MIXBAG OF MUSINGS

I had an old friend over for dinner last night. We've known each other for many years. Grew up together. It was another place and another time, and I certainly never thought we'd end up so closely linked in this far away land after all these years. Now the funny thing is that our situations are very similar. Not our personal lives - I've opted for a family, house and pets, while he's doing the bachelor thing with a cool car, condo by the beach, and no attachments - but our professional lives. Though our fields of expertise differ and the work we do is of a dissimilar nature, we both find ourselves having the owner of the company himself as our boss. This type of situation is not to be compared to that of much smaller business enterprises, such as a small corner grocery store, where it's basically the owner, his wife and a hired clerk. No, though the two companies I speak of clearly belong in the realm of "small business," they each employ somewhere aroun...

The entrance to hell lay beyond a short white picket fence, through a broken gate that was barely hanging on a single hinge. It wasn't the type of fence you envision in your 'American Dream' landscapes. It was a rickety, old, cheap looking and splintered, nasty set of paint chipped boards that were loosely arrayed together in a crooked line. They divided the dirt sidewalk that almost seamlessly joined the street from a front yard that was splattered with color. There were odd things laying about, randomly calling to your attention or begging you to look away. Broken toys and rusted car parts...a broken window frame...blue plastic tarps, stuffed behind a leafless bush...a baby stroller with a tire rim inside. A small potted plant stood in the pathway to the front door, but the plant had withered away to a twig. There was no grass. Whatever ground you could see was dirt, layered with trash and the droppings left about by the house bitch's latest litter. The smell permeat...

It was a crappy job, but still...it got me through nearly four years of college. Playing rent-a-cop at an abandoned brewery in L.A. Yet I let it go just to keep my long hair. It wasn't really the long hair that mattered so much (or so I told myself), it was "the principle of the thing." I didn't believe anybody should be able to control me to such a point that they could tell me I needed a haircut whenever they felt like it, regardless of my job performance or my overall personal grooming, or how it affected my work related tasks. I'd already spent three years in the Army being told what I could or couldn't do. When I got out I promised myself I'd never be pushed into a position like that again. So, I quit. As it was, I'd been suspended without pay until I gave in, so I wasn't getting anywhere. Besides, quitting seemed to give me the moral upperhand somehow. Now I found myself wihout any source of income, no immediate family within 5000 miles, a...