Tap dancers and groups like River Dance perform to entertain. Native Americans danced for special occasions with a wide variety of ceremonial dances, and during the special period of the persecution of Native Americans the Ghost Dance was even outlawed.

One of the best parts of dancing for me is losing myself in the music. And using one's whole body as a form of expression. Maybe that's what I enjoy about painting, too. The movement, the music, stepping back, forward, side-to-side. And not really knowing what's going to happen next.

EDNOTE: Most of the paintings and illustrations on my blog are available for sale. If you see something here that makes you say, "I gotta have it," be sure to let me know and we can negotiate a price. Feel free to click on images to enlarge.

For One Night Of Love // Afterword

SHORT STORY MONDAY

Ars longa, vita brevis.

If you have been following this story, you might have been surprised how things ended last week. What's this story about? It appears to be a love story. But then, we have a murder. Or it appears as such.

Frankly, I wasn't sure where to go with this story. I moved it to this point hoping it would resolve itself. I tried to create characters and situations that were believable, and somewhat tragic.

Jeremy is a typical good guy who is somewhat of a social misfit, lives alone. A lawyer builds a big house next door and there is a potential love interest thrown into his life. The girl has been away and is now living with her parents, but there is an unspoken undercurrent that Jeremy doesn't quite know how to read.

The storyteller's craft is challenging. He wants to keep the reader turning pages while also not telling too much. What's not yet revealed here in this unfinished story is the tragic victimization of the girl by her father. The story of this family is one of secrets. The reason the girl had been sent away to a private school was because the mother did not want the father to have access to her.

It is an ugly reality that we seldom talk about or hear about, but it's too real for many. I just learned this past week, for example, that Bobby Darin was the offspring of grandfather. That is, his grandfather was his father by means of his mother. Darin was a sickly kid who overheard his doctor say to his mom that he would never live past his sixteenth. This became a driving force for him, actually, the catalyst that triggered his drive.

I had two directions I was considering for the story. In one version I planned to have Jeremy carry the body to his own barn, then to make it seem that he was the one who accidentally killed the father/lawyer. My problem with this direction was that I couldn't help but see it devolve into a courtroom drama, and I lack the knowledge or interest to produce that kind of book which real lawyer writers have all done so much more effectively. In this version, Jeremy is a Christ-figure martyr, heroically taking the rap to absolve Alyssa from paying the penalty for what she had done, even if it were in self-defense.

Another direction I had in mind was similar. Alyssa convinces Jeremy to take the body, but calls the police and says the neighbor just killed her father. She would turn out to be a cruel person and this twist would be a final nail in the coffin of Jeremy's innocence. (In theory, he has been thus far painted as a tenderhearted soul trying to make a simple living in a complicated world.)

Still another direction might be that they all conspire, Alyssa, Jeremy and her mom, to hide the body in the back forty on Jeremy's property. The bad guy is bumped off and they all get away with murder. The audience cheers, after it is a movie, of course.

I don't like seeing people get away with murder in the movies, though. It seems like certain people might take a measure of encouragement from this and we end up with life imitating art. We all know that there are way too many people in situations where just such an action would be very tempting.

This is how my story For One Night Of Love fell to the wayside. I really don't feel inclined to take it any further. There were some good sentences in the story, in my opinion. But writing a story is a little different from making pictures or paintings. Whereas it is relatively easy to make something interesting without knowing where you're going when you paint, stories really do need a direction.

Where would you have taken this story if you have been reading it?

My Rorschach Technique For Making Pictures

Artists use a variety of media and techniques to make pictures. Most probably have something in mind ahead of time. For example, Dave plans to paint a cow. He studies pictures of cows or the cows themselves, does preliminary drawings and then takes this groundwork and defines on the canvas the image in his minds eye. Pedro, less a realist, might just paint a cow from the internal memory he has from observing cows while visiting his grandmother.

I sometimes make pictures in this manner, using observation first and giving definition second, knowing from the start precisely where I intend to go.

There is another approach to making pictures, though, that I especially enjoy. This morning I decided to call it the Rorschach Technique.

Hermann Rorschach, if you may recall, is the Swiss psychologist who developed the Rorschach Test more famously known as the Inkblot Test. Rorschach was fascinated by inkblot designs while growing up. The development of inkblots into an analysis tool was probably a natural progression for him.

The Rorschach approach is to use the designs to trigger perceptions, to identify personality characteristics in patients. Attempts were made by Rorschach and followers to make the results as scientific as possible. The resulting debates on the validity of these tests as an analysis tool have been with us to this day so that even on Wikipedia their reliability is challenged.

Well, my reference to the inkblot technique is only to suggest that one of my favorite methods of making pictures is to put abstract brush strokes of color onto a surface, then afterwards to see what it looks like. With a few lines, I extract the more defined image which I originally saw in my mind's eye.

Sometimes I like to leave the abstract in an ambiguous form, and other times I highlight and model the shapes to leave little to the viewer's imagination. The picture at the top of this page is titled Man Wrestling With Himself, a strong example of this Rorschach technique. I have been practicing variations of this since last winter using different colors of ink for backgrounds. Lately I have enjoyed the effects created by more muted colors. In this instance a brownish wash was used liberally on the paper. It is almost as if the man wrestling with himself leaped off the page. It was so vivid. Essentially all I did was take pen and ink to outline his form.

Great art? Possibly not, unless by some fluke some important New York art critic tells you otherwise. But it does produce interesting images and, as they say, every picture tells a story.

EDNOTE: Most of the paintings and illustrations on my blog are available for sale. If you see something here that makes you say, "I gotta have it," be sure to let me know and we can negotiate a price. Feel free to click on images to enlarge.

Formative Experiences

Life, in its fundamental essence, is a series of experiences. Fingertips pushing keys on a keyboard. Driving a car to work in the morning. Organizing photos on one's laptop. Talking to a friend on the telephone. Paying bills. Walking out to the mailbox to get the morning paper. Our days are filled with such ordinary things most of the time.

Then, there are the extraordinary moments, those unforgettable experiences outside the norm.

I was talking with my brother Don about my grandparents this morning. We were sharing memories, and it somehow came up how I used to talk with my grandmother for hours about mystical things like whether the Egyptians had been in contact with alien life (as evidenced by their remarkable understanding in the design of the Great pyramid) or whether psychokinesis is really possible. That is, can people bend metal simply by the power of their minds? Or levitate objects? The Russians were purportedly researching these things during the Cold War.

Don was a bit surprised by this side of my grandmother, and it became apparent that much of what I knew about my grandmother was not common knowledge. My grandmother had always been a highly intuitive person and read extensively along a wide range of interests that far exceeded what you might expect from a rural West Virginia housewife. This was all before the formative experience that gave birth to the following poem.

I'm not sure of the year but it was sometime in the early Sixties, an out of body experience. Without hallucinogenics. Rather, she'd had a stroke and while undergoing surgery left her body. For what she believes was a period of twenty minutes she hovered over the operating table, watching as doctors and nurses labored over her semi-lifeless body.

The Greek-Armenian mystic Gurdjieff once stated that our life experiences are like food. Some foods take more time than others to digest. My grandmother's long talks with me were an effort to process this experience she'd undergone.

So it is that some powerful experiences move us in deep places. The loss of a loved one. The unexpected death of a friend. A profound mountaintop experience. It is not only grief that takes many moons to process. Sometimes other kinds of experiences make such impact that people spend years seeking to better understand what happened to them.

The following is a poem which originally appeared in my grandmother's chapbook of poems titled Helping The Sun Grow. No mention here of the mystical, but a remarkably luminous and upbeat snapshot of that moment in time...

Aftermath Of A Stroke

Here I lie, tight packed as in my Mother's womb
I laid with restlessness a full lifetime ago.
But still entirely I, altho I have no room
To move about and at my will to come and go.
But now -- I wander, freely in my mind
The long road thru the crowding mists of time,
And pause in my journeying now and then
To live the happy times again
Made bright indeed by sunset's glow!

by Elizabeth Sandy