Below the Fold

Homeless for the Holidays

(The following post originally ran Nov. 21, 2007, and has become a Below the Fold holiday tradition of sorts. For those who have read it before, please pardon the repetition -- and for those who are reading it for the first time, I hope it serves as a reminder of what this holiday, and being human, is all about.)

LOS ANGELES IS A CITY of fragments, its people fragmented. It’s a place apart and in parts, a labyrinthine expanse so loosely bound as if against nature. LA is a place to live, not to be from.

Most people only see L.A. through a windshield – the observer protected behind glass, the observed seen in glimpses if at all. It is into this concrete dichotomy I drive several days a week. I’ve done this for nearly a year with no regret, save for the occasional Sigalert that slows traffic even more than the usual crawl. Once this happened by the Staples Center, forcing me to watch the video ad for “American Idols on Tour” more times than should be considered humane.

Almost every day, before joining my fellow commuters on Interstate 10 and 5 for the long slog to Orange County, I see a homeless man by the freeway entrance. Always smiling, always pleasant, and always with a hand out, as if he’s the operator of an imaginary toll booth. I give when I can, when the stoplight cooperates. This means lowering the window, a risky proposition in a place where people lock their car doors while they are still driving.

For months I saw this man – and then, a few weeks ago, he was gone. Maybe it was the weather, both turning slightly cooler and for a long while heavy with smoke and its unhealthy remnants.

He could be anywhere, doing just fine, but nevertheless I worry and wonder – whether he is safe, whether he found a better onramp, or whether he melted back into the jigsaw world of Greater L.A., another face in another windshield. This is the time of Thanksgiving after all, a time for holidays and families and desires for human connections. So I wonder, I worry, and wait.

The Day after Christmas
This man – and next time I see him, I promise to ask his name – reminds me of another man I met in Atlanta, exactly 17 years ago Friday. He, too, was (at least to me) homeless and nameless, a regular character at the CNN Center. I wrote about him in my book, and the following passage tells the story of our brief encounter:

“Where are you from?” The question came out of nowhere, as did the man. He looked 40ish, wearing a purple long-sleeved shirt, a green jacket-vest, a black hat, and a beard grown from neglect rather than purpose. As we talked, he would continuously sip from an empty Styrofoam cup. I wanted to tell him there was nothing in there, though I’m sure he knew. I just stared at the cup rising and falling from the man’s lips with mechanical precision.

I don’t know what was in the cup before, but based on our conversation, I got the feeling it was more likely vodka than coffee. We talked about life on the streets and how being homeless is a lot like being in prison – except that in prison you get three meals a day and a warm place to sleep. But that wasn’t the worst part.

“It’s the loneliness,’ he said, taking another imaginary sip. “All the time, loneliness. All of my friends are either dead or gone.”

I was going to tell him how lonely I felt that Thanksgiving, but decided against it. Here was a guy who has endured the same ugly feeling for six years, and I was depressed about one day spent in a warm hotel room with the people I love a phone call away. His cup was empty; mine runneth over.

“The day after Christmas,” he said. “A business is made or broken by how well it is the day after Christmas. Everything is defined by where you are the day after Christmas.”

We had been talking about Thanksgiving, but I wasn’t going to argue. This was his conversation. I was just along for the ride.

I gave him some money as I got up to take my tour, which he accepted but don’t think expected. When I came back downstairs an hour later, I spotted my friend talking to a couple of other street people. He waved to me as I passed.

He still had his cup and it was still empty. And I felt bad, really bad, because I knew that on the day after Christmas, he would still be there.

I never looked at people or a place the same after that. Everywhere is home for someone – every place has its own ecosystem that functions often despite itself. No matter where we live, we can connect.

Yes, Los Angeles is a city of fragments, its people fragmented. But while the pieces don’t always fit, we must, eventually, come together.

Revisiting the Ghosts of Auroras Past

“If we don’t meet again, your final assignment from me is perhaps the most important lesson you will learn in life. Go to your mother, father, brother and sisters, and tell them with all your heart how much you love them. And tell them you know how much they love you too. Go out of your way to make good memories…at some point these memories may be all you have left. May God bless you all, Bryan.”

Professor Bryan Cloyd’s e-mail to his students. Cloyd’s daughter, Austin, died in the April 16, 2007, Virginia Tech shootings.

Virginia Tech, Columbine, Aurora. There are so many more, of course, so many we can't remember despite each time promising ourselves we will never forget.

There will be a time to talk about news and social media again. There will be time to reflect on key moments, such as when a selfless teen turned Reddit into the world's most important news channel during the first hours of the Aurora, Colo., theater shooting that left 12 people dead and many more injured, some permanently.

For now, we just need to listen. We always have and never really do, but I hope against hope that this time it will stick.

I will say this about the suspected killer: As many of you know I have some experience talking to capital murderers, and the question I'm asked the most is what makes them into these monsters. Are they all poor, are they mentally ill, are they all on drugs?

The answer is yes, and no, and everything else. The common thread, if there is one, is that they are far more like us than not. They are friends, neighbors, family. They are a poor mentally ill kid from Kansas City, Mo., and they are an upper-middle class neuroscience student from San Diego, Calif., who bought a movie ticket and brought hell to a Colorado town.

Everything else I want to say I've already said in the below post from just after the Virginia Tech shootings. I'm reposting here in its entirety because I don't want to forget, and neither should any of us.

Now, Hear This (published April 19, 2007)

An elementary school student walked into his classroom, sat at his desk, pulled a loaded gun from his backpack – and blew his own face off.

This was almost 20 years ago in Jefferson City, Missouri. It was my first story on my first day as a reporter for United Press International. I still remember calling in the copy from a nearby pay phone, the crime scene and the students. I remember thinking how could this happen, why did it happen, and would it happen again.

Twenty years later, all that’s changed is the technology. News moves faster, guns shoot better. But tragedy is timeless.

You don’t need me to go on about the Hokie Horror that devastated Virginia Tech and froze the country in disbelief; we have Anderson Cooper for that.

I’ll just say this: It took five syllables and about a week for Don Imus to lose his talk radio job. Cho Seung-Hui gives us more than two years of warnings via teachers and students, spends time in a mental facility where he’s deemed a menace to society, and we don’t hear a damn thing.

Listen now.

Social Media, Milkshakes, and Life After Death (Father's Day Re-Post)

EVERY FATHER'S DAY I use this space to remember those who don't or perhaps never had fathers. Usually I just repost this story, originally published in 1990 when I was a newspaper columnist.

Today, however, I decided to reach all the way back to 2010 and share a post I wrote titled "Social Media, Milkshakes and Life After Death." You see, when I wrote that first story in 1990, I wasn't a father myself. Now with a daughter about to enter high school, well let's just say I have a new appreciation for dads and what we do, which in my case is to try and screw up as little as possible.

The post is republished below -- and wherever you are this Father's Day, and whatever you do, remember that it will be more meaningful than anything you do at work come Monday.

Social Media, Milkshakes, and Life After Death

(originally appeared December 2010)

ONCE IN A WHILE, less often now than before, someone asks about my dad, and I tell them I never knew my father. He died when when I very young, I say, and therefore I never knew him other than in faded pictures and fractured stories.

I’ve said this so many times for so many years that I believed it to be true. But it’s not. It’s not a lie, but it’s not true, either.

I knew my father. I was 8-years-old when he died, so of course I knew him. I just don’t remember him. In fact I don’t remember anything about my life prior to the morning when I heard he died.

My memory up to that point was erased. I knew my family members and where I lived, but my experiences were gone -- including any experiences I had with my father.

As bad as it sounds, it really wasn’t a problem for me. I wasn’t sad about having lost my dad because, in my mind, I never had one. And you can’t mourn for something you never had. My mind created the ultimate defense against loss: The inability to recall ever having lost in the first place.

Then a few weeks ago something happened. Something scary. Something wonderful.

I was in the car with my 12-year-old daughter. She was drinking a milkshake and had put it in the cup holder when, suddenly, I had this urge to tell her to hold the cup and be careful not to spill it. And just as suddenly I saw my dad, in my head, yelling at me for spilling a milkshake in his car, a brand new Cadillac.

A memory. A real memory, bursting through my synapses with the force of 36 years, propelled by the power of milk and ice cream.

I don’t know why -- whether it was the milkshake that shook the memory from its moorings, or whether it was because I was driving my new car, which made me remember my dad’s new car and the apparent anxiety we both shared about people spilling things.

I don’t know why, all I know is it was real.

So what does any of this have to do with social media? Just this: If I die tomorrow, my daughter may not remember me, but she will know me.

Social media and search have put my entire life online. She will see me, read about me, probably learn more about me than she cared to know even if I were still alive.

Many people still see social media as the Realm of the Narcissist, a place for ego and adoration filled with banal Facebook updates and pointless Tweets. Some of that is true, although there is far more good than bad; far more about social media that moves us forward than turns us away.

I think about what it would have been like -- what I would have been like -- if social media was around when my dad died. Those banal Facebook posts would be priceless to me, those pointless tweets like sparks of light.

I still may not have remembered, but I would have known. And that, I believe, would have made all the difference.

A Living or a Life: Preparing for the Second Grand Entry

I'M SOMETIMES ASKED WHY, back in the early ‘90s, I wrote a book on the death penalty. There were the obvious reasons, from my work as a reporter covering capital murder cases to the resurgence of executions in the United States. But the real reason I wrote the book had nothing to do with anything so complex.

My reason was simple. I wanted to know what it was like to know when you were going to die.

I was never too sympathetic toward any of the inmates I met, but I was intrigued and maybe even a little envious of them. Death Row inmates not only knew when they were going to die, they knew how and why. They knew how many days they had left and what they would do in those final moments. They had time to plan.

There are two key moments in life, moments I call the “Grand Entries.” The first Grand Entry is when we are born – we are not and then suddenly we are, just here, sucking air and frantically trying to figure out what’s going on (this feeling continues long into adulthood.)

We can’t plan for this Grand Entry. We just start living and keep on going until time or circumstance forces us to stop.

Then there is the second Grand Entry. Most of us don't see it until it’s too late. But if we choose, we can enter on our own terms.

We can either live to make a living or live to make a life. We can choose to leave an imprint on the world, to leave a legacy, to get affairs in order and prepare for the second Grand Entry.

We still can’t know when this Grand Entry will happen. But if I learned anything from my time with the denizens of Death Row, it’s that the “when” doesn’t matter if you’re ready to go.

The first Grand Entry is a gift. The second Grand Entry is an opportunity.

Don't waste yours.

On Thanksgiving, No One Should be a Stranger -- Or Alone

(The following post originally ran Nov. 21, 2007, and has become a Below the Fold holiday tradition of sorts. For those who have read it before, please pardon the repetition -- and for those who are reading it for the first time, I hope it serves as a reminder of what this holiday, and being human, is all about.)

LOS ANGELES IS A CITY of fragments, pieces loosely joined yet bound as if against nature. Most people only see L.A. through a windshield – the observer protected behind glass, the observed seen in glimpses if at all. Los Angeles is a place apart and in parts, where everyone lives but no one is from.

It is into this concrete dichotomy I drive several days a week. I’ve done this for nearly a year with no regret, save for the occasional Sigalert that slows traffic even more than the usual crawl. Once this happened by the Staples Center, forcing me to watch the video ad for “American Idols on Tour” more times than should be considered humane.

Almost every day, before joining my fellow commuters on Interstate 10 and 5 for the long slog to Orange County, I see a homeless man by the freeway entrance. Always smiling, always pleasant, and always with a hand out, as if he’s the operator of an imaginary toll booth. I give when I can, when the stoplight cooperates. This means lowering the window, a risky proposition in a place where people lock their car doors while they are still driving.

For months I saw this man – and then, a few weeks ago, he was gone. Maybe it was the weather, both turning slightly cooler and for a long while heavy with smoke and its unhealthy remnants.

He could be anywhere, doing just fine, but nevertheless I worry and wonder – whether he is safe, whether he found a better onramp, or whether he melted back into the jigsaw world of Greater L.A., another face in another windshield. This is the time of Thanksgiving after all, a time for holidays and families and desires for human connections. So I wonder, I worry, and wait.

The Day after Christmas
This man – and next time I see him, I promise to ask his name – reminds me of another man I met in Atlanta, exactly 17 years ago Friday. He, too, was (at least to me) homeless and nameless, a regular character at the CNN Center. I wrote about him in my book, and the following passage tells the story of our brief encounter:

“Where are you from?” The question came out of nowhere, as did the man. He looked 40ish, wearing a purple long-sleeved shirt, a green jacket-vest, a black hat, and a beard grown from neglect rather than purpose. As we talked, he would continuously sip from an empty Styrofoam cup. I wanted to tell him there was nothing in there, though I’m sure he knew. I just stared at the cup rising and falling from the man’s lips with mechanical precision.

I don’t know what was in the cup before, but based on our conversation, I got the feeling it was more likely vodka than coffee. We talked about life on the streets and how being homeless is a lot like being in prison – except that in prison you get three meals a day and a warm place to sleep. But that wasn’t the worst part.

“It’s the loneliness,’ he said, taking another imaginary sip. “All the time, loneliness. All of my friends are either dead or gone.”

I was going to tell him how lonely I felt that Thanksgiving, but decided against it. Here was a guy who has endured the same ugly feeling for six years, and I was depressed about one day spent in a warm hotel room with the people I love a phone call away. His cup was empty; mine runneth over.

“The day after Christmas,” he said. “A business is made or broken by how well it is the day after Christmas. Everything is defined by where you are the day after Christmas.”

We had been talking about Thanksgiving, but I wasn’t going to argue. This was his conversation. I was just along for the ride.

I gave him some money as I got up to take my tour, which he accepted but don’t think expected. When I came back downstairs an hour later, I spotted my friend talking to a couple of other street people. He waved to me as I passed.

He still had his cup and it was still empty. And I felt bad, really bad, because I knew that on the day after Christmas, he would still be there.

I never looked at people or a place the same after that. Everywhere is home for someone – every place has its own ecosystem that functions often despite itself. No matter where we live, we can connect.

Yes, Los Angeles is a city of fragments, the people fragmented. But while the pieces don’t always fit, they do, eventually, come together.

Beware the Flying Cars of Progress (Redux)

When my sister was young – a long, long, long time ago – a teacher told her that by time she was old enough to drive, everyone would have a flying car. She did get a Ford Cobra II, but every time she tried to fly, the California Highway Patrol brought her back to Earth.

I heard the same thing when I was young, but my Chevy Cavalier often never moved, much less flew. And just the other day, a friend’s eight-year-old daughter echoed the generational promise: “When I get older, everyone will have a flying car.”

There’s nothing wrong with dreams – but if your head is always in the clouds it become hard to see the way forward. Put another way, I’m all for the next new thing, whether it’s Google+, Quora, tablet devices, interactive TV or any number of technological advances that are the “flying cars” of the social media age. But none of these tools and products replace the need for intelligent storytelling, critical thinking or core communications skills.

So beware the flying cars of progress. Don’t let the promises of the future betray your responsibilities to the present. Technology can’t help you if you don’t have anything to say.

What a Social Media World Leaves Behind

There is a man – I don’t know his name – that comes to our local Starbucks every morning, pushing his walker with the tennis ball feet and flashing a gorgeous toothless smile.

He orders coffee. He finds a table and settles gingerly into his seat. And then he pulls out a newspaper and starts to read.

And he reads. And he reads. And he reads and reads until the paper finally surrenders, having nothing more to give, it’s pages creased and ink smudged.

The man smiles again, because he knows he has won. He has mastered this piece of technology, his daily ritual as much one of pride as it is of knowledge.

This should matter to those of us in the digital world for one simple reason: Because there are those of us who do not live in the digital world.

These people are not ignorant, not stubborn, not Luddites or purists. They are not old or insignificant.

Not everyone can afford the latest technology, nor should that ability be a prerequisite for access to news and information. Not everyone wants to be online or connected 24/7, nor should that behavior grant passage to broader understanding.

So the question is this – when the last newspaper comes off the press, and all the world’s news and ideas and hopes and dreams are atomized into lines of code, what do I tell the man in the coffee shop?

Risk May Lead to Failure -- But at Least it Leads Somewhere

In two or three years, my brother-in-law will either be bankrupt or a millionaire.

He will either profit from a complex set a business deals or go down in flames; nearly a decade of work and planning will be left to smolder on the pyre of What Might Have Been.

No middle ground. No contingencies. No safety net. Just Heaven or Hell.

Why would this educated man, a husband and father of three with one more due soon, take such a risk? Why would he pick a path leading to total euphoria or abject failure?

The truth is, when faced with the same choice, many of us choose a Third Way, one which guarantees neither pleasure nor pain.

The Third Way seems safe. A little risk, a little reward. It’s nice and in-between. The more you live in the middle, the further you are from falling off the edge.

But the Third Way actually leads nowhere. The Third Way disguises complacency with false security. The Third Way marks the beginning of your future’s end.

Not everyone can be a Bill Gates or Steve Jobs. And risk should be calculated and thought out, not supported by a whim and a prayer.

But we all can choose to do more, to be more. You can choose to believe in yourself, because financially and emotionally, you are the only person you can trust.

The Third Way is a dead end. Risk may lead to reward to or it may lead to rejection, but at least it leads somewhere.

Sometimes in Life, You Need to Tilt

I was never a big Elton John fan growing up. My favorite music from the ‘70s was mainly Kiss and Rush. I still believe Rush guitarist Alex Lifeson is either an alien or dark wizard, since no human should be able to play guitar like that, though that never stopped me from trying.

The one thing I did like about Elton John, however, was his pinball machine. Not to brag or anything, but I had "Captain Fantastic" mastered. I knew how the ball was going to fall, when to hit the flippers and how to get extra games.

You could get free games on any machine, but I had the best luck on “Captain Fantastic.” Most people just waited to see if they got a match -- that's when the last two numbers of your score "match" another set of numbers generated by the machine in a special readout. If you “matched,” you got a free game and a chance to keep going without feeding the machine more money.

I had a better way. It was simple, really – I waited for the last ball to drop, and then at just the right moment, as the final score was being tallied and the game about to end, I shook the machine. More often than not, this forced the machine to match and give me a free game.

Usually shaking a pinball machine was a bad thing, because you would “tilt.” That stopped everything dead, with no way to revive the game. But personally, I always found tilting worth the risk.

To a great extent, pinball is totally out of your control -- it's a lot like life in that way. But shaking the machine to win a new game was the one thing in pinball that you could do to make something happen. It was the one way to change the natural order of things, like a defibrillator shocking the heart. It might work or you might tilt, but either way, it was worth a try.

Shaking the machine was my secret weapon, my one chance to cheat a premature pinball death. I never understood why more people didn't try it. I used to look around the arcade at all these kids just standing there, conceding the game and quietly hoping that they'd get a match and play again. They never did anything to try to help themselves – either they felt there was nothing they could do, or they were afraid to shake the machine because they knew it was wrong.

That didn't make any sense to me. The way I saw it, the game was going to end if you didn't do anything, so you might as well do something, even if it was somewhat risky. Control the game, or let it control you.

As I said, it’s a lot like life. Sometimes you get another shot -- and sometimes it’s just tilt, game over.

What Will Be Your One Great Thing?

“If you really want to hear about it, the first thing you'll probably want to know is where I was born and what my lousy childhood was like, and how my parents were occupied and all before they had me, and all that David Copperfield kind of crap, but I don't feel like going into it, if you want to know the truth.”

“Don’t ever tell anybody anything. if you do, you start missing everybody.”

-- Holden Caulfield, "The Catcher in the Rye"

J.D. Salinger, author of the above quote, died in January 2010 at the age of 91. Not only will next month be the first anniversary of his death but the 60th anniversary of his seminal life’s work, “The Catcher in the Rye.”

That book changed my life and continues to do so decades since I first read it as a young teen (and it still sells more than 250,000 copies a year.) It’s the only book I read again and again -- and every time I see something new, not necessarily because I never noticed it before, but because I couldn’t. This is where art crosses into magic, where static pages seem to change to fit whatever you need to hear at that moment in your life.

Salinger reached such rarified air it’s no wonder he found it difficult to breathe once “Catcher” was published in 1951. In the more than five decades that followed, he lived as a recluse in a small New Hampshire town. He created One Great Thing -- a novel for the ages -- and either couldn’t live with the attention it brought or he was too afraid to create more public art, lest he be unable to match or surpass his One Great Thing.

Author and marketer Seth Godin says it’s important to “ship,” which means you need to continue to put your art into the marketplace. Some will be good, some will be horrible, and if you’re lucky, something you do may be great. It doesn’t need to be "Catcher in the Rye," but it will be yours -- a product or idea that defines you and that impacts those it touches.

Although Godin is right, I would add a caveat -- before you continue to ship, take a step back and think, really think, about what you want to be your One Great Thing.

All of us have this ability. For some it’s a calling, a need to create that One Great Thing so that they can live beyond their years. I’m not talking about kids and family, that goes without saying (and as a father, I can attest that there is nothing more important for us to do in this life.)

No, I’m talking about art, about culture, about making something so powerful that it connects you to strangers with such force that it knocks them over. I’m talking about your retirement party, when people asks about your legacy and proudest achievement.

Will you tell them about that marketing plan you wrote, that Tweet you sent or Facebook photos you posted? Will you talk about the money you made? Or will you just smile because you know it’s a rhetorical question -- because you both already know the answer.

During a typical moment of depression-induced reflection, Holden Caulfield says that “people never notice anything.” By and large he’s right -- we are oblivious to most things in life, even our own lives. We notice the important stuff when it’s too late or no longer relevant.

But he’s also wrong. All of us will, at some point, create and ship One Great Thing. A work of art. A piece of magic.

What will yours be?