The Spider in My Head

I've been trying to write all day. Two starts on what could become two posts are now filed away. Now I'm here at the computer and we'll see who wins. Win? Well, this debate has been going on in my head all day about something I felt passionate enough about to write about. I thought this was going to be about Julie, or it could be what it looks like being in my head. The second has lots of possibilities. But I will not know who is going to win for perhaps another hour. I'll just sit here writing and one of the stories will pop out nearly grown. No penalty for losing first place for publication. They'll keep coming out until they don't. I will go back and edit this beginning so it doesn't clash. The continuity thing. I'll invent stuff to tie the start and middle closer together.

Question: Is it better to stop and correct the finger mistakes at the time or roar along and catch them later? Answer: It depends. I usually correct things pretty quickly, which gives me an opportunity to take anything really clashing that's not supposed to be there, well, out. The truly obvious. On the other times, sometimes when I'm really typing so much slower than I'm thinking, I rush ahead, chase the idea to it's roots, typo's flying left and right. Then I go back and weed through the section again, correcting the finger fuckups, that's what they are 'cause I'm a very good speller. Sometime later, when one of the ideas has dominated, I'll start editing. Cutting and adding sections. Putting in the stuff I thought about later. Stuff that belongs here. Because this is the story. This is the story of what goes on in my head. Well, one of the ways it can be when I'm writing.

Stuff pops out and I write about it. But it's stuff that's been in there a long time. This is worked-on stuff. And sometimes not. Some of it just gets made up in the moment, improvisation with the words themselves. I don't mean "worked on" like the sentences just fly out word for word. But it feels like the pot is consistent enough to stand unaided. Well, deep enough. Deep enough to write out a non-trivial idea.

Anyway, this is a characteristic behavior pattern. My first answer is rarely the best. I do not talk precisely enough to satisfy some people, this is a huge clue. The depth of the ideas, like yours I'm sure, get better after a while. Usually I'll tell you that I've thought more about whatever.

Oh, now maybe this is the root idea. No, I mean the next one. I've noticed that it takes about a year to decide if someone is going to really work out in a new job. We're all on the same scale, but it's a scale in n dimensions. There are no tens, as Ken Cleveland used to say to me. (Yes, the Bo Derek movie.) Everyone has flaws, blind spots,

You do the best you can up front in hiring, but some people don't make it for reasons you were not aware of. I did an even worse thing, I hired a guy who failed a question when I interviewed him. Well, I didn't veto the hiring as I should have. It was a really fundamental technical question in our mutual area of expertise. He bullshitted me. I knew it Turns out the question was directly related to why he didn't get through his first crisis. He froze up. I thought, shit, a guy with a photographic memory. Someone who has moved along remembering all the rules but never learned to think things through. Probably he's learned how to think things through a long time ago and learned well. But he didn't have it then and I had spotted that during the initial interview and took no action. I figured it was an outlier, but even at the time it bothered me. He seemed really smart - knew a lot of stuff. He seemed to know how to think.

So one of the things you do in that first year is to get to see obvious holes in ability or skills that were not apparent earlier. A good manager looks hard for the holes and skills in everyone. If someone appears perfect to you, you have missed something so keep looking. Knowing people have weaknesses is one of life's lessons. Some people can hide for a long time, but usually you see it in the first year or much rarely after that. There is nothing wrong with having a part of you that does not work quite as well as others. You specialize in some things. You are really good at some things, and you pretty much suck at some things. But a good team or a good manager will make sure you work with someone good at that stuff. You hire towards your weak side. You hire complements, not supplements. You already here. Hire someone smarter that you. Strangely, it's a pretty rare risk for your own career. You did good by spotting the talent. We're all doing better because you recognized a weakness and compensated for it. So that's the whole thing with hiring. Get the best damn person you can find after a reasonable search or trial run.

I've hired people I knew weren't quite good enough. Got really burned in reputation for a while early on. Of course, hiring is such an inexact art and everyone will fail eventually. No one always hires or marries the right person. You get caught in new places. Good people appear solid or solid is the illusion.

So I had this BRILLIANT idea of writing about the weakness stuff, MY OWN STUFF, I'm working on. You will not be happy until you learn it anyway. So I might as well save us a lot of time and get it out there. Here is where I'm not happy with me in a business sense. Everyone is crazy at some level, but you probably will not encounter that area at work. So do I have a confessional weakness too? Forty years in business says NO. I'm just getting smarter. More connections between neurons or whatnot. Imagine if you could get two ends of the resume scale for everyone? What I'm good at and where you'd better have my back. Wow, so much less stuff to work through when you work together. Could be one or two missing, and we can always invent new ways to screw up. Given the negative consequences, however, people would much rather do the correct thing. Once you know what it is, a weakness is not hard to spot. Your friends, family and co-workers figure out as much as they have to to work with you.

So, why not get your own weaknesses out there? What am I, whatever looks out of David Sheriff's eyes, what are my weaknesses? Last place I hired on I just sent an email to the guy that I work with listing a few physical issues I deal with, Now don't get scared, I'm not going to get all icky on you. I propose to do even better. Get it ALL out there. Where do you need to make sure someone backstops me?

This is such an eminently rational way to apply for a job, list your weaknesses. Well, we covered the answer thing earlier. Unless we are both pretty sure, wait before acting on something I say before I have thought much about it. I can readily identify where those places are. I can rank the quality of my ideas. When I come across a new area I don't know enough about, I will generally say so and qualify the opinion.

Then, and this is the initial image that got this whole piece started. The problem sinks back from the present. Like a ruminant's cud, the problem situation keeps coming up at random moments. Well, that's not actually how I thought of it. I thought about where the ideas went to get processed and Eureka! answers occur to me. And do all of the ideas get thought about at the same time or do they time share the processor? I decided they mostly just get all slopped around at the same time. Whatever process it is that constitutes thinking in the background goes all the time and in parallel, far as I can tell. I will intentionally revisit areas that don't feel right yet. Lots of stuff goes on in the background. When I'm asleep, whenever. I can tell things are interesting in my life because I stop listening to music in the car for long stretches.

My consciousness is like a spider picking it's way through my thoughts. I just notice what pops up ripe. Some stuff needs more time in the kettle, some stuff is urgent and you do the best you can. Ken Cleveland taught me to think about plan b and whatever. If things go to shit at least you have thought about it and you will do a better job handling things. That's your job, to explore several moves ahead if you can. Like chess in infinite dimensions. You don't sometimes get very far in the plan you need now, but it's better than getting cold-cocked.

Startups and Scrum

Success can be an entrepreneur's most formidable enemy. Almost every successful, growing startup hits the point where it outruns the founder's managerial capability. In the usual case, the founders sell out just as the first whiff of trouble floats by. Alternately, the founder brings in a strong executive and continues playing on the Board. A third case I have witnessed, the founder swaps out nearly his entire management team for players who can operate at the new level of business. This is both painful and tricky, but I have seen it work, helped make it work. Scrum offers another path if the founder wants to keep spearheading his growing company. Nothing wrong with taking the money and moving on, mind you. Scrum just presents a new solution set to this old problem.

My entire four-decade career has been in startup companies. I often joined, somewhat coincidently, around the time they were having real difficulty scaling management systems. During the last 20 years I usually hired on with a high tech company to help fix some broken function like sales, marketing, quality, products or engineering. I materially participated in two successful turnarounds of roughly $25 million corporations. Most of the rest were sold off without my assistance. This gave me a season pass to a long run of the entrepreneurial startup show. I was late for the real money, but there before the final curtain. So I've been thinking about this problem for a while. How would I do it now if I wanted to? Now that I know about Scrum.

Scrum teams, not just Scrum software teams, can be amazingly creative and productive. They are not free of overhead, but they can really pay off on their investment, which is mostly in human capital. In addition to setting a few boundaries and standards, you must pay close attention to fixing stuff they say is broken. You must help each team improve their process with enough specialized coaching and give them direction with good Product Owners. Scrum teams are self-organizing complex systems. If you stay out of their way, rather than try to control what they do, the teams will surface and solve the issues in their chartered area. They will even solve problems no one knew about. Think about it. Product innovation, engineering, marketing, manufacturing management; Scrum teams can be designed for any kind of knowledge work. Point them in the right direction and things just get handled. Senior staff runs like a Scrum team, collaborating to devour problems, create solutions and focus the Product Owner teams. There's a lot of trivia you will not have to deal with. If you get the organization to this point where does that leave you as head honcho?

Well, you get to be something like Chief Product Owner. Your team helps you formulate a good vision and you communicate that vision everywhere. It is the same message, tailored a bit for employee teams, customers or suppliers. “This is where we are going. We all focus in the same direction, on the same business targets.” You defend this odd, new organizational system from the ignorant. You model the values and principles. Your team scouts the horizon and figures out exactly where to go. You just point. You are the office of final alignment and instigator of diversity.

Come to think of it, that is a pretty good description of what an entrepreneur spends a lot of time doing naturally. Scrum gets the organization aligned with you, not fighting you. You are leading, not commanding. A number of management functions will have to be re-conceived. Your team can solve most of those problems, many in ways that never occurred to you. If you do not understand Scrum, none of this will make sense to you. This will sound hopelessly naïve and idealistic. That is just fine. Enough people who do understand Scrum will try this and you can watch in your well-deserved ease.

Natural Law and Scrum

Scrum organizes people in classical ways to solve complicated modern problems. Humans have prevailed on this planet because they can work together in small groups to feed and shelter their families under extremely difficult conditions. Working together generates unexpected, useful solutions. Most of us no longer live and work in such collaborative groups. We don't have to. We forget, as a species, how we got to “now.” Current civilization is just fact, few of us question how it happened to be this way. "Natural Law" is a fairly disreputable concept in the sciences, but seems to fit in this context.

Scrum brings the small collaborative group into a modern context. We face complex problems at work that resist resolution given our quaint ideas about how work is naturally organized. Modern managers order employees around like so many tribal functionaries: build bricks, train warriors, distribute food, allocate irrigation water, collect temple offerings or levy tribute. This mode of business operation assumes most jobs are simple and the whip will motivate the lazy or enslaved.

Scrum works the really old fashioned way with a few defensive practices to keep enemies at bay. Scrum provides a structure that teaches and reinforces the classic values that humans employ to collaborate successfully. These are the identical values early men and women developed to collaborate because the survival of their kinfolk depended on it. All are necessary. You may not leave anything out. You will all know what I mean when I list the values. We, too, are people and we carry those instinctive ways of working within us. These core Scrum values are quite simple, but industrial management may consider one or more to be silly and naïve. This can put Scrum culture and "normal business culture" in conflict. That conflict is the source of resistance to Scrum. It is the reason many Scrum implementations fail to live up to expectations.

The Scrum (and small team) values are: Openness (aka honesty, transparency); Respect for others (meaning people) and their ideas; Commitment, accepting responsibility and then doing what we say we will; mutual Focus on achieving common goals. Finally Courage, that well-honed risk management tool that tilts a little toward sacrifice. If you are not going to be trampled by the Mastodon, you'd better have the courage to kill it. Even if you die in the attempt, your family will probably eat. That is where the behavioral parallel begins to break down. In life and death situations, your genes are very interested in the outcome, so to speak, and express their own values. We leave the elucidation and implementation of those values to others.

Cynicism, inertia and the trappings of power should not be underestimated. If we accept a paradigm of powerlessness, we can devalue or deny our most useful behavioral wiring. This is powerful stuff and we are conditioned to control it tightly. Mass rage is powerful. The utility of mass rage does not mean we are to pillage and burn. We are unlikely to align our interests perfectly with powerful instincts in the best cases. So we apply the classic principle of empiricism, inspect and adapt. We don't have to re-invent the method, just notice with discernment and act accordingly.

The small collaborative team pattern is neutral on a good-and-evil scale. You could run a criminal enterprise under the Scrum framework. How many examples of the good and the perverse utility of small teams can you think of? Many of us are wired to work collaboratively as surely as we find comfort gazing into a campfire or a television screen. Scrum is not the solution to every problem. If your group is lost and has a guide who knows the way, better to follow the guide than ramp up Scrum. Do only what makes sense.

“Scrum” was developed and first proved successful for managing software development. The best implementations of industrial theories were disasters managing software workers. Managers failed to realize they were dealing with something new: groups of knowledge workers, legions of software developers. When knowledge work was an individual game, say writing books, professional management ignored it. But now they were dealing with problems so complicated that it was impossible to think through the solution, write up a comprehensive plan and just turn the crank to produce whatever flavor sausage.

Complex problems throw off a continuous stream of questions and new ideas as you work them. You must continually incorporate new information and ideas into the emerging solution. The more carefully you plan up front and more rigorously you stick to the plan, the worse the outcome. Anyone who understands why centrally planned economies collapsed in the late 20^th century should get this and vice versa. Even the near future can unfold with almost infinite possibility.

Actually, the problem is even worse. Any process you can imagine for solving complex problems will become dysfunctional over time. The process itself must adapt to local conditions and the changing nature of the problems it solves. This was no problem for our hypothetical prehistoric team. They were not hung up on process. They looked at what worked and did more of that; noticed what foods made them sick and quit eating them.

So Scrum is less a method or process than a mindset which propels an adaptable framework. Scrum principles and values change the way individuals think and interact with one another at work. Scrum teams self-organize to do the work. They deliver a bit of the finished product regularly so anyone concerned can see if it's as useful as they expected and suggest improvements. The team works in regular cycles, called “Sprints” At the end of each Sprint, they meet to discuss their process. What worked? What made us feel sick? They decide how to modify the process so it might work a little better in the next sprint. Notice that the people who actually do the work decide how to adapt the process, not their managers trying to figure out what really happened and factoring their own bias in.

This illustrates a curious and central bit in Scrum. The Team have to work their way out of their own problems. They have to get collaboratively creative to eliminate some common irritation. They can ask for help. But if they can do the project work, which is challenging and creative, they are smart enough to fix their process itches. If you help them too quickly, the never learn how good they can be.

Sprints repeat in whatever seems like an appropriate cycle. They tend to range from two to four weeks. After a short time, the process develops a rhythm or cadence. If new work is demonstrated every other Thursday, it's easy to make that a recurring item on the VP's calendar. Other structural rhythms are built into Scrum, like the festival seasons of the year. We plan at the Vernal Equinox and take stock at the Autumnal Equinox. The festivals and holy days remind us to do all the necessary things in the right order.

Two individuals playing different roles keep the team on the tracks. You want the team to be as outrageous as possible, but you'd like all that creativity channeled in the right direction. These two are the Product Owner and the ScrumMaster. I'm sure both are personifications of ancient gods, but I'll let you work out which ones.

A Product Owner makes sure the team has a vision of what they are bringing to life so they can all move the same direction. The PO is the single point of control for what gets built and what does not. The PO tends to win when the team is maximally productive.

The Product Owner keeps a list of all plausible product features and organizes it so the ones that should be done first actually get done first. Business judgment is required here, not just quantitative data. Remember that lies sometimes come with statistical reinforcement.

The ScrumMaster guards the process and the team. The ScrumMaster either teams with the PO or opposes her, depending on the issue. The ScrumMaster is responsible for group dynamics, for modeling and teaching the values and key practices. Above all else, the ScrumMaster keeps the inspect-adapt loop working well. Both the ScrumMaster and the PO find it in their interest to shield the team from outside interference. The relative contribution of each role to the result varies. Be careful not to skimp on either one. Future not predictable, right?

The new thing in Scrum, to the extent there is one, is the suspension of this selection of classical cycles, teams, principles, characters and holidays within the Scrum framework. The combination is encircling, reinforcing, conflicting and supporting. It all hangs together; it all works as a system. This is why neglecting some practice might make the values fade or fail to germinate at all. Scrum, it has been observed, is how we used to do things when our backs were up against the wall. More true than you might first suspect. Just once more: the values make Scrum work. More precisely, people imbued with the values do all that astounding work. The practices, principles, ceremonies and artifacts just manage space where humans can practice the values while working. It's just how nature works.

Dry Gardening Success Report

It is just a few weeks into the damp season here in Southern California. I'm happy to report that my garden came through the Summer without any watering. None. Zero gallons. No irrigation. No dragging around the hose. Almost every plant not only survived, but now looks the picture of health.

I came across Olivier Filippi's The Dry Gardening Handbook last winter. I have been planting an assortment of drought-tolerant greenery in my small yard for several years. Filippi gave me the courage to put the entire assortment to the test. Filippi is a plantsman in Mediterranean France. The Mediterranean climate is characterized by hot, completely dry summers and cooler winters with more or less rain. The length of the dry season varies across the Earth's Mediterranean climate zones, which include Southern California. We think of ourselves as England with better weather when driving through thousands of acres of trim suburban lawns and masses of tropical flowers. We maintain this illusion by importing huge amounts of fresh water, most of which is spread over a landscape we otherwise see as desert. But we are not in a desert. We just don't get much rainfall. What we do get is concentrated in short periods of days or weeks sprinkled from October to May.

Filippi maintains that much of the problem gardening in this climate is that we mistakenly water our gardens in the Summer even with drought-tolerant plantings. Well, how else would we keep the plants alive? Filippi maintains that plants which evolved in these climates exhibit many strategies for coping with Summer. They switch to conservation mode in the Summer and back to growing mode in the Winter. If we water them in the Summer, we trick the plants back into Winter mode. In one of a dozen perverse examples, we encourage plants to develop shallow root systems which dry out quickly in hot weather. When pushed into Winter mode during the Summer, plants frequently die from environmental stress even with frequent watering. They cannot operate in two modes at once. We literally water our Mediterranean gardens to death.

Last Summer I took the pledge. I put away the hoses, turned off what little irrigation remained. Whatever died would die. Faced with a dead spot, I vowed to plant something different in the fall. I am simply amazed at what actually happened. By late September most of the plants were still alive but clearly dessicated. The fat, shiny leaves on my jade plants were thin and dull. But they had not fallen off.

We have had a few moist days now during the last three weeks. Mostly this has not been "measurable precipitation" as they call it. Mostly rain at this time of year looks like fog that is just a little too dense to stay completely in the air. The street may look wet in the morning, but the gutters are empty and all will be dry well before noon. We are still getting a few hot days in a row in mid-October. And to my great amazement, the plants look great. Leaves full and plump, you would never guess they looked near death a month ago. I was prepared for the plants to react to the rain, but not this fast. They waste no time getting back into growing mode.

Last Summer was on the mild side here, climatically speaking. It was not quite as hot for quite as long, but the garden may not have fully adapted to my new, hands-off policy either. New plantings, Filippi observes, may need special care for the first year or two. I will take special care to leave the hose in it's dusty pile. I will not water in the Winter either. I will encourage my dry garden to put down deep roots, to adapt to the small amount of water we get in Winter. Next Summer the garden will be even more ready to survive my total neglect.

Beowulf and Population

Any predator / prey relationship can be stable until the predator starts using tools.

We humans are the only / known instance / of that class predator.

This post began / as a reaction / to a post below / on fisheries.
Then the population of words exploded until there was a whole page, then more beyond control. Population can do that.

The verse / surprises still. / I doubt that I / am channeling Beowulf. / It's very weird / and unexpected.

Cut and paste / time plus time / we have another essay / up and smiling.
Our words / unlike us born so easy / need never eat / or bleed.

Yes, many practices are sustainable when the human population level is low compared to the niche it occupies. Fishing, for example.

Low human population / environmental balance: / entrancing concepts.
On par with / the Noble Savage / of Rousseau.

Determining the instance / of every living creature / population change / the ratio birth to death.

Fish produce millions of spawn for a population at least two orders of magnitude lower. I don't know exactly what the number is. Whether or not that figure is off by 1000%, the idea is the same. If you are prey species, you must reproduce furiously.

Predators are fewer / maturing in proportion to their prey / defending toothy shares.

It seems, as a predator population, humans have a death problem. The death rate is too low to keep our population in check. All numbers relative here, but I recall that the human population of the Planet Earth in The Year of Our Lord 1800 was on the order of five million. We have increased roughly 100 times since then. Two orders of magnitude.

So the ONLY thing that keeps / human populations low / is death on steroids.
Reproductive rates fall / in "advanced" societies / an eddy in the flow of time /
the "demographic transition" / a poor weapon / to brandish at the future.


Lots of practices are sustainable at low levels. Every fish in the sea is eventually eaten by something. Like every other life-form, human populations expand until they fill their ecological niches. When the niche is full, some resource becomes limiting. Only so much water (to pick one limited resource). Not all individuals will survive. Less food, famine. More food, lots of happy babies.

The wiliest, largest, best surviving female fish have the highest number of surviving healthy young. If her genetics had something to do with her survival, her progeny will spread her genes and a slight adaptation occurs. So what made the Tuna Club in Avalon famous?

The biggest, oldest fish / Hemingway's fish / our grandfather's fish / a grandmother.

Poor choice if you are looking for a sustainable fishery, but they weren't.

Their new way of fishing / light line and all / was the struggle / the metaphoric victory / men over beasts / of the cruel endless ocean.

Today we have some stuffed specimens and a bit of literature, but no more of their beasts. Just smaller versions, less productive. Our imagination's poverty, thinking over time. Now always trumps later.

We eat what our grandmothers considered trash fish. We eat fish inferior to theirs because that is all we have left. It's probably a good thing we have come to like invertebrates. Still squid and shrimp. When you find a successful preparation for jellyfish, tell me. We have scads of those now as the shoreline dies, as we feed their prey with farming runoff.

Humans can occupy virtually every environmental niche on Earth. Some support large numbers, some only a scattered few.

We adapt culturally / much faster than genetically. / We invent culture / even more efficient / than biology/ at adaptation.

Human culture / collapses with every death / and must be re-assembled / by children.

Best not to count on anything particular surviving. This is why our species cannot learn from history. Horror second-hand loses it's power to to stop cycles of mistakes. Our species is built to make huge adaptations with each generation. We cannot avoid repeating mistakes. We also cannot trans-generationally remember horror. Probably net good for species survival.

With the same sized brain that developed flaked flint choppers and progressed to Folsom points, replaceable, interchangeable stone tips for spears, we have perfected sonar and nylon nets. To bad for the fish.

Over the history we know about, more than a few civilizations have collapsed. Read Jared Diamond. For humans, collapse is almost always strongly connected with environmental damage, either caused or exacerbated. When the Sahara becomes a desert, few people live there without outside support.

Famine, disease, pestilence, war - all of these curb human population. This is scientifically undeniable if ethically painful. Of course, as politics shows, everything is deniable, anything is believable.

I accept that famine, disease, environmental degradation and the rest are all proportional to population. All serve to limit population size. As people, our survival instincts fundamentally oppose anything that kills people like us.

Savages we're willing to kill / while developing better guns / muskets over arrows / breech load better still / now mow repeating rifles / with sharper machine guns.

The history of colonialism would be much shorter if arms technology had somehow stopped with the repeating rifle. The aboriginals always manage to obtain your old technology to use against you

Our better sort / see aboriginal souls / need saving / from their nakedness. / Dark skinned people / resembling us / but slower. / Easier converts / than our countrymen.

A blink later we see / suddenly. / All people are family / some starving as we watch.

To fight disease / we poison insects / and unintended / consequences / weaken eggshells.

We eliminate smallpox, would banish hunger. We inflate the carrying capacity of the Earth for humans by harnessing a million year's dead.

Over two hundred years / we've fought death / with eon's power condensed / in fossil flesh / not just plants.

All the old limits are still out there, waiting for a string of "bad" weather, ethnic or religious wars, whatever destabilizes the fragile technological framework that supports however many billions of us are here now. How much infrastructure needs to deteriorate before we can't make cellphone chips?

Then death will bring us / closer to numbers / our planet can support. / Death in small ways / gigantic terrifying death / as only death's imagination / can conceive.

We have not escaped Malthus, we simply keep bad things at bay with credit cards. Plastic credit cards, plastic from oil of course. How much population debt can we carry?

One human, I don't like the message either. God grant us some escape from the fruit of our good works, too many of us. We ignore consequences too horrible to think about. Denial will not change the logic of overpopulation, but it might keep us sane for now, until the reaper comes.

We have been here before as a species. A currently successful species, resourceful and adaptable. A minimum human breeding population contains enough genetic variation to survive bad times and keep recessive genes from killing too many of us.

We descend through / an unbroken series / of successful mothers.

But sometimes there are very few of us, 50,000 perhaps, and sometimes there are millions. We tend to see our species in the mirror, right now. At most we recognize the ruins of 5,000 year old settlements. But our species, people like us genetically but with different cultures, have nearly died off and then rebounded more than once over millions of years. Many of our close genetic relatives died out. Met any Neandertal lately? Did we kill them more often than we slept with them? Recent scientific suggestion: Non-Africans have small traces of Neandertal DNA. So does it matter?

I cannot imagine what will force / a more-than-minimum sized / human breeding population / through the next environmental bottleneck. We should remember that life is the exception and death the norm.

It will involve a lot of death, slowly or quickly, death the same. The Four Horsemen will ride unchecked. I think the Book of Revelation in the Christian Bible probably has the suffering down close enough. Violence and death were more familiar in St. John's time. Violence and death have been invented. All we can improve on is how many how fast. We've had that answer for 65 years, almost exactly coinciding with my entire life.

We might disagree concerning / the supernatural role / in such poetic violence / the looming Apocalypse.

But the wailing women / crying out 'round Beowulf's funeral pyre / ashen and distraught / they knew. / Keening as the fire died / they knew.

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My Beowulf is limited to several passes through Seamus Heaney's wonderful bilingual edition since it came out in 2001. I could not recommend a better peek into the early European imagination. Can't find it just now or I would not have written my own version above.

Leashes

Lord, I hope this goes quickly. Force A: urgency to record or interpret recent thoughts and events by writing them down now. Force B: compulsion to accomplish a lot today. A prevails but B keeps asking for her turn. Leashes have undoubtedly inspired more than their share of literature; leash, lash, whatever. That I do not pause to verify the assertion indicates the answer is immaterial. Yes, I'll clean this up later. What gets posted initially is fairly stream of consciousness. I rarely reorder things, but I cut lot. I tighten it up. No indispensable sentences still in the MS. Stop, that's another essay, or wherever this literary form falls.

Edward and I just returned from an early walk in the cool, motionless fog. I should at least visit the northwest again. Hate endless gray overhead of Midwest. If you have clouds at least they should do something. We had a very good walk. Edward is the first dog I have been involved with since weaning. To say that Edward and I are close requires exploring definitions of close. Edward and I talk, well, I do most of the talking but Edward is not shy communicating back. I walk Edward, 30 pounds of getting-shaggy Shih Tzu, on a ten foot hunk of 1/4 inch single braid with a big knob of triple stopper knot).

I have noticed the "leash effect" frequently as Edward interacts with other dogs. The effect says that dogs have no difficulty dealing with one another off the leash. If one dog makes an aggressive move, perhaps the other runs off and circles back for the next round. Etc. Leashed, dogs' freedom of movement is restricted so they behave more aggressively.

Some days are better than others, but on a good day. . . . Edward understands plain language commands. He was trained pretty idiosyncratically. Which means by me, not really knowing what I was supposed to be doing. He knows "be cool," "be a good dog," "watch the house while we are gone." Edward received only the whisk of conventional dog training. I've never asked him to "heel." I'm more likely to say "wait here a minute," than issue a WAIT command. Edward pulls at the leash and I've only tried to break him of the worst consequences. I feel Edward's intention and power through the leash. Occasionally Edward requires slight dragging when he is being really intransigent.

So, the leash dance. As your dogs approach each other, most owners will let you know by the time they give their dog to interact if they're into letting the dogs mingle. We have strict leash laws and tend to always think of liability if our dog bites someone. I didn't mention Edward has been a crafty snapper? I'm really working on breaking him of that. So I tend to let Edward off the leash in pretty safe looking situations.

Well, forks and knives, I'm running low on energy. I promise or threaten, depending on your point of view, to pick this up again. It feels like there's a lot of interesting metaphors here in addition to lengthy direct observation.