Dear Santa...

Every day, heading to and from work, I cross Ben White at South First. Usually on the way home, I would see Santa. Santa was a homeless guy with a white beard, who often wore a red hoodie pulled up over his head, even in the worst heat.

I mentioned him in passing once to Jason, because I was curious as to why he would do that in summertime. Jason knew who Santa was as his former employer was officed just a block away. Jason had heard that inappropriate clothing was a sign of mental illness. And many mentally ill people can find themselves on the street, this I know.

Every day when driving home, I'd look for Santa. He lived, I finally determined, under a blue tarp in front of Chuck E Cheese on the North East side of the Ben White/ S. First intersection. I think it was supported by a few shopping carts. He'd always be at a bus stop, or walking along the street. He never had the obligatory cardboard sign asking for a donation, and he never seemed much interested in either the cars or pedestrians.

As winter came down, I was a little worried for Santa. Even with all the coats, and the beard to keep him warm... you know?

A while back, when headed into work, I saw someone leaning down to Santa's makeshift home and talking to him. The person wore a plastic ID badge of some sort, and was dressed like a professional. I wondered what might be going on. I'd hoped that it was a homeless advocacy group checking up on him in winter.

Not so long ago, I saw Santa in a new hoodie, walking from the southside of S. First.

And then Santa was gone. It was a few days before I noticed I wasn't seeing him. And then I saw his shopping cart/ tarp home was no longer there. Just a patch of dead grass and some refuse to suggest he'd ever been there.

But every day, both coming and going from work, I'd look for Santa. But every day, I kind of suspected... You know he wasn't the healthiest looking guy. He lived near heavy traffic. Sometimes things happen. Maybe that lady wasn't there to help him as much as I hoped she was...

And then yesterday when I was driving in to work, there was this weird, ghostly image of Santa, sitting, waiting for the bus. It looked like him. Legs out, hood pulled down. But inside, he was a shadow. He was all in white, but inside... was nothing. Someone had made a sculpture of some sort of Santa. Someone else was looking for Santa, too.

The image of the empty hood bothered me. When I go to work, I e-mailed Jason. "Have you seen Santa? I haven't seen him in a while. I think he might be dead."

You don't make statues to homeless guys who've just moved on.

On the way home, I saw the statue was still there, sitting as Santa would in the weather, hood pulled down. But with no Santa inside. Instead, in his arms he held flowers. And people were there, paying respects.

And just like I did every day, I drove home, and I didn't think much about Santa once I was home. Until I woke up this morning, and that image came back to me. The white hoodie statue, with nothing to look back.

This evening Jason sent me this article.

Apparently I am not the only one who looked forward to seeing Santa twice a day as we headed up and back S. First on our way to work and home. Or who wondered what happened to the face we saw every day, but whose name we didn't know... so how are you going to look after him?

I don't know what's become of Santa/ Jerry. I hope the story has a happy ending. Most often, these kinds of stories don't.

It's odd that so many, myself included, felt some sense of confusion when Jerry disappeared. And I am not alone in the sense of loss when I saw the statue on the side of the road.

I am reminded of one morning, now several years ago, when stuck in traffic headed south on Lamar beneath the train tracks just before 5th street, I looked at the memorial painted on the support beam for the bridge, the same way I had, literally hundreds of times before.

"Fair Sailing, Tall Boy".

The words had been there as long as I could remember. Even when the bridge was repainted, the memorial graffiti found its way back to the bridge within a week.

Some days things mean more than on other days.

In time the statue of Jerry will be taken away. Or melt in the awful weather we've had the past few days. But I wish it wouldn't. It would be nice to know that the statue can be there for us all to remember Jerry for just a minute every day, just as we watched him with curiosity each day on our way to work. Just checking in to see what he was doing this morning. Or maybe this evening. And to remind ourselves that we maybe should have had more to say to Jerry before he was gone.

Indy IV

enjoy it while its up on YouTube!

Happy Valentine's Day, Jamie

Hey, Leaguers! Tomorrow is Valentine's Day, the day when we're supposed to celebrate romance, love, all that stuff...

So a salute to the lady I've been associated with, lo, these many years.

Jamie and I have been together since 1995, and this is our 13th Valentine's Day together. This year Jason got Jamie tickets to Ballet Austin for Christmas, so tomorrow evening I go to the Paramount to see some folks in tights hop about and spin. If they added capes and someone got a knuckle-sandwich in the third act, it wouldn't be too much different from what I'd be watching or reading on a Thursday anyway, so I'm looking forward to it.

It's no secret that I'm not a huge fan of Valentine's Day. Partially because, I mean, honestly... once you're in it as deep as we are in the shared property department, its kind of tough to fathom why you need a special day. You have anniversaries, birthdays, real Holidays and many opportunities to communicate your specialness to one another. And somehow a $0.002 candy heart with the words "LUV YOU" printed on it seems to not really convey the meaning...

Anyhow, Jamie's a special sort of dame, and if you have to put up with the hoopla of flowers and not-very-good candy, etc... you might as well feel good about who you're doing it for. And I do.

Love you, Jamie. Happy Valentine's Day.

Ch-ch-ch-changes

So I'm going to be making a bit of a career change.

I like my current job. I do. The people are great, the work is interesting, and I've made some genuine, lifelong pals. That ain't bad. I like my clients, and I like what we do.

However, I've been given an opportunity elsewhere, and there are enough advantages to the position that I'd be silly not to take it. From the interviews, I can tell you the people at my new office seem terrific, too. Apparently I'm invited to a potluck in a few days. And I don't cook, really, so have I failed before I've begun? Maybe they'll be happy with a canister of Pringles.

The change will be very soon. Two weeks and a few days from now.

For Leaguers who've recently joined me at my current place of employment, I wish you the best of luck. You're smart and a go-getter. I am sure you will be quite okay without me saying hello every time you go to the water cooler and are forced to enter my line of sight.

Stray Thought of the Day

An apology to Peabo

Firstly, I gotta apologize to Peabo. I completely misunderstood what had happened with Herbie Hancock and believed he'd won for some sub-category, not album of the
year. I now understand the dismay a bit more. But I find the selection by the Academy to be fascinating.

I've dismissed the Grammies as little more than an acknowledgment of what Billboard has told us through record sales. Some vanilla pop would always win, stuff that had sold lots of records and usually had little to no artistic merit. It wasn't enough that Milli Vanilli had their award taken away. After all, someone had voted that their album was the best of the year to begin with. What group of right thinking people would come to that plurality opinion to begin with?

It seems that rather than further dig the music industry further into a hole, and further cementing the reputation of the Grammies as useless, could the music industry have made a decision to actually vote for something other than popular pop? I don't know, I haven't heard the album. But... it certainly makes me raise an eyebrow. If you want an analogy, it seems as if they went from voting for "Transformers" for best picture and maybe went for a "There Will be Blood".

I can't claim to be the huge fan of Hancock that JAL, Jason and Nathan are, but it's exciting to see him recognized for his work on such a big stage.

DITMJOD?

At last I feel free of the yolk of the whole DITMTLOD thing for a day or two. Jamie assures me she's putting together her own list. What is the acronym, then? DITMJOD (Dudes in the Media Jamie Once Dug)? I don't know.


Weekend

The weekend came and went too fast. These things happen.

Friday we stayed in, watched Jurassic Park for some reason, and I noted that so much of what seemed forward thinking in 1993 now seems like relics of a bygone era. Children declaring "This is a Unix system! I know this!" and then flying around through a high-end CGI interface when most people still didn't know what a folder was in Windows 3.1. Declaring that something being expensive must equal the cost of the item (light = plastic and cheap). Ignorance of chaos theory, and, of course, supposedly top paleontologists loudly declaring concepts that were then widely held in the paleontological community, and which have now been fully integrated into the zeitgeist.

We all know, in 2008, that some dinosaurs became birds.

Saturday we cleaned. It takes a serious amount of time to clean my shelves, and if you've been to League HQ, you know of what I speak.

We caught up with CB and David at the Alamo for a showing of Sweeney Todd. I actually liked the movie quite a bit. There was the definite feel of the underlying architecture of the stage musical beneath the whole thing. Young lovers, dramatic irony, a despicable villain or two... I'm not terribly familiar with Sondheim, and I have only vague recollections of CB and I viewing a portion of a PBS presentation of Sweeney Todd from back when we were in college.

If nothing else, being a bit of Burton nut back around when he did Ed Wood and Mars Attacks!, I recall that Burton had wanted to do Sweeney Todd back then. Part of me is very glad he waited until he had the cast he needed (Bonham Carter and Depp are great. Rickman is typically terrific), and the maturity to pull it off without getting precious about the whole business.

We were scheduled to come back to League HQ for some dessert, and were maybe twenty feet inside the door when Mel sneezed, somehow blowing his drainage tube free from his mouth. I have no idea how he pulled that off, but it was kind of sad... just hanging from his mouth, inside the dog-safety-cone he'd been wearing.

The eVet clipped the tube free, and Mel is fine. It was just typically weird stuff that seems to happen with us and our pets.

Anyway, Mel is doing better. No cone.

Yesterday Mel took it easy and I took Lucy to the dog park for a game of fetch. She had a lot of fun, but couldn't outrun this one red dog. I'd never actually seen that before. It was kind of funny.

Anyhow, back to work now.

Hope you had a good weekend.

Stray thought of the day - 02/11

I still have to pause and remember that Obama is Obama's last name. It still sounds to me like a first name. I think it's the fact that it ends with a long "a" sound, whereas his first name sounds like a last name, ending with a hard consonant.

Apparently in high school, he went by "Barry".

Also, Mike Huckabee is still hilarious. Watching him on the Colbert Report using Texas as a piece in air hockey was somehow deeply satisfying and said more about our process than I think was intended.