sliced

Few devices are as beautiful as a classic typewriter. This...

Wed, 09 Dec 2009 19:50:55 -0700

Few devices are as beautiful as a classic typewriter. This silent Corona Sterling was touted as a “workhorse” with a “streamlined design.”

Stylish.

Halle

Tue, 08 Dec 2009 15:18:47 -0700

She was being hunted by the Phoenix police right in front of our house. One of the two officers told me they received a call about a pit bull chasing people down the street. When I approached her, she trotted away from me. When I got down on the ground into a play position and tapped my hands on the gravel in the alley, she trotted back, then past me, then out onto the street again. When I got her attention and jogged away from her, she ran alongside me, staying several feet to my right, as I veered closer and closer. When she stopped to drink from the water bowl a neighbor had set down, I scooped her up and carried her in my arms back to the house, now three blocks away. The cops saw me, waved, and called off their hunt.

Saved.

Halle was lonely and weak without her former humans. The family she lost trained her to Sit and Stay and Shake, taught her never to jump on anyone, socialized her with other dogs and people, lavished her with affection, and even spayed her.

In just a couple of weeks, she has made us her new family. And we’ve fallen for her.

But our job is to rescue. And to foster. And to find forever homes. And without a good reason to keep her under our care, it’s time for Halle to get back to having a permanent family.

We hope she doesn’t have to go too soon, but somehow, I’m sure she will.

Adopt Halle.

Oreo's law

Sun, 06 Dec 2009 21:12:28 -0700

Oreo's law:

Far too frequently, a dog in Arizona’s animal control shelters is euthanized before any rescue group even has a chance to save it. Just last week, I looked into the eyes of an emaciated and very lonely pit bull that was euthanized the next day, before the organization I work with could even put in to rescue it.

New York’s proposed legislation creates a model that every state can follow.

The new rhjr.net

Sun, 06 Dec 2009 11:02:53 -0700

The new rhjr.net:

I didn’t mean to do it. I didn’t mean to get sucked into another site redesign so soon after the last one. But I did. And when my trusted CSS guru Stephanie Sullivan was too busy to take it on, I coded it myself. It took me at least four times as long as it would have taken her, but I’ve earned a pride in doing it myself I couldn’t have gotten by simply cutting a check.

In Designing the Moment, I stated my desire to someday, once again, achieve a site design I truly felt represented me. It had to be simple. So clean you could eat off of it. I had it years ago, but I’d never been able to again reach that plateau.

This one is all about the typography, and the fonts are served up by Typekit. I’ve added a mark, which I’ve never had before, and it doubles as the site’s favicon, which I’ve also never had before.

Today, my site, at long last, tells you who I am.

Learning to Draw in 1,000 Words or Less

Thu, 03 Dec 2009 12:34:36 -0700

My dad taught me how to draw when I was seven years old. We sat on the floor of his bedroom, leaning against the bed, and I watched as he sketched a farmhouse scene, complete with a tractor and wooden fence. I looked at the rough lines and swooned. Those lines, made by sweeping a #2 pencil across a piece of notebook paper without any thought, were beautiful. Magical. A more polished drawing would have been worthless — it was the imperfection that I loved. I wanted more than anything to whip lines across my own paper and produce a coffee cup, a zebra, a monster, a rocket ship. I sketched for years after that, but my lines never looked right. Too curvy. Not curvy enough. Too straight. Not straight enough. I retraced practically every line I drew, hoping always to make it better. It never was. The second and third pass made every line worse. The roughness of my lines was never the right roughness.

Two years ago, I ordered a frameless, magnetic whiteboard from an office furniture store for $450. When it was delivered a couple of weeks later, my dad and I spent a full day figuring out how to attach the thin, 30-pound sheet of metal to the wall in my home office. We settled on nailing up plywood and gluing the whiteboard onto it. It’s six feet tall and five feet wide, and is bordered by the edges of the plywood.

I also bought a classic and much-revered book about drawing. I bought or created every tool the book said to use and more. A glass frame with grid lines drawn on it in black permanent marker. A large sketchbook. Two small sketchbooks. A pair of pocket Moleskine sketchbooks. Art pencils in several shades. Gum erasers. I was determined to become a _visual thinker_ — one who expresses every concept or idea with sketches and doodles. I imagined the sketches I’d create and how I’d take pictures of them with my camera phone and email them to my clients to illustrate the brilliant ideas that would pop into my head every ten minutes through the will of my own momentum. I imagined awing conference crowds by drawing off-the-cuff illustrations during presentations, scrapping slide decks in favor of a flip pad and a set of Sharpies.

I worked through the exercises in the first and second chapters. The book promised to teach me how to, quite literally, see the world differently so that I could, at long last, transcribe images onto paper. Just a few days in, I drew a line-art sketch of an old man, and I was astonished. The book was right. It was the first sketch drawn by my own hand that I’d ever considered beautiful. For the next couple of weeks, I kept the book on my bedside table. Almost every night, I looked at the sketch of the old man and wondered if I’d ever again achieve that level of perfection. Every few nights, I picked up the drawing book and flipped through the next couple of chapters to see what came next. After a few weeks, I moved it and my sketchbook to the bookshelf, and promised myself to come back to it when I had more time. A month later, I flipped through the drawing book again.

It’s still there on the bookshelf. Next to the frame with the lines drawn on it. Next to the large sketchbook.

A couple of months ago, I flipped through the last Moleskine notebook I used. It was filled with words. Handwritten words, in black ink. On my whiteboard was a collection of sticky notes, grouped under labels I’d written with a black dry erase marker. The yellow pieces of paper were covered with notes I’d written in black ink.

On the six-foot-by-five-foot whiteboard I bought for $450 and glued onto the plywood I nailed into the wall with my dad, I had written words. In my fantasy, I was a visual thinker. In my reality, a writer.

On my whiteboard at this very moment is what could be considered a sketch. It’s a circle with a line running through it from upper-right to lower-left, the classic icon used to indicate something bad. Something you shouldn’t do. Something you shouldn’t use.

Inside the circle is the word “Adverbs.”

The Risk of Smoking in New York

Thu, 03 Dec 2009 12:32:22 -0700

The decision to move to Boston to be with Christine was easy. The act of moving could have been a lot easier. At the very least, I should have been more practical when considering what I’d do once I got there. Where I’d live. How I’d make money. But I didn’t think through any of these things, even during my two and half days as a passenger on a series of Greyhound buses during an almost non-stop trip from Phoenix to what was soon to be my new home. Two thousand, eight hundred eighty eight miles according to my pocket travel map. I kept the map for years afterwards, marking up in pen or pencil the paths I took from Place A to Place B, but this was its first trip in my pocket, and I had managed to kill at least a few minutes of the trip by highlighting the roads we took to cut across the country from my southwestern hometown all the way to the great big city of Boston.

We arrived in New York City at about 11pm. It was my first time there, so it was impossible to say if we were headed towards an interesting part of town or not. All I knew is that it took at least twenty minutes or so to get through a tunnel that seemed to transport us magically from just outside the city directly into the heart of it. At one end, we approached a forest of tall buildings. At the other, we were crammed between them, surrounded by taxis and people, the giant bus suddenly no more significant than a matchstick thrown into a pile of garbage.

Oh, the garbage. There was garbage everywhere. Black trash bags, stuffed and tied, lined the sidewalks. Every sidewalk. It must be trash day, I thought. And I guess there are no alleys here, so all the trash has to go on the sidewalk for collection first thing the next morning. I imagined how the streets must look like when all the trash is gone. Sparkly, I thought.

We pulled into a long and slanted parking space at the bus station alongside what seemed like a sea of other buses. In the past two and half days, we’d stopped in practically every town you could stop in between Phoenix and Boston, some big, some small. Not one came even close to having as many buses at its station at one time as this one. The Big Apple had a very busy bus station.

I filed up the center aisle behind the others and stepped off the bus, feeling quite like the star of a movie in which some cocky kid from the Midwest wearing a straw hat and chewing on a toothpick moves to New York to get his start at a career at which he can only be successful by losing the chip on his shoulder but succeeds anyway by being just cocky enough to win over the grouchy bar owner and, in the process, the pretty girl. I wanted a cigarette. I wanted to look tough, like I belonged there. Mostly, I wanted a cigarette.

I decided to go inside the building to look for a smoking section. I wasn’t tough enough to stand outside, or to smoke in whatever damn place I felt inclined because I was cocky and could get away with it. A few seconds later, I met a man more excited about bus station customer service than anyone alive. Well, I didn’t so much meet him as get accosted by him. He stepped abruptly towards me, gesticulating wildly, eyes about to pop out of his head from the strength of his conviction that every stranger to his beloved city must be properly welcomed. I’m not sure I could have given the police a remotely accurate description of the man even moments later, but in the years since this event, he has gradually evolved in my memory to look more and more like Harrison Ford in the movie version of The Fugitive, prior to shaving his beard. Shorter, scragglier, and dirtier, but yeah, The Fugitive.

“Where’s your gate, man? Where’s your gate?”

He said this loudly enough that I was sure everyone within twenty feet of me had to have been alarmed, but no one so much as turned their heads. Of course, my eyes were glued on this incredibly zealous bus station greeter, so I might not have known even if they did.

“Um.”

“Where’s your gate, man?! Where’s your gate?!”

He spoke in capital letters.

I pulled the bus ticket out of my pocket and flipped it around a few times to find right-side-up. “Gate Eleven,” I said.

“It’s over here, man! It’s over here! Follow me! Right this way, man! Right this way!”

These may not have been his exact words, but they were certainly something to the effect of, I’m fucking crazy and you better do what I say or you’ll find yourself alone and dying in gutter in New York, you cocky straw-hat-wearin’, toothpick-chewin’ son of a bitch. He didn’t say all that, but I’m pretty sure it’s what he meant.

I followed.

He led me past the main entrance and down a main corridor, emphatically yelping the whole time to “Come this way! It’s over here, man! It’s over here!” I spotted the smoking section as we raced past it. A small room with a glass wall, full of hacking, middle-aged trashy people too poor to fly to New York, an attraction a tour guide might introduce by saying, “And here we see Smokers, in their natural environment.” It was the first time I’d ever seen one of those rooms. Damn, I thought. I need a cigarette. That room is kinda neat. New Yorkers sure are crafty. “Follow me, man! Follow me!” I followed. The capital letters won the argument.

Gate Eleven had in front of it a line of people sitting on the floor. Indian style. Fetal position. Bags. Purses. Food. Whatever. Just a line of people waiting for a bus, no different than any other line for any other bus. The Fugitive pointed at the floor behind the twentysomething African-American woman at the end of it.

“Wait right here, man! Wait right here! Your bus’ll be along in about an hour. Wait right here!”

I sat.

He turned and charged back towards the entrance. “Wait right there. It’ll be here in an hour. Just wait!” He spotted another man whose face apparently said, I’ve never been to New York. Please accost me. “Where’s your gate, man? Where’s your gate?!”

I stood up. I nodded at the twentysomething woman, little else than pure fear in my eyes. I walked back to the smoking room. If I needed a cigarette when I got off the bus, now I needed three of them.

Fifteen seconds after taking my first step in the great city of New York, the clock on my first New York minute was nearly over. All I had left to do was wait.

Wait. Right. Here. Man.

The Drum Stool

Thu, 03 Dec 2009 12:32:00 -0700

The drum stool sits on the hardwood floor, pushed up against the wall, its full weight born by the rubber grips on the feet of its three legs. Each leg is made of two 18” metal bars that run parallel to each other, connected at the end so they fit together into the rubber foot. Where they connect, a single metal bar extends inward to the stoolÕs center support pole. The bars from all three legs connect to a sliding ring that wraps around the pole, making the tripod of legs collapsible. At the top of each leg, the two bars are bolted from either side into a black pipe that serves as the base to the shaft used to adjust the seat’s height. Screwed into the shaft is an oversized wing-nut that resembles one of those cheap drum keys they give away at music stores whenever the staff drum guy wants to look generous. Sitting atop this contraption of metal and moving parts is a generous cushion seat in the shape of a round pillow, much thicker and taller than typical the drum stool throne. Its top is a soft, black cloth, its side a pseudo-leather, silver, with a subtle sparkle pattern. Printed on the silver, in black, is a logo for Pork Pie Percussion. Beneath the logo is the tagline, “Made by an American.”

I bought the drum stool more than a decade ago, at the same time I purchased my first all-new drum set. I’d owned several before, but this was my first brand new kit, and it was the set I always wanted: a black Pearl kit with a gorgeous and resonant sound that could punch a club audience in the gut or be as gentle as a breeze in the recording studio. The kit, including all its hardware, a rack mounting system, and cymbals, cost over $2,300, and I went into debt with my father for the hundredth time in my zeal to bring it home. In the three years that followed, I practiced, started a band, played shows at bars all around Phoenix and Tempe, recorded a dozen or so of our songs, got a tiny bit of airplay on a local music radio show, grew to resent my bandmates for wanting to write music for an audience a decade younger than we were ourselves and avoid the music we wrote and played best, became disgusted with the constant pursuit of rock stardom, and quit the band. When I later sold the kit, the drum stool and a deep purple beech wood Yamaha snare drum were the only parts I kept.

The stool sits in front of the window. The drum set sits next to it, stacked, its hardware tucked away in a corner of the room. Since leaving the band seven years ago, my drum set has been torn down, stacked in a corner, set up, stacked again, moved, stored in a garage, sold, replaced, set up, torn down, and stacked one more time. Its current home is against the wall between the two windows in the small back room of my house that I use as a home office. The drums, which have bright white shells, white textured heads, and white rims, sit one on top of the other, from bass drum to floor tom to snare drum to rack tom. When they are set up, they’re really quite beautiful — a striking display of white on white that makes the kit look bigger than it is. Stacked in a tower in my office, a thin layer of dust shows what the drums now mean.

I rediscovered my passion for making music about two years ago. Every few days now, I move the stool to the center of the room, position my large, stand-mounted Remo practice pad in front of it, and pull out my old drumsticks. With these artifacts from my former life, I practice taiko songs.

The Overlook

Thu, 03 Dec 2009 12:31:06 -0700

It’s a powerful thing to realize you’ve just had an experience that will change your life. These experiences can be easy to miss. They’re not always dramatic. They’re not always even obvious. Sometimes, almost nothing happens at all save for the subtlest of epiphanies. Stacy felt this once. She was at a point in her life when she felt everything was beginning to change. She didn’t expect these changes, nor was she comforted by them. But as she talks about it, she doesn’t even mention the details; she focuses only on their effect. As with any sort of transition, though, she now believes these changes, which she may not even remember, were so critical that they affect her to this day, almost fifteen years later. What she does remember is the epiphany.

I was on the cusp of being an adult, but still very much a teenager. I was confused, lonely, heartbroken and lost. Things that I had relied on (and perhaps taken for granted) werenÕt there anymore. I had never felt this way before Ð I was always quite confident with my place in life. I never had doubts about myself or my friends. That is what made this feeling of unrest so unnerving. Frightening. It was completely different from anything I had experienced before.

One day, Stacy got into her car and drove to the overlook. It’s the same kind of spot lots of us find, in lots of different cities and towns Ñ one where the voices of those around us are quieted enough to finally hear our own. One where the din of our lives is overtaken by silence.

The overlook was a sort of divine place on the way to Fountain Hills. It was a long drive, but once you got there, you could escape Ð sitting on the hood of your car, looking out onto a sea of lights from the city. It was fairly unpopulated and I could imagine that this place could have been an ideal Òmake-out pointÓ if it had existed in the 1950Õs. I can picture a Studebaker or Ford Fairlane parked up there and fitting right in. The last time I went to the overlook was with my friend Robert, at one of the lowest times in my life. I met Robert through a group of mutual friends and hadnÕt realized how important he would become to me. Robert was also in a strange place in life. He had taken off traveling and most of us had no idea where he had gone. When he came back into town, I confided in him about my struggles. I was desperate for some sort of answer, some form of guidance. Together, we drove to the outlook and looked out onto that sea of lights. We talked, we sat in silence, and we discussed philosophy Ð the Tao Te Ching, in particular. I am not sure how it happened, but something clicked in my mind that made everything clear. I was finally able to see past the clouds in my head. I felt like a million pounds had been lifted off of my chest. I felt free. I was able to finally make decisions that would alter my whole way of life. Most importantly, I felt happier than I had in a long time. I remember taking a deep breath before we left the overlook. I felt as if it was perhaps the first breath I had ever taken.

Stacy experienced a moment powerful enough for her entire future to begin to emerge, and she knew it at the time it happened, and she remembers it even now. She can actually point to that moment in her history and say, That’s when it happened Ñ that was the day. But what is most interesting about Stacy’s story is the title she chose for it: The Overlook. It adds something profound to the story Ñ perhaps serendipitously profound Ñ because it doesn’t speak to just one aspect of the story. It speaks to three. At its most obvious level, the title describes a physical space Ñ a view of the city that holds its buildings and people and noise just far enough away for them to become less than real. Beyond that, though, it’s a statement about just how easy it can be to overlook our own importance in a person’s life, whether a friend, spouse, family member, or someone else. The Robert in this story was me. And I completely overlooked how important the moment was to Stacy. I never knew until she told me this story. Most of all, it’s a reminder that even most of us lucky enough to have a moment like Stacy’s may overlook it in our own lives, both as it happens and later on. That perhaps we should be more awake to these moments. That perhaps, as the Tao Te Ching itself tells us, we should be a little more attentive, and present, and mindful. Maybe then we can catch these moments before they’re paved over by the promise of something else. Something better.

The overlook isn’t there anymore — it has since been turned into the ever-present warning of new housing development, which is very sad. But it somehow lends to the divinity of that hill.

Thanks for sharing, Stacy.

Outside of himself

Thu, 03 Dec 2009 12:30:19 -0700

Just three or so short years before finding complete and utter happiness, Marc was in a very different mood. No job. No clear ambition. Just a bass guitar, an indie-rock band, and a few good friends. I was one of them.

Whenever I visited the modest two-story condo he shared with three of our disheveled and disorganized 19-year-old mutual friends, Marc would ask, “Did you want to take me to Zia?” Zia was the record store indie-rock musicians went to when they needed more indie-rock. And yes, I usually did want to go there. It was the phrasing of his question I found funny. I don’t know, I often thought. Did I really want to take him there? I don’t recall ever having had that motive prior to visiting his poster-covered space in which Marc’s possessions orbited around a black Futon and “Kiss of the Spider Woman” movie poster, but he very frequently arrived at Zia’s parking lot on the back of my Honda scooter nonetheless.

A year later, while he occupied the teenage-boy sized bedroom in my father’s house in suburban Glendale, Arizona, next to my own, we had another of the epic philosophical conversations that were the core of our friendship, this one centered on religion. Having been yet another Christian child who strayed from the pew as a young adult Ñ a theme in our circle of friends ÑÊhe passed on a few of the stories that had previously bothered him enough to begin questioning his faith.

Well, not his faith, per se, but the logic of his faith.

As he saw it, there were far too many flaws in the logic of his religion for it to be truly believable. Supernatural feats delivered by otherwise perfectly average human beings. A god that claimed absolute righteousness and perfection, at the same time performing almost unspeakable acts of cruelty while being worshipped as benevolent. These things tugged at Marc, because the desire in him to explain the world away into some agreeable box is the very same desire that moved him to religion in the first place. Through his childhood, religion was the explanation. By sixteen, however, the dissonance began to wear thin, and it was at about the same time that the godless started inviting him to parties and asking about his record collection. Eventually, the tug was enough, and he reconsidered his views. He looked around, as many do, for other options that might better suit his spiritual needs. The more he looked around, the more he saw trends.

During the late-night living room conversation, he told me that every religion had a little bit of the puzzle right, but none of them had it all. We agreed that organized religion placed a barrier between God and the devout. An afterlife is possible, but in a very different way than the Christians of Marc’s past thought. Science tells us that energy doesn’t die, it changes forms. Energy, then, has to go somewhere, so ghosts and reincarnation and all sorts of other religious notions are indeed plausible, perhaps even likely. He told me about an old Native American myth that if you stab a man in winter, the steamed air that escapes from his body at the moment of death is his soul rising to its eternity. He talked about the Christian high school he attended. The popular guy. The insecure and pregnant sophomore. The palm trees in front of the school that strangely bent and twisted around like flexible plastic straws.

Marc didn’t seem particularly saddened or ashamed by the loss of his religion. But then, he was melancholic on his good days. Rather, he looked like a man who had simply let his brain win an argument that perhaps should have been left to his heart.

Over the next few months, he bent and twisted himself through a series of miniature hardships, some memorable, some not, that somehow each left him slightly more wanting than before. His band broke up. His friendships had weakened. The burgeoning relationship with his girlfriend had entered a dark hour. And he drifted for a while through a malaise that few noticed, including me. I wasn’t around much then; I was busy with my own problems, and we simply didn’t cross paths as frequently as in the old days. I never thought it would be permanent. But during some indistinguishable moment, when no one seemed to be watching, Marc turned his head and began to see a path.

Two years later, the next time I saw him, where this story started, he had settled into a job at Zia that eventually turned into a several-year stint as a store manager and a much longer stint as a music buyer. He had a girlfriend that everyone adored Ñ the same girl Ñ who was later diagnosed with Multiple Sclerosis and, after marrying Marc and giving birth to their two children, purchased a wheelchair. He had a growing relationship with an unorthodox church that eventually led to a counseling position and a life of piety.

Marc at 23 was a man who had rested his argument with logic, and subsequently, with love. With faith. With happiness. He was a man whose philosophical discussion was once again centered on religion, this time minus the dissonance.

Marc at 19 and 20 seemed, by contrast, an unfortunate apparition. A man who had fallen outside of himself. A man sitting just to the left of where he should have been. Just far enough away to become wholly disconnected.

It was ten years ago. Marc is now a media buyer for a Christian music distributor. He lives in Nashville with his wife and their two children.

He still has a bass guitar and a fine collection of indie-rock.