Rahm's a jerk, but he's our jerk

     This was an assignment. I don't have a Sunday column, and don't usually attend editorial board meetings. But my boss asked me to sit in on the mayoral "debate" at the paper Friday morning and write something. Not that I minded. The 2015 mayoral election is a dreary affair, and taking aim at those involved was as difficult as shooting a duck in a bucket. If this piece seems a tad sharp, it's because of the unpleasantness of contemplating what passes for political discourse in this city.  The Occupy Chicago rhetoric seems to have infected the general view of Rahm Emanuel. Everyone hates him—his personality makes that easy, I'm not fond of him either, but knee jerk contempt overlooks that he's making all these hard choices for a city that was busted long before he got here. People seem under the delusion we have vast resources, that Emanuel's closing mental health clinics because it's his idea of fun. 
      How anyone can pretend to care about the city yet back one of the crew of misfits running against him is beyond me. I'd never met Willie Wilson before; he seemed uncertain where he was or why he was here, and began by saying he had no interest in the Sun-Times endorsement. Bob Fioretti I knew; I drove around his ward with him once—and see his campaign as the standard end-of-career lunge. I was actually fond of him, despite his shutting down a business in his ward, Felony Franks, because he didn't like its name. But that was before watching him mudsling, trying to make something stick to the mayor.  Repellent. Rahm is Rahm. I'd never met Dock Walls, but thought he passionately expressed the views of the big chunk of the city who are African-American and disenfranchised. Jesus Garcia I've been trying to shadow for a column for the past month, but arranging it seems beyond his press secretary's ability. I don't suppose we'll get that set up now. 

     A baby, a bozo, a jerk, a firebrand and a stiff.
     Or, if you prefer, Willie Wilson, Bob Fioretti, Rahm Emanuel, William "Dock" Walls and Jesus "Chuy" Garcia.
     The quintet of men who would be mayor for the next four years stopped by the Sun-Times Friday for a debate, of sorts, 90 minutes to talk about their vision of the city.
     It wasn't pretty.
     Let's go in order, left to right.
     Wilson is a political novice, a millionaire running for mayor because he's missing

whatever gene keeps you or me from doing embarrassing things that we aren't capable of accomplishing half well.
     In my case, I suppose it keeps me from auditioning for "Swan Lake." With Wilson, who built a successful medical supply business but is missing that gene, he's running a campaign half as a mission from God—he closed his remarks with a prayer—half as a how-can-we-lose-when-we're-so-sincere, Charlie Brown run at the football.
     "I'm running for mayor wanting to make some definite changes," he said. "I want to come from the heart."
     Given that his transit of Chicago history will end Feb. 24, it would be cruel to focus too much frank assessment upon him. Wilson points out that his formal education ended after one day of eighth grade, and perhaps after the campaign he can use his example to inspire kids to stay in school.

    Fioretti — well, "clown" is a harsh assessment, especially since he dialed his hair color back, though his smile is still a chilling, facial appliance that walked off from "American Horror Story." He was a competent, block-by-block alderman before his ward was redistricted away. Now he is hammering away below Emanuel's belt, dragging the mayor's son into the campaign for getting mugged, hoping for a miracle. He continued his unfair flailing Friday, tossing everything that comes to mind into the blender, reaching back to the Clinton administration, accusing Rahm of having been "an advocate of cutting welfare benefits," as if that were a bad thing.  I almost blurted out, "That was the most successful social change the federal government initiated in the past 25 years." But I was here to listen, not talk, so I was able to hear Fioretti blame Emanuel for the assault rifle ban expiring, and for in general wrecking the city. 

     "Chicago is moving in the wrong direction," he said.
     The mayor needs no explanation. We all know. He seems to have sincerely believed his high opinion of himself would simply be imparted to the voters by osmosis, and is hurt to discover otherwise (though $30 million of TV ads ought to gin up some affection, or at least the required number of votes). He did not actually say anything jerkish Friday. He was the same as always, reptilian, his voice a little softer, which to me seemed restrained fury, an I-spend-four-years-trying-to-save-this-frickin'-city-and-THIS-is-the-thanks-I-get!? seething resentment.
     Unlike the others, however, he actually has a record.
     "In the last four years, we've presented four balanced budgets without a property, sales or gas tax increase," Emanuel murmured. "Four years in a row we increased our investments in after school, summer jobs and early childhood education."
     Walls was the surprise. In my mind he dwelled in the realm of perennially ambitious street hustlers trying for a legitimate score—I wasn't 100 percent sure he was a different person than Wallace "Gator" Bradley before now. But he came on strongest of the five.
 

   "There's two Chicagos," Walls said. "There's a world class Chicago and there's an underclass Chicago. The world class Chicago is beautiful, safe tourist-friendly robust, full for resources and unlimited opportunity for Rahm Emanuel and the other 1 Percenters. That's the Chicago the media loves to brag about.. Then there's the underclass Chicago that nobody wants to talk about: decaying neighborhoods, unsafe streets, people dodging potholes and bullets."
     Too true, and well-put, though he jumps to a surprising conclusion.
     "Under Rahm Emanuel, Chicago is the most racially segregated city in America," Walls said. He didn't add: and under Richard M. Daley. And under Harold Washington. And under Jane Byrne. And under Richard J. Daley. And under Martin Kennelly. 
     The question is, what would Walls, who said he was retired from a t-shirt business that grosses $40,000 a year, do about it? 
     Garcia carries himself like a man balancing phone books on his head, like the profile off a coin, a minor bureaucrat in a small country who should be wearing a red sash and applying wax seals to official documents while ceiling fans slowly turn.
     "I have been living in the same bungalow for ... 24 years, 34 years married to the same woman," he began.
     Well Jeez, why didn't you say so? Here's the keys to the city.
     Chicago's problems burst the confines of our 90 minutes; we really only talked about the ballooning pension disaster and the crumbling schools. None of the would-be mayors connected one to another, as if cuts in the schools were being done for the heck of it. All seemed to toss airy notions at the former—Wilson brought up the will-o-the-wisp of a Chicago casino, Fioretti a tax on LaSalle Street trading, Walls would encourage small business like his t-shirt operation. All except the mayor discussed schools as if we had all the money in the world, and Rahm just hates to spend it on poor folk.
     "They want to put children at risk, that is intentional," Walls explained, calling charter schools "a diabolical plot."

     Listening closely for 90 minutes, I didn't hear one promising idea, one exciting proposal, from anybody. When Tom McNamee, the editorial page editor, ended by asking the men to give their vision of Chicago's future 20 years from now, he merely lit the fuse on a blast of bromides. 

    "The future of the city of Chicago rests in redeveloping the neighborhoods and the former industrial belt," Garcia said. "Chicago has the potential to maximize its position and its advantages especially given the great assets that we have in the field of transportation: rail, highways, air, and its port.  Those are tremendous assets that put us to become a hub for tremendous economic activity."

      "Chicago hasn't had an industry to call its own since the stockyards," Walls said. "Our best hope rests in small business. Many of those small businesses are gems waiting to happen...We cannot exist as a service economy. That's like eating at your own flesh."

     You get the idea. Emanuel made sense—"Twenty years from now Chicago is still going to be a very diverse, vibrant economy," he said. "My number one goal is to make sure it's also a city middle class families can afford to live in and raise their children in... Chicago's diversity is its strength." Wilson, of course, added  a surreal note. "We must make sure Midway and O'Hare reflect the neighborhoods they serve." I'm still chewing on that one; it has to be an oblique reference to who gets concessions there, or just gabble. 

     I can't vote in this election, not living in Chicago -- as I'm sure you'll point out, trying to undermine the plain truths outlined here. But watching the spectacle, I kept thinking, "Rahm may be a jerk, but he's our jerk." You might not like what he's doing, but at least he's doing something. Garcia seemed to think that the parents, once consulted, would close the schools themselves. The airy, let's-put-on-a-show speculation of the other four was truly frightening, given that, through some wild longshot, there might be a tiny fraction of a chance one could be mayor: say 1 out of a 1,000. 

    Walls speaks a good piece but has done nothing to make anyone suspect he could do the job. The others have neither the language nor the experience. Voters seem resigned that Rahm Emanuel will win. Looking at his opponents, I can say with confidence: not only will he win, but he should win. God help the city if he doesn't.

Saturday fun activity: Where IS this?

    John McPhee once wrote an article about a geologist who could identify a particular stretch of beach, anywhere in the world, just from a handful of sand.
    And while it might seem unfair for me to expect you to be able to determine exactly where this lovely tropical scene is to be found—what island, or peninsula, or other locale—my faith in you is such that I know you can do it.
     Where is this sun-drenched tableau, which I thought might perk you up on this late January day, with snow on the way? There are lots of clues—the particular style of boat, the distinctive color of the water, the rocky beach, and of course those give-away palm trees in the distance.
      The winner will receive one of my brand-new 2015 posters, suitable for framing, certain, almost, to be a collector's item decades from now, complete with its own custom made container manufactured by Chicago Mailing Tube. Post your guesses below. Good luck. 

Poet Donald Hall pens a guide to old age

     Could it be that human beings are supposed to die at 60?
     That all of our supposed medical advances will be seen, someday, as a blind alley, a mistake? That a world where men die of cholera at 45, when women die bearing their ninth baby, will be seen as preferable to the coming gerontocracy of extended decrepitude, of living corpses idling away meaningless years in tiny rooms waiting for their prolonged, tortuous deaths?
     I'm not saying I believe that. Given that half my readers seem to be 80, I'm not suggesting you should all be dead. I'm glad you're here, just as, when I turn 80, I imagine I'll be glad to be here, too.
     At least I hope I will.

     But I have to wonder, especially having just read Donald Hall's new memoir, Essays After Eighty (Houghton Mifflin Harcourt: $22).
     Though I am the rare person who goes to poetry readings and buys poetry books, I had never heard of Hall, poet laureate of the United States in 2007, until I read a rapturous review in the New York Times, and ran out and bought his book, as a kind of preparation, the way I read Bear Attacks: Their Causes and Avoidance on the way to hike in Colorado. I figure, old age is coming, eventually. Might as well know what to expect.
     A futile task, Hall explains, because we arrive at old age and are shocked to find ourselves in "an unknown, unanticipated galaxy. It is alien, and old people are a separate form of life. They have green skin, with two heads that sprout antennae." Pleasant or annoying, the aged "are permanently other. When we turn eighty, we understand that we are extraterrestrial."
     Sounds awful. But if you object to that; blame him, not me. I'm just the reporter.
     The old are ignored, trivialized, condescended to. A guard at the National Gallery of Art explains to Hall that the sculpture he's looking at is by Henry Moore, in singsong, as if to a child, while Hall manfully resists pointing out that he knew Henry Moore, personally, and wrote a book about him.
     The book is at times quite funny. The highlight, for me, is when Hall is awarded the National Medal of Arts. He goes to Washington to receive it from Barack Obama and, well, let him describe it:

     A military man took my arm to help me climb two stairs. . . . I told the president how much I admired him. He hugged my shoulder and bent speaking several sentences into my left ear, which is totally deaf. I heard nothing except my heart's pounding. When my friends watched on the Internet, seeing the president address me, they asked what he had said. I told them that he said either 'Your work is immeasurably great' or 'All your stuff is disgusting crap,' but I couldn't make out which.

Mrs. Fiske Warren and Her Daughter

     Humor is the bulwark against dolorous age, though Simon Rich this is not. Much of this brief book, 134 pages, is taken up by Hall's cherished memories — driving from Vienna to Greece with his new wife, Kirby, in 1952. Interesting enough, and punctuated by the occasional bracing flash of self-awareness.
     "One feature of old age is gabbing about almost-forgotten times," he writes, and his almost-forgotten times involve quizzing Dylan Thomas about "Do Not Go Gentle into That Good Night" and meeting Mrs. Fiske Warren and her daughter, whose portrait, "Mrs. Fiske Warren and Her Daughter," was painted by John Singer Sargent in 1903.
     While tragedy has certainly visited him: his first wife lost to divorce, his second to leukemia, Hall has it a lot better than most, living on the New Hampshire farm that has been in his family since 1865. His memories include Exeter and Harvard and Oxford. He has a quartet of women seeing to his needs, including lover Linda, and while he relates his good fortune, he doesn't seem to grasp it.
     The awards roll in, and he likes that, after the ritual faux pooh-poohing. A lot of the book is spent receiving honors, which reminded me how the importance of career flares up in old age, the irresistible impulse to valorize your past, to reassure yourself that it all Meant Something. The damning thing for me was the book flap biography, which reads, in its entirety: "Donald Hall, who served as poet laureate of the United States from 2006 to 2007, is a member of the American Academy of Arts and Letters and a recipient of the National Medal of Arts, awarded by the president. He lives in New Hampshire."
     I know those aren't necessarily written by the author, but were it me, I'd sit at the book warehouse with a scissors, snipping those off the flaps before I let that go out.
     I left the book reminding myself: vanity is a black hole whose gravity grows as you age. If fate sentences you to live, try your hardest to tear your gaze away from the black star of your ego, and think about other people. Hall's children and grandchildren are ghosts in the book. He might have focused a little on them, but the task eluded him. Still, the book's worth a read.
     "There are no happy endings," Hall writes, "if things are happy they have not ended." Indeed.

Union Station: fix the gross part, save the sagging stone steps

     Union Station is a hell hole — loud, crowded, smoky, cold, in winter, airless in summer, dripping cascades of what please God is water all year round. 
      So news that Amtrak finally plans to toss $12 million into fixing has to be welcome, although anybody who has spent anything on home repair has to immediately wonder how far $12 million is going to go. Announcing a $12 million facelift of Union Station is like me saying I'm spending $600 to put in a new bathroom in my home. Given that the "multibillion dollar" master plan to truly update Union Station, can $12 million even give it a good scrubbing (a skepticism reflected in headlines such as Time Out's, "Amtrak Commits $12 million to make Union Station less gross." Less gross. To totally eliminate grossness  would cost $120 million. Easily).  And there is the very real possibility that the years of construction work and inconvenience of the repairs will dwarf whatever improvement they actually achieve. That would surprise no one. 

      Still, to the degree they might enlarge the South Platform, even maybe drill another exit route down there, is to be applauded. It might means travelers won't have to queue in endless, we're-all-gonna-die-down-here-someday lines, waiting forever, our ears next to throbbing locomotives, just to get out of the place. 
     Although. One detail of the plan gave me pause. Not that they're listening to me, or any of the 120,000 commuters forced to descend into Union Station's stygian horrors every day. The geniuses in charge have announced they're going to fix the marble stairs into the Great Hall, steps gently worn over the decades by millions of feet, in Oxford wing tips and sandals and wrapped in rags. Chicago is not an ancient city, and those sagging stone steps are the closest thing we have to an old stairway in Jerusalem or Rome. So while God knows I would never argue with any kind of improvement at Union Station, I would say, fix those marble steps only after you've fixed everything else. Which is a code for "never." 
    That said, they'll probably fix them first. 

A visit from the Dog Police

     "Where's Kitty from?" a dinner guest asked, moments after she walked in the door and, by necessity, met our dog. 
      Silly me. I assumed she meant the name. Where's the name "Kitty" from. 
     "There's actually an interesting story," I began. "'Kitty' is short for 'Katerina.' She's a character in Anna Karenina. See, we had two cats, Anna and Vronsky, and they..."
    "No, no," our guest continued. "The dog. Where did you get the dog from?"
     Ah.
     The great moral question of our day.
     Now that religion is no longer a handy way of quickly establishing your superiority over others, pets have assumed that role. "Where did you get your dog?" isn't an idle question; it's an insinuation, an accusation, fired from the safety of the moral high ground. At the top of the pecking order are PETA zealots, who of course wouldn't have a pet at all -- mere slavery, in their eyes, and demeaning to the animal to suggest that something as foul as a human can exert dominion over it just because the human feeds it and cares for it and provides for all its needs. 
     On the next lower rung are those who, compelled to share their quarters with animals, adopt pets from shelters, with the sense of moral purity tossed in free.  These people seem constantly on the hunt for inferiors to educate. Puppy mills are horrible, yes, but not every breeder is an abusive puppy mill. Nor do other social wrongs get the same treatment. Nobody ever asks, "Where did you get those khakis from? You didn't get them from a sweatshop in China, did you?" 
     I've had the question put to me a dozen times, with a cocked head and an arched eyebrow. They see our cute little dog, obviously not a mutt, and their suspicions, well, they just can't control themselves. Blood in the water. 
     "We rescued her from a breeder," I've taken to answer, hoping to sow confusion.  I haven't yet said, "We got her from None of Your Fucking Business Farm." But that's coming. 
     Anna and Vronsky, I rush to say—maybe it'll cut down the death threats—were adopted from the Chicago Anti-Cruelty Society which I referred to them for years after as "The Cruelty Society" for their demeaning, you-aren't-going-to-eat-these-cats-are-you? interview. Cruelty to people is fine. For a moment we were worried they'd decide to put the cats down, just to spare them the indignity of falling under our control. 
     Our dog was found online, by our younger son, adopted as a small puppy, from a woman in Evanston who, well, I'm not exactly sure where she got her puppies from. Maybe she  grew them from seeds. But if the puppy was abused, then all dogs should be so abused, because she's the sweetest, happiest dog I've ever met. We're delighted to have her.
     Back to our pre-dinner conversation, which devolved from there. Let's say my hosting duties trumped my pride, and I did not tell her to take her superior stray-rescuing ass back out the door. But it was touch-and-go for a moment.
   This exchange came to mind this week when the GoDaddy domain name giant pulled "Journey Home," their Super Bowl commercial, after howls of protest because how it depicts puppies. An adorable pup, "Buddy," bounces out of the back of a pickup truck, laboriously finds his way home, crossing railroad tracks and hiding out from a rainstorm under a bridge.
   "Look it's Buddy! I'm so glad you're home," the joyous owner exults, sweeping the pup into her arms. Then her voice drops, menacingly. "Because I just sold you on this web site I built with GoDaddy—ship him out!" 
    Funny, right? The sweet moment punctured.
     Wrong. Not funny. Not funny at all.
     "If you can buy a puppy online and have it shipped to you the next day, it's likely you're supporting inhumane breeding," the Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals tweeted, apparently having no actual animals to save. Tens of thousands of people, similarly situated, signed online petitions.
      GoDaddy, no doubt happily enjoying this spasm of publicity without actually having to lay out the millions to run the commercial, promptly announced they'd instead run one of their buxom GoDaddy girl commercials, causing all sorts of additional on-line gripping about that—though not so much this time that the commercials won't air. 

     Why is that? Why is mildly alluding to the fact that dogs are bred and sold—they are, and glad we are of it—unacceptable in 2015, but giggling jiggle-jugged spokesmodels are just fine?
     "Why outraged over GoDaddy Puppy and not GoDaddy girls?" one tweet asked.
     I'll take that one.
     Twas always so.
     People have more sympathy for animals than they have for other people. This is nothing to be proud of, and nothing new. New York City passed its first anti-cruelty to animals law in 1867. Seven years later, when religious missionary Etta Wheeler wanted to save a 9-year-old girl, Mary Ellen Wilson, from being beaten and abused, she found there were no laws being violated, and the police shrugged. So she turned to the Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals, arguing that Mary Ellen, as a child, was sort of an honorary animal, almost as good as a horse or a cow or a turtle or any of the creatures who were protected under the law. The SPCA was convinced, and went to bat for little Mary Ellen. 

     Our hearts go out to animals, because they're so cute and because they don't have any of those qualities we so despise in human beings. All the better if we can stand up for the animals we claim to love while simultaneously running down the people we obviously hate.  Nobody is protesting the men slamming each other into ground beef on live TV Sunday. But one Hollywood pup play acts getting sold, and our hearts bleed. It's not about helping animals so much as it's about puffing ourselves up.
     Or to put it another way, nobody ever says, "Hey, lots of kids in orphanages--why didn't you adopt?" But then again, that's people, and they don't count as much. 

Ernie Banks one of a vanishing breed: us

     Journalism is a kabuki, a ritualized form, polished over the years.
     We have our traditions. Some subjects we avoid. You’ll never see the “Lotto: Sucker’s game or stupid tax?” headline.
     On the other hand, every snowfall is covered like a fresh shock, like an unexpected occurrence. Snow in January in Chicago; who’d have imagined?
     Our rituals are particularly strong when a celebrity passes away. Scribes automatically share a personal vignette, supposedly to offer illumination into the fallen star, but actually thinly disguised braggartry. Yup, knew him, hung with him.
     Though my one encounter with Ernie Banks says nothing about me, other than I can give directions, and a lot about why the city is honoring him today.
     Banks walked up to me, about 15 years ago, because I was the guy at the desk by the door on the fourth floor of the old Sun-Times newsroom. He introduced himself and asked where the picture desk was.
     Not that I believed it was him immediately. Back then, all sorts of people would show up at the paper. Delegates from distant planets. A pair of men in full braided gaucho outfits, brandishing guitars, wearing enormous sombreros. You never knew who you’d bump into. I once turned the corner and almost smacked into Ben & Jerry, the ice cream makers (“Ben!” I cried, almost falling to me knees. “Jerry! I love you guys!”)
 

Banks, me, Tom McNamee, Don Hayner

   But he looked like Banks. And he had on this expensive-looking leather Cubs jacket. I figured, if he were a street person, he probably wouldn’t have that jacket. So I walked him back to the photography department.
     “Ernie just wandered upstairs,” remembers Rich Cahan, who was a photo editor. “I do recall him saying that he just didn’t remember what it looked like — the game that is. That he remembered the sounds, the cheers, but couldn’t remember what it looked like.”
     The photographers gathered around, started pulling out photo files.
     “Keith Hale, who was working in the lab during those years, offered to make copies of Ernie’s favorite pictures, or all of the pictures,” said Cahan. “Ernie was thrilled, and Keith went right to work as soon as he left. They were ready for Ernie the next day.
     But Banks never came back for his photos, which was also in keeping with him. Childlike innocence and follow-through do not go together — if they did, Banks might have spent his career on the Cleveland Indians or the Chicago White Sox: both teams wrote him letters, while he was in the Army in Germany, inviting him to try out. But in his excitement returning home, he forgot. He rushed back to the Kansas City Monarchs, where the Cubs snapped him up, for a song.
     Which relates to why Banks came by the paper himself. Derek Jeter would send a go-fer. When you have money up the ying-yang, you have go-fers, and you send them.
     Banks did not have money up the ying-yang. When the Cubs signed him in 1953 to play for their Cedar Rapids farm team, he did not dicker. He did not negotiate. He did not use a lawyer or an agent. He had forgotten about the Indians and White Sox.
     “I was so nervous I had to hold my right hand with my left as I scribbled Ernest Banks … on a document that seemed to be a mile long,” Banks wrote in his autobiography, “Mr. Cub.”
     He did not even notice how much he was being paid. Banks found out later, from the Monarchs manager, Buck O’Neill.
     “On the way back to the South Side, Buck kiddingly grabbed hold of my right arm so I wouldn’t jump out of the automobile as he asked, ‘Do you realize that you signed for $800 a month? After your first full year in the majors, I want you to write me with news that your salary has been doubled. It’s all up to you now.”
     Even in 1954, $800 a month wasn’t much for a professional athlete. Banks earned just $6,000 in 1954; an average American salary was $4.500. It’s the equivalent of earning $60,000 a year today.
     It’s easy to rhapsodize the simple past, when you’re not the one who got shafted. “Show me the money” is never going to tug at your heart strings the way, “Let’s play two” does. But someone was making big money from baseball in 1954. It just wasn’t players like Ernie Banks. Our affection is cold comfort, a booby prize. People still love Derek Jeter, despite his millions..
     When Jeter retired from the Yankees last year, Gatorade produced a rhapsodic video where Jeter, the grateful star, instructs his driver to pull over and he walks the last few blocks to Yankee Stadium, a god among mortals, as the camera records the stunned and grateful reaction of the delighted proles and Sinatra sings "My Way."
     Derek Jeter earned $12 million in 2014, about 300 times the median household salary.
     Ernie Banks earned $85,000 in 1971, his last year in baseball, about 10 times the median household salary.
     That’s how America has been going. The top floats away, and the the lower classes scrabble for crumbs. We don’t even get the same quality hero anymore. Ernie Banks was a great guy, but there was something tragic about him, about all those players, because they got screwed. Which is also why we love them so much, because we’re getting screwed too.

The clocks are stupid, not me. Really. They are.

     A smart person can do some pretty stupid things.
     Whether the doing of those stupid things crosses some stupidity threshold and transforms the heretofore smart person into a newly minted stupid person depends on a) the number and magnitude of the stupid thing or things this supposed smart person has done and b) the charitable or non-charitable way in which those stupid things are viewed.
    You'll have to decide...
   Last Wednesday evening, Dan Savage, syndicated sex columnist, author of best-selling memoirs, MTV star, perhaps the most significant journalist in America, asks if I'll be on his top-rated podcast. 
    I reply, "yes." 

Dan Savage

    Actually, I reply, "YES!!!!!" with the enthusiasm of a schoolgirl accepting her first date, because this represents the kind of outside validation which, laboring behind the plow, digging furrow after furrow in the hard earth, I crave.
     He tells me his producer—a producer is a person who handles the fine details such as scheduling, someone I don't have, but could sorely use, as will become evident—will contact me and schedule our chat. Ten minutes later I hear from producer Nancy. 
    "We will call you most likely around 11 Pacific time," she writes.
     Well, even I know the West Coast is two hours behind us, so that's 9 a.m. my time, I think. About the time I arrive at work. But if the train is late, as it sometimes is, I'll be huffing along Wacker Drive at 9 a.m. instead of poised in my chair, calm and composed, nipping at a fresh coffee, ready to wax with the kind of wit and intelligence that will project me into the world of syndicated columns, best-selling books and top podcasts. I decide it would make more sense to stay home to do the podcast. I prepare by listening to Dan's podcast, then get to bed early.
     At 8:45 a.m. Thursday, I set aside my work, pour a hot cup of coffee, and am poised in my chair, calm and composed, nipping at a fresh coffee, ready to wax with kind of wit and intelligence that will project me into the world of syndicated columns, best-selling books and top podcasts 
     Waiting. 
     9:05 a.m., poised in my chair, calm and composed, nipping at a fresh coffee... aw heck, you get the idea.
       At 9:06, worrying I'm seeming over-eager, I shoot Nancy an email. "Standing by." 
      Hmmm, must be a delay. I picture an electronic control center, crackling with activity. 9:10. 9:15, I use my cell to call my own phone. It rings. That's a good sign.
       At 9:17 I send Dan an email. "Running late?" 9:20 a.m. I think to check the time in Seattle. It's 7:26 a.m. there. Ohhh. Two hours before. I send the producer an apologetic note beginning "Whoops..." and reset my mental clock for 11 a.m. Go back to work or try to. 
     10:50 a.m. I'm ready, hot coffee, turning bon mots over in my head. Are they bon motty enough? 11 a.m. Poised in my chair, calm and composed, nipping at a fresh coffee, etc. etc. Right on the nose, 11 a.m..     
     11:05. 11:10. 11:20, my composure wilting like a ... heck, I should be able to come up with a sexual metaphor, in honor of Dan's line of work ... wilting like a ... ah ... like an, umm, thingie...  umm....that ... how does he write that sex stuff anyway? It's a lot harder than it looks.
    Well, wilting anyway, flagging like an, err... I figure, I'd better call his producer.  I get voicemail. "That was today, right?" A few minutes later I get an email. 
     "We were thinking 11:00 Pacific time. That's 1:00 your time," she says. "Can you still do it?"
      You'll notice the lack of sarcasm in her reply. Professionalism. 
     I look at the original email. 11 PST. 1 p.m. my time. So two mistakes. First, I read that as 9 a.m. Central time instead of 1 p.m. And second, when I realized the difference, I transmuted the original time from 11 to 9 a.m.. Error upon error. This is why I work in a medium where I can go over and over things, to make sure they're not screwed up. I don't function well in real time.
      We finally do the interview, but I must have been so wound up that I muffed it, because Dan—pretending like the mistake was all his, which is true professionalism—asked me to do it over again. Which I did. By the time we were done, it was about 2:30 p.m. The results, well, you can judge for yourself, once the podcast is posted at 5 a.m. Central Standard Time.
    I think.