Untitled Document

04 May 2004

Self Starter

It is hard to be a self starter. I am always worried about it, the starting.

Like this morning. It is the second day of a new job. The stress and the tension of showing up at someplace new is gone. I know where to go, I know how to get there and where to put the car. My crap is strewn around the office that looks down on the marble floored atrium.

They don't know I am a fraud, and it will take them months to do so. All I have to do is get out of bed and put on my grin and polished shoes and knot my tie and get downtown and do it.

I am a self-starter. I know I can do it. Unless I roll over and close my eyes here in the darkness...

The new Boss is an ex-Marine. A tough guy and a good guy. He was recruited to start this little enterprise as part of a big old industrial age concern that is in the process of reinventing itself.

They don't understand the business I was in for decades, but there know there is money in it somewhere and they have asked me to go find it. I am a self-starter. I think I can. If I can get out of there this morning and get at it.

I got up and started the coffee and listened for news from the war. There seems to be a lull in the violence, or maybe it is the stink of the revelations about the abuse of the Iraqi prisoners.

They buried Pat Tillman, too, the former Arizona Cardinal football player who is the only famous person to give up his way of life to serve, and then give up life itself. His former coach spoke, and Senator John McCain did too. I am humbled by the courage that Tillman displayed.

And I am dismayed and shamed by the revelations from the prison. I feel that there is a stain on me that I cannot remove. The Army has now charged seven troops in the scandal, and issued letters of reproach to the chain of command. The two stories revolve around one another, and the attack ads from the Presidential campaign are the pivot on which they turn..

I took up a sheaf of stories I wrote years ago. They are yellowed but the typescript is still legible. I am numbed by the news and chilled by the sudden cold of early May blowing through the window I have left ajar. I feed a sheet into the scanner by the computer. It is converted into digits, which are recognized by the software, and reconverted through the miracle of the Windows operating system into gibberish.

It takes time but with careful work and an eye on the original I can make the words that were locked on paper decades ago free. I can rearrange history, tailor it, if necessary and recycle the words into something both old and new. I wish I could do that with the present.

I scan a story about Africa, and one about the loss of a fighter jet near the Four Degree Channel south of India. These were real things, hard things at times. But there is a grim innocence about them, a swagger that the young have, not knowing what was coming.

After all the years, I cannot see that I did anything to contribute to make us safer. I wonder what I would have done if I could have had a glimpse of the future. I imagine I would still have gone off and served. It seemed like the honorable thing to do at the time. But still, what did it mean. I look at the words and wonder.

I rouse from the reverie of times past. It is coming up on seven. I need a shower and I need to find my grin and shine my shoes. I have to get started today.