Are you sure?

I've worked within the bureaucracy of a municipal government agency for many more years than I'd like to admit, and even more than I ever intended. Early on, my job was kind of fun. I spent a few years getting to know the details of an operation that provides an actual service, and the sometimes colorful characters who provide these services "in the field".

Eventually, I got pretty good at my job and was promoted up the administrative tree. The further up the tree I went, the more I became something of a bridge between between the field, and the bureacracy that "supports" it. This, too, was interesting for a while, but it eventually had a corrosive effect on my soul.

Yes, it's true. It turns out that bureaucracies are indeed full of lazy, spitelful, CYA-obssessed, and above all incompetent, well, bureaucrats. Bureaucrats, it turns out, are not frustrated idealists just waiting for someone out of a Frank Capra movie to inspire them to process forms quickly and simplify their procedures. And did I mention that they are often incompetent? More so than you ever dreamed? Well, they are.

This is where the soul-deadening part comes in. I've become so accustomed to the first answer or explanation (and usually, the second or third ...) someone gives me being false, quickly rendered in order to get rid of me, and completely contradicting any facts brought to bear on a conversation, that I can no longer simply accept what someone outside of work tells me. I assume that any answer to a question is some combination of deceptive, ill considered, and wrong. I cross examine every interlocuter with a series of "are you sures?"s and "perhaps you really mean?"s, and "consider the exact opposite of what you just said and imagine for a moment that that were true instead"s. This sort of thing may have served Socrates, well, but in the modern world, it just gets you branded a pain in the ass, and doesn't get you any closer to figuring out why they're threatening to cut off your cable service.

Recently, I have had something of a reawakening to the possibility of competence. A little over a year ago, my son Alexander was born. A prenatal ultrasound had revealed that he had a clubfoot, but we had been reassured that our son would not turn into Richard III and that the clubfoot could be treated non-surgically with a near certain prognosis of correction and normal function. Still the clubfoot was on our minds, and after he was born, it was evident.

The morning after he was born, it became apparent that something more serious than the clubfoot was wrong. The first time he tried to breastfeed, he choked and turned bright blue. Alex was quickly moved from the hospital nursery to the neonatal intensive care unit (NICU), where he underwent a series tests.

It turned out he had a congenital abnormality of the digestive system and trachea called an esophageal atresia and tracheo esophageal fistula (EATEF) as well a minor spine and kidney problem. These problems taken together are a syndrome called "VACTERL" The EATEF part of the deal was "incomptible with life" but completely correctable with surgery.

To make a long story short, the surgery was successful, and Alex came home from the NICU five weeks after he was born. Over the following year, he has grown rapidly and turned into a very cute, active, bright child. There have been a number of complications and scares along the way, and he still requires close follow-up by an army of specialists, but to all outward appearances he is completely healthy and thriving. Obviously, he's also the best looking and smartest baby born in New York in the last several decades, but that goes without saying.

Along the way, I have probed every doctor as I would an accounts payable clerk in the agency where I work. Instead of sullenness, obfuscation, and failure to act, I have been greeted with clarity, compassion, accurate diagnoses, and optimistic prognoses that have all worked out they way the medical professionals said they would. I have met doctors who return calls at any time of day or night, patiently answer every question, laugh at my inappropriate jokes, and most importantly, treat Alex carefully and compassionately.

For all the good this has done Alex, it has also taught me to once again to value the opinions and abilities of other people. So these fine people have given me two gifts -- a wonderful, thriving son (who before the middle of the 20th century could not have survived), and they reanimation of a small piece of my own soul. I still yell at accounts payables clerks, but every once in a while, I allow myself to expect a co-worker to do something right the first time. They haven't lived up to that expectation yet, but I have hope.

Pickin' and Grinnin'

For much of my life, I've spent as much as several hours a day playing guitar. Sometimes this has been serious "practicing", other times more like random noodling. My focus has usually been on electric guitar, but lately it has shifted more toward acoustic. Part of the motivation for this has been a search for songs I can play and sing for my young son, Alex. I no longer have time for more than a few minutes of guitar at a time (1 year olds demand a lot of attention. Who'd a thunk it?). So entertaining him with a bit of picking kills two birds with one stone.

Alex seems to like songs with a bit of a beat, and a happy major-ish kind of sound. He also likes to crawl up to the guitar while I'm playing, start swatting at the fretboard, and use the neck as a chinning bar. This all kind of makes open tunings work a bit better than standard tuning. I can take my fingers off the strings, pry him off the neck, and let him bat at the fretboard, and the results will be a little closer to music than it would be otherwise.

I've never been much of an open tuning player, though. I've occasionally played a bit of slide blues guitar, and done the Keith Richards thing, but rarely gotten too far figuring out chords and plucked phrases, a la the great fingerpickers. To address this deficit, I dug up a Blind Blake CD and started figuring out one of my old favorites, "Police Dog Blues", which Blind Blake plays in an open E tuning (or maybe D capoed up a whole step). This has got a strong ragtime beat, a gentle sounding vocal melody, and lots of cool licks that aren't too hard to figure out. It also has two of my all time favorite blues couplets. Singing about the dog who guards the house of a girl he's fallen for:

I'm scared to bother 'round her house at night
I'm scared to bother 'round her house at night
She's got a police dog craving for a bite

His name is rambling, and when he gets a chance
His name is rambling, and when he gets a chance
He leaves his mark on everybody's pants.

I love the way he sets up the expectation (by naming the dog "Rambling") that the dog will do one thing (like maybe ramble around the neighborhood), and winds up doing something totally different. Alex seems to like it, too. When he's getting all fussy and upset about going to bed, singing "Police Dog Blues" usually stops the screaming.

No if I could only get him to sit still for my solo arrangement of "Giant Steps" ...

What Happened to "X"

OK, here's my first real post, and it's a doozy ...

I grew up in a high rise middle-income housing complex in Greenwich Village in the 60s and 70s. My family was part of the first wave of tenants who moved in as the building was completed. Many of these other tenants were also families with young children. The building was one of those classic NYC housing deals that don't exist anymore -- really nice, really cheap apartments, that no one ever moves out of.

As a result, most of the kids who moved in together wound up growing up together, attending the same schools, playing together after school, and, as we grew older, doing the things that teenagers do together. Of course we didn't all hang out together in one crowd, and we all had friendships away from the building, but there were fairly stable subsets of kids in the same grades who made the trip from infancy to adolescence together. My main partner in crime in the building for most of my childhood was a boy I'll call "X".

X and I knew each other even before we moved into the building. We played together as babies in the playgrounds of Washington Square Park. We went to the same junior and high schools. For several summers, our families stayed in beach houses near each other. It wasn't as intimate or deep a friendship as some I've had, but we were close and spent an awful lot of time together until about age 16. After that, we drifted into different circles of high school friends, and after we graduated, we went our separate ways. Over the 25 years since I graduated from high school, I've seen X only a handful of times, but it's always been friendly, and he has always been one of those people I think of trying to track down and catch up with.

Fast forward many years later and I hear a bit of building gossip from my mother, where X's parents still live, too. It seems X was arrested in an FBI sting for attempting to solicit a 13 year old girl (actually an FBI agent) for sex over the internet. He's under house arrest pending trial. He's not allowed to see his child, and is looking at a minimum five-year sentence if convicted. I google his name, and because X has spent much of his career as an entertainment and gossip journalist, the details are easy to find, and pretty lurid.

I get in touch with another building alumnus ("Z" who remained close with X long after I did) , who fills in some more of the background. X had had a drug problem, and had gone through a messy divorce, but there had never been a hint of anything like this before. Z says X had been getting his personal and professional lives together after hitting bottom and seemed to be doing well.

So what the heck happened? X was a fairly ordinary kid. Bright, though not particularly intellectual or academically dedicated. Good at sports, though not really a jock. Funny and gregarious, though not charismatic. A bit of a prankster, and a wiseass, but overall, he was a good kid. We grew up with some kids who got into some very ugly stuff, but he definitely was not one of them.

His growing up to become a gossip columnist surprised no one who knew him, but a pedophile? Was it drugs? Lonely late night hours on the internet robbing him of inhibition and judgment? A bizarre spasm of middle age? Or was this always something inside him? A ticking time bomb set up by something in childhood? I've gone over every memory I've got of him and his family, but I have absolutely no insight into this. "You think you know someone." A cliche, but in this case, the truest one I've ever met.