Sunday, April 27, 2008

Thinking Thoughtful Thoughts, or So I Thought... I Think...

The recent outrageous spike in gasoline prices has got me thinking…no, not about knocking over a bank or forging lottery tickets, but about what the oil companies think they’re doing.

Maybe I’m a graduate candidate for the Bumblebrain School of Economics, but it would seem to me that, in this burgeoning green climate of petroleo-electric hybrid vehicles and the looming advent of practical hydrogen fuel cell technology, the oil companies would be competing for market share by lowering the price of gas. Granted, there’s the whole supply-and-demand ethic at work, and deeper thinkers than I remind me that the oil suppliers – meaning the OPEC – are the ones who set the prices for crude oil, and the rest of us demanders pay accordingly down the line, the recent record profits of the American oil refining companies notwithstanding.

This spike in prices has me thinking the oil companies – the producers as well as the refiners – realize the jig is up. I think they think the world is at the edge of the abyss, looking down into the limitless expanse of alternatives for fueling our world that don’t include crude oil, and it’s more than willing to leap. And the oil companies are trying to squeeze every last dollar out of the consumers that they can before the cows come home to roost.

That, or they’ve seen the bottom of the barrel, so to speak, and are padding their futures before they leave the world dangling in the breeze….

(Oooh! Hey! Bank.... Lottery tickets.... Hmmmm....)


Dad Update
On Tuesday April 22, Dad moved out of the nursing home and into the Illinois Veteran’s Home, in Manteno, about 50 miles south of downtown Chicago, straight down Interstate 57. Not like he did the moving, however, as he was transferred from bed to chair, wheeled into a medi-van, driven to the new place, wheeled in for a medical evaluation, and then transferred to bed. All in all, it was a tiresome day for him.

In the same move one of my fears was unrealized while a co-related fear was fulfilled: when my sister announced about a month ago that Dad would be moved on April 22, I feared that he would not make it to that day, and would die without the comfort (as we perceived it) of being surrounded by men of his generation who share a significant life experience, and who might be able to bring a modicum of emotional comfort and camaraderie to his last days. I also feared he would survive, and thus prolong the misery of his worn out, useless body, the agony of the decay eating him alive from the inside.

But he is still with us. For that, selfishly, I can be happy.


Rope-a-Mope
Am I doomed to spend the rest of my life resenting the who that I am not, who could’ve kept either of the two women I have loved with my whole being from divesting themselves of me? Does everyone who has let a good thing get away go through the same thing I am going through? Or am I just a terminal mope?

Did I fuck up the only real chances I had, or have I still yet to find “the one?”

Does this section even make sense?


Joy
What can better describe the meaning of the word ‘joy’ than this?



Nothing, that’s what!


(Okay... Just so any cat people don't feel left out....

)

Sunday, April 20, 2008

One Year

It was one year ago – yesterday, Saturday by day of the week, Monday by date – that I had a traveling vet come out to the house and euthanize my Dalmatian, Angel.

Just writing that paragraph above caused a tightening in my throat. How raw the pain is still after a full year. I have this photo of her on my iMac desktop,

so I see her every day I'm home. And I have a shot of her I snapped with my camera phone one day at the vet's office, and it's now my phone's "wallpaper," so I see her every day, regardless of whether I'm home or not.

It's been a year… a full year of occasionally driving past the vet's office I took her to – more frequently in the last few years than in her youth – thinking that I have no reason to stop there any more; a full year of walking past the pet foods aisle at the grocery store, or the pet supplies stores, knowing that there's nothing there for me to get; a full year of seeing other people's dogs and getting on the floor with them and making a silly fool of myself trying to give and get as much lovin' the brief minutes will allow me.

At moments it is difficult to comprehend that so much time has passed, that so much life has happened to me, since I sent Angel out of existence. Too often and too easily the images return of sitting in the grass in the shade of the garage in the back yard that pleasant Saturday afternoon and holding her while the life slipped out of her eyes and her breathing slowed to nothing, and time has disappeared, and it feels like now.

Some may read this and think me silly to wax poetic about a "lesser" animal a year dead while my marriage lies in a coma awaiting the plug to be officially pulled. Don't get me wrong; I have mourned the death of my marriage. I very often still do. But we're not putting an end to a life, just a life together. It was love that died…or, if not love, then devotion. With Angel, the devotion was in her eyes right until the moment they lost focus and she slipped away. That and the reality that it was my decision hit me more powerfully. It was the most difficult decision I've ever had to make, and the worst thing I've ever had to do. Leaving the house in which I had shared nearly nine years with Mrs. Farrago comes a close second.

I guess, as far as my life is concerned, I would have to call 2007 The Year of Pain and Loss. Except the pain lingers, and the loss echoes.

So I think it's time to put something else on my desktop, something innocuous, like a photo of my car or a naked woman, anything to stop bringing my mind back to the most difficult day of my life, yet one of the greatest joys I ever knew. But what to replace her with…the Macintosh Swirly Screen?

Saturday, April 19, 2008

Living Up To the Name of the Blog

This is one of those periods where I really have the urge to write something, but nothing meaningful comes to me. I have the few personal projects that have lain dormant for a long time and, thanks to my attitude, will remain so indefinitely. (One is in research hiatus…waiting for me to make some phone calls and/or visits.)

And so I write here nothing meaningful. I'm left but to journal…poorly.

Last weekend I paid a visit to my father, though via a circuitous and reminiscent route. I decided to drive through the sadly dilapidated town I used to call home, and stopped at Hi-Way Bakery, just around the corner and on the other side of the next block from the house in which I grew up. For as long as I can remember, Hi-Way Bakery has made these unbelievably scrumptious chocolate covered cinnamon rolls – not too sweet, not too chocolatey*, and oh, so good – that have at times been the object of my obsession. The place has changed hands only a couple years ago, from the original(?) owners, the DelCotto family (unsure of the spelling), to a middle-aged couple who seem to really have a passion for the business, but are staring down the barrel of bankruptcy due to the local poverty; the town is made up these days only of the elderly and the very poor young, neither of which has any disposable income to speak of. I wish I could have bought every last pastry in the place to help the guy out, but I know I would have only eaten the chocolate covered cinnamon rolls….

From there I drove over to the home of my father's brother, Joseph (Giuseppe), and his wife Angela, or, more colloquially, Uncle 'Chooch' and Auntie Ange. 'Chooch' recently had his own brush with death, as a doctor was overmedicating him with a blood anti-coagulant, which caused internal bleeding and… well, suffice it to say that 'Chooch' almost bought the farm. And he can barely walk, due to his diabetes, and to the fact that he has seldom left the sofa in his living room since he retired 25 years ago.

When I left there I decided, while eating the first of two chocolate covered cinnamon rolls I had bought, to drive past Dad's place and head down to the speck of a town called Sherburnville, just a stone's throw from the Indiana border, about 60 miles due south from Chicago. According to an old obituary that we found among my mother's keepsake possessions after her death, Sherburnville is where my maternal grandfather was buried in 1968. As my mother was estranged from her family for most of her adult life, I know very little about my grandfather. What I do know I learned from other family members or from preserved records; Mom rarely spoke of him.

Oddly enough, as I learned a few years ago, it is through Mom and, of course, her father that I, along with my siblings and their children, am a Mayflower Descendant! More on that in another post, perhaps, but I have seen the family tree linkage! Somewhere in the centuries which intervened between a fortuitous marriage in colonial New England and the birth of my mother in 1928, the family went from relative riches to literal rags, from white linen to white trash. But I think Mom did a good job climbing out of that heap, marrying a respectable, self-motivated, if not-yet-self-employed man (never mind that they "had to" get married!), and I only have vaguely revealing traces of white trash in me. I mean, I have in the past lived in a single-wide trailer.

But I digress. I had been to the cemetery at the church in Sherburnville before, but I had not been able to find my grandfather's grave marker. This time I made sure to look for other cemeteries. I looked in Sherburnville, first, at the same cemetery, but again I was unsuccessful, and began to believe I was in the wrong place, or worse, that the information I had was erroneous. I headed to another church, another cemetery plot, where I encountered an old woman whose father used to be the pastor at this particular church. I asked her if she knew the area, particularly Sherburnville. She confessed she wasn't too familiar with Sherburnville. I told her of my quest, and she suggested I contact the local area historian, and gave me his phone number. As I left the church parking lot, I called the man and left a message on his answering device.

I drove back to Dad's place where I spoon-fed him his favorite soup, and a McDonald's strawberry shake, the only types of food he will eat. After a short visit, which included a brief pissing contest with Dad's asshole roommate who watches golf incessantly and at high volume, and who cranked his TV's volume to 11 when I turned Dad's TV on so he could watch The African Queen at a volume he could hear, I left. With a tummy full of soup and milk and cream, Dad was sleepy again. Rather than sit and watch him snooze, I let him sleep in relative peace. (Asshole roommate had been convinced to turn down his volume when an orderly threatened to go get a nurse.)

On the way home I (ate the other chocolate covered cinnamon roll!) received a phone call from the local historian with whom I had left the earlier message, and he had found my grandfather! I was looking in the right cemetery after all, but in the wrong place(s)! My next visit to that cemetery will be on a sunny warm day.

Monday I flew to Houston for what turned out to be a rather fun shoot on Tuesday. A corporate VP for a client company whose annual meeting is approaching had agreed to appear in a spoof documentary about the lost city of Atlantis (the meeting this year is in the Bahamas) as all of the "expert" interviewees – a bald man with a serious overbite, a very stout woman, and an Einstein-ish professorial type! They had hired a professional theatrical make-up artist who did a fantastic job on the skullcap and the characterizations in general. The guy in the video is not an actor, though he clowns around quite a lot, doing impressions and character voices for the pleasure of his friends and colleagues, so he fit right in, blending into the characters seamlessly. Despite the fact that it was fully a twelve-hour day, it was much fun…until we had to leave on Wednesday. It was a 6:22 am flight, for which we had to leave our hotel at 3:40 am. UGH!

When I arrived at the office – at 10:00 – I had to jump right into a script revision for Thursday's shoot for the Despised Product. Then, when I revealed to a freelance technician that I was shooting in our studio the next day, he shifted into foul-mood. When I asked him what the problem was, he told me that Thursday was the only day he had available to him to dismantle said Despised Product, an activity which would interfere with our shoot, and vice-versa. After learning how much more it would cost to reschedule the freelance shooter and the actor to Friday, I then asked the technician what the Thursday shoot meant to him. He said he would have to try to knock out most of the dismantling on Wednesday afternoon. Since it was my communication failure to let everyone know about the Thursday shoot, I volunteered to help him dismantle Despised Product. I left the office at 6:30 pm.

And I returned to the office at 7:00 am the next morning to help the shooter set up and prep for the shoot. We finished setting up with a couple of hours to spare until the noon call time for the actor, so I ran an errand to pick up a hand-prop for the actor, a "miniature model" of a car that was actually a radio-controlled toy Corvette.

The actor showed a little late, but, after a few lighting tweaks and wardrobe choices, he proved to be an absolute dream to work with! Many live presentation actors use what is called an ear-prompter. It's just a mini-tape recorder that he reads his lines into and then plays it back into a tiny earphone. He then speaks along with his own voice, and it looks and sounds like he has memorized pages worth of monologue! It's one of those things that relatively few people can do, and even fewer can do well. This guy was fantastic! He made the shoot very easy to get through, and he incorporated suggestions very well. Certainly worth the small fortune we're paying him. Maybe.

After helping the shooter to strike all the lights and the backdrop, and then cleaning up the rest of my mess, I left the office at 7:00 on Thursday. I was physically exhausted, after my extremely long days Tuesday and Wednesday and the early wake-up on Thursday, plus the mental exhaustion of directing a shoot (it sounds funny, but it does take a lot out of a person!), and I quite literally passed out on my bed at 10:00, feeling like I had truly accomplished something.

All day Friday I was dragging my ass around the office. Despite getting a full eight hours of sleep, not counting apparently being awaken briefly by the earthquake that shook Illinois, I felt like I could have used another 4 hours!

Next week I have to hand the Despised Product project – the supervision of the edit – back to my boss, as on Tuesday I am helping my sister to facilitate Dad's move from his nursing home to the Illinois Veteran's Home, and on Wednesday I fly to Phoenix for a three-day shoot with a client.

As I say "UGH! What a long week!" surely you must be saying "UGH! What a frikkin long, boring post!"

And yeah, I got it. Stop calling you "Shirley."





*I know… you're saying, "How could anything be too chocolatey?!"

Thursday, April 10, 2008

Pieces In Parts

Sleeping Broody
As I have written several times, I work at a company that produces business meetings and conventions large and small. We also produce our own video support for the meetings, and that’s where I come in. I’m the staff “shooter,” the guy who runs the video camera – as well as sets up lights -- when we shoot interview pieces all over the country. Additionally, when a particular client has chosen so, I go to a business meeting/convention with other guys from the video department and I shoot as much wacky footage, as well as straightforward documentary footage, for the highlights video that we produce and show to the attendees on their last day at the meeting. And this explains all the traveling I do. However, when things are slow, or there are no videos to shoot, I am very often given shit jobs around the office. This has lessened in the past couple of years with the addition of younger, stronger and more "abuse-able" staff, which leaves me with even less to do, and a greater pressure to look busy.

Lately – and largely due to the past lousy year of my life – I’ve felt fairly burned out, as though I exist in a fog. My passions don’t ignite like they used to. My dreams aren’t as possible as they used to be. My tolerance for frustration is lower. My sense of humor has dulled, and I don't laugh as much. Now that I find myself free to break free, I don’t … want to. I seem only to want to be home in the solitude of my apartment. Ironically, while numbly going through the motions of my job and my life in this fog, I’ve been acutely aware of how automatic and uninspired I’ve been. And of how powerless I’ve felt to change it. The divorce looms. My father still slips away from me. Am I just waiting for these clouds to clear?

A few years ago I made it clear to my immediate supervisor that I was interested in taking on more responsibility; specifically, to helm video projects as a producer, which means booking shoots, lining up interviewees and sometimes actors, supervising or overseeing edits, some writing, taking the client’s vision and throwing it away to replace with my own, though it’s usually the other way around… With my eye as a shooter and my desire to write, I think I could be a decent producer. I know… okay, well, I believe I already was a decent producer when I made local commercials and promos at the broadcast and cable TV stations in the golden days of my career, so if I could blow the dust off of the gears I’m sure they’ll spin freely again.

But, with rare exception, this wish has gone unheeded. Until now.

A couple weeks ago the boss handed me a project to produce a demo video for a product our company’s owner is trying to develop and market. Personally, I think the thing is just a huge albatross around our corporate neck, but it piqued some interest at an expo last year, so he has hope.

So I get to produce a video for a product I despise.

And then the boss threw another project at me, to update a video we originally produced (which I shot) two years ago, a tool to be used as a fund-raiser for a Catholic college-prep high school. After an initial meeting with them, we’re now producing a new video from scratch. Get me! The company's token atheist working on a video to try and suck money out of people’s pockets for a Catholic enterprise!

But this is a pretty neat school. I won’t name it, but it is a member of this network. If you read about them you'll see what I mean. So if you have a spare thousand dollars lying around that you don't know what to do with, give it a thought. And don't worry. None of your money will go to me – this project is pro bono.

After a slow start over the past couple of days, much like a reluctant waking from a sound slumber, I spent much of today handling tasks for the despised product project, contacting a talent agency and deciding upon an actor, script review to see what might be cut, feeling the wind get knocked out of my lungs when learning what the chosen actor will cost, and then knocking out three brief scripts for skit ideas being considered for an upcoming highlights video at a business meeting.

Suddenly I felt awake. Alive. I was functional again, wading into waters I hadn't visited for quite a while, feeling the exhilarating kind of fear the unknown and the unfamiliar instill in an eager explorer. I felt a tremble in my hands and arms and chest that was almost electric – though most certainly caffeine-induced…not to mention the sweaty pits. I only hope I do well enough for the boss to value me as a producer, and maybe I can climb out of the rut a little.

Okay. I'm awake again. So whadd'I miss?


Dad Update
Enough old fogeys have died in the past several weeks to allow my father to move up from #46 to the top of the list at the Illinois Veteran's Home. He moves there from the nursing home on April 22nd. That's the good news.

He recently told one of my sisters that he is not afraid, that he is ready to die. I guess that can be viewed as a good thing. At least he's not terrified at the thought, as long as he's telling the truth. But, knowing his beliefs, and knowing as much as I can about the life he led, I don't think he has anything to fear. He was a good man…IS a good man.


It's Not Cold, But It Is Sore
This morning the tell-tale tenderness started on my bottom lip, and by mid-afternoon a mean cold-sore had sprung up there. Since 2001 I've been taking a prescription medication to quell the frequent eruptions I had been having. It doesn't stop them all together, but it truly has made them fewer and far betweener. This is the first full-blown, blistering, aching flare-up I've had in probably two years or more. The medication has also worked to keep the few flare-ups relatively minor. But, obviously, it doesn't stop them completely.

This is the first one I've had since my breakup with ts2bx Mrs. Farrago. It reminds me of how, when I got one – or thought I might be getting one, kissing her was out of the question for about a week. And that's got me thinking.

I really miss kissing.

Tuesday, April 01, 2008

Onds & Edds

The Farrago World Tour 2008: Raleigh, North Carolina
By some strange coincidence, ten of the fifteen bloggers in my “Better Blogs Than Mine” list – ten out of all the blogs I frequent regularly – are women. Maybe that’s not such a bad thing, though most of them are married. Of those ten women bloggers, three of them live in the Raleigh-Durham area of North Carolina! I don’t know if that means I have a thang for southern women, or if maybe it means that Raleigh women don’t have anything bett – erhm… ah, I mean that Raleigh women are just darn good writers!

I guess there are a couple of other ladies from the area whose blogs I have not yet latched onto, and I guess there are a couple of male bloggers there, too, but who cares about them? (just kidding Biff!)

So, anyhoo, my wonderful* job sent me on an assignment into the Raleigh-Durham area (pronounced, I like to believe, by the locals as “Rollyderm”) and, in a rare bout of presence of mind, I managed to remember to contact the Rollygirls with plenty of time to spare and to let them know I was coming down for a couple of nights, AND I had one of them free!

In a surprising bit of schedule synchronicity, kenju, Tiff and Claire all cleared their dockets and came out to greet me. Kenju brought her hubby, Tiff brought The Things, and even the blogger formerly known as Biff Spiffy showed up (and I’d like to know how he found out about it!) (just kidding Biff!)

There was absolutely no effort on my part; the ladies took over from my notification, choosing the venue, the time, the decorations, the band, the set list, the menu, the potpourri scents that changed with each progressive meal course…

Nah! Just kidding. They agreed on a sports-bar kind of place that is reputed to have great burgers. I ordered the ribeye steak.

The food was great, the company was outstanding, and as I knew would happen, the evening wasn’t nearly long enough to enjoy fully. In other words, I wanted to be able to hang out until we were all tired of each other, but I had to leave first thing in the morning, and I wouldn’t have gotten tired of any of them until around noon at the earliest.

And the best part of the whole evening is that we snuck Biff’s credit card and passed it around for everyone to pay for their meal with, so the whole night was on Biff! (just kidding Bif… no, wait. We really did that one. (Thanks, Biff!))

A photo was taken, but since I was wearing my Snow White outfit, I’m afraid there may be trademark issues with the Disney Corporation, so I won’t publish it.

So, thank you ladies and Biff for letting me enjoy your company for a couple of hours. It’s good to know I have a passel of friends in Raleigh I can hang with next time I’m there.


Fork A!
I don’t know for sure, but it would seem my presence amid the likes of Kenju and Tiff, the local Blogger Hit Queens, has gotten some of their mojo on me, for today SiteMeter indicates that by 7:00pm CDT, FARRAGO had 21 hits, a new world’s record** and a surge that pushed me past a new benchmark!!

Whoever you are in Miami, at some labs that shall remain nameless, and using Sprint as your ISP, you are my 4,000th hit! If I had money I’d send you a prize. Maybe I’ll send you a personalized, autographed copy of my list of Better Blogs Than Mine.

Thank you everyone! You like me, right now, you like me!†


*written through gritted teeth

**for farrago-mish-mash.blogspot.com

† ©1979 Sally Field™ and the Motion Picture Academy of Arts and Sciences®