New Quaker Notebook

I was on the phone with a client. I happened to touch my forehead and my hand came back wet with sweat.

"Marc, look, you're a first-class consultant, the best I've ever dealt with. My God, my system's running better than I've ever seen it run in three years, and my network administrator is walking around bored most of the time—maybe I should just fire him—because he doesn't have any trouble-shooting to do to keep him busy—I think I will fire him, after all—but I've thought about this for a long time and I've decided to retain the Kudzu brothers for my system consulting needs."

"But, Bob, we still haven't resolved the network cabling problem you've got and the Kudzus haven't handled a system as large as yours before. Look, I know those guys. They're smart, but frankly out of their league with a fifty-node system like yours...."

"Marc, you're a nice guy. So let me be straight with you. I think you're good at what you do—brilliant, really—but this FAMWAY! crap is standing in your way. I'm just being honest with you. It seems that every time you're over here, you're tapping somebody to come to one of those damned FAMWAY! meetings and I have to listen to all the complaints and frankly I don't want to deal with it any more. Look, when you finally give up on that pyramid scheme, give me a call. Maybe then we can do business again. What's that? Okay. Listen, sorry, Marc, but I've got an appointment. Give me a call, okay? Thanks, Marc, I knew you'd understand. Good luck with that scheme. I hope it pans out for you. Good-bye."

That was the fifth client I had lost in two weeks. After hanging up, my hand went involuntarily to my wallet. Then I thought of Christine. How was I going to tell her that our income just got sliced in half? Really, this was my problem and I had to find the solution to it. I was responsible for my family's well-being and I was going to fulfill that responsibility. Besides, no matter what anyone else said about the FAMWAY! business, it works and I wanted it to work for me.

I reached for a copy of the month's So You're In FAMWAY! and leafed through the pages. The first half of the magazine spotlighted the big stars in the business. Joe and Jackie Zimmerman—Sapphires. Rob and Sammi Fredricks—Opals. And then there were galleries of Topaz levels, and Zircon levels, and Jade and Garnets and Amethyst levels, and more galleries with Aquamarine, Moonstone, Sardonyx couples and faces. The lower levels got increasing larger in number, and the pictures got increasingly smaller in size. Then there were the new distributors—no pictures, just names in alphabetical order. Hey, I could soon be in this magazine, too! The program works! So what if I never get rich fondling computer equipment and schlepping coaxial cable from one room to another. FAMWAY! would be my vehicle for obscene wealth. I will be nouveau riche. Disgustingly rich. People will ask me with sincere indignation: Have you no shame? And I will laugh, because when you are that rich, you can do anything you want, and at that level on the economic scale people seem so small, like ants on the ground, that their indignation is laughable, and I always laugh at the laughable.

But you do not get rich just waiting for it. If you just wait for it, then you could be waiting a long time. For then it becomes like a lottery—you might win, you might not. And then it becomes like people killed in freak accidents—it might happen to you, it might not. As I understand it, to get money, you have to do something, anything—dig a ditch, move papers around on a desk, hold out your hand, point a gun—anything at all. But to get rich, well, that takes the right approach, because not everything works.

Take, for example, the guy who sells everything he owns and sinks it all into a bank account with simple interest. He's a single guy, you know, and therefore has the freedom to do such things. He then goes down to a cryogenics lab to have himself frozen, the contract being that he is to be revived in a hundred years. He figures that in a hundred years his bank account will have grown into a fortune. So a hundred years go by and they revive him. He jumps off the table and shouts with glee, thinking about the fortune waiting for him in the bank. He runs out the door, heading for the bank. But running to the bank is taking more time than he anticipated, and he can't wait any longer, so he stops at a phone booth and makes a two-minute call to his bank to find out how much money he's got. "You've got a hundred million dollars in your account," says the bank's officer." "Hooray! I'm a multi-millionaire!" he cries. At that moment, the telephone operator breaks in and says: "Sir, your two minutes are up; if you wish to continue your call, please deposit fifty million dollars."

So, in order to make money, one has to do something. And I was going to do something. If it works for others, and with enough consistency to the pattern, then there exists a template for success; if I follow the specs of that template, then it should work for me, too.

Why did I want it to work? What was it that made the accumulation of an obscene quantity of money so necessary for me? Basically, I wanted both time and money, and I had neither. I had no time to spend with my family and no time to vacation, and no time to enjoy what was left of my life. It seems I never did. I did not have the time when I worked full time as a hospital data administrator and I had no time now, working for myself. Now, admittedly, I have money, and had money when I worked for someone else, but not enough to give me the luxury of time and not enough of the money to enjoy life during the brief time I had to spend it. It was time I wanted most of all and money could buy it for me, if I could get it without having to spend all my time getting it. Because by the time I got the money accumulated, I would have time, I suppose, but not really at an age when I could enjoy it. So the money was needed to buy time and to buy what I needed to enjoy that time. I wanted money and I wanted it now. Later would be too late.

So I went back out and tried the plan.

"Marc, this is what you've got to do." The voice was that of my sponsor, Paul. I had called him and we made plans to meet at the restaurant of the nearby Holiday Inn. We met at 11 o'clock. "The plan is simple," Paul said. "First, you have to be accountable for what you do; you have to be reliable and keep your word. If you tell someone you'll be there, you be there! Second, stay teachable. Be open to what the leaders in this business have to say; they've been where you and I are, so they know. Be ready to learn from their experiences. Along the same lines: read and study daily. Spend fifteen minutes a day on some positive writings. Listen to tapes. You gotta get on tape-of-the-day. Nobody who's made it in the business ever did it without tape-of-the-day. And you absolutely—I mean absolutely—have to attend the major functions and rallies, in addition to the open meetings. I'll tell you about these as they come up. Next, use your own products one hundred percent. Support your own business, and demonstrate your belief and commitment in it. Besides that, get three to five people to the open meetings every week."

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The Way of All American Cars

I'm not sure what the owner is planning to do with this relic of the American hamburger, or rather the advertising of the burger, but Florida's climate is not treating it well. I was out on the bike today and was compelled to photograph it. I'm pretty sure that's an AMC Pacer in there.

I took this photo with my Helio Drift cellphone and its 2-megapixel camera and then resized and optimized it with Xatio Image Optimizer v5.1.

If it's true, well, it's true

I can't say that I'm much of a fan of Gore Vidal, but still I admire his boldness. Like Quentin Crisp before him, he gets away with the most outrageous stuff. It's usually right-on-target stuff, but outrageous nonetheless.

Vidal is 83 and travels in a wheel-chair, but he has his wits, and wit, about him. Witness his September 30 interview in the UK's Times. A couple of my favorite quotes:

America should leave Afghanistan, he says. "We've failed in every other aspect of our effort of conquering the Middle East or whatever you want to call it." The "War on Terror" was "made up," Vidal says. "The whole thing was PR, just like 'weapons of mass destruction'. It has wrecked the airline business, which my father founded in the 1930s. He'd be cutting his wrists. Now when you fly you're both scared to death and bored to death, a most disagreeable combination."

Today religious mania has infected the political bloodstream and America has become corrosively isolationist, he says. "Ask an American what they know about Sweden and they'd say 'They live well but they're all alcoholics'. In fact a Scandinavian system could have benefited us many times over." Instead, America has "no intellectual class" and is "rotting away at a funereal pace. We'll have a military dictatorship fairly soon, on the basis that nobody else can hold everything together. Obama would have been better off focusing on educating the American people. His problem is being over-educated. He doesn't realise how dim-witted and ignorant his audience is. Benjamin Franklin said that the system would fail because of the corruption of the people and that happened under Bush."

Well, those ignorant Americans are being fed another media dose of WMD. This time the deception is Iran.

Behind the Bush Brain

The truth about the Bush administration ... From Mr Fish at Truthdig.com. Cheney and Bush get the real cartoon treatment by the amazing Mr Fish:

I would guess that what's at issue is Dick's disappointment with George W's move toward independence from the former vice-president during their second term in the White House.

Weltanschaung

Among my summer reads was Jonathan Littell's intimidating novel The Kindly Ones (Les Bienveillantes, the Well-Meaning, in translation by Charlotte Mandell). Even at 984 pages, it was well worth the time, although most of that was at bedtime with a night light, a propped-up pillow, a Chihuahua under the covers beside me, and an interfering cat on my chest. It's a wonder I didn't have nightmares, given the subject matter of Littell's novel. Well, maybe not so much the subject matter, but rather the steady spectacle of shootings, gassings, beatings, rapes, bombings, bodily fluids,¹ homosexual dalliances, much wine and cognac drinking, and beautiful Aryan women whose names begin with the letter "H."

The narcissistic memoir is certainly violent and turbulent, but it is moved forward by a steady undercurrent of rationalism and belief in the Nazi Weltanschauung. This isn't to say that there aren't some strange surprises, such as an amazing nose-biting scene in the last chapter, but such events only add to this clever treatment of an ugly period of modern history. In the eyes of Dr Maximilien Aue, legal scholar and SS officer, his Führer leads by precisely expressing the spirit of the the German people, the Volk, and fulfilling the goals of the Weltanschauung. We know how it ends, but the novel goes a long way to helping us understand just how it is that Aue can declare: "I live, I do what can be done, it's the same for everyone, I am a man like other men, I am a man like you. I tell you I am just like you!"

1. As for the bodily fluids, I can't wait for someone else to point out how the protagonist's behavior at his twin sister's house closely resembles a disturbing performance-art display by the Viennese Actionist Günter Brus in 1968, which led to his arrest and imprisonment. See the 2006 art show Primal Secretions: A Günter Brus Retrospective: "In his Aktionen after 1967, Brus pushed himself to further physical and mental extremes as he analyzed his own body and its functions, while colleagues such as Hermann Nitsch and Otto Muehl concentrated on the role of the body in the construction and analysis of psycho-dramas. Symbolism was generally dispensed with in the performances, as Brus publicly urinated, defecated and cut himself with a razor-blade, for example. The first of these Aktionen to be performed in public, Citizen Brus Looks at his Own Body, was performed in Aachen and Düsseldorf in 1968; in June of the same year his Art and Revolution, performed at Vienna University, led to his arrest and a six-month prison sentence for degrading the symbols of the State."

New Book Available

My new book, Twelve Stories from New Orleans (ISBN 9780982430200), is finally out and now available from the Florida micropublisher De Signis Press. It will take a few weeks before it shows up in the normal booksellers' outlets—although it's already available from Amazon.com and Barnes & Noble.

The book is small, only 106 pages, but it's funny as heck. Well, hey, I think so. Besides, several of the stories first appeared right here.

A Queen Palm Blooms

I was out on the bike again today and I just couldn't resist this, especially since you don't witness it very often (well, maybe not often enough) and only in a climate like Florida's. This is a bloom of the Cocos Plumosa. First it's encased in a long shell and then—bloom.

I also took this photo with my Helio Drift cellphone and its 2-megapixel camera and then resized and optimized it with Xatio Image Optimizer v5.1.