Field of Steve

Last week I got around to writing about a proposal to allow Bremerton residents to have chickens in their backyards. I say “got around” to it because it had been on my list for months. A reporter from another paper got to it first and I was ashamed, so I had see if I could do better. You can read the story here, and watch the video, which isn’t quite as funny as I wanted it to be, but it was good enough and I wanted to go home.

Wednesday night I went to a city council meeting where the councilman who is leading this effort shared some of the rules. One is you can only have up to four hens. They can’t be roosters. Another rule is that the four chickens don’t count against the city’s limit on four pets, which is great because our cat doesn’t lay eggs.

Joannie Rochette of Canada lost her mother on Sunday. On Tuesday she was the third best skater at the Olympics in the figure skating short program competition. No one appears to be holding out that she’ll do well enough to medal after the long program, but Tuesday’s performance was a gift. (Click on the link to watch the video.)

At some point in my life I came to see criminals as something other than the crimes they committed. Maybe it was the years between college and when I met Diana, where I proved that a man without a plan isn’t to be trusted. Somehow I think it was sooner than that.

In fifth grade there was a boy whose name I can’t remember (And it’s really bugging me that I can’t.) who startled me one day when he suddenly erupted and called the girl next to him something completely random, like “a communist.” The boy told of riding his bike and finding a dead cat by the side of the road. The kid put a firecracker in the cat’s mouth, lit it and watched it explode. “That will teach you not to smoke,” he said he told that former cat. I was horrified, but I laughed like crazy.

Another kid whose name I do remember was a constant source of trouble, but was genuinely nice. Because of his inability to catch on to schoolwork and his penchant for displaying attitude, he was doomed to continuation school by the time we reached high school. There was something amiss in his family, though I never got close enough to figure out what it was. Years later I saw him yelling at a girl I knew from church, a girl who had fallen away because she never really found a friend there. She was his boyfriend. He got her pregnant. I wasn’t surprised.

These two boys I remember, even if not by name, have yet to show up on Facebook, so I’m left to wonder what became of them. So much can give a kid a tough start to begin with that it’s no wonder years later when you read in the newspaper that they’ve been busted for meth, got arrested for doing something that to most of us seems incredibly stupid, or maybe died an accidental death. Or maybe they found a way to make life work.

I have my doubts. I heard Michael Hanlon, who wrote the book “Ten Questions Science Can’t Answer (Yet!): A Guide to Science’s Greatest Mysteries.” He told the host society doesn’t really deal well with people who aren’t very smart. We accept that we can’t all be elite athletes. Most of us just aren’t built for it. Yet we expect everyone to go to college. These boys I knew didn’t cope well early on, and didn’t get a lot of help.

Then there is my nephew, who is in prison, again, for reasons none of us seem to know. That boy wasn’t wired like the rest of us. You see those movies where some country type says, “That boy just ain’t right.” That’s my nephew. It could be alcohol his birth mother drank while pregnant with him, or so we’ve heard. Whatever it was, he wasn’t wired the same as you and I. So it’s hard for me to be too certain that he is, shall we say, a dirtbag. No matter what those two boys from school ended up doing, they aren’t either.

In Rick Bragg’s book “The Prince of Frogtown,” he comes to accept that there was more to his father than all the bad things he saw.

“But over a lifetime I have known a lot of men in prisons, men who will spend their eternity paying for their worst moment on earth. It came when they caught their wife cheating on them and thumbed back the hammer on a gun they bought to shoot rats and snakes, or got cross-eyed drunk in some fish camp bar and pulled a dime-store knife, just because they imagined a funny look or a suspicious smile. You do not have to forgive such men, ever, that minute. You can lock them away for it, put them to death for it, and spend your eternity cursing their name. It is not all they are.”

This doesn’t mean people shouldn’t pay for their crimes. It wouldn’t hurt, though, to consider that we aren’t the sum of all the bad things we’ve done.

Six years ago I took up blogging writing about Janet Jackson’s exposed breast. The point behind launching the effort was to learn about blogging, but also to have a history of writing available when I wrote my first book. The blog would help market books, and the books would market the blog.

On Saturday I applied for a business license to become a publisher in this state, marking the real beginning of the purpose of this blog. Over the past few years I debated how I would get my first book published. Within the last month I definitively concluded I want to publish myself. I have confidence enough in the quality of my work that I could get a publisher. The pay-off for that, though, is less attractive than it once was.

Any advance for a book would be unlikely to amount to much more than minimum wage. Publishing companies are being less generous with the handouts, especially since the economy tanked and the industry itself is in technological flux. Another soon-to-be self-published author got himself an agent, who told him he’d probably get at most $5,000 as an advance, which he wouldn’t get all up front. And that $5,000 would be all he’d probably ever get.

Self-publishing used to be primarily for those who couldn’t get a book sold to a publisher and had the money to pay for the printing themselves. Those books were immediately suspected of being of awful quality and had trouble finding space in the market. There were exceptions, but they were rare.

Print-on-demand and evolving consumer habits are changing that. For the past decade or so it has become entirely affordable for authors to go their own way in publishing. Of course, this means there are probably more awful books out there, but I have enough confidence in my writing that the quality of the book isn’t going to be the issue. For a few hundred dollars as a publisher I can get my books sold on Amazon and other retailers. For a few more bucks I can start getting them physically into stores.

There is the additional reality that big publishers don’t traditionally love their authors’ books. It’s all about what will sell. There is nothing wrong with that approach. I want to make money, too. But for someone passionate about the work I think it’s a method less likely to create longevity in the field. Typically what happens is big publishers throw books against the wall to see what sticks. The rest, which is the majority, they return. An author who doesn’t do well the first time isn’t likely to be invited back to try again. On the other hand I worked for a small publisher for a year and saw that they were passionate about the books they chose to publish. It didn’t always translate into massive sales, but the publishers continued to work angles for years and years to get those old books sold. In my case I can continue to market the book in perpetuity and I’ll be motivated to do it. I can work the angles long after traditional publishers would have given up.

Beyond that, I want to be in control. I’ll hire someone to edit my work, but I’ll be the one making the changes, deciding on the book’s look and feel. Ten years ago I did get a publisher, but let him decide too much. I was embarrassed with the result and had virtually no recourse. Putting the books in my control means I get to write more of them as well. And this way, I just might get that old book out on the market again.

On Saturday I registered for a business license with the state and founded the company Narrative Arts. The first couple of books will be test projects. I imagine there will be some return on my investment, but I would be thrilled if I broke even. I’ll wait until a couple of months from now to unveil what books are coming.

Part of this is also a reaction to what’s going on in the newspaper world. For years I’ve appreciated the stability that comes with being paid a salary, but the earning ability was put on shaky ground for a while. I always thought I should take more control of my earning ability anyway. Things seem to have hit bottom in the industry, but that’s no sure thing. Having a second income that has the potential of being a first income is exciting.

Every so often in years past, especially before I became a reporter again, I would catch a little entrepreneurial fever, but usually it was toward something I had no natural passion for. So when things got the slightest bit difficult — be it in selling NuSkin or 900 numbers — I’d get tired of the act. The best thing I ever realized was I thought I had a great idea for a restaurant, but was smart enough to know that I wanted nothing to do with running a restaurant business.

The reason the entrepreneur in me will continue to push in this case is because it’s backing something I want to do anyway. I want to write books, a certain kind that will be spelled out more as I develop Narrative Arts. This whole venture is designed to make it possible for me to write books for the rest of my life. The first book that makes a profit will help pay for the next one, and so on. Chances are, that’s why this time my venture adventure will work.

This story in Sunday’s Kitsap Sun is one I had wanted to do for years. As it is with every story, once it was written I counted all the ways I could have made it better than it was. That’s what writers do. Despite that, it was probably one of the most rewarding writing projects I ever did for a newspaper. In a post down the road I’ll write about why I wanted to do the story. Here’s one of the videos that accompanied the story.

Eight years ago when the Sept. 11 attacks happened it was news that consumed our work as reporters for that week and beyond. Even a couple of weeks later a fellow reporter wondered aloud when he would write the first story that wouldn’t include at least one sentence saying something akin to “since the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks.”

For obvious reasons the Haiti earthquake, while devastating and still generating news, didn’t dominate our hearts the way the attacks did. For me professionally it had the most minor of impacts. I happened to be on my regular cops duty the day after the quake, which meant being responsible for any late news coming in. Another reporter had written about Molly Hightower, a 22-year-old former resident of the area whose parents still lived in town. Molly was in Haiti for a year working with disabled orphans.

Molly’s parents were available to the media, following the sage advice that the best way to keep someone concerned about your family member is to keep talking about it. For me I just shared a few e-mails with Molly’s dad Mike. Because I was in the loop that one night, during which I did not have anything to add to the existing story, I continued to receive the media e-mails the Hightowers sent. I was touched by their gratitude. Often it is true, and perhaps with good reason, that families in this kind of situation resent our intrusion. I sent a note right before deadline Wednesday night. “Any news?” Mike Hightower responded that there wasn’t. It wasn’t surprising. They weren’t expecting to hear anything at least until the next day.

On Thursday there were a couple of e-mails saying who would be speaking for the family. Then there was a link to a news story that gave room for some hope that Molly would be found alive.

When I read the e-mails Friday morning, there was this:

“We received the call we did not want, Molly’s body has been recovered.
Thank you for the prayers you all offered and the respect you have shown my family.”

I never knew Molly and only knew her father through the e-mails. Still, the news hurt. Another co-worker, Chris Henry, had written about Molly on the South Kitsap blog and I think accurately described her.

“I did not find a saint. Just an upbeat 22-year-old with a taste for Starbuck’s and Taco Bell, a love of children and a deep well of compassion.”

Over the hours that I had anything to do with this story, I found a video Molly made showing off the kids she was working with. If I were to answer why the news hurt like it did, I’d say, “The video got my hopes up.”

I am a blessed man.

Just this evening I was recounting to my daughter that in all my years, and I’ve had more than it might appear, I’ve not once been bitten by a lion, or a tiger.

That may seem astounding to you, but I assure you it’s true.

There are innumerable ways I have been blessed, experiences I’ve not had that I hope I never do. It’s that I’m not a risk-taker, but good fortune has prevented me from experiencing some of the maladies that strike so many. If there are odds in this world, apparently I’m good at defying them.

Not once have I had rabies. Surgery for swallowed glass? Not I. Lemonade laced with deadly poison has never passed my lips. All those plane crashes we hear about have all happened when I wasn’t flying.

I’ve had the kind of luck few people have.

Never have I had the experience of being somewhere in public, like church or a Major League Baseball game, and suddenly realized that I wasn’t wearing any clothes. Believe me, I’ve checked. Countless times I’ve reached down and tugged on my pants just to make sure I remembered to put them on. I’ve never had the awkward experience of wondering how to handle the situation once you realize you’re not wearing anything. I mean, do you just sit there and pretend it’s normal and wait for everyone to leave before you exit? Or do you make a quick getaway, hoping few people will understand why? Is it possible in that situation that no one would notice? Would they look at me and think, “Hmmn, there’s something different about Steve today, but I can’t quite put my finger on it?”

Fortunately for me, it’s not something I’ve had to go through.

I just pray my extraordinary good fortune will continue.

It may be too much to ask that fictional cartoon characters behave rationally. From what I remember, though, the extreme possibilities available in cartoons were so outlandish and fantastic that they were beyond the scope of believable. Bugs Bunny did things I wanted to do, such as tormenting Canadians, but knew I really couldn’t. So I didn’t really draw any life lessons or anything else of value from the rabbit other than a few comebacks that could net me a fist in my face.

I became most troubled by what saw the other day on a show about a bilingual kid who travels the world carrying a backpack that has a map of every place I’ve never been and takes with her a pink-booted monkey.

Because we have a television and aren’t afraid to employ it as an occasional baby sitter, Apollo has developed a love for Nick Jr.’s Marina of the Fresh Beat Band, Max & Ruby, Diego, the Backyardigans, Ni Hao, Kai-Lan, and the show that gets today’s study,Dora the Explorer.

It’s a show I’ve seen a lot. Dora speaks Spanish and English, which is all good. She asks questions and waits for answers. Not once have I seen any of my kids answer out loud. By the time they’re old enough to figure out that Dora wants a response, they’ve outgrown her. Recently Dora’s mother had twins, which they didn’t realize until they were born, something that just doesn’t happen anymore, but I won’t quibble with that detail. The other day the twins escaped the house, crawl into a stroller, which makes it start rolling out of the yard on a path that will eventually lead them to a geyser, the Gooey Geyser, to be precise.

Aside from your standard negligence, so far it’s all good. Before the geyser is a farm and a garden. The parents have joined in the chase and when they all get to the farm they split up on three different paths. In the barn Dora and Boots meet a horse who tells them that he has hunger. “Tengo hambre,” he says, wanting three apples.

You know, it’s fine that the horse wants some apples and that he wants help from Dora and Boots, because I’m certain he didn’t understand that Dora’s little siblings were on their way to a boiling death in the Gooey Geyser. But I think the hungry horse would have been content going hungry a little while longer had Dora explained that she was trying to save a couple of lives. But no. Dora wants to please eveyrone and asks for our help in finding apples, then carrots. So now if those babies get cooked, we’re accomplices, unless we yell at Dora to have the sense to get going, which I have a hunch she wouldn’t have heard, despite the pretense that we’re along on this trip.

Later the group is heading through the garden and the flowers in the garden decide they won’t let anyone pass without A. Being woken up, or B. doing a funny dance, or C. making a funny face. Knowing what these babies are headed toward, I’m thinking Dora should be pulling out the weed whacker and telling the flowers to back the #$%&! off. But no, they all do their dances and faces and other unreasonable things. They end up getting to the kids just in time, but it’s all so unnecessary if they had hurried a little more, or not left the gate unlocked, or the stroller in the yard or the babies’ window open.

I’ve been watching too many of these shows.

If you’ve ever seen Dora, you’ll love this video:

Please, think of the reporter’s children.

I found this video here. Its title is “Are women born this way?” I know at least one who was, and, no, I am not married to her.

This place should be home to baseball well into October.

The Dodgers should have every reason to expect to win the National League West. They have by far the easiest path there.

The Dodgers have three games against the Rockies to end the season and six games against the Giants in September. Meanwhile they are four games up on Colorado and seven up on San Francisco. Neither the Rockies or Giants could overtake the Dodgers just by sweeping them. They need help. And later I’ll show you why that’s unlikely to happen.

The Giants have the toughest route. They have 12 games against the Dodgers and Rockies and three against the NL-Central leading Cardinals, and four against the Cubs, who have a tough path to the wild card spot, but do have a winning record.

The Rockies have nine against the other two teams and three against NL-East-leading Phillies.

The Dodgers have nine against the other two contenders. The other 25 are against the five worst teams in the National League. If the Dodgers don’t make it to the post-season, it will be a gift to Dodger fans, because they would have to be so bad that a trip to the playoffs would be nothing but an embarrassment.

Does this picture mean I shouldn’t embrace children anymore?

After Thanksgiving dinner in 1990 I boarded plane to Denver to work a weekend conference of a company whose employ I’ve long regretted. The incident I recall isn’t one of those that I would put in a list of reasons why the company failed, but maybe I should.

The company sent people tickets to a business seminar and promised a free gift of accounting software and some basic business and motivational books. I had been with the company a year and obviously had never read the books, because when a guest at one of the events pointed out a quote, I had to admit I’d never seen it. I don’t remember the quote, but I do remember the author — Adolf Hitler.

Most people would agree that an American motivational book should not include a quote by Hitler, no matter how true it might be. What I do recall about the comment was had it been said by someone else who wasn’t one of history’s greatest murderers, it would have fit just fine.

Now House Speaker Nancy Pelosi said that anti-health-care reform protesters had swastikas on their signs. While she has been denounced as a liar by some, I thought I had seen pictures of it and in looking around the Web tonight, I verified that I had.

On one level, though, so what? Liberals did it to Bush, too. You can’t judge all health care opponents for what a few crazies do.

What if they’re not crazy? The yellers on the left likened Bush to Hitler in reference to totalinarianism, which you might argue is valid. With Obama the yellers on the right might be referring to Germany’s socialism under the Nazis, which many argue is valid.

In a National Review column Andrew McCarthy argues that likening health care reform to the Nazis is appropriate, because the Nazis were socialists and that extended to health care. “The wisdom vel non of policies adopted during over a decade of Nazi socialism cannot be off the table simply because, in the end, the Nazis were monsters,” he wrote.

Well, actually, I disagree with McCarthy. For me it goes back to Godwin’s Law specifically and more generally the “slippery slope” argument we often hear. We won’t legalize something we might approve of because it could lead to us legalizing something we don’t. I hate that argument. You draw a line and you leave it there. In the 1970s we decided 18-year-olds should be able to vote. Have we since decided it should be OK for kids old enough to drive? We let 21-year-olds drink alcohol. We draw lines all the time. Sometimes we move them, but it’s not usually just because we moved them closer years before.

Besides, and this is where it gets dicey for me, it would be foolish to assume that even the most vile, evil, ungodly person in the world was capable of doing nothing good or worth emulating. I’m not saying we should emulate Hitler’s hospitals. But even an article on an Anti-Defamation League site points out that Nazi scientists may have been the first to discover that tobacco is bad for the body.

Here are things Hitler reportedly said. I can’t verify that he really said these things, but I saw it on a Web site, so it must be true. Tell me which ones you disagree with.

“Make the lie big, make it simple, keep saying it, and eventually they will believe it”

“How fortunate for leaders that men do not think.”

“The man who has no sense of history, is like a man who has no ears or eyes”

“The day of individual happiness has passed”

“I love you Mommy”

I have no proof he said the last one, but Hitler was close to his mother, so it’s not inconceivable that he did. And I think the first one was actually his propaganda guy, but Hitler surely embraced the idea even if he didn’t say the actual quote.

Regardless, my main point is that you don’t use Hitler to support your case or to dismiss someone else’s. Health writer Tinker Ready agrees.

Where McCarthy might have a point that sells is when he writes of “a trajectory of socialism,” but again I feel he’s relying on the slippery slope model:

“There is a trajectory of socialism, regardless of the good intentions of many socialists. As he framed it, you take things such as health care, things that are traditionally understood as within the ambit of individual liberty and free choice; you move such things into the ambit of state responsibility as the welfare state emerges and grows, on the theory that it is government’s responsibility to provide for everyone’s needs (by redistributing resources); as more things are moved from private to public control, the state by definition becomes totalitarian; and, inexorably, the totalitarian state gets bad leaders and the society comes to reflect the policy choices of those leaders.”

This suggests that elements of our government are not socialist already. When did government decide it was a good idea to take roads out of the ambit of individual liberty and into state responsibility? How about wars and parks? Dictators and capitalists have both employed slavery. Do we rid ourselves of both? Are all the countries that have adopted some form of socialized medical system on an inevitable path to having their own versions of Hitler?

In the same ADL article mentioned earlier, Penn State history of science professor Robert N. Proctor draws the line pointing where German science failed:

“There is nothing inherently evil about physicians working and cooperating with their government. The moral failure of the German medical profession was its willingness to collaborate with the Nazi state, its willingness to serve Nazi values. There is nothing wrong with physicians working to preserve the health of a larger community; that, after all, is the essence of responsible public health. What differentiated National Socialist public health from genuine public health in a reasonably civilized society was the exclusive nature of what the Nazis considered “the community.” Nazi values excluded Jews and others deemed racially or genetically unfit from the völkisch community. It bears repeating: Most German physicians in the Reich failed to challenge the rotten substance of Nazi values, the murderous directions of Nazi initiatives.”

Opponents and supporters of health care both have solid arguments to make for their cases. Maybe the public option will end up being a Trojan Horse for universal coverage. Maybe insurance companies are driving medical costs up. Maybe Medicare’s doing it. Those are all worth discussing. But as soon as you bring up “Nazi” or “Hitler,” you’ve lost me.

For a couple of years I thought about Friday.

More than a year ago following another round of layoffs I wondered whether it was time to get out of the journalism business. I thought at the time, rightly as it turns out, that as long as I didn’t pull off a major blunder I could probably make it to Friday. So I opted to put off any thoughts of making a career change, until I hit the 10-year mark in journalism.

A couple of months ago I learned of an opening in a position that seemed would be the next logical, and more stable, place to go. The only problem I saw was that it would likely begin before the 10-year anniversary I had committed myself to.

On July 31, 1999 the culmination of months of work resulted in an orientation at The Daily Herald in Provo. I wanted to be in the Northwest, but I guessed the newspaper there would be a step.

The irony now is that the same force that made it possible for me to get a job is the one that’s making it difficult for me and others to hang on now. In the late 1990s the Internet was creating new opportunities for writers, not reducing them. With venture capitalists unwisely throwing money at any start-up Internet venture, the online community was flush with opportunity, including online news sites. That meant many traditional journalists were leaving newspapers for online sites. The plus for me was newspapers had openings. The Daily Herald, after some unknowingly clever angling on my part, offered me a job as a religion reporter, which a few months later turned into a city government/higher education job.
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The Kim and Steve saga, of which there were several chapters on this blog, appears to have ended thanks to Kim’s inability to stay away from someone from whom she was legally required to maintain a distance. It wasn’t Steve. I can’t remember who it was. I think it was a woman.

After several reports of the two of them, or one of them, heard on the police scanner and making brief appearances in the police blotter, the pair has drifted away. Steve’s whereabouts are unknown to me, though it seems the lack of Kim has made it easier to not draw attention from the cops. I haven’t heard a thing about him in weeks.

Kim, on the other hand, will be making her home in jail for the next several months, after the third violation of a no-contact order. The other person had the same order, so both might be jailed.

Of course this could be a good thing for both Steve and Kim. Steve gets to get on with his life without her and she has a year to stay sober. I’m not sure either of those results will play out just like that, but we can all hope.

As for me I rarely visit the Sev anymore, but I still check the reports to see if Steve will make a new appearance. How much do I hope to never see either name in a police report again? More than life itself.

I’ve been preoccupied. I’ve got a story to tell you about Apollo. Well, I think I’ll tell it. Until then, or something else, let this tide you over.