Echoes of His Cacophony

Yesterday.

It's late, real late. My brother needs boxes to pack his drums -- the ones he bought on eBay and we picked up in San Marcos the night before his gig at the conference. He needs the boxes to ship the blue drums home.

So he decides to go to Wal-Mart. "Is it open this late?" he wonders and then leaves the house for a very long time -- too long for mere box scrounging.

By the time he returns, we are in bed. When he comes thru the door, we hear not the sound of boxes, but the sound of shuffling plastic bags.

He went shopping!

Today.

It's late.

As I sit here and Trudy retires to the bedroom and Ben sits in the living room nose in his book, my brother is packing his boxes -- the boxes he found last night.

This is no run-of-the-mill packing. This is industrial strength packing.

The drums are painstakingly disassembled with the hardware put in plastic bags and the drums cleaned with Windex and stacked inside one another with bubble wrap lovingly applied between the cyclinders.

And the sound of the packing tape. Oh, the sound of the packing tape at 11:00 at night.

Tomorrow.

Tomorrow night will not be like this. No iPod playing thru the living room stereo while a CD plays on the computer in the study. No late night dashing off to Wal-Mart. No boxes. No drums. No bubble wrap. No packing tape.

Silence. Yes, we will have that. And the echoes of his cacophony.

11:18:30 PM   permalink: []   feedback:   comments: []  

Bolton's Hat

1. They Launched Challenger Anyway.

Take off your engineer's hat, and put on your manager's hat.

What does that mean?

I'll tell you what it means: Wrong answer. Try again.

And on a cold morning they launched Challenger anyway. The crew never returned.

2. Do Your Job Well.

Those words, take off your engineer's hat, mean a lot to aerospace engineers in the trenches today. Do your job. Do it well. And don't be afraid to stick to your analysis, even when managers and politicians with other things on their minds tell you to try again.

3. Bolton Vs. The Analyst.

Ok. So what are we to make of a State Department official who plays the same game with intelligence analysts? And what are we to make of the fact that when the analysts refuse to change hats, he tries to get them fired?

Why, we nominate him to be ambassador to the United Nations!

4. Go Dog, Go!

Do you like my hat? ([1] [2])

No. I do not like that hat. Good bye.

10:32:17 PM   permalink: []   feedback:   comments: []