One Over X News

Mortality and Immortality

I am saddened by the news that someone that I considered as a close friend has died. Although I did not personally know Johnny Carson, like many Americans I certainly felt that I did. There was a period in my life during college when I would not think of missing his monologue. It was an imperitive for me to watch at least that much of his show. He was truly a genius. His timing on jokes was perfect and his feel for the audience was impeccable.

Dealing with mortality is one of the difficult lessons in life. The death of a friend notwithstanding, the death of a parent, grandparent, aunt or uncle may be traumatic for a child. However, a parent enduring the death of a child has to be worse. My parents experienced that with their first born son, Baris. The reason I am even alive and writing this for you is that my parents wanted to have another son to carry on the family name and to be whatever Baris was not able to be.

Having children of my own I can't begin to imagine the pain of losing any one of them. I love my children very much. They make me laugh more often than they make me cry. I especially love going out to eat with them. Whenever we are all together it is a memorable event, especially for the restaurant.

My life is enjoyable whenever I am doing something with the kids or even just because I know that they are around the house. Even though in general my life for the past few years has sucked, my kids have been there for me, giving purpose and meaning to my existence.

Maybe I garnered a taste for the loss of my children when Jina moved them here to the Space Coast in Florida and I was stuck in an apartment in Wallingford, Connecticut. It was unthinkably heartless that for two years my company would not allow me to relocate 'in status' even though that was the verbal deal that had lured me to Connecticut in the first place. Some regions in Florida would take me back if I wanted to take a major cut in pay and work as a salesperson. This was in great contrast to the conditions that had been explained to me when I relocated in order to spread the culture of the company to the northeast, when I had relocated to Connecticut in the first place. They had promised me that as long as I spent two years in the northeast they would relocate me back to Florida but could not promise any location. I was good with that and so was Jina. Nine years later that was the strangest proposal that anyone had ever heard and clearly not in accordance with any established company policy.

One of the Florida store managers that I spoke to who himself had been with the company for only three years told me, "If you're good enough you'll get promoted again."

I had been with the company before he had even heard of the company. I had started out as a salesperson when the company had a total of 63 stores. I had busted my ass, working sometimes 20 days in a row without a day off, putting in untold and sometimes uncompensated overtime hours to make things right. I had lost all of that time, time that I could have spent with my children when they were young. I did it because I believed in the company and their bullshit that I would make a fortune with them if I merely stuck it out. I made a good living. I even had a good life that I barely enjoyed because I always felt that my job was threatened. But I did as I was told and I stuck it out.

What I was really sticking out was my neck and they promptly severed their relationship with me as a sharp firm blow to the back of my neck. As a parting shot, an insult of the highest order, I was told that if I was good enough I might get promoted again. If I had been a piece of crap employee I might have licked my wounds and moved on long before the opportunity for them to kick me in the private parts.

They killed me. They used me up and discarded the spent carcass. Afterwards my confidence was destroyed. From all of that pain came the impetus to finish a lot of unfinished projects, though and to write at least one of the books that I had envisioned. There is nothing in life that does not have some purpose. There are no accidents. Coincidence is merely what you call something that you cannot readily connect into the sequence of events. For some reason it was necessary that I had to live through that. I would have never written what I have written had I been transferred to Florida and was now still working for that company.

In all my life I have strived to respect people that respect me. It has worked out pretty well. I try very hard not to judge others. Maybe that is from my strict Christian mother's instruction but I really do want to be nice to other people. I try to make the world better for others. I know how to survive. If I didn't already know how to survive from growing up in rural Ohio, hunting and fishing, then the military certainly instructed me.

It was while I was with my former employer that I met a vendor representative named Joe. I won't use his full name here out of respect for his privacy. I rank him among my best and closest personal friends.

Joe is a unique person. He has vision problems that requires him to wear different glasses for different challenges. So he has a pair or two on lanyards supporting around his neck at all times. That in itself serves to make him stand out.

He loves to wear a certain type of floppy hat and wears any number of easily accessible tools belt-clipped around his waist. The overall first impression is that of a Boy Scout Master.

Joe is meticulous to the point of being anal retentive. In many ways he is the exact opposite of the way that I am. I have a cluttered desk but I swear that I know where everything is. Joe labels everything, files copies of everything and always has the records of what he had done ready at a moment's notice.

Joe is a gentleman and a gentle man as well.

His wife is a recently retired school teacher and is probably the perfect soul mate for Joe. They had met when they were both reporters for the media handling political conventions in the late 1960's. Their relationship simply and honestly works and it is largely because they function as a single entity on so many levels that the first time I witnessed it it startled me. Kurt Vonnegut Jr. referred to a similar couple a 'nation of two'. That is the perfect label for Joe and Sue.

I was very fortunate to know Joe. I had built a computer for him and went to his condo to set it up for him. Joe was a vendor representative for a lot of different companies and only one of those companies brought him into my store. In the course of talking with him I learned that he was a representative for Advanced Micro Devices (AMD), the 'David-sized' rival of the ubiquitous Intel. I had a great deal of respect for the value that AMD put into their products and told Joe that I had build several computer solutions for people around their processors. That was how Joe first learned that I actually was a closet computer technician stuck in a managerial role for a home improvements warehouse.

Joe possessed an old Intel 386 12 MHz based computer system and he wanted to upgrade to a AMD K6-2 300 MHz processor based system. His company had been sending his demos that required a more advanced version of Windows than his machine could handle. He wanted to replace his computer system but he didn't want to go with a cookie-cutter retail machine. He wanted something particularly suited to his needs, customized and designed for him from the ground up. I did that for him. I would have sold him the system at cost for parts and software, donating my labor as I had for many of my friends but he insisted in paying me for my time and trouble.

In the scope of events in my life, I built his computer while my kids were visiting with me for the summer in 1998. I actually purchased all the parts for my kids computers at the same time that I bought the things that Joe wanted and received a decent enough discount from my friend Sid who had a computer shop close to where I lived. I built a computer system for Joe that lasted for four years, until he wanted to upgrade.

It was very fortunate that I knew Joe. That day that I quite working for my employer, I was stupid. I had nothing waiting in the wings. The news of my quitting had apparently spread like wildfire through the gossip network of my company. I was quite possibly the most loyal employee that they ever had. It was a mismatch of personalities between my boss, his boss and I that lead to the unfathomable circumstance that I departed. At any rate Joe heard about it and called me at home.

He told me he had a job for me if I was interested and gave me a number to call. I needed that. It turned out to be a fairly steady income for a little over a month while I packed my things and made ready to move to Florida. When I came to Florida I found employment with Joe's marketing company. I did a lot of odd jobs and extra things like delivering papers for Florida Today, but the job that I had gotten through Joe was the mainstay of my income for almost a year until I found a job with my present employer. As the marketing company was based in Las Vegas, I actually got to fly out there for training a couple of times.

I had been to Las Vegas once before when I was in college. My roomates friend had connections and we flew up in a private jet and stayed a weekend in the capital of everything surreal in the known world. When I went out there on business I think I was most impressed with how much had changed since I had last been there.

The point to all this discussion about Joe is that you never know how things will turn out and you may actually need to depend on the people that you meet in ways that you could never possibly foresee. I was fortunate to have a friend like Joe. Everyone needs to know someone like Joe. He certainly fulfills the objective that I have set out as my philosophical goal in life. He made my life easier for having known him.

If I could live forever I would never find anyone quite like Joe. I can say that for a fact because each of us is as unique are our fingerprints. Living forever though is kind of a disturbing thing. I know that people pursue immortality in different ways. In the back of my mind I may even had a reason that I write. It may be out of a the desire that my words will live on into the future as an enduring epitath.

In One Over X I deal with the quandry over the immortality of Andy and also Brent. The immortality that they gain in their lives is based moreso on their inability to die than the perfection of their bodies or souls. They each have to exist as a pretty-much slowly rotting yet still animated corpse, except thst they have the ability to mask what they are from others whenever they so desire. I suppose all of that comes from the concept of 'be careful what you wish for'.

In total honest here, I really and trully believed that Andy would go hog-wild with his immortality when I first put that concept into Book 1. Five books later I was surprised where we had arrived. I know I know, Book 6 isn't even out yet but it is written. I know what is in there and you do not. I may have to put a sample of each book of the first series on this Blog to satisfy the clamor (of a few) for more books to be in print.

One of my new readers of this Blog anyway sent me an email. She is a model who lives in the midwest - probably not the best place to live if you are an aspiring model. She is cute and smart and I think she will make it. I hope only that she is wise enough to squirrel away some of her money for when her looks fail her, say around age 33.

She told me that she is blown-away by my writing and has no idea how to comment about anything, whatever that means.

Success in any endeavor is all about connections and contacts. I know several people (479 and counting) through The Internet. I am pretty particular and selective. I meet people all the time and even in my store. Some people I offer to help, others I won't. I help those to want to work at achieving their goals. I will also help those that are good and supportive of others. It think that is pretty much all you need to get into my good graces, whatever that is worth. At the moment I am barely able to assist. That will change dramatically in a few months. I am certain of that. It is largely building future capital. That is what I believe

In a future Blog I will explain how books become published and distributed. It is both amazing and mind-boggling. It is also invaluable information for anyone crazy enough to want to be a writer.

E

For more information on books, go to www.acbooks.com

posted by Unknown @ 2:59 PM