Crisis 2: Are My Hands Too Soft For Real Work? (Part 2; Six Crises, Memoirs of a Membership Coordinator)

After I'd begun working at the station for a while, after my first Radiothon (which began 8 days after my first day at work, 9/11/98), and after I'd finished entering pledge forms from the Radiothon into the incredibly disorganized and inaccurate Membership Database, and after I'd apologized to everyone for taking so long to enter the pledge forms into the database...

And after I'd begun to realize that the little cards stapled to the pledge forms that I'd ignored were meant for me to look at, and read, and listed the thank-you gifts that the donors had pledged for, and were expecting in their mailbox, and after I'd apologized to the donors for not getting those gifts, and asked them to swing by and I'd give them the t-shirt in person, and after they'd swung by the station and shook everyone's hand and I'd taken them back to the premium closet and showed them the KRCL t-shirt and they'd taken a good long look and asked me what else there was and I showed them the horribly tacky little clocks on CDs and they'd smile gently and leave...

And after all that I began to notice at the staff meetings that while I was doodling in my yellow legal pad and listening to Betty (name changed) and Linda (name changed) fight that every once in a while against my will I would hear about actual station business, something about a Capital Campaign that I thought had something to do with state politics and another thing about a "new station" somewhere that Lewis and Felix were building, and Stan (name changed) would mention to Bart (name changed) that he'd dropped by the New Station and talked about blah blah and wiring to Lewis and something something more about the wiring...

And Lewis the Engineer would sometimes come to the staff meetings and talk authoritatively about the work on the new station, and look around disparagingly at the staff and shake his head sadly, and I gathered from Bart the GM that Lewis did this because he and Felix were performing a lot of constructing and wiring the new station type-work pro bono, or free, as they say, and that the pansy office staff didn't seem too interested in coming out and pitching in because maybe they were worried that they might hurt their baby-soft lily-white itsy-bitsy widdow hands or something to that general frigging effect, and looking down his engineer glasses at the miserable specimens around him at the staff meetings with something to that effect behind his poker face and baleful, practical, what-the-hell-do-you-office-people-do-all-day-anyway looks he kept giving us that I was missing while I drew funny pictures of Lewis as an otter with glasses and Bart as a walrus with nicotine patches on his flippers and Linda as a barky little pug with bug-eyes snarling at Betty as a mean alley-cat who kept licking her claws and pretending to ignore the little dog while she sat there as close enough to the little dog's food dish as it is possible to do without driving a little dog completely out of its tiny little mind.

So when I heard that maybe the office staff was expected to come out do their part with the wires and hammers I got a roiling knot in my stomach, which is the seat of my soul and barometer of my innermost feelings, and would do mental exercises to calm and focus all my energies on the doodles, but I knew that eventually I would be expected to wield a hammer and prayed that it would be nothing too technical or handyman type stuff, and I could smack a few walls with it and get out.

And then one day Betty said at a meeting "Have you seen the new place?" and I eventually gathered that she meant me or Cheri (name changed), or me and Cheri, the administrative assistant who came in for 20 hours a week or so and typed pledge forms and answered the phone and mailed out t-shirts to donors so I wouldn't have to and could focus on the bigger membership picture like wondering if she was single or if the woman at the burger shop up the street was single, or if her mother who owned burger shop up the street would have forgotten about the bounced checks by now...
So I eventually gathered that Betty was talking to me and they all agreed that Cheri and I should see the new station which I eventually gathered was not the real "new station" but was only the temporary new station because the real new station had not yet been purchased by the Capital Campaign.
And so we did, and so we went one day out to the temporary new station located in the same building as a self-storage facility that serviced the men of the homeless shelter next door and that they occasionally used as a party pad for individual parties in their own 5 x 5 storage units that contained everything they owned including maybe some party liquid to imbibe alone in the 5 x 5 party unit which they would sometimes pass out in.

It looked like crap, and it was grimy and I wished I'd drawn it because some things you can't describe and the portion of the building that KRCL would use was all along one hallway about 500 feet long and 10 feet wide and could not possibly have passed fire code. When we got there Lewis handed us gloves and I didn't get a hammer but Lewis did enjoy taking me up to the roof that you reached by a ladder over a stairwell and if you didn't fear heights like I do you'd have been only mildly queasy climbing it.

We hauled garbage or something for a few hours and Lewis let us go after establishing to himself that we would really be of no practical help whatsoever since we didn't understand wiring except for Stan anyway and what else where we going to do there? But we did get to go down into the basement of the storage place which is one of the creepiest places in the city with a low ceiling and crumbling brick walls and storage places like little rooms and there are little creepy objects here and there like pieces of dolls that say "Eee eee eee" to you silently in your mind and other garbage and long passageways but I never drew that either but it's okay because I still sometimes have nightmares about it as a memory tool.

Crisis Resolved:
We moved into the new station and I ended up helping Stan "soundproof" the new on-air studio!! Which was an honor because somewhere in the middle of my first radiothon when I'd work from 11 am to late in the morning and spend most of the night hours talking to the volunteer nighttime DJs I began to love them and their music and I fell in love with the station like a dizzy schoolgirl and wrote my name "Andrew KRCL" like we were married in my notebook by the animal pictures and pictures of Linda eating excretions...

So I felt honored to drag fiberglass insulation, which is miserable material to work with because it leaves un-biological fibers all over your skin that slowly work inside and poison your system forever and never degrade and are immortal while you die all around them, to drag that poisonous stuff up ladders and into the ceiling space above the tiles with Stan and we worked and sweated for hours and hours in that miserable room, which was far far bigger than any other on-air radio studio I've ever seen for no reason at all, and we finished with the insulation and got down off our ladders and Stan momentously closed the door and said; "Let's see how it sounds" and you couldn't hear a needle drop between the two of us as we listened to the silence of Perfect Soundproofing for exactly 1.5 seconds before we heard crystal clear like he was hack-coughing between us the sound of Bart clearing his tobacco-clogged lungs and throat about 500 yards away up the long hallway in his office at the front of the building and Stan shrugged and said "It'll be fine."

Crisis 1: Hating My Boss after 1st Day (From Six Crises; Memoirs of a Membership Coordinator)

KRCL, DAY ONE:

My new boss Linda (name changed), the station's development director, took me to lunch on my first day and told me, confidentially, just between the two of us, that my predecessor had been really terrible to her and she'd been ready to fire her...She assured me that she was perfectly willing to fire someone if she had to. I think she felt she had to tell me that because my friend was the chair of the board of directors and I might feel untouchable and have an attitude...

But I really was untouchable and I knew it and had gotten the job in the first place because my friend was the chair of the board of directors and I knew this and I knew she knew this and I didn't take her at all seriously, but since I was also friends with my predecessor I felt grossly insulted by her remarks and disliked her intensely from that moment on and had a terrible attitude about any work she gave me, which after a while was not very much.

And the actual job consisted of mostly grappling with a miserably unpleasant DOS program called Memsys (that I eventually grew to love and admire after years of dating) and giving donors who walked into the station their t-shirts and weird thank-you gifts and of answering the phone, mostly incredibly easy tasks which I routinely failed to perform well if at all, and I spent most of my time avoiding Linda, and ignoring the phone, and talking to the volunteer DJs while they performed their 3 hour on-air shifts.

Crisis Resolved:

After only a few weeks at the station I realized that almost everyone associated with the station hated my boss Linda even more than I did, she was universally loathed as a miserably unpleasant, controlling, and half-witted toad, and had even had people hurl cups of coffee into her office and scream at her in public meetings. She'd kept her job by smoking with Bart (name changed), the General Manager at the time, and by viciously fighting with Betty (name changed) at staff meetings so Bart wouldn't have to. Toward the end of her tenure, Linda had become so powerless that I remember telling her I had done nothing to prepare an ill-considered mailing that she'd asked me to prepare, and I remember telling her this with I am now ashamed to say an inordinate amount of glee. Linda left when Betty was made GM. Weeks after she'd left, Betty went to me and as a final turn of the screw asked me to call Linda up and tell her she owed the station money for some questionable purchases she'd made on account the previous month.

New Years sklog; recent lapses & failures

Fairly pleased with 2008 New Years sklog; a kind of symbolic survey of the state of my life and mind; probably the major opus of my art career. Und so...

On a less positive note, 2007 was a fairly degenerate year for movies and books, and the polar ice cap continued to recede.

Also, I myself wallowed in failure - again - and allowed my current fantastic novel project to wither and die through neglect - again - something for which I'm not proud and will probably try to forget about by denying it loudly at parties and family socials until I've even started to believe it myself because I'm afraid that if I argue with myself and try to bring it up that my self will start talking really loud in the middle of the party and behave like an ass with the hostess and drop chip parts in the guac and dribble on his shirt and break the toilet and it's better to just keep pretending that everything is fine even though I've had it and I just can't stand it anymore.

I've also not really been keeping up with the sklog, which is really supposed to be weekly, but I haven't exactly been wasting my time because I've reached four hat level in my crossword book and how likely is it that anyone besides my mother or my wife will notice if a sklog stays on the page for longer than a week?

Latest sklog and graphic novellette progress report

5,685 words and counting! In the midst of the production of which I made some creative control decisions and went through some sleepless nights and decided to make the novel a graphic novellette. It seemed more realistic after I took a look at the novel's content in terms of quantity (averaging a shade over 189 words a day) and in terms of quality (five disparate plots, innumerable changes in tone and genre, and a change in narrator from first-person to third-person, back to first, then back to third-person again, basically a literary triple play and we're still not out of the first chapter) and I've decided that my text could use some bolstering from visual aids. And I hate describing things to people. And I hate reading other people's descriptions of things. Hence the graphic - and I don't like over-long books - hence the novellette.

Of course that means I'll have to practice comic forms. This week's sklog is my first attempt at incorporating text boxes, word balloons, and thought bubbles into the visual arts medium. Text boxes are fantastic because they're cheating on the purity of the visual narration, just as the visual narration is cheating on the purity of the verbal narration, and everyone's cheating on each other and nobody minds because it's a party and let's invite the word balloons and the thought bubbles too because they're both totally groovy and they understand and everyone can just crash on the couch or the floor. Happy Holidays!

Stunning progress on the Novel

I've decided that to justify the expense of maintaining this state of the art blog for my mother and a couple of other readers I should probably use it for something besides its primary function as extra explanatory text for the Hagenart sklog.
So I've decided to start posting self-congratulatory notes to myself whenever I find time to work on My Novel, the noble and majestic tome the conception and creation of which has consumed the better part of my life and which after numerous re-writes and deletions and inevitable memory losses contained before tonight just over 2400 words.
But I toiled over it like a machine today, stretching it out to just over 4100 words in one day (pant pant, gag, retch, spit, blink uncomprehendingly at appalled onlookers)!
About 1800 of those words, written on previous occasions under the influence of far less inspiration than tonight, will have to be deleted, but oh the survivors are looking perky and well indeed! Vibrant and healthy and fit, the words I'll have left after the necessary extinctions will be the Times New Roman version of phytoplankton, ready to teem!
On a slightly negative note: I may have to find a new writing spot. Keep getting bugged while I try to write.

Rome LIves!

The hagenart sklog for 11/11/07, which happens to be Veteran's Day, which I celebrated by reading excerpts from a book about World War II, but did not employ any veteran's themes in the sklog, which I drew while we waited outside the Borghese Museum to go in and view the Bernini sculptures which my uncle had so fervently recommended to me as being superior to anything by Michelangelo.

Well, I couldn't honestly tell who was better than who. The Michelangelo's and the Bernini's and the Donatello's were all amazingly detailed and lifelike, but by the time we went home I'd seen so many other statues that I could hardly bear to look at them. They had halls and halls of them in every museum over there, and after a while they kind of blurred together, good and bad.

I think the statues were like billboards in ancient rome, that they put them up everywhere and most of them were garbage by hacks and people going home from the market or the forum would look at them and sigh and say; "Another goddamn statue - why do they have to do that?" and shake their fists at them and try to get the senate to pass laws against them and the senators all agreed, it was a damn shame, all those statues cluttering the city, you couldn't even see the sky or the trees anymore, and they shook their heads but the head of the sculptors union was a sleaze ball businessman who shook his head and told the senators that the statues were actually helping the city by encouraging citizens to win wars or do well in business to get their own statue made, and disarmed opponents by thoughtfully sketching their heads and telling them how excellent their image would look in marble, overlooking the Via Sacra, and when all else failed asking senators if they wanted to see a small sculpture he was particularly proud of, a little two-dimensional profile of ceasar, and why yes, it was sculptured in gold, and yes, it was in fact a dinari, and yes, he did have a large chest full of such sculptures available - why, senator, are you a supporter of the arts?

I'm actually quite fond of statues, especially big ones, but Italy gave me my fill.

Italian Epilogue: Pompei Scavi

As kind of a postscript to the Italy trip, I thought maybe I'd describe my inner thoughts as I wandered the streets of ancient Pompei, give my ruminations some illumination, you might say...Isn't that some nice writing?: "give my ruminations some illumination"...Just say that out loud...I'll try and think up some other rhymes as we go along. Anyway, gazing upon the 2,000 year old wagon ruts in the cobblestone streets of Pompei Scavi (which means "The Pompei Excavations" in Italian) it occurred to me to wonder what our cities will look like 2,000 years hence, will our buildings survive? Probably not the buildings of Salt Lake, they're all very cheaply made, except for maybe the City Library, and the Temple of course, and the Giant Parking Garage under the gateway...but the all the rest would be rubble, ruins, a few bare walls, and would be greatly improved by the conversion, and people might look at them and let their imaginations run wild, so wild they might think something pretty or somewhat bearable stood there, once.

As we hurried through Pompei Scavi, fleeing the huge German tour groups with their bull-horn-voiced guides, I thought somewhat wistfully of Salt Lake's future prospects as a historical disaster site; we have no volcano, but the lake could rise, perhaps precipitously, and preserve our city in salt water (does that work?) and tourists would one day wander our streets as we wandered Pompei - well, maybe they'd snorkel our ancient streets, or use scuba gear, and think we were very quaint and magically tragic (bam! brilliant writing again - it reads like music!) and mysterious and ill-fated and get goose-bumps when they gazed up on our aged and corroded basement junk that we never threw away because we knew how interesting the piles of it would look in 2,000 years.

Somewhere along in these ruminations I had the fantastic notion that in this entry there would be some kind of a verbal zoom out, out to a view of the Earth from outer space, and my voice, deep and powerful like the guides of Pompei Scavi; describing the possibility of humanity's future demise, complete erosion and dissolution of even our greatest monuments, nothing but a layer of polluted carbon in the strata of the earth's history, but zooming out and out again dramatically, to humanity's final, most indestructible, most vast and stupendous and truly embarrassing monument, the TV transmissions we've been emitting for 50 years or so, and with that to end the entry on a powerfully ironic note...

- but I can't do that because they've already used that idea in a couple movies, Galaxy Quest, and this 90s movie about little kids in a homemade spaceship who meet TV-quoting aliens. These movies, of course, are also now being transmitted out into space, to whatever alien intelligences are really out there. We can only hope they understand!