We got caught up in that fight between the Writer’s Section, Legal and Marketing yesterday. They are in a tussel about a potential second edition of one of the old titles called “Stones of the District.” There are two of the interns from Marketing and Legal now iin the process of shredding one of the remaining hard copies of the book in order to re-digitize it for updating.

The point of controversy is publication rights on re-issue, which is not comlete without appending a new ISBN to the tome and ensuring we are not sued for old tresspasses. We think we are OK, since the events described happened a couple decades ago. It is and interesting contrast in our times, since back then it was a little dangerous in some points around the old square-shape of DC. Now it would almost certainly be fatal.

Management told us not to think until we were told what they wanted to hear. It is a matter of corporate policy. In the background? We were mildly interested in the tumult in the “Hush Money” trial up in New York, since it seems to feature crucial testimony by a disbarred and convicted perjurer. Entertaining, for sure, but that news also included a note about Senator Mendendez, a New Jersey incumbent who apparently keeps gold bars in the pockets of his old suits in his back closet. That is our current political system.

You can see Management’s concern. So, we could maunder about that and those sorts of social changes to incorporate in new books and new editions for old ones. The new book is already more than a hundred manuscript pages already. “Life in the Fall (of the Empire)” is about what is happening to us now. In the process of that effort, we have temporarily suspended production. We were pointedly reminded our efforts could cause inadvertent thought. Or worse, the act of “speculation” about what is about to happen to us next.

So, we wound up taking a trip in time to avoid thinking about it. The topics available? Jeeze, that required extra hard non-thinking, and we tried to limit it to events more than 40 years in the past. Some of them are family-created and hang on the walls of the Chairman’s office. like these:

(Bill Reddig- “WER”- did these while a cadet at Naval Air Station Pensacola in 1945. He later was able to turn his artistic talents the design of sleek futurist autos for the Space Age auto industry. But that is his future, not ours).

Those were fun, nicely turned out, and when not sketching his buddies in pen-and-ink, did cartoons for the “Gremlin Gazette,” the base newspaper. Or on laundry tags when no drawing paper was available.:

(We are in the process of trying to figure out who “Walt” might have been or what happened to him the better part of a century ago. But we are thnking about getting to the gym).

There is more to come on all this, plus other sketches from other people not quite as far in the past. But for today, we have been told not to over think things. We are happy to be compliant on tht front, anyway.

There will be more of this while we are not thinking. Meat, the guy stuck with marketing what is actually available from the back-list has the expression you would think. This is how he looked after the meeting yesterday:

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