Zing Blade

Surely one of nature's most vexing ring tones is a mosquito’s high pitched whir. If the drone alone annoys enough, more bothersome still is forethought that the caller is also drilling for blood, and if successful, will leave an itchy bump as it hangs up. For the past few months such a pest has been petulantly wringing me - and its name is Mike Blade.
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Blade and I graduated from the same prep school together. Wait, that’s not entirely accurate - he merely attended. Be that as it may, even as I shooed him away then - and am now reluctantly swatting again, not long ago this same buzz-kill petitioned me to host his wedding at Evins Mill, aggressively lobbying for the best “deal” I could give him.
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Out of loyalty to the tribe - and compassion for the woman who would suffer him, I acquiesced, knowing well the ensuing interface would be pricked with bloodsucking banter. Blade would not disappoint and continues to draw blood, routinely appending parasitic wisecracks to private and public communiqués alike.
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Our exchanges inspired this abridged field guide - on how to zing and be zinged. The overarching counsel for the zinged is to understand a mosquito does not act with intent to irritate or harm, but is simply fulfilling a biological imperative. Chronic zingers act from a similar necessity, albeit psychological in kind.
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Some may be angry, while others simply feel inferior - as Blade does in my presence, but whatever the reason, a zing is a cry for help, and the zinged must respond from a place of strength and compassion. This foundational principle aside, below are a few case studies from our parries that elucidate select zing tactics and tenets.

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[In response to a post wherein I wrote "I embark upon what perhaps is a fool’s errand"]

Blade: Everytime you leave your house, it’s a “fool’s” errand.
Me: I am a fool – and wise enough to know it.

For zingers, Blade’s jab was utterly brilliant, incorporating the “four C’s” of effective zinging - curt, clever, comedic and cutting. For the zinged, the best alternative in such circumstances is often to cede the field of battle gracefully. Unless you have an ace in your pocket, a re-zing is likely to appear pathetic and grasping. Lick your wound and move on.

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[In response to a post promoting a Father’s Day Cookout wherein I playfully wrote “if you’re man enough that is”]

Blade: So I guess you won't be able to attend your own resort's cookout...
Me: …on behalf of my clients, William Cochran and Evins Mill, please cease and desist from all such wise cracks... or you'll be hearing from our law offices….
Blade: ...the truth is an absolute defense to any defamation and/or slander action.
Me: ...for that reason our legal team is delighted that your wife has eagerly volunteered to testify in my client's defense.

Blade’s lead here was weak and left him vulnerable, which is to say, don’t zing lightly – it only eases your target’s volley. Two, if your target is male, calling his manhood into question is usually a safe bet - certainly so if Blade is the target. Three, the zinged must occasionally punch back, if for no other reason than to remind your nemesis he cannot use you as target practice.

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[In response to an essay I penned about a defeat I suffered in high school]

Blade: I thought for sure you were going to write about one of the devastating beatings I administered to you on the basketball court. You used to cry there as well.
Me: What took you so long? I expect better from you - which in your case is to say worse....

Intrinsically humorous or not, in contrast to the guttural laughter earlier zings had evoked, this one barely registered a “hardee har har har.” It was as if Blade’s daily dosage of zings had immunized me. Not entirely desensitized, I am disappointed his zings no longer itch, for laughter is cathartic, even if at your own expense.
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Such is the danger of being a one trick pony, and herein may be the most critical advice for Blade and other aspiring zingers, who would well use the zing not as an end in and of itself, but only as one means to a grittier grail, which if we're honest is the humiliation of your target - or at least a marking of territory.
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In accomplishing this end, a zing is best deployed in concert with other instruments, for relying on the zing alone renders you predictable and correspondingly limp - as Blade’s wife is sadly discovering. Since a zing is only as potent as it is unanticipated, zingers must keep their targets off-guard.
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Whether you lull them with inattention or ingratiate them with kindness, your zing will penetrate more deeply when their soft underbelly is exposed. Put another way, for the zing you plant to bear the fruit you desire, you must also till the soil. Then and only then will you be a zing master - and not just another dull blade.

Flattened

Around this time thirty years ago, I became acquainted with the Morehead Scholarship, an elite program affiliated with the University of North Carolina. Among many other perks, it bestows upon recipients a free education, hip summer internships and a certain cachet. For reasons that remain unclear to me, I resolved as a fourteen year old to vie for the scholarship - quite casually establishing an ambitious goal which I then toiled vigorously over the following four years to attain.

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My quest for the Morehead exacted notable sacrifice, including late nights of earnest study and weekends of leading extracurricular endeavors. It also sired impressive achievements, including the presidency of the Honor Council and editorship of the school paper. Along the way, I was “tapped” into Totomoi, the school’s fraternity of high achievers, and received the prestigious “Most Honorable Student” award - all the while growing more convinced the Morehead was mine for the taking.
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When I learned otherwise, I was not just deflated but utterly crushed. My mother knew I would be flattened, as perhaps only a mother could, and instead of calling me with the good tidings as planned, delivered the painful news in person. I still recall beating my clenched fists on the dashboard of her Honda Accord - a wholly unusual outpouring of anger, accompanied by an equally uncharacteristic display of tears.
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If you’re rolling your eyes now in a “cry me a river” kind of way, I hear you, for in that forlorn pantheon of loss and defeat, my own would scarcely register on a Richter scale of set-backs. Losing an opportunity is hardly akin to losing a loved one or a livelihood, nor one’s home or health. That said, my experience of loss in that moment was profound, for I felt broken in a way I had never felt before or have since.
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As such, I consider the loss a shape-shifting event, influencing how I navigate troubled and tranquil waters alike. I wonder for instance if this set-back fostered a risk-averse orientation, whereby I would henceforth swing for base hits rather than the bleachers. Though some would say Evins Mill is a home run, it was a hedged bet nonetheless, for my father was behind me, as was my naive ignorance of the risk.
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I also suspect the set-back trained a sarcastic voice, which occasionally rears its wry head in these essays and routinely provides succor in difficult situations. It may have also spawned a self-deprecating willingness to take myself as seriously as I should, which is to say, hopefully not very. A spirit of skepticism also made its debut appearance in wake of the debacle, for when faith in one’s manifest destiny is shaken, the curious tend to question other basic assumptions about life and how to live it.
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Speaking of assumptions, perhaps another outgrowth of the Morehead mishap is that I no longer presume a glass is half full or half empty - only that it bears both in equal degrees. And if Pollyanna bears high hopes while the world weary are resigned to low ones, as a self-described realist, I would jettison expectations altogether and simply strive for the desired outcome, knowing that the striving is its own due - and that the "best laid plans of mice and men go often askew."

Paper Boy

Ten years ago this month, I graduated from one of the nation's top business schools and soon thereafter scored a gig with the Gannett Corporation, which publishes daily newspapers in cities nationwide. I didn't land in finance or strategy, nor in marketing or accounting, but squarely in operations - and not as a master of logistics either, but as a paper boy, who seven days a week for the following year rose at 3:00 a.m. to deliver the daily news.
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I may be the only paper boy in the annals of that storied profession to have performed the job in a BMW driven by an MBA. How does a relatively intelligent individual with so much education grow up to be a paper boy? There are no easy answers, but during the years I left Evins Mill to attain my degree, the business suffered severely. This is not to suggest it had flourished under my early stewardship, but the rapscallion we retained to manage the business in my absence drove it further into the ground.
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As the business could ill afford to support me, I cast about for interim sources of income to allow me time to resuscitate its fortunes. I initially toyed with the idea of waiting tables. Though I did after all have some experience in hands-on hospitality, my vanity put the kibosh on this rather sensible approach and drove me to consider more innocuous alternatives, for I cringed at the prospect of groveling before one of my peers.
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When I stumbled upon the paper delivery ad, I knew immediately the job was as perfect as it was pathetic, for what could be more anonymous than flying through the streets before sunrise. If I spent the previous two years mastering such rarefied skills as managing inventory or valuating companies, in less than two hours I internalized the basics of paper delivery, and learned more esoteric aspects of the profession on the job.
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To ensure a paper consistently hit its target for example, I could soon calibrate the strength and trajectory of my toss based on the velocity and torque of my vehicle and conditions on the ground like snow or ice. More than grasping simple technique, I was also reminded of a sobering reality - that around me were scores of people who hitherto were as invisible to me as they lived and worked right beside me, struggling on the fringes just to make ends meet.
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Unlike many of my scrappy colleagues I suspect, my financial situation, while not ideal, was not dire. I may have been cash poor but did possess not insignificant assets against which I could and in the end had to borrow. Catholics might suggest I harbored guilt about this unearned financial cushion and was subconsciously wearing my paper route like a hair shirt. Romantics could say I was acting on some quixotic impulse, tilting at the windmills of my own financial hardship.
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Southern confederates might interpret my route as homage to the lost cause ethos, for in its unrelenting nature, paper delivery carries a heavy whiff of futility. As for futility, the philosopher Camus might explain my job choice in terms of existential angst, rolling my papers each morning just as Sisyphus, that unfortunate figure from Greek mythology, rolled his boulder up a hill - only to watch it roll down again, requiring him to repeat the task for all eternity - and finding life’s meaning therein.
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However one cares to interpret the fact I took this turd of a job, I remain proud of the experience. That I would feel pride should come as no surprise, for at the end of the day, it was pride, more than hair shirts, windmills, lost causes or existential angst, that led me to this humbling opportunity.
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Post Script: I would like to thank that kind family on Kirkland Avenue who left me a Christmas Day tip. And as for the gentleman on Castleman Drive who called my boss every time his paper was a few minutes late, I still recall his silhouette by the bay window as he waited impatiently for his paper - and wish he could now read my extended finger.

An Almighty Application

As many of my Facebook friends can confirm, I am active on-line as much to promote my business as I am to break bread with them. And since most of my “friends” are clients or prospective guests of Evins Mill, I rarely visit polarizing topics like politics and religion. That said, en route to Florida’s Emerald Coast last week, my family passed a church whose marquee announced “You don’t need Facebook to talk to God.”

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I’ve been fascinated with religious signage for years and even once considered collecting these folksy adages into a book whose clever title would read “Signs from God.” Given my interest in religious marquees, my involvement on Facebook and my unending wrestling match with the Almighty, I took this sign as a sign to comment upon its message – albeit with Abrahamic misgivings.
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To the extent God exists and is listening, the marquee’s plainspoken words seem obvious enough, but the message drove me to consider a counter intuitive notion – that Facebook would in fact serve as an elegant and effective platform for communicating with God, and more than that, for comprehending Him/Her/It. So far as I know though, God has yet to establish a page.
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If so, atheists might cite His on-line absence as just one more indicator, albeit a flimsy one, that He does not exist. Other rationalists might assert that God’s absence tells us nothing about His existence, but only that if He does exist, God must be Aristotelian by nature, a prime mover that spun the web but no longer intercedes with His creation – that is to say, the kind of God many of our founding fathers embraced.
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Some theists might take His absence only to mean that God refuses to forfeit his omnipotence to human constructs, though for most Christians anyway, there is precedence for such surrender – namely on the platform of a cross. If God does eventually create a Facebook page, it would at least, hoaxes aside, verify His existence and establish beyond doubt His intercessory credentials.
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As illuminating as His registration would be, God's subsequent on-line behavior would reveal much more. Were God for instance to issue commands via Facebook with political or military objectives, we might gather that He is akin to the tribal God of the Pentateuch, Joshua and Judges, or even the eschatological God of Ezekiel, Daniel and Revelation – or of present day religious militants and Armageddon enthusiasts.
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If God however used Facebook to draw our attention to social and economic injustice, we might identify Him as the God of the Hebrew prophets and perhaps even Jesus himself – or of many modern day social activists. If God used Facebook rather to highlight our sinfulness and need for salvation by grace or good works, we might accept the vision of God given to us by the likes of St. Paul and St. Augustine.
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However God would or would not reveal Himself, one seminal problem with a Facebook divinity, outside bandwidth, privacy issues and other mundane considerations, is that it would diminish His mystery. And science is doing a fine job of that without God abetting it. And why would He, for one of God’s strongest suits is the mystery of it all - a mystery that has allowed God to be many things to many people over many millennia.
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The mystery of our universe not only grants God a protean quality but also requires for our part a degree of faith in how we choose to understand that universe. Whether we place that faith in faith as a believer does, in reason as many scientists do or in some other elucidating mechanism, absent certain knowledge we can hardly escape having faith in something. Conversely, if we possessed unassailable knowledge of the cosmos, including God, I’m not sure we’d need to have faith in anything.
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If the act of believing then is a by-product of uncertainty, embracing the fragility of our knowledge should foster a spirit of humility. Perhaps such humility, spawned by life's mystery, would inspire a collective respect for our manifold conceptions of God – unless of course those conceptions lead to acts of violence. By the way, I’m not looking for any Kumbaya moment here – just a breath of grace and forbearance.

Howl

Not long after graduating from college, I invited a few high school chums to Evins Mill for a "men's retreat." More than a caddish gathering of twenty-somethings, it was conceived with an elevated purpose in mind - to share with each other our respective life missions and the perennial goals that would naturally flow there from. There would also be a heavy dose of critique and accountability. Heady stuff for sure. And in just a few days, I ship off for the 14th such retreat in as many years.
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The idea for this outing sprouted during one of life's more earnest moments - when horizons were seemingly limitless, and before we made those decisions that would inevitably impose the boundaries born of career, marriage, child-rearing, financial planning and so on. If I wax nostalgically, I do not do so regretfully, as for most of us this is life’s unavoidable trajectory, and I am thankful for my own.
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I'm also appreciative of the confreres with whom I annually discuss life's plans and passages. And if this rarefied notion of goal sharing was born in earnest, these conclaves have been anything but innocent, and remain punctuated by bouts of sophomoric debauchery and witless irresponsibility. None will forget the time we nearly burnt down the vacation home graciously lent to us by a family friend - indeed, it is seared in our memory. But we can laugh about it now - right George?
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In spite of ourselves, we dutifully reserve time for a modicum, if not a muddle, of personal transparency, though I’ve witnessed that such openness increasingly dwells as much on our past as on our future - and is now as reflective as it is ambitious. With more miles behind us, this shift in gears makes sense, as does another shift - our visions for the future are now marked as much by aspirations as they are by metrics. Perhaps some of us, humbled or tempered by time, are hedging our bets.
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That such testimony is routinely shared with and by alcohol-impaired minds undoubtedly renders the exchange less crisp, but openness, such as it is, might not percolate at all without bourbon’s succor - for alas, the shadow of the strong and reticent man looms large even for the most self-possessed among us. Sober or otherwise, in these late night communions we break bread and new ground, even if the following day we couldn't always describe in detail the mountains we just scaled.

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And if these wayward retreats do not exactly measure up to my original vision, it's all for the better, for the vision was as pompous as it was well meaning - and would surely render such weekends a grinding slog. As it is, they have evolved into a rich tradition that I think all of us to varying degrees anticipate and relish. Even if I don't frequently see most of these jackasses, I take comfort in their ritualized company.
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And to the loved ones whom we leave behind this weekend, should you witness a faint red glow on the horizon, you'll know we burnt the house down this year - and not just figuratively. If on the other hand you are awakened late one evening by haunting bellows from distant woods, do not be alarmed for your safety or our own - as wolves are not the only creatures who would howl at the moon.