Milkmaids and milkmates from Ecuador to Estonia have been getting after me to refocus this blog on the Men of Milk. You were mildly amused when I assumed the role of musicologist, studiously analyzing the merits and warts of more commercially successful bands—but that's not really what drew you to themilkmen.space in the first place or what's kept you coming back for more. 

Let me take a wild guess what you've missed most: it wouldn't happen to be more shameless self-promotion, would it? You know, those chatty missives hyping us as one of the greatest undiscovered bands of all time and yours truly as the top dual-threat songwriter/prosewriter extant?

Message received! And it's certainly true that historically I've relished my role as resident hypemeister. I would have been happy to continue in that vein, but 2021 wasn’t exactly a banner year in Dairyland. It’s hard to crow about achievements or accomplishments ... when there weren’t any. Our lack of production was, er, humbling, to say the least. If that wasn’t humbling enough, I had to contend with becoming a septuagenarian—a septuagenarian finally forced to face the devastating reality that the band nearest and dearest to my heart may never receive the plaudits for our long-term output that we garnered nonstop when we broke so briskly out of the gate. That never stopped me from producing one recognition-worthy tune after another, until, uncharacteristically, I sulked my way through 2021.

I'm already unsulking in 2022, chewing the cud and weighing the canniest ways to reconnect our fanbase with the mother teat. Come to think of it, there’s a compelling tale I’ve held in reserve that addresses a vexing question I’ve deflected for the better part of forty years: how on earth did we ever find the funds to keep churning out topnotch tunes over seven decades without selling umpteen million recordings and stadium seats—like every other band that's survived anywhere near that long’s had to do?

“Desire” is the one-word answer. 

Fine, but the money to alchemize desire into “product” had to come from somewhere. In our case, monolithic conglomerates like Apple, IBM, Intel, Century Link, and Safeco Insurance all (inadvertently) pitched in, not to mention even stranger bedfellows like Marijuana, Inc., and no less a facilitator of our dairy dreams than the freakin' United States Treasury Department by order of the Department of Labor! 

Hooking up with these deep-pocketed benefactors must have taken us years and years of high-level planning and tense negotiations to pull off, right? Nope. It was all serendipitous—though par for the course, when you pause to consider the peculiar script my "inside-out life” has followed. You see, whenever I’ve made concerted attempts to monetize my artistic efforts, I’ve usually failed miserably; on the other hand, I’ve been on the receiving end of one startling windfall after another, allowing me to keep expanding my songwriting Silo of Hits and my prose writing portfolio. If I sit in a lotus position, I can see those out-of-the-blue cash infusions as some form of karmic recalibration, arranged by a benevolent universe, compensation for the Herculean effort I've poured into creative projects that's rarely been rewarded through conventional means. 

But I'm getting ahead of myself. Back in the days of Milk Crusade I (1979-1985), there actually was a plan in place, masterminded to rocket us to the outer stratospheres of superstardom. It was simplicity itself: soliciting and receiving support from the most obvious player—the dairy industry.

That was the intention, anyway. I saw it all, in vivid detail, right from Day One in 1979 when I stumbled out into a frigid early morning mist after an all-night recording session in a Table Mesa suburb. As yet unidentified crunchy sounds preceded the emergence of a milk truck swinging onto an icy driveway. The grand scheme was already formulating in my mind, even as I watched a uniformed milkman hop out of his snub-nosed conveyance, jiggling milkstuffs in a bottle carrier, striding purposefully toward a Watts-Hardy Dairy milk box. By the time he'd gingerly arranged an assortment of lactose-based staples and retraced his steps, the whole milking schtick had crystallized in my mind: our name would be The Milkmen, our stage show would feature a robotic bovine, and our uniforms would be adorned with patches proclaiming our proud sponsors in the dairy industry, just like racecar drivers' uniforms are speckled with patches advertising their backers in the oil and gas racket. It was, bar none, the best idea I've ever had. I get all tingly just thinking about it. 

Alas, this noble ambition never evolved beyond two dozen stenciled milk boxes gifted by Boulder’s Watts-Hardy Dairy. I’ve cried in my milk over our (okay, my) failure to execute that game plan more times than I care to admit. 

Boulder's lamentably defunct Watts-Hardy Dairy was reconstituted into the Dairy Arts Center.

Inability to ally with the dairy industry could have spelled disaster for our fledgling enterprise if the milk gods hadn't been looking out for us—in the most roundabout ways imaginable. If The National Enquirer wrote a headline about it, it would be : “Fortune 100 Companies Paid Me $300,000 Not to Write!”

That's just a little taste.

But first there was ...

 

Marijuana, Inc.
The entirety of Milk Crusade I (1979-1985) was bankrolled through selling metric tons of "the magical herb." Everything from our guitar picks to our outlandish costumes and stage set to Bessie the Cow was purchased with proceeds generated from these “ill-gotten gains.” 

Oh, wait, tell a lie: “Lolita,” the song that won the 1981 KBCO Songwriting Contest, jumpstarting our career in the process, was incubated in a private fantasy studio literally built into the rocks above Left Hand Canyon. A pad and a half like that existed because its foosball-loving owner was the brains behind conceiving, manufacturing, and distributing millions of doses of Mr. Natural blotter acid (LSD)—an all-time great product worthy of enshrinement in the Hallucinogens Hall of Fame. To be precise, Acid, Inc. paid for the studio itself—which offered us weeks and weeks of free time to come in and put the radically-designed room through its paces—while Marijuana, Inc. picked up the tab for everything else, including an engineer, a studio musician like Ric Parnell, who'd later become immortal as Spinal Tap's expoding drummer, and prepping and pressing a single. 

Back in the day, gigs like New Wave Mondays at Boulder’s Blue Note Club actually paid us really well—but not nearly well enough to afford extravagances like flying Parnell and his redheaded “bird” Cindy out from LA to play one gig. If you didn’t fly her out too, well, then her “old man” would go on a coke binge and wind up playing the snare drum with his head at sold-out shows we'd have to end early, pissing off everyone in the club who was worshipping us like the second coming moments earlier.

In the early 1980s, the commodity with that sort of purchasing power was usually reddish-golden Colombian weed, pressed into 20-50 pound bales in South America, exported to Florida by plane or boat, then overlanded to key distribution points like Boulder/Denver in recreational vehicles, typically Winnebagos, or "Winnies" as they were affectionately called. Despite the presence of unsmokable stems and seeds rarely encountered in today’s meticulously groomed sinsemilla strains, a $35 ounce of Colombian was affordable enough, tasty enough, and effective enough to keep your average stoner blissed out for weeks, if not months.

If you were well-connected, like I was after a few years of dependable service, you could buy a pound of Colombian for roughly $300 in 1980 money. There are sixteen ounces to a pound. Selling 9 ounces for around $35 each—which invariably “flew off the shelves”—left seven ounces of pure profit. In other words, buy for $300, sell for $560, make $260—which came in handy back in the day when $600/month rents for decked-out, mountain-view two-bedroom condos were commonplace and dinner for two with a decent red at the swank Flagstaff House looking out over the plains all the way to Kansas cost $75. That was the retail market in a nutshell. 

Before long, I graduated into wholesaling, marking up each pound $20 or so. That translated to a quick $1,000 killing on a 50-pound bale ($20 x 50 = $1,000). When things were rolling, I’d sell more enterprising customers three bales at a time and pocket $3,000 for an afternoon exchange. 

There was also the option of selling a certain amount of individual pounds out of every bale, at, say, $50 profit per, and wholesaling the rest. There were unlimited ways to win at the outlaw pot game (and some ways to lose, too, as we'll find out). 

Eventually, I seized upon the most creative of them all: manifesting a pound of weed out of thin air! How exactly does that work? A pound is 454 grams. I’d take a bunch of bales, spread them out all over my living room’s orange shag carpet as was my custom, and divvy the lot up into one-pound Ziploc freezer bags. Then, I’d reach into each bag, carefully extract precisely one gram from each bag—according to a dead-accurate Ohaus triple beam balance scale—and place it inside a “special” bag. In a couple of weeks, that special bag would swell in one-gram increments until it reached 454 grams. 

Voila—that's how you summon something from nothing! Only the something was now worth at least 400 bucks. Back then, you could buy a pretty decent guitar or amp for $400 … or hire a seamstress to design, fabricate and customize Milkmen unis … or start saving up for a synth … or pay a soundman’s salary for three or four gigs … and so on. I could get away with doing that because everyone knew that weed dries out over time. Minor amounts of shrinkage were accepted as an occupational hazard; no one had any problems with pounds that were 99.77% intact.

Another avenue for monetization opened up: “the transport sector,” driving cars and recreational vehicles between south Florida and Boulder. Piloting a Winnie crammed to the gills with the devil’s weed through bible belt states where they regularly locked guys up and threw away the key for interstate transport came with a commensurate amount of pressure—and commensurate compensation, around $7,000 per round trip. That’s $7,000 each for you and the babe selected to pose as your better half seeing the USA on a road trip. Then full-size car routes to less perilous locales like Pittsburgh opened up; the Boulder-Pittsburgh route was a relative breeze. That paid roughly $3,000 for the round trip, plus expenses, for four days’ work, when the weekly personal income per capita in the United States averaged $200—before taxes. Not bad!

At my intermediate level in Marijuana, Inc., the lifestyle was ideal. I was deep enough into it that I thought nothing of plunking down cash on the barrelhead for a new Toyota Corolla hatchback, but not in so deep that I had to deal with the risks and logistics of importing a skunky, bulky substance into the country. My “co-conspirators” consisted of a few college buddies that I'd stayed in touch with and friends of those friends; I never once saw a Colombian or a gun (much less a chainsaw!) during the decade I thrived as a purveyor of outlaw pot. Looking back over my checkered career, I'd have to say that outside of my highest calling—lead singer for The Milkmen—saleshuman in the cannabis trade is the position I've been most suited for.

In 1989, two factors brought this reddish-golden era to a climactic denouement: several of my "associates" were busted and “went away,” and my daughter, Isabelle, popped out. Her tiny helpless protoplasm was way too cute to contemplate not being around. Clearly, the smart move was quitting while I was ahead, exactly what I did. 
 

The Transition Phase 
You might suppose that "professional life' couldn’t get a whole lot more off-the-wall than playing a space-milkman heaving bucketsful of lactose into a pulsating crowd—or being cast as half a husband/wife team maneuvering weed-laden Winnies through redneck Georgia—but supposedly stolid, sober Corporate America stages some sneakily great Theater of the Absurd. 

Take, for instance, the drama at one of my first corporate stops, a quick two-week PC-support stint at Telecommunications, Inc., or as John Malone, “the king of cable television," initialed it, TCI. IT had me scampering all over their Denver Tech Center towers, setting up PCs, installing software, swapping out blown CRT monitors, and so on. One day I was tasked with installing Microsoft Office—which, in 1992, came on 25 floppy disks which took an hour and a half to install—on a high-ranking exec's PC. 

The most provocative station in TCI's lineup had to be The Spice Channel, a treasure trove of softcore porn. That's the channel this exec left on for my viewing pleasure, one man of the world to another, while he took off for lunch. It had the desired effect: Emmannuelle 2 minimized the drudgery and really made time fly, very considerate of him. Anyway, somewhere around the 14th disk mark, I called my wife on the office phone, thinking nothing of it. To make a long story short, the same guy who’d directed me to watch porn on his personal TV had me axed for having "the audacity" to use his personal phone! Okay, then. 

Speaking of phones, my punishment for being summarily dismissed by TCI for pawing one was finding my salary doubled at my next stop, communications colossus US West (later Qwest and now Century Link), “the phone company” for fourteen western states. I reported to their facility in the Denver Tech Center, all bright-eyed and bushy tailed, ready to show the world what this PC Support Specialist was really made of. Aside from the fact that the same supervisor who'd hired me on a Friday was no longer working there by the time I showed up the following Monday, one small hang-up kept me from making the positive impression I had in mind: it took the phone company, which had brought me on for “phone support,” six weeks to bring me a phone! 

When a phone eventually materialized, naturally I anticipated that the dead zone otherwise known as my cubicle would instantaneously transform into a hotbed of activity. Think again! I began receiving maybe one 13-second phone call every three days or so, more often than not from some confused linesman in Idaho or South Dakota, who’d shinnied up a telephone pole and dialed the wrong support number in a blizzard. 

I was still without a computer, that was a bridge too far for the US West IT Department. When soul sister Sharon, an inner-city black supervisor intent on proving women of color could excel in the workplace (which by then had already been proven beyond any reasonable doubt innumerable times) tapped me, of all people, to sort out some imagined life and death crisis requiring the immediate use of a working PC, she issued an executive order to march right over and use the department manager’s. 

Once bitten twice shy, I was feeling more than a little squeamish about the possible repercussions of carrying out what amounted to a suicide mission. Big Paul, the heavyset leader-of-men this early Dell machine belonged to, was one surly dude. He’d given us underlings, er, “motivational talks,” informing us that he’d warned his own wife that if she ever failed to carry out his bidding, he’d “bone her like a fish,” so imagine what he’d do to us. Oh. Of course we'd have all have run through brick walls for him after hearing that ... that is, right after we all got done throwing up in our own mouths. Anyhow, I’d barely begun untangling this supposed crisis on the department manager's PC when I caught a glimpse of his stocky frame huffing and puffing my way. Uh-oh. Drawing closer, Big Paul's cool, calm, and collected mien morphed into a sinister scowl. Looming behind me, he stared intently, pupils dilating, eyebrows lifting, before bellowing, “I feel so violated!”

And here I was thinking musicians were the world’s biggest prima donnas! 

Until it was so rudely interrupted, that was my first taste of sitting in a cubicle all day long doing absolutely nothing while getting paid absolutely everything. I figured that had to be an anomaly in Corporate America; boy, did I figure wrong! You might think I’d never work at US West again after committing yet another unpardonable workplace faux pas, but you’d think wrong—not only did an organization entrusted with the care and maintenance of a communications network stretching from Santa Fe to Sioux City hire me again, it hired me again twice!

 Perhaps you're wondering how someone without a corporate bone in his body wound up working for one Fortune 100 company after another? Curiously, love of music paved the way. In the late 1980s, with The Milkmen down and possibly out, I wanted to keep playing in a band context—only there weren’t any analog beings in my immediate orbit I was psyched to play with. As luck would have it, this was the exact point in time and space when digital bandmates became a thing. Not only were they a thing, but I already had them at my disposal. One of the better purchases I’d made with my filthy Marijuana Inc. lucre was a now-mythic Oberheim System. The cutting-edge trio consisted of an OB8 synthesizer, a DMX drum machine, and a DSX sequencer. Hardware sequencers like the DSX could simulate an entire band by recording passages of notes played on synthesizers and drum machines, layering various sounds from bass through brass together, then playing them all back with your timing imperfections corrected. 

That was empowering enough, but right on their heels came software sequencers, designed to exploit the new MIDI protocol. That was a big deal because not only could PCs perform more complex sequencing feats than hardware sequencers, they could display a full screen's worth of information to boot. An endearing little Mac SE running Mastertracks Pro replaced the DSX as the brains of my outfit, expanded to include Yamaha DX7 and Roland D50 synthesizers, and a Yamaha Rev 7 rackmount reverb. Now I could compete with commercial studios in the privacy of my own home, without forking over hefty hourly rates for studio time—or I could provided I had the time and patience to demystify how all the components worked individually and collectively, with minimal help from manuals written in inscrutable "Japo-Saxon." In the advent of the digital age, when online user forums were just becoming a thing, unraveling the vagaries of electronic gear out was no small feat.

Some PCs, more often than not Macs, showed an aptitude, if you will, for creative pursuits, though by and large the vast majority of bland, beige boxes churned out by the likes of IBM and Compaq wound up on the desks of corporate drones, designated for bread and butter tasks like word processing and spreadsheets. 

In the dawn of "the dotcom" era, business sections of "great metropolitan newspapers" began running articles about the wonders of computer networking, where a server PC—programmed by and attended to by highly-compensated network gurus with arcane knowledge of router tables, mainframes, and communications protocols—controlled anywhere from a few to a few thousand PCs. It occurred to me that was pretty much what I was already doing with my music setup, and, hey, I could get paid to do this. 

But no one becomes a highly-compensated network guru without first familiarizing themselves with the nuts and bolts of PCs. And so it came to pass that at the age of 40, I sucked it up, enrolled in the PC Support Specialist program at Votech in Boulder, and, a few seasons of relatively intense labwork later, officially became one. After I posted a, shall we say, somewhat fictionalized resumé on nascent job search sites dice.com and monster.com, high-tech recruiters seemed impressed with the fresh educational credit. Didn't Hall and Oates raise their voices in song about the joys of "Adult Education?"

Before I knew it, I was fulfilling temporary "contracts" for employers who needed to bring someone on, but either didn't want to go through all the rigamarole of hiring full-time employees or liked the idea of a no-commitment trial period to see how you worked out. Meanwhile, I'd enrolled in night school at Red Rocks Community College in Golden (not far from world-renowned Red Rocks Ampitheater), on the fast-track to becoming a Certified Network Engineer.

Making the grade as a CNE involved passing a trickily-worded series of multiple-choice tests—and, curiously, no lab work whatsoever. After a few near misses, I eventually passed those by the skin of my teeth. However, just like passing law exams doesn’t automatically make someone the terror of a courtroom, just because I happened to have passed some written tests on the third try didn’t mean I was anywhere near ready to run a mission-critical network serving some 35 million customers. That didn’t stop the business entity which had just switched names from US West to Qwest from hiring me to do precisely that! 

In fairness to the name-challenged utility, being completely unprepared to run a network didn’t mean it didn’t look like for all the world that, certificate in hand, I was ready to run a network, or sound like I was ready to run a network at interviews I aced—primarily because I had so much practice entertaining reporters who'd asked me everything under the sun about The Milkmen. Sure, I was well-spoken, at least in comparison with tongue-tied engineering types unaccustomed to dummying things down for laymen. That's why some genius thought I'd make an ideal personal network guru for Chairman Joe Nacchio and the rest of the Qwest cabal; that bunch was in the final stages of transforming a $34 blue chip stock into a 34¢ penny stock, from the vantage point of their plush executive aerie atop the 44-story Qwest tower at 1801 California, Denver.  

That logic behind that move may have made sense at the time, but, in my heart of hearts, I knew bombing out as a network administrator was just a matter of time. While it was inevitable, it still took a while, since, unbeknownst to me or anyone else at the time, Nacchio and cohorts were only days away from being busted for securities fraud. After the FBI yellow-taped off the 44th floor in a showy raid, business activity at Qwest ground to a standstill. The resulting brouhaha provided momentary cover, delaying my "outing"—but not before the fateful day toward the end of my tenure that, with nothing more pressing on my calendar than exploring the bowels of a skyscraper, I meandered into the Technical Writing Department.

This newly discovered department momentarily threw me for a loop. I had no idea that it existed, or what a technical writer even was. The name implied an individual blessed with perfect left-brain and right-brain symmetry, someone who only had to be technical half the time— which sounded like an immense relief—while the other half of their time, they followed in the footsteps of Ernest Hemingway and Jane Austen, though perhaps that's over-romanticizing the imagery.

In any event, I counted five such beings manning their stations in their obscure corner of a lower floor. One of them was composing ad copy for a flyer publicizing a forthcoming company picnic, earmarked for conspicuous posting in the cafeteria and break rooms. Huh. I was imagining something more along the lines of user manuals. Corporations actually paid these souls to document condiments, cold cuts and cole slaw? Like, really? My jaw dropped. My head tilted to the side. Ding! I think they call that a eureka moment. 

I immediately inquired whether the department needed any help—they did! Apparently, tech writers were in demand. Promising. Enough so that I updated my resumé with actual non-fictitious experience, placed the beefed-up version on job sites, and prepared to field calls from headhunters. I didn't have long to wait. Wouldn't you know it, one of the first ones to get in touch claimed to have an in with the main Qwest tech writing group.

Nah—there was no way the battered telecom was going to allow the likes of me inside another one of their extensive downtown Denver commercial real estate holdings—was there? Oh, yeah, there was! And not only did Qwest bump my salary and print me out another ID card, but they were gracious enough to set me up in a dream cubicle overlooking Larimer Square!

 

Qwest
You may have heard of government programs that pay farmers not to farm. Would it stun you to learn that corporations pay writers not to write? Not only was yours truly one of them, I may have cashed in more for writing less than anyone who ever strode the corridors of industry. It was fitting that I took the first steps toward earning (well, making) a six-figure income under the aegis of the same Rocky Mountain utility that had already sent me packing ... twice. 

When I learned that I was under consideration for a third stint with Qwest, I figured there was no possible way the troubled utility could outdo the Daliesque Theater of the Absurd productions it had already put on for my benefit. I severely underestimated them!

The surreal nature of human resources, Qwest style, was in evidence as early as the initial interview. A crack committee of lifers described the caliber of character they were seeking to hire—nothing less than a walking-talking combination of Shakespeare and Edison. Whoever landed the job would have to think like the inventor and write “release notes” like the bard. This Übermensch would also need a good working knowledge of Unix, an operating system I was about as fluent in as ancient Etruscan. I’d digested a morsel or two of it in computer school, which I leveraged by typing the four-letter word in the Relative Skills section of my resumé. Those four innocuous characters landed me the job. 

I learned that the release notes I’d be compiling would theoretically be read by systems administrators at various satellite POTS (plain old telephone service) line installations scattered throughout the vast American West. What these systems administrators administered, holed up in outlier locales like Truth or Consequences, NM, were the desktop environments of customer service reps (CSRs, aka ”operators”). The issue was these CSRs had to login to way too many slow-loading mainframe programs in order to carry out basic tasks like adding services, handling billing inquiries, and so on. The halting process took a good fifteen minutes to complete and required advanced improvisational skills, which not too many operators possessed, in the event the creaking system went down during a call, as it was wont to do.

A new system was under development that would automate and accelerate this awkward series of procedures, rendering the old system obsolete in the process. Until it was up and running, the division I was assigned to was expected to keep issuing one or two-page bulletins describing minor patches that could be applied as needed, in order to keep the antiquated system chugging along. The computer language the patches were written in was the aforementioned Unix. 

The specific tech writing feat which supposedly required familiarity with it turned out to be nothing more than cutting and pasting a couple of sentences’ worth of command lines from one document to another—without having to grasp what a single syllable meant. I kid you not when I swear that my fourth-grade daughter could have performed the same operation just as efficiently. Even if I'd slammed twelve shots of Tequila and took a handful of horse tranquilizers, it still wouldn't have taken me any more than fifteen minutes to tweak the release notes into an intelligible state. The first month or so into my contract, the pattern seemed to be that these bulletins had to go out maybe once or twice a week.

So, once again, I had next to nothing (constructive) to do at Qwest, which gave me all the time in the world to notice that my absolutely fabulous cubicle at 1475 Lawrence Street boasted an operable glass door, providing easy access to a patio overlooking the sights and sounds of Larimer Square, downtown Denver's most bustling block. Not too shabby! I spent a good portion of the day bathed in actual sunlight, as opposed to mind-numbing fluorescents, free to take girl-watching breaks whenever necessary. When you're the only human on the third floor not actually working, that was pretty often. And those breaks became even more habitual, once I realized that our division was being phased out, fewer and fewer release notes needed to be readied, and no one was really minding the store. 

But how many girls could I watch? And how many rays could I catch? What was I supposed to do with myself the rest of the time?

Well, at the start of my third and last stint at Qwest, there was the occasional tête à tête with Jerry Jackson, our doomed division's department head, who'd send for me whenever he required my not-so-special talents to touch-up release notes about arcane software—which no self-respecting field engineer would ever read, since every last one of them regarded consulting them as a sign of weakness. He’d dispatch one of his attractive software testers to fetch me from my cubicle or the patio, depending on where I happened to be exulting in the present moment. Barb or Shiela would present themselves at my cubicle, give me a wink and a nod, then beckon with an index finger. That was the call to arms—“writing” services were required. I was to follow one of them through the security labyrinth and into the formidable server room, where Jerry held sway. 

Most server rooms are sterile, EMF-ridden, windowless spaces you wouldn’t want to spend a second in more than you absolutely had to. Our server room had an imposing array of floor-to-ceiling windows, framing epic views of the Front Range and the downtown Denver skyline. Stylish ergonomic chairs that looked like they belonged on the flight deck of the Starship Enterprise added to the designer chic. In a random universe, the low-level background hum emitted by an entire floor's worth of fans, hard disks and power supplies felt somehow reassuring. 

After the first few forgettable forays inside this high-tech haven, I settled into my real role on "the team"—a role for which I was, indeed, invaluable. I’d noticed the existence of a Nerf basketball hoop hanging off a Herman Miller overhead storage bin in Jerry's command center. The toy apparatus was somewhat of an anomaly; it hadn’t been in use during my initial visits—or before Jerry had a chance to size me up. But now he was casually squishing a Styrofoam ball in the palm of his right hand ... shooting the breeze about what was up with the Broncos or some forthcoming concert at Red Rocks … nonchalantly tossing the porous orange orb a few feet into the air … then taking aim and firing. Swish! He threw me the ball. I too fondled it for a few seconds, getting a feel for the heft and the distance, then swished it myself. He threw it to me again and again. I swished it again and again, from further out each time.  I was accurate, too! Jerry was elated—finally, he’d found someone in the department who could give him some real competition! My status in the sanctum sanctorum of the Qwest empire shot up exponentially, along with the frequency of my appearances.

Now Barb and Shiela were sidling up to my cubicle several times a day. If that wasn't enough, shortly thereafter I received security clearance to come and go as I pleased into a highly-sensitive nerve center, where an errant Nerf ball landing on the wrong switch could cripple phone service across a fourteen-state grid. 

At that point, Qwest was showering $30/hr. (equivalent of $65/hr. in 2022) on their rookie tech writer to contest game after game of Nerf basketball on a court with a view to die for. Duking it out with Terry in a simulated playoff series gave me the illusion I was a professional athlete, which, for all intents and purposes, I was, for a good six months. Over the forthcoming weeks and months, any business need to pretend that release notes mattered anymore vanished. A live-and-let-live policy was in force throughout the doomed department.

“Fifteen-minute breaks” became hour-long departures spent sampling single-origin coffees or indulging in the art of the sandwich across the street at City Market.

“Lunch-hour” turned into two-hour plus explorations of the many stimulating amenities and attractions that had sprung up all around Larimer Square. I’d try on retro western wear at Rockmount Ranchwear or check out the latest trekking gear at Patagonia. Overland Sheepskin Company stocked some sumptuous pelts. 

As I recount these retail ramblings on Qwest's dime, it should be noted that the general public wasn't completely unaware that things had become a trifle, um, shall we say, unstable over at Qwest. Not only had its stock taken a nosedive, wiping out the retirement funds of loyal employees and the brokerage accounts of conservative investors who'd been looking for a safe play and lost their shirts instead, but it had also been widely reported that the publicly-traded utility was now billions of dollars in debt.

So, how does a “phone company”—which collected an average of $75 a month from every home in a 14-state area, in pre-cellphone days when everybody absolutely had to have a landline and charges for long-distance were exorbitant; before you even figure in the immense revenue stream that flowed in from business customers—manage to get itself tens of billions of dollars in debt? Wouldn’t Qwest have had to make a concerted effort to fail that miserably, when it had a monopoly and a mandate to collect all those proceeds each and every month? Not when you’re paying guys and gals $60,000+ a year to play Nerf basketball in server rooms! And, don’t forget, contract workers’ agencies got paid really well, too, almost as well as we did. The split was 60-40, so they raked in $40,000/yr. from Qwest, too. 

Many dollars banked and clutch baskets sunk later, Qwest finally pulled the plug on our terminal division. There was some real talk of keeping me on—assigning me to the new division tasked with automating CSR logins seemed like a natural progression. That probably would have gone down, or it would have if I hadn’t become infected by the laissez faire attitude running rampant inside the condemned division I was assigned to—which wasn't necessarily the case with other divisions, in particular the tech writing division I was actually employed by. Specifically, it hadn’t spread to the hall-monitor type with access to the same industrial office copier I’d commandeered to print early drafts of Dick, a detective novel I’d been plotting to keep myself occupied. I must have printed thousands and thousands of pages of drafts before this exec caught me red-handed. For some reason, she took offense at my use of company copiers to produce the great American novel. Imagine that! 

The copier incident sealed my fate at the hemorrhaging telecom, but not before I’d built up quite a nice little war chest. I could afford to take some time off, continue working on the novel, and prep the songs I anticipated recording for our comeback CD, Dairy Aire. Dick and Dairy Aire wouldn’t have turned out a tenth as well as they did without the generosity of Qwest, the first of many inadvertent angel investors who came to the aid of Los Lecheros (as we're known in Lima) in our hour of need. 

 

Apple
The transactional relationship I had with Apple when I worked for them as a MIDI music demonstrator in 1992—getting paid exactly what I actually deserved to be paid for the actual effort I made—was a rarity, a one-time exception, when the stars aligned and my financial life didn’t feel twisted inside-out. There’s nothing to satirize here; the tragicomic adventures don’t write themselves like they did at every other corporate way station I stopped off at. 

I'm not going into depth about the Apple show for a simple reason: it was the antithesis of all the Theater of the Absurd productions I had a front row seat for at all my other corporate gigs; it was more like a well-rehearsed musical. When I tease the headline that “Fortune 100 Companies Paid me $300,000 Not to Write,” those of you who own Apple stock will be relieved to know the i-nnovative Cupertino company wasn’t one of them! 

I bring up my time at Apple because: 

• Apple not only paid me to write marketing copy, they also compensated me really well to compose original music! I spent months writing and refining an hour-long demonstration they rolled out at a highly publicized, well-attended, white-tie catered function at their swank 17th floor digs at the Denver Tech Center. 
• It’s noteworthy that in an era (early 1990s) when Apple and IBM were going at each other’s throats like King Kong vs. Godzilla, Apple focused on shaping public opinion that original thinkers, creatives, and the truly hip used Macs, while dull, boring, conservative drones settled for IBM PCs. That’s the exact same brainwashing meted out by my local Mac User’s Club as well. Well, the reality was that every last male I saw at Apple wore a three-piece banker's suit, while the supposedly staid IBM workers (I'd find out shortly) went "casual Friday" every day, in golf shirts. 
• It’s interesting to note that with the rivalry between Apple and IBM at its most contentious, and everyone taking sides, which "dashing dairyman" do you suppose a few years later became one of the few earthlings who'd cashed checks from both of them? That’s right, me, the least likely corporate infiltrator you'd expect! 
• For contrast, since the next section takes such a deep dive into arch-rival IBM. 
• To note that the only company which didn't throw away money on me around the turn of the century is the only company that's even better positioned in 2022. Duh!

I could go on, but this recently unearthed and digitized video of "Compose Yourself," speaks for itself. Enjoy! 

{video coming soon}

 

IBM
Worming my way through two heavily-fortified security checkpoints that screamed “military industrial complex,” I was stupefied that International Business Machines would even consider hiring the same character who’d introduced ritualized milking to the art of stagecraft. The burgeoning PC industry, having exhausted the supply of cookie-cutter geeks, had been reduced to recruiting alternative types, such as yours truly, esteemed author of “Dickheads and Fuckfaces.” 

IBM. From the 1960s through the mid-1990s, the computing colossus was the most influential and recognizable PC maker on earth. Its Charles Eames and Eero Saarinen designed Egg Pavilion took the 1964 New York World’s Fair by storm. An audience of 500 fairgoers took their places in The People Wall, a steep grandstand, gasped as it was hydraulically hoisted inside an ovoid precursor to an Imax theater, then had their minds bended by multimedia presentations spread across multiple screens. The message conveyed by IBM's Information Machine was plain: its “idea men” could solve just about any technological riddle you could possibly run past them. Yeah, it was gonna cost you more than the price of a set of studded snows, but if you were seeking a NASA-level partner to launch your growing concern into the Space Age, you knew who to call. 

“Coot Lake” was another IBM recollection filed in the “Fond” section of my memory banks. In 1980, I’d stared out at the IBM campus, off in the distance, its bevy of sandstone buildings camouflaged in the grasslands between Boulder and Longmont, while I was skinny-dipping in Coot Lake or sunning along its sandy shores—alongside hundreds of free-love inclined satyrs and nubiles. The scene gained national, er, exposure, after it was featured in Newsweek’s "investigative report" on hedonism in Boulder, catchily titled, “Where the Hip Meet to Trip.” The magazine’s writers described the city as “one giant fern bar, a haven for the counterculture, and a place where “dropouts drop in.” Small wonder I fit right in. 

Now I found myself off course, roving the wilds of IBM’s 3,745,080 square-foot campus, attempting to find a mid-manager's burrow situated somewhere in one of ten interconnected buildings on a site the size of LAX. 

In the 1990s, in common with most people who already owned or were looking to buy a personal computer, I’d been bombarded with ad agency propraganda that buying an Apple computer affirmed that you were young, hip, and creative—and that owning one automatically made you superior to IBM buyers, who were, in so many words, old, fuddy-duddy, and dull. And oh, by the way, Apple epitomized a paragon of virtue and IBM was an evil empire. 

Said demonically effective programming had me doing double-takes when I encountered IBM employees dressed in anything and everything but conservative banker’s suits—which is all I ever saw at Apple. I saw maybe two suits that day, spotted on execs from IBM Corporate wearing orange Visitor tags like my own. The majority of white guys wore golf shirts, Indian and Pakistani guys stood out in turbans and braids down to their butts, Ethiopian dudes said “I’m black and I’m proud” in dashikis and sandals, Asian women carried out their assigned tasks in pleated crepe skirts and silk shirts embroidered with date palms. The “I” in “IBM” was starting to make sense; the Fortune 100 juggernaut was certainly far ahead of the diversity curve. 

Everyone I asked for directions seemed really chill, way more than I was, as I hustled down a series of impossibly long hallways connected to other impossibly long hallways, too close for comfort to being late for the big interview. Those extended passageways shared an architectonic feature that was giving me the willies: lined up one after the other, like little honeycomb cells, were a series of puny, windowless, fluorescent-lit closets, I mean offices. None of the doors were cracked open so much as an inch. Occasionally, one opened just long enough to let someone out or in, and I’d catch a quick glimpse of way too many drones crammed elbow-to-elbow, moored to their PCs, staring at low-resolution monitors, getting a good whiff of each other's patchouli and now extinct-for-good-reason aftershaves like Hai Karate. It was hard to imagine that some of the ideas that had changed the course of civilization germinated within these constricted confines. 

When I finally found myself hovering outside the office of LeRoy Coleman, an Afro-American middle manager who'd risen up from Denver’s Five Points neighborhood, it took all my willpower to stop ruminating on the IBM Egg, sybaritism at Coot Lake, the odds of becoming the first earthling to collect paychecks from both Apple and IBM, and waking up screaming inside a sardine can. I inhaled from my diaphragm, knocked on the door, heard a deep, "Come in," and stepped inside. The greeting coming from behind a desk could have been scripted by Beckett or Ionescu for The Theater of the Absurd.

“To be honest, I don’t know why they asked me to interview you or what you’re supposed to be doing here, but Troy isn’t here today,” he bellowed, in a gospely basso profundo. 

Existentialism is hard to define, but you know it when you see it. Being supervised by persons who had no idea how or why they were supposed to supervise me was a recurring theme reprised throughout my corporate travels. I'd learn that Troy, presumably my supervisor, wasn't present and accounted for because IBM had ordered him to take some R&R in Cabo, along with his wife and towheaded progeny, since he hadn’t taken a vacation day in three years, he was the department MVP, and they needed him fresh for some momentous-sounding mission classified top secret for the moment.

“I guess I should ask you a few questions about your resumé.” 

Fire away. Wait a second—was this a done deal already? LeRoy seemed to be going through the motions. I was getting the sneaking suspicion that I was a shoo-in to be hired for a yearlong contract with IBM. That’s not something that I would have predicted back in the day when I was side-stroking the circumference of Coot Lake sans swim trunks. 

After lobbing a few softball questions about all the good work I’d done at Qwest (not!)—which were so basic I was unable to sustain my preferred  fantasy that I was a guest on the popular Dick Cavett Show—LeRoy wrapped things up: 

“Look, I’m a real hands-off manager. As long you’re doing what you’re supposed to—whatever that is, I dunno—you’ll find me the nicest guy on the planet. But if you mess up, I’ll be all over you like a cheap suit.” 

I blinked my eyes at the threatening cliché; faking subservience had never been a go-to option in my emotional repertoire. One emotion I wasn’t faking, irrational fear of confined spaces, kept me from embracing the shock hiring more fully; claustrophobia was making me more light-headed by the second. 

“We’re running out of space and PCs,” LeRoy informed me, as if I hadn’t noticed, “but we’ve found a place for you to sit and a PC for you to use.” 

Gulp. Images of a sputtering 286 CPU and a ten-year old radioactive CRT monitor with mucous-green phosphorescent dots crossed my mind. 

Trailing LeRoy down those elongated passageways, I'd seen the horrorshow hiding behind each and every doorway. The inference that these were the first-call cages and we were heading toward more stopgap solutions was even more worrisome. 

Boring inside the matrix, LeRoy swiped a card, unlocking a control room of sorts, dominated by a retro array of IBM 360 magnetic tape-based data servers which would have looked right at home on the set of science fiction flicks like Forbidden Planet. With a flourish, he pulled open a solid oak door-within-a-door. Gasp! Adrenaline— manufactured in rapid response to a dire need for self-preservation— surged up my spine. Inside a windowless, oxygenless room, no bigger than a breakfast nook, seven sensory-deprived schnucks kept the home fires burning.

And there it was, an unoccupied place for an eighth, no bigger than the space allotted for a stool at a cramped lunch counter, my own slice of heaven. The silent scream I let out could have been heard in Nepal. Permit me to sum up my state of mind in one word … petrified. No. Can. Do. My conscious mind succumbed to brain lock; fortunately, my subconscious mind was already diagramming a Hail Mary play to salvage the situation. I wasn’t exactly brimming with confidence that I could sell the resourceful suggestion it spit out, but it was the only shot I had.  

“I appreciate that you’ve found a spot for me in your rapidly expanding division,” I began, in my most diplomatic tone. “If I heard you correctly, you said that you’re running short of space for workers, and that you’re running out of office computers, as well.” 

LeRoy’s face didn’t give much away; maybe I caught a trace of “marginally pleased” that I’d paid attention to his pronouncements and validated them. 

“That’s right,” he confirmed. 

“Well, maybe I could help things out by … (I swallowed hard) working from home, you know, telecommuting.” 

The word “telecommute” had only recently appeared in certain early-adopter dictionaries. I paused to see if the intransitive verb confused him. It didn’t seem to, so I forged ahead.

“If I work from home, someone else on our team (corporations love sports analogies) could have this valuable space and this (mismatched) PC and monitor. The PC I built at computer school is a 486 (flying jets at the time). It’s got a 40-meg hard drive (capacious at the time!), and it’s already loaded with FrameMaker and other tech writing software (that I’d smuggled from Qwest and loaded onto my home machine for just such an occasion). I also have a modem and a reliable laser printer (at a time when not everyone did).” 

I awaited LeRoy’s reaction, psychologically prepared for a sanitized, corporate version of “Fuck off and die.” 

What I heard instead was: 

“That’s something to consider. Let me talk it over with Troy.” 

Ah, Troy. LeRoy had spoken about the Global Services Division’s absent Golden Boy in glowing terms. When he wasn’t jet skiing, slamming body shots or “otherwise engaged” during his forced vacation, Troy was checking in with the mothership. I knew, because a few days later, word came through that my request to telecommute to IBM had received the department's stamp of approval. Yes! There is a God! What a break! It wouldn’t be the last time my subconscious mind bailed my conscious mind out. 

That week was the first of around fifty that I’d bill IBM eight hours a day from the comfort of my own home, bivouaced in an extra bedroom, familiarizing myself with a stockpile of synths, sequencers, and drum machines I'd requisitioned to record an instrumental CD. I was making progress, in baby steps, when the fellow from the recruiting agency that represented me called. Although I was pretty sure he was just checking in to see how I was getting along at IBM, I still got a little antsy—there was no telling how they'd react to the announcement that I was telecommuting.

“So, how are things going over at IBM?” he asked, matter-of-factly. 

“Well, I’m not working at IBM, I’m working from home.” A more accurate statement would have been: “Well, I’m not working at IBM, and I’m not working at home.” 

“Oh. Have they got you working hard?” 

“Hard as in hardly; I have no idea what the assignment is, and the only guy who can get me up to speed is kayaking in the Yucatán.” 

“No problem. Just keep on billing ‘em.” 

Sir, yes sir. Whatever you say. 

We'd just established there was no issue whether I'd get paid whether I typed a single word or not. But things couldn’t possibly keep slipping through the cracks, could they? Surely a model corporation like IB-effing-M could never be as lax as Qwest, could it? Unlike Qwest, their top execs hadn’t been hauled off in a paddy wagon, their phone booths weren’t being replaced by cellphones, their stock had just soared to an all-time high and appeared unstoppable. I naturally assumed that once Troy returned from Margaritaville, absurd practices like paying contract workers not to write would screech to an immediate halt.  

You're gonna wanna watch this!

On paper, that reads like a reasonable assumption, but … they didn't. Back in the coal mine, Troy had a lot of catching up to do. Sorry, he was digging out, no time for a tech writers, but he’d get back to me whenever he could. A week went by. And another. Finally, Troy cleared his power-packed schedule and penciled me in—only to cancel at the 11th hour, explaining that there were “just too many fires to put out.” The fire danger must have been great, since Troy postponed our next three or four scheduled meetings, as well, blaming on the same element. 

Two months after I started cashing IBM paychecks, I still hadn’t worked a single second—snapping the previous record I’d set at US West by a good two weeks. My latest unintentional push to set the Guinness Book of World Records for Getting Paid Not to Write was off to a rip-roaring start. 

Eventually, the mystery man kept an appointment. Any need to guess at the motivational forces that spurred Troy on was rendered moot once I made myself at home in his golf and grog-themed office. Lit in the soft neon glow of Coors and Rolling Rock beer signs, surrounded by 8x10s of his idols like Tom Watson and Jack Nicklaus grinning ear-to-ear as they donned their prized green jackets after winning The Masters at Augusta, this server savant—who looked like a quarterback and thought like an astro-physicist—gave demystifying the nature of my mission at IBM the old college try.  

The best I could piece things together—which was about as easy as piecing a shredded document back together—IBM Global Services, out of Boulder, Colorado, was determined to build the world’s most extensive “data cloud” (whatever that was) to support “virtual help desks” (whatever they were). Extensive means expensive; they had high hopes that IBM Corporate,  headquartered in Armonk New York, would chip in—to the tune of some 50 million dollars. Ah. Silly me, how could I not guess that? Funny, they left that eight-figure number off the online job description. Or maybe I was hitting the bong or something when I skimmed it? 

I couIdn’t quite wrap my head around a number like that, but I could put two and two together: the assignment at IBM I’d been hired to successfully complete was writing for fifty million dollars. The audacious number made my ears perk up; the challenge wasn’t entirely without appeal. After all, I really was a persuasive writer, wasn't I—even if up to that point no corporation had shown the good sense to tap into that available superpower. Surely IBM was the exception? 

But first, there remained the not insignificant matter of getting up to speed on the data cloud itself. Sounds easy peasy, except that since the project was clearly Troy’s baby, he was the sole conduit to unlock its mysteries. Therein lies the rub: just because Troy had the right stuff to conceive and design the biggest, baddest, boldest and most potentially lucrative project IBM had ever undertaken, that didn’t make him the right guy to break it down for a layman. I sensed, correctly, that even tangential involvement with the writing process gave him the heebie-jeebies.  

But the data cloud of doom wasn’t going to get funded unless some walking, talking combination of T.S. Eliot and Sir Isaac Newton, presumably yours truly, documented precisely what it consisted of in the way of componentry, capability, and scalability—not to mention what sort of ROI the most sophisticated network ever built was projected to generate. Refining the concept would take a year or so, Troy guesstimated, and would have to be documented every single step of the way—which is why I'd been handed that one-year contract. 

A subtheme I picked up on is that this network prodigy stood to make out pretty well in the event his brainchild was greenlighted by IBM Corporate. I was perfectly happy to make his dreams my reality. After all, Global Services had already regaled me with an $10,000 endowment to spend as I pleased—like on immersing myself in electronica. On top of that, Troy was down to earth with me, and I liked wallowing in the soft glow of his office ambiance (I forgot to mention the imaginative installation of small-distillery Scotch bottles, separated into Highland Malt, Lowland Malt, Speyside Malt and Campbeltown Malt variants). His lair felt somehow detached from a cold cruel world. So, yeah, I was down to help his young family out any way that I could—which isn't to say it was going to be any less of a bitch. 

Over the next weeks, whatever semi-coherent jargon I could leach out of Troy in person or over the phone came out impossibly cryptic. Cryptic, sryptic, after collecting two months’ worth of IBM bucks in exchange for breathing air, it occurred to me that that it might be in my self-interest to produce something, anything, in the way of documentation—if only to justify my continued presence on the payroll. Toward that end, I pored over my sketchy notes and a complex, yet easy-on-the-eyes series of drawings Troy furnished (he was a whiz at creating those in a program called Visio), like a monocled archaeologist deciphering hieroglyphics.   

It's a solar fam now; the former IBM campus outside Boulder.

This is as good a place as any to point out that long before and after I roamed the IBM campus, I’d tried my hand at all manner of writing—prose, poetry, lyrics, novels, short stories, journalism, academic treatises and so on—that I justifiably took pride in, and I can confidently state that much, if not most, of it was “up to snuff” (to use a slightly archaic turn of phrase). I tossed in that admittedly haughty self-evaluation up in the express hope of assuring you that self-deprecation isn't my default mode—because the “deliverable” I was about to hand in was, without question, the rankest, rancidest, rottenest drek I’ve ever shown another human being!  An assessment like "embarrassing" doesn't begin to hint at its god-awfulness. The only redeemable parts were the powerful technical drawings that I’d liberally pasted in. They were so advanced, they could only have been created by a Vulcan. Or Troy. 

Sheepishly, I turned in what I made a special point of emphasizing was a beyond-rough first draft. I waited as Planet Earth's leading data cloud architect thumbed through it, professorially, bracing for the expression of horror that was surely coming. 

“This is great!” he enthused. “You’re quite a wordsmith. Let me have a few of the guys read this.” 

Huh? Say what? Really? Had he been hitting the Laphroaig 30 Year? I can recollect handing in what I'd hesitantly termed a “report” on a Monday. That Friday, I heard back from my supervisor. He sounded downright ecstatic, as if he’d just holed an ace. 

“You’re not going to believe this!” 

“I’m not going to believe what?” 

“We just got the $50 million from Corporate. Lew Gerstner (IBM CEO) loved it!” 

“Loved what?” 

“Your report, what else?” 

“What report are you talking about? Wait—no way! You showed that rotten first draft to Lew Gerstner?” 

“That rotten first draft just got us $50 million. You’re a god!” 

Dumbfounded, I would have loved to freeload off Troy’s euphoria, but there was a big question where the grand slam outcome left me—had I just made myself obsolete? Global Services hauling in the fifty mill was beyond comprehension. While it’s true I’d strewn a smattering of psychological selling seeds amongst the steaming pile of dung that passed for a prospectus, unknowable forces had to have informed Corporate more than anything I put in that dopey doc. 

“What’s next?” I asked. 

“We’ll let you know.” Click. 

Then they didn’t. That didn’t deter me from chanting my agency’s “just keep billing ‘em” mantra. As the hours, days, and weeks rolled on, I had to wonder: was IBM just going to keep on paying me indefinitely? It was a long shot, although, based on the strange phenomena I'd already encountered on my various corporate odysseys, by no means was it an impossibility. 

For some reason, most people in the 1990s assumed Dilbert was satire ...

Troy did call on me again, right after the seed money had cleared the last bureaucratic hurdle and had been safely deposited in Global Services' coffer. He said he had another job for me, I should come in, he'd fill me in on the details. Sigh. Oh, well—the notion of getting paid indefinitely to not write was more than a little bit far-fetched.  

This new “job” would turn out be a patrician proposition—compared to the more pedestrian pastimes I pursued at Qwest. I caught wind of this as we sped away from the IBM campus in Troy’s Corvette C5 Special Edition convertible, his coveted collection of MacGregor clubs rattling in the boot, making a beeline for his slant on hallowed ground —Lake Valley Golf Club. Instead of getting paid to play a goofy niche sport like Nerf basketball, now I was getting paid to play a gentelman's sport enjoyed by kings, rajahs, and caliphs. I was really coming up in the world! Then we were a god and a guru in a golf cart, one of a half-dozen of 'em full of freshly-funded cloud services engineers, downing flasks of the good stuff, Macallan 24-year old, as as we hacked up the innocent course’s fairways, rough, and sand traps. 

Wow! Global Services was so over-the-moon that it got the funds it vitally needed in a few months instead of the full year they anticipated, they just kept on paying me for the rest of the yearlong contract. I suspect the logic was as simple as what’s fifty thousand to make fifty million? It didn’t even register to them. No one at IBM or my agency ever said boo. By the end of the contract, I had all the time, money, and gadgetry I’d ever need to record Silicon Rebels to my exacting standards at Coupe Studios in Boulder. The instrumental CD exceeded my high expectations, receiving  a fair amount of praise when it came out; it’s a collector’s item now. 

Based on what I saw in Corporate America in the 1990s, it was reality!

Silicon Rebels wasn’t an official Milkmen recording, per se, but it was still “instrumental” in prepping my subconscious to conjure up ever more ingenious ploys to source financial aid for forthcoming Milkmen projects that my conscious mind wouldn't have dreamed up in a thousand years. Additionally, that investment in MIDI music production came in handy for fleshing out what had previously been guitar-heavy Milkmen arrangements. Our productions turned more luminous, more “technicolor,” as a result. 

Après IBM, my resumé was starting to look stellar; no recruiter or employer would ever suspect that I’d failed upwards like five times in a row—or that I’d been paid for something like 3,000 hours when I’d actually worked maybe 120. Now I could pass myself off as a Senior Technical Writer, get paid twice as much, and really sock away some dough.  

The next (unintentional) victim, I mean (inadvertent) benefactor, on my list was none other than Intel Corporation, riding high after selling half a billion CPUs in the dawn of the information age, but currently rudderless after founding father Andy Grove passed away.

 

Intel
I was sitting on a chunk of coal colored lava outside an adobe earthship, a Taylor 612C on my knee and metal fingerpicks affixed to my right thumb, index and middle fingers, rehearsing the Travis picking part to “World Without Dreams.” The sacred mountain loomed in the distance, lording over Pueblo Indian lands. In the foreground, a mayordomo and his crew were clearing out acequias— a series of primitive man-made ditches used to irrigate farmlands—the traditional way, with hand tools. Liking what I was hearing, I carried my six-string inside. Surveying all the recently acquired gear in my makeshift yet mighty studio, I positioned a Rode Classic mic in front the Taylor, took a deep breath, and pressed Record. 

Four and a half minutes later, I played the track back, expecting to be elated with the results. Instead, I was astonished to discover at least three dozen mistakes and a bunch of loud pops where the metal picks had inadvertently struck the spruce top. Those tiny mishits sounded like thunder. It occurred to me that during a four-and-a-half minute fingerpicking song, with those three fingers in constant motion, a guitarist strikes the strings over two thousand times. Even if I played the part 98% perfectly, dozens of retakes and corrections were required. Oh. Funny thing about that! It was hard to miss the conclusion: there’s a huge difference between what sounds good sitting on a rock and what sounds good on a recording you’ll be listening to for the rest of your life. I also realized I couldn’t have picked a harder part to tackle right out of the gate! Huh. This was going to take a whole lot more time, effort, and focus than I’d ever imagined. 

By 1999, I’d banked enough “fuck you” money to record a CD in an inspiring locale of my choice—preferably one that put some physical distance between myself and the prying eyes of my about-to-be-estranged wife and her two-pronged plan for self-improvement (mine): 1) become a full-time, uncomplaining, wage slave like her and her yuppie friends; and 2) stop whining about spending all my not-so-hard-earned money on home remodeling—and none of it on home recording. 

Practicality is not, in and of itself, an attackable concept, but I’d already leaned so far in that direction, I was about to keel over. Taos, New Mexico, 315 miles away from Boulder, Colorado, beckoned from afar. The scenic tricultural (American Indian, Hispanic, “White People”) community was far enough away, yet close enough—about a four hour drive away, back in the days when I’d think nothing of racing 100+ MPH through the middle of nowhere and a speeding ticket only cost $75—to check a lot of boxes. 

Two natural features demanded attention: the Taos Gorge, almost as awe-inspiring as the Grand Canyon—particularly if you hiked one of the trails leading down to the bottom of it with llamas and a guide or took a balloon ride through it—and Taos Mountain, jutting majestically out of sacred Indian lands. Somewhere up there was Blue Lake, the mystical wellspring no white person had ever visited or was ever likely to. Concealed by a stand of ancient cottonwoods, the Taos Pueblo, still inhabited after 1,000 years, was the most recognizable Native American structure in the American West, an artist and photographer’s staple. 

I settled into a fabulous adobe abode overlooking a sea of sage and pinion-dotted Indian lands. There was something particularly virile about the volcanic soil. Sunflowers regularly hit twenty feet and hollyhocks came close. The night sky humbled the great planetariums, especially with a full moon rising over the crest of the Sacred Mountain. Gazing out into infinity emphasized just how small my imagined problems were, in comparison with the enormity of the cosmos. The tiny hamlet of Arroyo Seco, within walking distance of my casita, was far, far away from the land of the cubicles, far, far away from the chain stores uglifying the suburban highway interchanges encroaching on my acreage in East Boulder, far, far away from the cares of the world. In other words, Arroyo Seco’s fertile environs couldn’t have been any more ideal for cultivating creative projects.  

Before I could tap into that energy, assimilating a new PC, a Soundscape SSHRR1 Digital Audio Workstation (which eliminated the need for tape recorders), and a lineup of unfamiliar studio gear was going to take a whole lot of woodshedding. That wasn't going to happen overnight; user documentation hadn’t really taken a great leap forward; user forums were still in their infancy. Getting the hang of how it all worked as well as experimenting with where each piece should be positioned within easy reach was some tough sledding. I kept at it, though, and, after a lot of trial and error, I was getting acclimated to wearing multiple hats—engineering, performing, arranging, producing, writing, editing, etc.— at once. 

With no one else around to take up the slack, I began recording all the instruments and vocals myself. That included bass and drums. Faking an entire drum kit on a MIDI keyboard (Alesis Quadrasynth Plus Piano) was doable, although it was a grind—but that’s what artists did in Taos, they ground out art, the noblest human endeavor in my book. I felt unfettered and alive, to quote one songstress, at one with time and space, responding really well to life in a gallery-filled town that was basically one big arts colony.

It was big news when Milkmen co-founder Steven Solomon joined the fray. He began making regular pilgrimages down from Denver to escape his own domestic, er, challenges. That upped the ante exponentially—at long last, The Milkmen were recording again, after a, sheesh, fifteen-year absence! All was right with the world! Natural order had been restored. 

We were methodically working away, track by track, song by song, relentlessly going about the business of recording the collection of tunes that ultimately became the Dairy Aire album. Suddenly, the assembly line ground to a halt, interrupted by a call from a headhunter. That wasn’t unusual, I was in high demand—I mean, who wouldn’t want to hire a top gun tech writer who’d already pocketed six figures for pecking out maybe two readable sentences over a three-year period, right? With little appetite for more Theater of the Absurd, and with fortune smiling down on us in the digital recording domain, I’d been blowing off all tech writing gigs. This one, however, took on a life of its own. We join the call just as it was getting interesting ...  

“So, how’d you like to work in Salt Lake City?” 

Hilarious! What delicious jest! Luring me to the land of the Latter Day Saints (LDS) was never going to happen, but this Lorraine Rougement had an undeniably sexy name and a very seductive voice. I played along for a lark, impressed with her detective work; after all, she’d tracked me down in Arroyo Seco, NM, population 1,385. 

“Why would anybody want to do that?” 

“Because we pay more. Not everybody wants to come to Salt Lake City.” 

“You don’t say?” 

Having already herded the star-studded likes of Apple, Qwest, and IBM into my corral, to the outside world, I must have seemed like the type of can't miss, blue-chip prospect underdog Salt Lake City could recruit to compete with the big dogs in Silicon Valley. The process wasn’t any different from BYU recruiting out-of-state football players to knock heads with four-star recruits from Stanford. 

Let’s see, did I really want to exchange my freedom and a drop-dead gorgeous view of the Sangre de Christo range—where eagles and hawks now glided on the thermals—for captivity and closeups of the synthetic fibers woven into cubicle wall panels? 

While I mulled that over, Lorraine filled in the pregnant pause by moving on to, what they call in sales, the “trial close.” 

“Let me rephrase the question. What would it take to get you to come to Salt Lake City?” 

This time I was quicker on the draw. 

“A private jet, a limo, an expense account, a deluxe hotel room, and dinner with you!” Flirting with the recruiters was part of the game. They all sounded like goddesses who might have an extra bonus for you, provided you played along with the seduction. The wisecrack got a belly laugh out of her. 

"It's five dollars every time I make you laugh." That one, too.

“No, really, what’s your hourly?” 

This wasn’t the time to think small. Stalling for time, I asked Lorraine to read me the job description. Based on my previous tech-writing stops at Qwest and IBM, published job descriptions were maybe five percent accurate, if that. This one included some long-winded gobbledygook about product specifications, milestones, and localization. 

“Who’s it for?” I asked. The bigger the fish, the more valuable the catch. 

“Well … I shouldn’t be telling you this … but. . . Intel.” 

Intel? Hmm. You don’t say? I'll quickly note that Apple's Steve Jobs & Co. loved smearing Intel—which designed, manufactured, sold, or licensed 95% of Earth’s CPUs and chipsets (think motherboards)— almost as much as IBM. To hear them tell it, Intel was part of an evil empire, in cahoots with IBM, that was subjugating the valiant alliance of Apple Computers and Motorola CPUs, condemning their precious Macs to a niche proposition scarfed up by artistes and creatives. Well, ever since IBM a) demonstrated they actually had a more relaxed culture than Apple, even though Apple ads constantly portrayed PC users as douchebags in ill-fitting polyester J.C. Penny suits; b) showed me they were way ahead of the diversity curve, hiring amiable humans from all walks of life who treated me really well, c) proved that PCs could handle creative tasks as well as any Macs, and d) kept the checks coming for the entire year of my contract despite my pathetic output (albeit hiring me actually paid off for them)—consider me reprogrammed. Suffice it to say, yeah, I’d work for Intel—but only if the price was right, as in very right. 

“$60 an hour,” I finally responded. That very right price ought to scare them off, pronto. Virtual monopoly or not, what company could sell enough PC parts to justify that hourly, $20/hr. more than I’d made at IBM, the equivalent of over $110/hr. in 2022? 

As days turned into weeks and I still hadn’t heard back from my Gallic-named LDS sweetheart, the odds that Intel would swallow a ludicrous hourly rate like that shrank to one in a trillion. I put Intel out of my mind until, another day in paradise, Lorraine called back to relay a special news bulletin: 

“Intel wants to interview you.” 

Silence. 

“Do you have a writing sample you could send?” 

“Ummmm. . . uh. . . yeah.” 

Sixty bucks an hour—for at least six months—was a deal even a sensitive artiste approaching the top of his game had to take seriously, especially after it had begun dawning on me that even though home recording was technically “free,” you still had to “buy the time,” beaucoup amounts of it, in fact, in order to compete with A-room studios like The Record Plant. I didn’t want to come up short, the main reason I agreed to a phone interview. As for the writing sample? Well, one major reason that I’d managed to keep failing upwards for so long is that the companies looking to hire me as a tech writer could only guess how good I really was based solely on my resumé—no one works for Fortune 100 companies without signing confidentiality agreements. So, when the next company up asked me to provide a writing sample, I could always fall back on, “Sorry, I signed a confidentiality agreement.” Perhaps a couple of pages from those innocuous minutes of that meeting I wrote up between IBM Global Services and IBM Corporate would satisfy Intel? Yes, that would do. 

A few days later my interviewer and prospective supervisor, Anne Flack, called as scheduled at 2:30 sharp. She was a tough guy all right, all business, with a bunch of nettlesome hypothetical questions designed by corporate psychologists to weed out prospective wage slaves—I mean employees—who were easily rattled. “What would you do if . . . you saw a monkey juggling mushrooms?” “How would you prepare for … sexual reassignment surgery?” I had little appetite for this line of suppositious inquiry. There were guitar solos to work out, lyrics to hone, imperfect takes to edit. I doused that line of questioning with, “Look, I’m flexible, and I get with the program, whatever the program is. If that works for you great. If not, great.” 

The quintessentially bad interview concluded with Anne offering me the usual opportunity to ask her any questions. Instead of demonstrating some want-to by posing a perfunctory question or two about the position, I focused on what was most important to me: could I or could I not telecommute from Arroyo Seco? That was nixed; if hired, I’d be part of a “team” (of course) that held a lot of meetings (I’ll say!). I put the chipmaking Goliath out of my mind and went back to figuring out how to fake horn parts on a MIDI keyboard. Ah. Better. This was much more like it. I went back to "walking in self;" it had been misplaced for a while. 

Three days later, with the recording moving right along, Lorraine called back, all giddy to inform me that Intel had just offered me a six-month contract for some $60,000—despite the fact I hadn’t developed any rapport with my prospective supervisor to speak of. Lorraine and her agency also stood to split some $40,000 for their trouble. 

Intel Corporation had just made me an offer I couldn’t refuse. 

As you can imagine, the contrast between The Land of Enchantment and The Land of the Latter Day Saints was stark. I can reduce it to three words: welcoming vs. unwelcoming. The Mormons were never overtly rude or mean to me or anyone else who wasn't one of them—they just acted as if we were invisible and weren’t there. They’d talk to me in meetings at Intel because they had to. Or they’d talk to you at their places of business, also because they had to. When they didn’t have to, when you ran into them on neutral grounds, like, say, Aisle 27 at Super Target, well, I could have dropped my drawers and no one would have given it a second glance. I tolerated being an invisible man for about a week, couldn’t abide it a second longer, then took up residence in Park City, a forty-minute commute away. The artsy, thriving community was hopping, with the Sundance Film Festival right around the corner and excitement building for the 2002 Winter Olympics. 

Sundance Resort, outside Park City, a fall-in-the-American-West hotspot.

I had high hopes that first day as I dallied in the Intel lobby, grinning at a fanciful display of Intel Bunny People, waiting for someone in my department to come down and fetch me. I was into outer space tchotchkes as much as the next guy; those little dudes in their silk spacesuits suggested that Intel might have a lighter side than I anticipated. The free ride surely had to end this time; it was inconceivable that a company renowned for reliability wouldn’t make damn sure I had more than enough on my plate to keep me occupied every single hour, every single day, right? Wrong on both counts! 

A luminous display of Intel Bunny People. I like those little guys!

I was doting on the gaily colored Bunny People because the Intel show started off reprising the classic “my supervisor is away on vacation” theme. A guard manning the front desk had been paging Anne, only to conclude after a raft of calls that not only wasn’t she even in the building, she wouldn’t be for two weeks. It took a while to find someone in the tech writing department with the faintest idea what a Jewish guy named Lory from New Mexico was doing in their building. Once the confusion was sorted out, I lingered in my assigned cubicle—regulation sized, thank you—surfing the primitive, graphically-challenged, slow-loading “before” version of the worldwide web in 1999. 

Two weeks and $4,800 later, Anne returned, in a buoyant mood, refreshed from a long break, the proud owner of a shiny new fire-engine-red Volvo V70 Turbo Wagon she'd taken delivery of that very weekend. She was enthralled with the Swedish Steed, like a pigtailed girl with her first bicycle. I spotted this handsome object of desire in the parking lot, where she pointed it out. This Asian-American supervisor conveyed a flattering message—she was so happy and grateful to have a heavy hitter like me around to serve as the lead writer on two new product launches the powers-that-be at Intel were stoked about.

Naturally, I had more than a passing curiosity exactly what those unidentified products were; alas, the full skinny would not be revealed that first day that Anne was back in the saddle. Nope, she had like 67 meetings to attend, she told me, scurrying off to attend the first one, but she’d be sure to fill me in whenever she could.   

Around $600 later, she did. Before I describe the projects I was slated to write user manuals and online help files for, I should note that Intel’s terminally ill guiding light, Andy Grove, had left the company six months prior to my coming on board. The company he helmed was foundering a bit at that point. It had just released its first series of chipsets that weren’t rock solid. For the first time, Intel faced competition from a rival chipmaker, AMD, which had developed a compatible CPU that represented the first real threat to its supremacy. Anticipating losing market share in the forthcoming CPU wars, the new brain trust sought to insure the company’s future through diversification. With that in mind, the not-so-bold Mormon thinkers in the Marketing division—their fiefdom was right down the hall from my cube—must have been tripping on their own planets when they dreamed up the oddball products I’ll describe. 

The first proposed future product launch was, of all the useless things, an ISDN router. What is an ISDN router, 99.999% of you are wondering? Well, it's really nothing more than “a modem”—for a protocol practically unknown in the United States. ISDN, a broadband protocol like DSL, achieved a whopping .001% market penetration in the continental United States at the height of its popularity. I read that the target Marketing was shooting for was one percent of the US market. Really? For an Intel product? What happened to world domination? Talk about aiming low! Like, why bother? 

Stranger still, instead of relying on what had been for a decade a world-beating internal R&D department to cobble together what was essentially a simple box, Marketing decided to outsource development to save money. That misguided attempt to save money wound up costing the chipmaker orders of magnitude more than they would have paid their own perfectly good staff—only the best and brightest engineers they could lasso after scouring every corner of the globe. The third-party entity Intel selected which theoretically had some sort of demonstrated track record in ISDN router design was Zarco, out of San Jose (not Krypton). 

The internal code name for the ISDN router was ... it pains me to type this … Rhine. Ouch! 

Some companies managed to bring ISDN routers to market. Here's one where it belongs—in a museum!

Future product launch #2 that I’d ostensibly (you already know where this is going) write the manual and help file for was a small-business one-size-fits-all server. Its internal code name was … wait for it … Berlin. Berlin and Rhine. Rhine and Berlin. I wondered: what's with the Third Reichian names? Were Moab and Zion already taken? Anyway, the one-step-above-useless one-size-fits-all server with minimal RAM and enough storage capacity to hold maybe a tweet and a half was less capable than just about any workstation it would theoretically be going out into the field to control. More damning, the under-specced utensil was proprietary, meaning owners couldn't make upgrades themselves. Instead, they'd have to call a support line if they really had a hankering for a hard disk that could store more than a month’s worth of emails and a geek in a van to make a house call and install it, for a bloated fee. When I attempted to point these shortcomings out—folks in PC-land detested proprietary, non-expandable systems; closed systems were Apple’s claim to fame, and they cost markedly more to buy and maintain—I was shot down. Non-expandability was written-in-stone. 

Besides their Teutonic code names, both under-development products shared a common bond: neither one of them existed at the time Intel was paying me $2,400 a week to write user documentation for them. There were no molecules, electrons, or ions. In the tech writing sphere, you generally want all the tactile interaction with the hardware you’re describing you can get, to do a halfway decent job of it, then, you’d typically like to pound on it a bit as "end users" are wont to do, to find out if the merchandise can take a licking and keep on ticking. Not only did neither bright idea ever see the light of day during my six-month tour of duty, they never even made it to the working prototype stage.

Nonexistence didn’t seem like any kind of stumbling block at all to Anne. I maintained that knocking out documentation for products that never made it off the drawing board was like paying to enter a filly in the Kentucky Derby when you didn’t own one; the analogy went right over her head. What, pray tell, was the paramount concern for my obsessive, trying-to-prove-her-worth-as-a-female-Asian-American supervisor? Insuring that the documentation (that hadn't even been started) was finished in ample time to be “localized” (translated into the world's seven most popular languages). Her bonus, performance review, possible promotion, and even brownie points were contingent upon hitting every milestone like clockwork. To put it in the plainest possible terms, my "superior" at a Fortune 100 company was asking me to refer to the functional specification and the product specification—then just make the manuals and help files up. 

Well ... the truth is she really couldn’t have found anyone anywhere who could have done a better job of fictionalizing user manuals than a “wordsmith” who’d scripted everything from beat poetry to detective novels with varying degrees of success. That burst of ego aside, as you might imagine, I had several issues complying with this insane request. Aside from the basic dishonesty, very few people on earth had spent the massive amounts of time I had trying to figure out how to operate devices that shipped with inscrutable instructions. If it was hard for me, what about my ninety-year old dad, struggling to perform the simplest operation on his Gateway computer, stymied every step of the way by piss-poor documentation. There was no way I wanted any part of making a bad situation worse. Creating faux documentation guaranteed to fuddle “users” from Fiji to Finland was a truly unappetizing proposition. I told Anne as much. The argument fell on deaf ears. 

The impasse between Anne and myself remained intact throughout the duration of my six-month contract. How’s that possible?  Well, the development teams charged with producing the router and the server never got their act together— notwithstanding the “Monday-Friday” act they put on during our bi-weekly conference calls. On Monday: “Oh, sure, we’ll have a working prototype for you on Friday.” On Friday: “Oh, sure, one last tweak, and we’ll have that overnighted to you on Monday.” Repeat once a week for six months! Each interminable meeting lasted a solid two hours plus and felt like two epochs. Attending each two-hour snoozefest compensated me to the tune of $120—for sitting there daydreaming about being back recording in Arroyo Seco, going to barn dances with fun-loving cowgirls in boots 'n twirly skirts, chowing down on huevos rancheros at the Taos Inn. 

Anne’s hysterical emphasis on achieving localization milestones by artificially-imposed deadlines, for products no one in their right minds in the real world was clamoring for, had a way of taking her over her body. If I had to put a label on it, I'd stop short of “satanic possession.” On the other hand, stating that her persona shape-shifted from land-of-opportunity success story to screaming banshee whenever the touchy subject came up, which it often did, is no exaggeration. When she wasn’t racing her engine, Anne spoke the King's English flawlessly, with only the slightest trace of an accent. She could put herself on the page perfectly well; I knew, because every now and then she’d ask me to edit a blurb she'd written about this or that. Conversely, when Anne had at the one sentence a month I was being paid some $10,000 or around $1,000 per word to pen, the edits seemed sensible enough. But when she became excited, fretting about missed milestones and hammering me to fictionalize pages and pages of user guides for products that never advanced past a circuit board with blue wires dangling off it or a PC case minus its innards, she really slipped. 

“Chest fa woe wha fawn shun oh specks! Wha conned yew doe at?” she’d impel me. Translation: Just follow the functional specs. Why can’t you do that?” 

Of course she was right, I could do that, that is, if I was willing to ignore all the havoc psychotropic documentation was certain to wreak in seven languages on five continents. The problem was, I saw myself as a “user advocate.” Anne saw herself as a milestone Nazi. I had a conscience. Anne had a deadline. And so the battle lines were drawn. 

We had our first big spat just as the place was emptying out one fine Indian summer evening. 

“Yew own kay boat meyers tone foe yoko eyes eh shun!” Translation: you don’t care about the milestones for localization. 

“That’s right, I care a lot more about the people who actually have to use the products,” I responded. It’s fair to say that was decidedly not the reaction she was looking for. 

That time, things blew over. The coming weeks found me reposing in the all-too familiar confines of my cubicle, waiting for operable prototypes I could put through their paces. It’s an uncomfortable feeling to be doing absolutely nothing while everyone around you is doing absolutely everything—even when the clock's running and a Fortune 100 company is lining your pockets not to write. Making money for nothing is a lot more of a laughfest when you’re telecommuting or starring at Nerf basketball six hours a day. I was soooooo bored, I volunteered to help out on other projects; but no, any second a fully-functional Berlin or Rhine was sure to appear out of a puff of smoke on my desk— just like the ISDN wizards at Zarko had promised. We were so far behind, I had to be ready to jump on it at a moment’s notice. Whatever. 

Five months into my contract, in vital need of something new and different to raise my spirits, I’d come up with just the ticket: spending the upcoming four-day Labor Day weekend at Larry Seyer’s studio in Austin, turning him loose on a test mix of “Tide to Turn.” There were several reasons Larry was an outstanding candidate to mix Dairy Aire. He used the same Soundscape SSHDR1 system I did; that’s how I found him, on our fledgling user’s group, and he just happened to have won seven Grammys for mixing Asleep At The Wheel. Promising! I flew down there and proceeded to have the time of my life, watching Larry do his thing, hearing my songs transformed from sounding pretty darned good for a beginner to pretty darned great full stop. Larry was one of the first well-known engineers to embrace digital recording; spending time with him was an invaluable crash course in exactly what to and what not to do. 

“Tide to Turn” needed a drum track (which would have taken me a week to peck out on a MIDI keyboard). I asked Larry to choose a studio drummer in a town full of superb ones. The guy he picked was none other than Pat Mastolloto, who’d laid down the beat on all of Mister Mister’s megahits like “Broken Wings” and “Kyrie,” the Rembrandts' “That’s Just the Way It Is, Baby,” and regularly toured Japan and Europe as a member of King Crimson. OMG, you couldn’t even be in the same room as him, he was such a woodchopper, but what a performance! After playing it like 500 times in a week, I couldn't find a single nit to pick with the test mix. Larry was the guy, all right. 

After that brief yet spellbinding return to the creative world, I don’t know how I would have made it through my remaining time at Intel without that mix to buck me up. I’d play it on my old-school Alpine car stereo in my Acura Legend, over and over, sitting in the Intel parking lot, psyching myself up before I could bear to enter the building. There was a huge contrast between the inspiration I got out of my creative efforts and the consternation my inside-out professional life caused me. I was becoming increasingly conflicted about it. Conflicted or not, my war chest was overflowing. I’d accumulated a nice little chunk of change, enough to live high on the hog, save a little something, and still have plenty left to fund what was on track to become an epic Milkmen comeback album. 

Fall in Utah is as glorious as anyplace in the Rockies to visualize the triumphant return of the  Milkmen, but Jack Frost was nipping at my nose. I wasn’t sure how I could afford to keep living in Park City once ski season began, rents tripled, and "the jet set" would take over my cushy condo. If my contract wasn’t renewed, that was a moot point. If you’ve made it this far, you can probably guess that despite the ongoing battle royale with my high-strung supervisor and six solid months of unparalleled unproductivity, Intel was loco enough to renew my contract. I almost fell out of my chair when Lorraine broke it to me. Unreal! Parole wasn’t in the cards ... yet. 

Then I got my back up and made one last stand against fictionalization, pushing Anne over the brink. She’d just informed me in no uncertain terms that something like the third projected milestone for localization had come and gone. Anger and despair were written all over her face. Some of it had to blow off and, sure enough, debris came flying my way. I’ll spare you all but the last line: 

“Yew in sub awe donut!” 

Guilty as charged. 

The next morning, there was no sign of Anne. Strange. I wondered if she was in a more peaceful place, sedated in a straight jacket. She didn’t roll in till after lunch, which wasn’t like her at all. When she trudged in, her maniacal side was nowhere to be found; in fact, she seemed like a broken woman. I remembered that at one point early in our relationship, it seemed like we might actually be friends. She was so girlish when she was rhapsodizing about her new car, the joy of her life. Speaking of which … 

“What happened?” I ventured. 

Anne actually shed tears. 

“I c-c-c-crashed my car. It’s in the b-b-body shop!” Crocodile tears. Those were the last words I’d ever hear her speak. 

These days I’m a lot better at being nonjudgmental. Back then: serves you right, sucka! The mental anguish she was willing to mete out to customers confounded by repeated attempts to make sense out of fabricated documentation didn’t faze her in the least, but that crimson mass of mangled Swedish steel—tragedy! 

Anne recovered her equilibrium in time to do what she had to do. Later that afternoon, security dropped by to escort me and a cardboard box full of purloined treasures, including a dozen Intel Bunny People, off the premises. Hooray! Yes! Free, free at last! 

After an extended pit stop in Boulder, I couldn’t wait to get back to Arroyo Seco. Miraculously, my beloved adobe casita was available and waiting for me. To make a long backstory short, Steven and I spent the rest of the winter and the following spring working our derrieres off till we put Dairy Aire to bed. With all the time in the world to experiment, the productions grew bolder and more elaborate. The same innate compulsion that had never been called upon at any of my highly-compensated tech writing stops came out in force. Instead of coasting through the day, never using more than two percent of my brain, I was laser-focused, operating at two hundred percent brainpower. Having my own "project studio" was liberating—no wasted energy staring at a clock while you’re coughing up $125/hr. For once, I was living life to the fullest. 

Thanks to the inadvertent largesse of Intel Corporation, I could afford to have Larry mix and master the whole shebang, not to mention the sizable travel expenses—like staying at the way cool Austin Motel across from the iconic Congress Club. Winding up with that 13-song recording —which holds up just as well today and is without any doubt the high water mark of my life from 1995- 2015—is a more than fair tradeoff for the many hundreds of hours my physical body hibernated in a Salt Lake City cubicle. Back in 2000, when Dairy Aire was a freshly minted product in CD form, I'd fire up a big juicy doob and just let it loop, taking in the uplifting high desert terrain extending a hundred miles past the Gorge. Bighorn sheep pranced around out there. Slackers on shrooms were out there, too, soaking their cares away in any number of natural hot springs gurgling out of the earthy depths. And so all was right with the world, or it was until once again I heard the distant drums of headhunters … 

 

Medsite—The Grand Finale
From coast to coast, fireworks departments cap their Fourth of July skyshows by shooting off every Screaming Spider, Crackling Horsetail, and Chrysanthemum they have left in a prolonged burst of explosions that leaves no one wanting more. That was me after my last big-time tech writing gig—I had nothing left, and I didn’t want any more. People have a hard time comprehending how an authority on how to succeed in business without really trying, given carte blanche to make money for nothing, just walked away from the privilege. The answer, in a word, is Medsite—the grand finale of my tech writing career. But I’m getting ahead of myself.

When headhunters came for me again, in late spring of 2001, I steeled myself to sing for my supper like everyone else. How could the law of averages not kick in? How many times could outwardly successful companies, that ought to know better, pay a guy, handsomely, not to write? And how could my next gig possibly match, much less exceed, the toxic levels of dysfunction I’d already measured at the likes of Qwest, IBM, and Intel? As usual, I underestimated American ingenuity—those were just the warm-up acts! 

The aforementioned big-name big-deal corporations were “the establishment.” A succession of startup “dotcoms” was coming for them, financed by a slew of deep-pocketed venture capitalists looking for and betting big on the next big Fortune 100 company.    

Medsite, an ambitious brick and mortar medical supply house out Newark, NJ, with designs on establishing an online outpost, had everything they were looking for. Sure, I’d been around the block, but I hadn’t yet had the, um, valuable life experience of not working (but getting paid like I was) for a dotcom. Nor had I seen up close and personal examples of the Silicon Valley “work hard play hard” ethos, galaxies away from anything eyewitnessed in Colorado or Utah—that is, until my indoctrination into The Medsite Way.

Flush with VC cash, Medsite engaged Cybersource, a dotcom in its own right that specialized in developing e-commerce portals, to assemble a team of high-level programmers, database jockeys, software testers, network engineers, and project managers to whip its portal into shape before another online supplier could sneak in and corner the market on gauze, tongue depressors, and lubricating jelly. The recruiting firm had already rounded up over a hundred high tech Hessians tasked with fast-tracking the project to completion. 

In their haste to add a tech writer to its starting lineup, not only had the IT pros at Cybersource acquiesced to my request to telecommute from Colorado to New York’s Financial district—where its cavalry scouts were already preparing the ground for online commerce—they'd also agreed to my latest tranche of ergonomic demands: no funky office chairs, no flickering monitors, and no fluorescent lights, just in case I had to make the odd cameo appearance at the job site in Lower Manhattan. 

Negotiations concluded, Cybersource flew me out to its San Jose, CA command post for orientation. They’d also slotted me in to make a brief appearance in The Big Apple, to get to know the players there. I'd be lying if l told you that I foresaw myself becoming a jet-setting tech writer—on an expense account no less—when I first sucked it up and trained to become a PC Support Specialist at the advanced age of 40. I tried out my new economic clout that first night in San Jose, gorging myself at a local raw bar. Getting into the swing of things, I washed down the groggery’s coveted Stellar Bar and Malpeque Bay oysters with a Muscadet Sèvre-et-Maine Sure Lie highly recommended by a clique of Sonoman viniculturists padding their own expense accounts. Pas mal! The following day I presented myself chez Cybersource, a stone’s throw away from the stately Winchester Mansion; the turreted Victorian painted lady was an odd sight juxtaposed next to a concrete ‘n glass office park. Odder sights were moments away. 

The Cybersource hive was a hotbed of unusual-to-me-at-least activity. I was taken aback by the sight of jury-rigged computer stations crammed into every available nook and cranny of hallways and conference rooms; it wouldn’t have been surprised me if a half dozen contract workers weren’t plugging away at makeshift desks hastily thrown together in the lavatories. Notice that I omitted any mention of the techies sitting at these workstations? That’s because only half of them were—every other one was curled up under their desks, fast asleep. Had someone slipped Owsley acid into my morning latte? Was I hallucinating? 

A scant few hours later, after an unforgettable display of "play hard,” Silicon Valley style, interrupted the superlative examples of "work hard" I was already straining to process, I knew I was. It started with a quickening in the collective mood, from inertia to an increasingly animated state—techies’ antennas had picked up and passed on the communiqué that Cybersources forces had met some momentous milestone. By now, I knew all too well what those were, though I was blissfully unaware of this guideline in The Dotcom Handbook: “Whenever a milestone is reached, all work activities must immediately cease and a mandatory blow-out celebration must promptly commense.” Sure enough, at the stroke of 2 pm, all work abruptly ceased. Buglers blew Reveille for the sleeping drones, caterers and mobile bartenders scrambled to set up buffet tables, a DJ went right for the solar plexus.

I couldn’t help noticing that one of the comatose drones had, in the two-minute time frame of a 60s AM pop song like, say, Roy Orbisons "Oh Pretty Woman," metamorphosed from out like a log to rudely awakened to sprung to life to dancing the ... I wouldn't bet my life on it, but I'm pretty sure it was the cha-cha slide. For the following four hours, my assigned tasks were eating, drinking, and being merry (at $65/hr., $260 total) while commemorating a “team victory” I had no hand in winning. Things were off to a rousing start: I took home $520 for the day and consumed at least $100 worth of Roderer Cristal and crustacea. Compare this clambake with what passed for a wild celebration in Colorado: a retirement party, held in a break room with flickering fluorescents, where, for the grand occasion, the company splurged on Sprite, cold cuts and white cake from King Soopers with the poor schmo’s name spelled out in wobbly piping. 

Orientation revealed that medsite.com site absolutely had to “go live” by the drop-dead date of August 21, 2001. To stay on track, Cybersource was authorized to go into “whatever it takes” mode; “no expense spared” mode was a subset of that. All these cyber-troops had to be deployed to Lower Manhattan, fed on expense accounts, richly rewarded for meeting milestones, and shipped back home every now and then to see if their families still recognized them. Or, should I say, what was left of them had to be shipped home—if the insane working hours didn’t get them, the mandatory celebrations surely would.  

That sojourn to San Jose left me well-fortified for my forthcoming meet-the-players trip to Lower Manhattan. I couldn’t have been any more relaxed as the turbulence-free flight followed the Hudson before banking hard left over the hard-to-miss Twin Towers on its final descent to La Guardia. There was nothing to get worked up about, the visit shaped up as purely ceremonial—by prior arrangement, I was just passing through. I wouldn’t be sticking around NYC much longer than the time it takes to order a couple of chestnut-roasted pretzels and ride up to the observation deck of the Empire State Building for an eagle’s-eye view of the tri-state area.

Reporting for active duty at a nondescript office building next to The Federal Reserve Bank on June 21, 2001, I felt immediate sympathy for all those poor suffering slobs without prior telecommuting arrangements chained to their PCs on the 17th floor. Anywhere between 125 and 150 techno-geeks toiled away up there at any one given time. Cybersource had rented the entire floor, cleared out the temporary walls and cubicles, ripped up the carpeting, removed the ceiling tiles, brought in a truckload of conference tables, and scattered networked PCs across every every last inch of available real estate. Zip-tied spaghetti strands of Cat 5 network cabling strewn here, there, and everywhere added just the right touch of chaos. From what I could tell, this sardined, sleep-deprived crew accepted the haphazard arrangements as just another day at the office. No sound absorption was no cause for concern; neither was all that electrical current humming away, night and day. Nothing Cybersource could throw at them bothered any of the fifty of so dedicated beings snoring under their desks, catching some quick Z’s. Evidently, the habit traveled well from Silicon Valley to Silicon Alley. 

Any doubts about whether I’d be paid to write or not to write at this plum assignment vanished within seconds of reporting to the Medsite brass. When “Who are you?” “Who do you work for?” “What do you do?” and “What kind of writing is that?” are the first questions out of manager's mouths, you know your dubious record of getting paid more to write less than anyone in the history of letters will not only stand, the odds of putting it so far out of reach that it becomes untouchable—like Joe DiMaggio’s 56-game hitting streak—were stacked in your favor.   

One supervisor had the bright idea that, maybe, if I sat for a while with the software testers, I might chance upon something or other that needed to be documented. That didn't exactly ring true, but for $65/hr. I was willing to be a good soldier. Initially, my pesky human ego condemned what it saw as its diminished status, forced to sit and mingle with the lowly testers, in anything but the ideal ergonomic conditions I'd bargained for. I was overthinking; the crack corps of Indians, Vietnamese, and Russians turned out to be an affable enough crowd to hang with—and imitate.

The way it worked was that each time a new version of the beta site software was ready for release, a couple dozen testers seated around four big conference tables, arranged in a square so that they could all see each other, waited for a manager's count down. Once they heard "Go!" they'd hammer away at their keyboards in a determined effort to “break” the software. That’s how the lead programmers determined whether or not the database was “scalable,” i.e. could thousands of doctors and medical assistants from all over the globe order supplies at once without the server melting down once medsite.com went live for real. These tests would continue for weeks, or until the software was deemed robust enough to sustain that type of pounding. Testers recorded the bugs and error messages they encountered, managers logged them, then programmers huddled together to review the notes and mull over the most efficacious ways to squash the bugs and smooth out the user experience. 

So much for any guilt I might have harbored over not working; I was stringing several sentences together every few hours, wasn’t I? I was working! Based on prior usage rates, jotting down a few stilted sentences every four hours was uncharted territory for me. Maybe I'd have the honor of putting in the world’s first online order for an oxygen tank? In any event, I was now under the aegis of "Ding" Duong, a very driven and very intense Vietnamese testing manager—someone who took his role as drill sergeant to heart. As per his movement orders, we had to man our battle stations every four hours, every day; in other words, we had to answer the bell six times a day. That’s why, for a lot of these worker bees, sleeping under their desks was a lot more practical from a logistical standpoint than getting all comfy in their posh hotel rooms, then dragging themselves back to the office. 

Speaking of posh hotel rooms, I had to hand it to the classy Cybersource requisitions squad. My swank 15th floor pied-à-terre at a boutique Bank Street hotel offered superb views of New York City Hall, the resplendently deco Woolworth Building, and the familiar Manhattan skyline as seen from an unfamiliar angle. This is where I’d be ensconced, lounging in the lap of luxury, before heading back to Colorado after my meet-the-players week was up. But right now, the only place I was heading back to was the 17th floor, for another software test. 

The Woolworth Building

While I'd gotten past the stuck-up notion that I was too good for the testers, the anti-ergonomic conditions remained a cause for alarm. I mean my chair had only two possible adjustment points, not the six or seven it took to dial in optimal spinal alignment; seriously, how was I supposed to not work in conditions like that? 

After performing a few calculations while I waited for another countdown to begin, the upside to accepting the harsh (to me, spoiled rotten by deep-pocketed entities who could afford to) conditions was inescapable. It didn’t take a database jockey, like the Brainiacs I was surrounded by, to estimate that I’d be taking home roughly $6,370 a week to file a dozen shorthand sentences a day, that maybe one programmer would glance at, then immediately file in the trash. I was well aware that’s more than most writers make in their entire lifetimes. Guiltily, I offered to edit the bug reports the international testers scratched out in halting English. A supervisor put the kibosh on that: “No, we can’t possibly waste Lory on stuff like that.” 

More pressing matters took precedence—like straightening out my love life. Alex Guznov, the personable tester I sat next to, insisted that what I really needed was a Russian wife. Mrs. Khrushchev, a daughter of The Revolution who did not appear to be centerfold material as photographed with her mischievous husband Nikita when the happy couple toured the John Deere plant in Iowa in 1959, sprang to mind. Said imagery was immediately dispelled after russianwives.com eventually loaded (back then, sites with lots of pictures took forever to load, if they ever did). Ah. Now I understood why venture capitalists were salivating over this newfangled internet thang. I was staring at a glamorous array of behind-the-iron-curtain babes, in all their airbrushed glory, who, the site intimated, couldn’t wait to escape the clutches of the drunken local misogynists they were currently schtupping. In between tests, Alex and I evaluated Russian wives from Odessa to Vladivostock. 

Guess the Russian wife?

When I wasn’t testing e-commerce databases or ogling Russian wives, my hunting and gathering forays began diverging from lower Manhattan—which shut down tight at 5 PM, after the financial district closed—to Tribeca, Soho, and eventually all the way up to the East Village. There was some awfully good grub available in The City That Never Sleeps. Dean and DeLuca was within walking distance, if you were determined. Taking in a little theatre along the Great White Way was also high on my list of new and different ways to ply an expense account in one of the most expensive cities on Earth. I’d seen theatergoers queuing up to snatch half-price sameday Broadway show tickets at the busy 2 World Trade Center Plaza TKTS booth.

I’d grab a sandwich and join them; the bustling commons, a block and a half away, was a prime people-watching roost. Japanese tourists photographing each other, dwarfed by the world’s tallest edifices, blended with a constant infusion of commuters emerging from the teeming PATH station. This grand-scale variation on ye olde public square was ideal for killing time during what were quickly turning into my customary three-hour lunch breaks. Thirteen hundred feet overhead, on the 107th floor of the North Tower, was Windows of the World—arguably the most spectacular restaurant in a metropolis full of them. I’d leap at any chance to strap on the old feedbag there.

That wish was granted in no time flat. Wouldn't you know it, 17th floor was buzzing that yet another milestone had been reached (Cybersource smashing the record for the most people sleeping under their desks at one time on one floor, perhaps?). The entire 100+ member crew was ordered to immediately report to WOW en masse for another mandatory blowout celebration. OMG, I can only imagine the bill those poor venture capitalists had to foot: well over a hundred people, an open bar, everyone ordering everything on the menu at a ritzy tourist trap. Over the next months, as “we” achieved milestone after milestone, not only did the Cybersource brigade take over clubs and rack up epic charges there, we took our esprit de corps back to WOW for two more bacchanalias on the corporate dime. Medsite was really going to have to carry on a brisk trade in crutches, canes, and butterfly bandages to recoup the kazillions these insatiables racked up on recreational expenses. 

Three weeks into my one-week visit to New York, the defining moment of this tour of duty came to pass. I needed to have my time sheet signed by Duong, the Vietnamese test manager—who was anything but a pushover. I was really squirming over submitting a bill for 196 hours for a two-week time period—a staggering number that just happened to be 101 more hours than I’d ever billed bi-weekly! Sheepishly, I handed the form in. This Southeast Asian taskmaster gawked at it intently, looking concerned, as in very concerned. 

“One hundred and ninety-six hours?” he enunciated, slowly and quizzically, dragging it out, staring at the slip of paper, hard, as if that could the change the numbers to ones more to his liking. 

Uh-oh. My heart sank. It was too good to be true. I’d been found out. 

“Is that all you worked?” 

What?!?!?! 

“You worked less hours than anyone in here!” 

Oh. 99% of the America work force had just clocked the same old same old 80 hours the past two weeks. I’d just handed in a timesheet for two and a half times that—and here I'd been called on the carpet for malingering. Consider me reprogrammed! I'd never let that happen again. 

You’d suppose that, after being vested with what amounted to a license to steal, maybe I’d stop obsessing about telecommuting from Colorado? Nope. I convinced Cybersource to fly me back there, as per the original agreement, couching it as request for a long weekend’s leave to visit my daughter. I really had no intention of returning. Well, after I got what I wished for, I found I wasn’t nearly as comfy not writing in my cushy home as I'd imagined I'd be. A few vexatious questions had arisen, not the least of which were, “How am I going to telecommute and do my job?” and, more aptly, “Just what is my job?” 

It took a while, but it finally dawned on me that the real job was figuring out what the job was. 

That was going to take some doing 2,000 miles away from the action. In the midst of these deliberations, the eye-catching sum of $12,870 for two weeks non-work had been direct-deposited into my checking account. For unfathomable reasons, Cybersource wanted me back in New York. So much for my telecommuting obsession and my non-negotiable ergonomic demands—those had been chucked out the window now. I began packing anyway. 

Speaking with the Cybersource concierge handling travel arrangements, I learned that my former pied-à-terre in lower Manhattan, conveniently located a block away from the job site, was full. Where would I be staying now? The answer, as implausible as it seems, was the Mayflower Hotel on W. 81st St, incredibly inconveniently located a whopping 120 blocks north—or closer to Connecticut than Brooklyn. The same brain trust, which thought nothing about dropping $75,000 at Soho hotspots for milestone celebrations, had a strict policy of not paying a penny more than $250 a night for our techno-nests. The Mayflower was the only available hotel in Manhattan with vacancies offering a corporate rate of $249. I could only imagine what sort of rundown rat and cockroach-infested fleabag that was and what breed of settlers stayed there. 

Cabbing in from La Guardia, taking in the nighttime sights and sounds around the Museum of Natural History, I couldn't help noticing that this vibrant Upper West Side hood boasted an exemplary selection of fine eateries to fuel me and any number of haberdasheries to cloak me. Sure enough, I’d finagle a way to charge my spree at NYC landmark Harry’s Shoes—a pricey pair of Ecco boots and an even more precious pair of Mephisto sandals—to my expense account, justifying the purchase as a “medical expense.” After all, I needed comfortable walking shoes, since I’d broken a toe stubbing it on a suitcase in the middle of the night, because, I successfully petitioned, “I was disoriented from overwork." 

We pulled up to the hotel on W. 81st. Before I could form an impression, my attention was arrested by an extraterrestrial object, which hadn’t been there the last time I went museum hopping, that had materialized across the street. It was impossible to gaze upon the newly-constructed Rose Center For Earth and Space without doing a double take. A five-story glass cube encased a giant sun, around which revolved nine planets replete with lifelike rings, moons, and craters. You don’t see that many of those. In the off chance you might otherwise miss it, glass cube and model solar system were bathed in an ethereal violet glow that really drew you in. My fifth-floor digs fit for a king offered an unobstructed view of this Ninth Wonder of the World and the nocturnal cityscape beyond. The only rat in residence was me, though this paid-not to-write rodent was, as usual, ready, willing, and able to nibble away at any urgent requests for documentaiton, should any of them unexpectedly materialize, à la the Hayden Sphere. 

There remained the small matter of translocating my physical body from an Upper West Side hotel to a Lower Manhattan jobsite. For the first week, I cabbed it each way. When accounting saw that each cab ride cost $25, they strongly suggested that I “economize” by calling a limo. The limo only cost $20 each way, so, being chauffeured theoretically “saved the company money.” Who was I to bitch? Now I was on an expense account in Manhattan, being limoed to not write. 

Logical minds—like the ones presumably belonging to the venture capitalists' accountants—might do the math and wonder why they were good with shelling out $289 for a hotel and two limo rides when they balked at paying, say $254, for a hotel closer to the job site from whence I could have walked to not work. That doesn’t even take into consideration the two hours they’d pay me to commute each way through standstill rush-hour traffic—which cost them an additional $130 ($65/hr. x 2 = $130). So, their effort to “save” five dollars or so a day cost my employers an extra $170 per diem ($130 for two hours “work” + 2 x $20 for limos rides = $170) over the next six weeks—or a grand a total of $7140 (42 days x $170 = $7140; there were no weekends on this watch). In case anyone’s still uncertain, the question “what killed the dotcoms?” requires less conjecture than “what killed the dinosaurs?”

Back on the bustling 17th floor, if I hoped to preserve my place in this high-tech Hieronymous Bosch tableaux, I needed something to write about. Pronto. There was a possible lead; a casual conversation with the Medsite owner ’s wife had put something in my ear about the existence of customer service reps who clocked in at the company’s supply warehouse across the Hudson, in Newark, NJ. From what little she could tell me, I gathered that these reps had been taking phone orders, since time immemorial, from doctors ordering off hard-copy catalogs in traditional, pre-e-commerce fashion. The same reps were slated to be cross-trained to support the massive e-commerce portal now code-named Optimus. Bingo! I smelled a mission—writing a training manual for CSRs. 

But just who were these beings? What made them tick? What did they resonate with? The thing to do was take the Holland Tunnel to Newark and find out. I somehow doubt that “Jungle Avenue in Boogieland,” as the limo driver not so affectionately dubbed the roadway he left me off on, was in any danger of being designated by The United States Department of Transportation as a scenic byway; the six “intrinsic qualities” it looks for in a landscape don’t presently include gigantic cylindrical smokestacks spewing noxious clouds of who-knows-what, chemical plants, oil refineries, abandoned factories, urban blight, or the world’s largest neon Budweiser sign affixed atop its industrial brewery.  

Ironically enough, I actually had prior experience working on “Jungle Avenue in Boogieland;” Belmont Avenue in Newark to be exact. I kid you not. My dad, Henry Kohn, commuted daily to I. Lehrhoff and Co., a small appliance (electric shavers, Mr. Coffees, toaster-ovens, etc.) warehouse in Newark from River Vale, our lily-white neo-colonial suburb tucked away off Exit 172 in NJ's more New Englandy northeast corner. He was the “advertising man” who put Lehrhoff ‘s catalog together. Maybe I inherited my innate ability to set world records in obscure accomplishments from Dad—he’d been dropping quarters in the coin receptacles at four Garden State Parkway toll plazas each way, six days a week, for thirty-five years. That’s a lot of coin and a hard record to top. After being an iron man like that, by all rights the New Jersey Turnpike Authority should have commemorated his achievement by naming a Henry Kohn Toll Plaza after him. 

My job description at I. Lehrhoff & Co. was “Christmas help,” picking, packing, and shipping orders on the lower floors beneath the showroom. I discovered, to my great surprise, that Dad was beloved in the warehouse. That was curious; he was a phantom at home. “Oh, you’re Henry’s son!” Brutus, one of the pickers, gushed appreciatively. There was a practical benefit to being Henry’s son; under Brutus’ protection, the skinny long-haired suburban hippy kid was a lot more likely to make it back from the five-block lunchtime walk to White Castle in one piece. 

After spending much of my adult life in Colorado working for concerns like Marijuana, Inc., I could scarcely believe I was retracing my steps to work at another warehouse in Newark, some thirty-five years later. My salary, $25,000 month, was in a different league than the two dollars an hour I made at Lehrhoff’s. On the other hand, Medsite could have been a parallel universe—a bunch of prosperous suburban Jews running warehouses full of retail goods staffed by inner city blacks. 

Before I take you inside the Medsite CSR Department, I probably ought to mention that in the unlikely event an African-American person is spotted in Boulder, Colorado, it’s probably because a tornado carried them there from someplace else, someone was nodding off in the guard tower, or they were a CU football player. The few Afro-Americans roaming the streets wisely dialed back the ethnicity. 

Not so in the customer service department at Medsite! I was startled by luminous variations on couture, hair weaves, makeup, and nail care that I’d been missing out on in Colorado. A Xeroxed sign reading “You Say I’m a Bitch Like That’s Something Bad!” reflected the inner-city perspective. By and large, these examples of the feminine divine were “built for comfort, not for speed.” As of August 1, 2001, not a single one of them could tell me what the internet was. Naturally, I assumed someone had already broken it to them that they were being transitioned into web support, but hearing it from me was a news flash to them. Their collective reaction in a word: dread.So this was the target audience Silicon Valley-based Cybersource was lavishing $65/hr. on me to reach—inner city, African-American, internet-challenged urban goddesses, the least Wired humans I’d ever laid eyes on! But, hey, the CSRs were my people now, and I was their user advocate. I’d have the backs of these Big-Mama-Jamas, just like Brutus had mine, as I took them by the hand and escorted them through the virtual mean streets of cyberspace. 

The only problem was, these alien creatures were currently charged with taking phone orders, not interfacing with the likes of me. According to LaToya—she of the robin's egg blue acrylic claws accentuated with faux diamonds and matching eye shadow I'd been observing—only Harold, the dynamic department manager, who was a real go-getter but wasn’t around, could possibly be in the know about the in-progress e-commerce portal. This cultural anthropology-rich reconnaissance mission concluded with a promise that Harold would get back to me Monday morning. 

Harold didn't get back to me Monday morning. Or the rest of Monday. Or Tuesday. I was growing stir crazy waiting around on the 17th floor. I had to make a break for it. Then I was loose on the narrow, cobblestoned 19th century streets. I’d been wanting to more closely inspect "The Cathedral of Capitalism," the Woolworth Building,  and took a poke around. Its numerous Beaux Arts flourishes—barrel vault mosaics, brass salamanders, and plaster grotesques—didn't disappoint. I hadn't had much chance to check out Battery Park, where the ferries embarked for Liberty Island. I lingered there for a while, watching tourists feeding fragments of Wonder Bread to the pigeons.

Growing more emboldened, I perambulated around the southern tip of Manhattan till I stopped to tour a 19th century schooner docked on the East River. Exploring the wooden whaler put me in a seafood mood, indulged with Little Neck clams, served in a thick chowder with a packet of oyster crackers, at a vibey, musket and pistol-themed Revolutionary War-era tavern. Momentarily satiated, I meandered past the pastiche of electronics shops, luggage stores, delis, bagelries, Korean flower shops, Chinese restaurants, and Army-Navy stores comprising the cityscape of Lower Manhattan. Breathing in the scents of freedom—wafting aromas of soot, sauerkraut  and Sabrett hot dogs—I popped into Barney’s (formerly Barney’s Boys' Town) to model classic Armani suits and more flamboyant Jean-Paul Gauthier prêt-à-porter. I spent hours in there, trying on everything in the racks. 

Give or take four hours after I set off on my jaunt, I doubled back to the Medsite encampment. Same as it ever was. With a definable mission, my presence was no longer required at the testers' tables six times a day. I plopped down at my old place there anyway, to find out what Alex had been up to. We’d already scoured Russia, Lithuania, and Ukraine in our exhaustive search for a Russian bride; he reported making some headway scouting potential soulmates from The Republic of Kazistan. 

“These ease thee goy-ill for you to marry, Lo-ree. I have peeked her oat for a you.” ("This is the girl for you to marry, Lory. I have picker her out for you.)

The chosen one was Marian, a twenty-something blonde with some roots showing holding a living accourtrement—an orange and white cat. She, or her translator, had a way with evocative imagery: 

Time flies like arrows, but I’m sure that you’ll manage to find me 
My hobbies include parapsychology 
I adore quiet evenings, and I like traveling by sea 
Someday I will find him—I’m looking for you my one and only! 

Fifteen years later, those lyrics found their way into “Marian From Kazistan.” I’d been producing it in the back of my mind the whole time. 

Now it was midweek and there was still no hide nor hair of Howard. Fortunately, Alex and his fellow “Russkie” testers came up with the ultimate diversion: going uptown for "Russian Wives Live," at the opulent Russian Samovar on 52nd St.

And then there they were, a cluster of them at the bar, looking refined, well-coiffed, haute-coutured, and, dare I say, available. After a fourth or fifth shot of garlic Vodka—anywhere past two is unchartered territory for me—I worked up the courage to chat one up. In my inebriated state, I presumed she'd been encouraging me. Things seemed to be progressing, or they were, till I felt an insistent tap on my shoulder. 

“Lo-ree, dose are za holy gark lay-dees, ewe butter com buck to our tay-bull now.” Translation: “Lory, those are the oligarchs' ladies, you better come back to our table now.” Oh. Live and learn! 

Howard finally took like my 86th call toward the end of the week, after which  another expedition to darkest Newark was in the works. Some guys have all the luck! In the seventies, Howard would have been one of the life-forms that inspired Nina Simone to write "Young, Gifted, and Black." He had the intellectual good looks of a Malcom X; his choice of designer eyewear definitely had homage to the former devotee of the Honorable Elijah Mohammed written all over it. Over the next week, in a grueling process reminiscent of dentistry in the 18th century, I managed to extract enough somethingness from Howard and les demoiselles de Medsite to take a crack at faking a Customer Service manual. 

I even got the okay to finish it in Boulder. One day I was at the Trident Café, daughter in tow, when I ran into famed beat poet Anne Waldman. She used to live on the same floor as me at the Hotel Boulderado. Making conversation, I asked her what she was up to. 

 “I’ve become tenured faculty at Naropa. I just got back from readings in Dublin, Copenhagen, and Prague. My latest book of poems is out, published by City Lights Books. I was just named Outstanding Woman Poet and I won the Heavyweight Poetry Slam. And you?” 

“I’m writing CSR Training for Optimus,” I replied weakly. 

Have I mentioned how unsettling my inside-out life had become? Unhelpful thoughts—like CSR Training for Optimus was going to make me more money in ten weeks than the entire faculty at Naropa’s Jack Kerouac School of Disembodies Poetics took home in a year—were hard to shake.

Conflicted or not, I was still “a pro.” Employing advanced tech writing stratagems to stretch the thimbleful of data I’d collected into an authoritative-looking thirty-page manual, I broke paragraphs into bullet items and numbered lists, enlarged the charts and graphics twice as large as they needed to be, chose 14-pt. body type, blew up all the heads and subheads, shrunk the margins, and, by hook or crook, wound up with a vaguely presentable manual. We’re many pages into a saga about technical writing, yet it occurs to me that I haven’t provided a single sample. Looking for a surefire cure for insomnia? This less-than-scintillating excerpt from the Optimus opus will always be there for you: 

---

Intro 

On August 21, 2001, medsite.com launched Medsite Supplies, a web-based supply store. Medsite had previously offered a small online store now replaced by Medsite Supplies. 

For the first time, customers have the option of ordering a full line of medical supplies online. Some customers will prefer phoning or faxing in orders the traditional way. These options will still be available. 

The website offers a new way of doing business. However, you will continue to use the customer service skills and extensive product knowledge you developed using the old (MDS) system. This is an opportunity to learn about emerging technologies as you help customers conduct business on the web. 

What is Optimus? 

Optimus is the name of the new computer system that supports medsite.com. 

A development team from Cybersource is working with Medsite to design and refine the Optimus system. You’ll probably meet some of the Cybersource developers over the next few weeks. In addition, you'll be interacting with members of the Medsite/THP Supply Store Product Management team. 

This document provides an overview of the new site with an emphasis on the Customer Service module you’ll use to manage accounts. It describes many of the new tasks and processes Customer Service Representative (CSRs) will be called on to perform. 

If you haven’t already taken a look at the site, now would be a good time to do it! 

---

OK, so it wasn’t Ulysses. But it probably made me more in ten weeks than Joyce made off Ulysses in ten years! Oops. I was doing it again! 

Back in Manhattan, I handed CSR Training For Optimus in on August 28, 2001. What kind of feedback did I get? The none kind. I didn’t hear word one about it until I came up for review, on September 7th. The reaction was basically: “Hey, great manual, good job, you’re a fine fellow, thanks for playing, have a nice life.” Sigh. All things must pass, right? 

I spent a couple of days decompressing with my parents in Toms River, NJ. On September 10, 2001, Connie and Henry Kohn dropped me off at Newark Airport. Wouldn’t you know it, our flight path followed the Hudson River again, where I took one last look at the classic Manhattan skyline with its twin towers kissing the sky. I thought about Philippe Petit, the French high-wire artist who gained fame for his unauthorized walk between the twin towers. The whole flight home, I couldn’t get those images of Philippe, having a ball dancing on the tightrope 110 stories up from street level, out of my mind.  

The next morning, September 11, 2001, back in Boulder, my friend Steve from Ft. Lee, NJ called. Sounding shaky, he told me to turn on the TV.

 

Safeco Insurance Company
Supine on a poorly lit crosswalk, still clutching a Whole Foods bag of Weruva cat food, lashed by the freezing February rain, surrounded by firemen who’d immobilized me and looky-loos, I hadn’t felt this optimistic in a decade. Maybe I’d walk again and maybe I wouldn’t, but, from the look of things, an as-yet unidentified insurance company had just underwritten Songlab—the magnum opus I'd been pining to record for as long as I could remember.

When I tell people that in 2013 I was struck by a car and suffered a compound fracture of my right tibia and fibula, a separated shoulder, and assorted bumps and bruises in a pedestrian accident, the inevitable reaction is “That’s terrible!” They’re shocked when I respond that getting hit by a car was the best thing that ever happened to me! If I’d made it through that crosswalk unscathed, I would have spent the rest of my life feeling like I'd underperformed—instead of feeling like an artistic success who’d fulfilled my creative potential—a huge psychological difference. 

You’d be surprised how many brainwaves can flash across your mental screen in the brief amount of time it takes to topple from walking upright to lying motionless on a busy four-lane thoroughfare: 

• It was a chilly night in the Mile High City; strangely, it was raining, hard, not snowing. 
• That Whole Foods had only been open a week; drivers weren't expecting foot traffic at this intersection. 
• I’d been proceeding across BelIeview Avenue on a clearly marked crosswalk. 
• I had a Walk sign. 
• There were witnesses. 
• I was aware that a car had just sideswiped me; I probably didn’t have a head injury. 
• I wasn’t feeling any pain; I could be paralyzed. 
• Uninsured motorists don’t drive new Lexus ES-350s; the well-heeled Asian woman I caught a quick glimpse of behind the wheel hadn’t hit and run. 
• If I hadn’t paused in the crosswalk for a split second when I was unsure if a Chevy Tahoe streaking up to the traffic light saw me and was going to stop, I wouldn’t be typing this; the Lexus turning left that clipped my leg would have caught me flush. 
• My subconscious mind had just intervened to solve a major problem, the best way it could, that had stumped my conscious mind for 13 interminably long years. 

Which major problem? Finding the time and money to record another legacy-cementing album after Intel Corporation inadvertently financed Dairy Aire in 2000. But wait—what happened to all the loot I'd socked away prior to that explosive Medsite grand finale? The Big D, divorce, happened to those riches, the same twist of fate that also befell my mostly-paid-for million dollar ranch in East Boulder and a curated artwork collection. I was about to get all-too-familiar with another D for Devastation term: Downward spiral. By 2004, I was in survival mode—exchanging empty cat food cans for new ones at Whole Foods because “my cat didn’t like it” (the grocery chain had an incredibly liberal return policy before it was acquired by Amazon). Or I’d comb through my CD collection for disks that weren’t too jacked up to sell at Twist and Shout, hoping against hope I'd scrounge up enough single-digit dollars to eat somewhere inexpensive, but decent, like Wahoo Fish Taco on Colorado Blvd. 

And what about all those windfalls that had paved the way for so many previous escapades, the ones I'd become conditioned to believe would keep coming around, like clockwork? Disappeared—without a trace. Hey, some years, twisters touch down and tear through the Kansas grasslands while others … there’s barely enough breeze to keep the turbine blades spinning.  

Why not just get another tech writing job? Well, when I cavalierly swore off Corporate America in 2001, little did I suspect that, just a few short years later, the Fortune 100 companies and venture capitalists I unintentionally fleeced would return the favor by revoking my backstage pass privileges. Truth be told, I was so broke in 2005 that I would have gladly licked my way across I-70 to land another $65/hr. tech writing gig. But things had changed—drastically. Previously, I only had to beat out three or four tongue-tied dweebs to get the job; now I’d had to have to fend off three or four hundred equally-qualified candidates who knew how to play the interview game, too. With so much competition, hourly rates shrank to a third of what they’d been. As for the very specific skillsets employers were now seeking, well, try this analogy: you’re a sportswriter, you’ve done a perfectly good job of covering the New England Patriots, whose colors are red, white, and blue. You apply for a job covering the New York Jets, whose colors are green and white. You get the word—just because you proved that you can cover a red, white, and blue team, that doesn’t mean you can cover a green and white team. You’re too much of a risk. Sorry, Charlie! 

So, the doors to the corporate world had slammed shut, at least for the high-paying gigs I used to land in my sleep. Reduced to taking a sales job at CompUSA in Boulder, at least I'd home-rolled my own PCs, used Apple products extensively, earned PC support and network certifications, and stalked the hallways of capitalism's finest, so there wasn’t a whole lot I didn’t know about hardware and software. Aside from the fact that management was allergic to sharing profits with the sales force, CompUSA was actually a great setup for me. Drawing on my sales experience at Marijuana, Inc., in no time flat I became the star of the sales floor. I was even named Douchebag, I mean Employee of the Month, for which I was awarded a wooden plaque worth a wooden nickel. That’s not quite the sort of acclaim I was seeking at that stage of my life; on the other hand, now I could afford to splurge on cat food by the case. But rents were climbing in Boulder, my daughter Isabelle was approaching college age and I was staring at out-of-state tuition, and even hitting it out of the park at a big box store was still only good for a subsistence living. 

Now that I’d demonstrated an ability to "sell, sell, sell" in a retail environment, if I wanted to make "real money" in an industry that took just about anyone in, the thing to do was become a car salesman—or an anti-car salesman, as I played the role—despite having a long list of conscientious objections to anything and everything having to do with the petrochemical industry and its proclivity for turning pristine ecosystems into superfund sites. That tree-hugger mentality actually came in handy, when I found myself selling Toyotas in 2006. I could barely sell the Corollas and Camrys that flew off the lot for other salemen, but I was a whiz at selling Priuses, Highlanders, and other hybrids. Selling hybrids in a state filled with environmentalists had its advantages; I led Colorado in hybrid sales, taking home another corny plaque in the process.    

OK, so now I was a “highly decorated” car and computer sales grunt, which may have been preferable to folding myself into a square glass box for gratuities as a street performer on the Boulder Mall, but working a retail sales floor really wasn’t any more “me” than twiddling my thumbs for eight hours in a cubicle. “Me” was The Milkmen, the love-of-my-life band that had remained on life support since 2000. My preoccupation with the Men of Milk beat on in my heart of hearts, that heartbeat was strong enough to shatter a stethoscope—and we had plenty of unfinished business. 

While we’d outwritten and outrecorded some of the music biz's best and brightest at various times (not always, but often enough), we’ve done it largely in a vacuum. I wanted to think that, although it was late in the game, our body of work would somehow attract the attention of musicologists who’d pore over it like the Dead Sea Scrolls and validate it worthiness. That’s what, by all rights, it deserved—according to my fragile human ego, which, though admittedly prejudiced, wasn't necessarily “wrong.” In 2000 AD, Dairy Aire replenished our “Silo of Hits” with irrefutable proof that The Milkmen weren’t just legends in our own minds; there just wasn’t quite enough of it that we could get away with resting on our laurels from that point on. By 2013, it had already been high time to restock for a decade. Our inability to do that, over time, especially when I felt like our udders had so much more milk left to give, eventually began to gnaw at me. And it gnawed at me and gnawed at me, as the years rolled inexorably by. Oh, how I yearned to slice that first syllable off “unfinished” business, to crank up the milk-making machinery again, to take on the ultimate challenge—recording a 30-song, 2-CD magnum opus that pushed us to the outer limits of creativity and beyond—the studio equivalent of summitting Mt. Everest.

On a more optimistic note, during those 13 windfall-less years, even as I turned 52, 54, 56, and 58, with the probability of ever milking again slowly ebbing away, I hadn't noticed any appreciable drop-off in my ability to come up with A-material that could be relentlessly honed into A-plus-material. Retaining the ability to summon the muse as I approached my seventh decade came as a pleasant surprise, debunking the conventional wisdom that you write your best stuff in your twenties, then you just regurgitate your past hits in Las Vegas or on Rock Legends cruises from there on out. Constantly dreaming up ingenious ways to arrange and produce the ideas swirling in my head to maximum effect, I remained convinced that my best work lay ahead of me— whatever my chronological age might be.  

Another saving grace that kept me motivated, even as time marched on, was discovering that I appeared to have all the traits of what gerontologists call a superager—someone with the mental faculties of a person twenty years younger. Longevity ran in my family. I self-hypnotized myself to stay ready, to remain vital, in case something miraculous happened and the opportunity to set off on a milk crusade for the ages somehow presented itself. 

All that positivism was well and good, but it still left me two precious commodities shy of turning visualization into actualization: time and money. I didn’t have the latter, which meant I didn’t have the former, either. It just wasn’t happening, or even close to happening, at any point between 2000 and 2013. I felt utterly powerless. Not only couldn’t I figure out how to record, I couldn’t even figure out how to get the hell out of Littleton, the satanic suburb I’d reluctantly moved to after getting priced out of the rental market, first in Boulder, then Denver. 

The Columbine Memorial

Upshots of the American-dream-turned-nightmare littered Denver’s most right-wing outskirts: 

• Wadsworth Boulevard, the main drag, was home to every Big Box retailer under the sun. What marked the 10-block stretch closest to me as particularly despicable were the capacious parking lots, constructed when the rise of American consumerism was at is peak and it looked for all the world as if every day was going to be Christmas Day. Post-2007 recession, those expansive parking lots were are maybe 1/10 full on any given non-December day. That stench of rampant consumerism, symbolic of the prevailing, “you are what you buy” mindset, was a real bringdown. 
• When I became Littleton’s newest resident, I found a nearby trail that encircled a lake. I was exploring the reeds and the bird life, seeing where things led, when I came upon a man-made artifact giving off some heavy energy. It had a name that stopped me in my tracks: The Columbine Memorial. It was freaky seeing the obituaries parents had written in honor of their slain teens, chiseled in stone for posterity. There were pictures of President Clinton speaking at the dedication ceremony. You could walk up a little hill to a shrine, which afforded a great view of … yup, Columbine High School, the scene of the crime. If the energy on Wadsworth Boulevard a few blocks away wasn’t oppressive enough … 
• Michael Moore had just come out with his latest documentary, Bowling For Columbine. One of the more memorable scenes takes place in the cavernous lobby of the Lockheed Martin Corporation, situated in the Littleton foothills. Moore and a company spokesperson are standing in front of a 50-yard long Minuteman III Intercontinental Ballistic Missile. The documentary maker asks the munitions man if he has any idea at all why some countries consider the United States a threat, and the guy, standing five feet in front of a warhead capable of reducing Rhode Island to rubble, draws a blank. 

Man, I wanted to blow that town! But all wasn’t lost; only a few short exits away, via the 6th Avenue freeway, a long overdue development had the aptly named Mile High City abuzz: marijuana legalization, and the sudden proliferation of retail shops dispensing "the devil's weed" in its many solid and liquid forms. That 2011 bolt out of the blue brought back warm and fuzzy memories of my productive stint at Marijuana Inc. I saw how the nascent cannabis industry was a boon to communities, providing a profusion of jobs people actually wanted and a tax bonanza for the city, county and state. The former cow town had reimagined itself as the most progressive city in the USA.

While all those colorfully named and aromatic cannabis strains—Grape Ape, Sour Diesel, Kosher Kush—really popped in retail settings, to the delight of aficionados—I couldn't help noticing that conventional reporters and economists had a hard time wrapping their heads around the unique commodity. What I knew about it they failed to realize was that people responded to it entirely differently than they did to unregulated commodities like pork bellies, cotton No. 2, and tangelos; they didn't just sorta like it, they considered it God's gift. Academics, who wrote supposed learned treatises about it, viewed the versatile plant as nothing more than a subject in a study; few of them had ever tried it, fewer if any were connoisseurs, and basically none of them had ever sold so much as a gram of it —whereas I, on the other hand, knew all too well that proponents viewed as nothing less than the linchpin that held their very lives together. That disconnect called for an entirely new breed of economist, a poteconomist, if you will, who could account for the pungent herb’s vastly underestimated earning power. There aren’t too many  substances that get you high that you can build a house out of. 

I'd never spent one second of my life dwelling on economics before, but there was a lot to weigh in on, so I followed my feelings and launched an expert site, Cannabis Commerce. Now I had a forum to pontificate on all aspects of the business, including “cannatax.” The same soul who was paid a small fortune to sit in a cubicle and not write for months on end banged out something like 60 features in 18 months. I also sold ads for the site, and picked up some decent change as a copywriter for all the new firms jumping in on “the green rush.” If that wasn't enough, I worked as a trimmer; those commercial grows I rotated around, which had taken over every available square foot of commercial real estate in the former Queen City of the Plains, were a botanist’s wet dream. That had to be the trippiest part-time job in America. 

Cannabis Commerce kept my mind occupied and my phsical self out of trouble, even as I turned 60, then 62. I was getting by, things weren’t as dire as they’d been, I was finally breaking out of a long downward spiral—but no closer to living out my recording dreams. I really, really, REALLY wanted that next siege of recording—but I just couldn’t have it—no matter how determinedly I tried to will it into being.

Of course I’d been trying to solve a longstanding problem with the same conscious mind that had been stymied at every turn. Sick and tired of waiting around for it to come through, my subconscious mind had seen quite enough. Saving my dairy dreams from extinction required drastic action; sure, that stunt it pulled was a little, er, messy, seeing as how it required years of physical therapy to completely recover from—but I’d become one with Belleview Avenue again, gladly, if that’s what it took to milk again. 

One shrouded figure ignoring the freak rainstorm drew closer, bending down to inspect the damage as if he knew what he was looking for. I had to ask: “Does it look like I’ll be able to walk again?” “Your bones are sticking out your lower leg at a right angle, but I’ve seen a lot of those on the ski slopes. It’s repairable. They’ll put a titanium rod in it and you’ll be good to go again.” This fellow seemed to know what he talking about. Maybe he was a medic at a ski resort? As much as I wanted to believe him, I hadn’t actually seen the snapped-off bones (probably a good thing or I wouldn’t have been so calm), I couldn’t take that diagnosis to the bank. 

An ambulance rushed onto the scene. The paramedics threw me with a choice of hospitals: Saint Joseph’s or Swedish. Hmm. A choice like that had massive repercussions. Picturing Catholic priests hovering over me waving crucifixes was unappealing, which put me off Saint Joseph’s. I remembered liking the goofy Bob Hope movie, I’ll Take Sweden, and its ditzy theme song “I’ll take Sweden ya ya ya,” when I was 12. So I took Swedish, ya ya ya. Score one for my long-suffering conscious mind—that’s the best decision it made in a decade. 

Open wound injuries like mine get you VIP treatment at emergency rooms, to keep infection from setting in. The Swedish ER docs poked around for a while, waiting for the on-call surgeon to arrive. Enter the man of the hour, Dr. Craig Davis, and his reassuring bedside manner. The compound fracture, this unassuming yet confident looking fellow informed me as I lay on a gurney waiting to be wheeled into surgery, was no big deal, he was going to “fix” it, which would “only take an hour or so,” at which point I’d be on the road to recovery and he'd be on the way home to polish off the dinner I'd interrupted. The word “fix” sounded awfully optimistic, as did the time estimate— considering he’d have to clean out the wound, put the bones back in place, measure and install a titanium rod, sew up the wounds, prepare and put on a cast, and clean up the mess, but, darned if many hours of intensive physical therapy later, he wasn’t proven right on all counts. 

A colleague from Dr. Davis’ orthopedic practice dropped by my room on his rounds the next day. This bone man spent an inordinate amount of time staring at my chart. 

“How much pain are you in on the 1-10 scale?” he finally spoke. I sensed, from his tone of voice, he was anticipating a response in the 8-10 range. 

“Zero.” 

He looked at me askance. The he checked the chart again.  Something didn’t compute. 

“Craig did your operation? He’s the upper extremities guy at our practice.” He made it sound like “Craig” was too much of a doofus to name the leg bones, or if the operation had been performed by a crossing guard. 

Upper extremity or lower extremity specialist, it's safe to say that Dr. Davis absolutely nailed (well, screwed, there are eight of them, four around the ankle, four around the knee) the repair. After so many years wandering in the wilderness, the lucky breaks didn’t begin and end with my right tibia and fibula; now they were coming at me in flurries. 

Try this “top ten” list: 

1. Choosing Swedish Hospital drew Dr. Davis in the luck of the draw. No one could have performed the surgical procedure any better than he did.
2.  While I was clearly discombobulated, I wasn’t in a world of pain. After the anesthesia wore off, I refused heavy medication, even though the staff kept offering it, not to be a hero, but because for whatever reason, I just didn’t need it. I think I took two Percocets total. 
3. Due to my reduced financial circumstances, I was on State of Colorado Medicaid. The operation, the week at the hospital, the follow-up visits, and the physical therapy would be covered. 
4. I lived on the third floor of an elevatorless building. Swedish couldn’t even release me until I found someplace to recover with wheelchair access. Who came to the resuce but my ex and her best friend, someone who’d always been standoffish toward me in the past, but, in my hour of need, offered her townhouse in South Boulder with its ground-level entrance that I could roll right in and out of. She even cooked for me for six weeks!  
5. Sports medicine clinics in Boulder and Littleton (six weeks later, when I could drag myself back up the stairs) really came through for me with some world-class physical therapy; Colorado is one of the most active states; its physical therapists don't lack for experience. Colorado is also home to the most Rolfers in America; if you’re not familiar with deep tissue structural work, and you've been hit by a car and have to learn how to walk again, you might want to be! 
6. As much as I ragged on it and couldn’t wait to leave it, unbeknownst to me, the City of Littleton had just installed Earth’s biggest and best hot water therapy pool in its sprawling new Rec Center in the foothills, minutes away from my house. I really made progress in all that buoyant, soothing warmth. 
7. One day I showed up at the therapy pool, only to find a water aerobics class had taken it over. As I stood there, looking puzzled, the instructor motioned me to come on in. What, me join a class full of old biddies who could barely stay afloat? Well, the instructor invited me again, a little more insistently, then the ladies themselves implored me to try it out. Oh! Those water-resistance exercises turbocharged my recovery. 
8. Hiring the Ramos Law firm to handle the ambulance chasing. What “should” have been a slam dunk settlement turned into a psychodrama requiring advanced people skills to resolve—they were up to the task. 
9. Steven Solomon, my longstanding co-writer and Milkmen co-founder, who hadn’t talked to me in five years, took the opportunity to reconnect.
10. Reconnection was followed by Steven's committment to go all-in on the Songlab project and give it his mightiest effort. 

While things were copacetic on the therapy front, the “slam dunk” insurance claim had all the eamarks of a long, drawn-out affair. It took weeks just to confirm from that the driver was insured, period, and even longer to identify Safeco as the actual insurer. Then Safeco took its sweet time divulging the driver’s coverage limits, a telltale sign that any hope I had for a quick pay-out was a pipe dream. Someone from Ramos Law had attended the driver's hearing, describing her as "a real piece of work" because, among other things, she'd worn a short, clingy, leopard-print dress to court with a matching cap.

Swedish Hospital and Medicaid would also have a say in whether there’d be anything left over, above and beyond the medical fees. I could possibly walk away with as much as $200,000; or I might find myself shut out entirely, marooned in a healthcare black hole, in a country where hospitals get away with charging like $50,000 for a box of Kleenex. It was impossible to predict how it was all going to shake out. 

For reasons hard to pinpoint— possibly related to how the settlement date and amount affected a court's perception of the leopard woman's criminal case—Safeco dragged out the inevitable. The Safeco adjuster's most dastardly delay tactic was maintaining that since I wore all-black on a black night and was walking across blacktop, his company somehow wasn't libel. That defense was never going to hold up, but it effectively slowed the wheels of justice. 

Despite enocuntering stiff resistance from Safeco, Brian from Ramos Law stuck to his a “you catch more flies with honey than vinegar” approach. After what seemed like an interminable amount of back and forth, his tactful strategy ultimately paid off; the insurer caved, Swedish took the high road, Medicaid showed the quality of mercy. Lo and behold, a manna from heaven six-figure settlement—affording me the freedom to do whatever I wanted with the next three or four years of my life—was mine! 

On the off chance you couldn’t guess, “anything I wanted” included all the gear I’d need to record a world class album. It also paid for renting dream homes in uplifting locales—like the one I stumbled into in Manitou Springs (next to Colorado Springs) with picture perfect views of Garden of the Gods, the Manitou Incline, Cave of The Winds, and the Manitou Cliff Dwellings. Seeing those four natural and man-made wonders out your picture windows has a way of easing the strain of staring at a computer screen for the thousands of hours it takes to systematically write, arrange, perform, and record 30 songs to the nth degree of perfection.

Garden of the Gods: what I saw out my picture window while I was recording Songlab! Nice!

Getting to record Songlab exactly the way I wanted to, in the most favorable conditions possible (well, until my dad died and I had to schlep all the gear to New Jersey for a year; the Songlab backstory deserves its own memoir), negated the accumulated pain of losing my wife, losing my home, becoming financially devastation, exchanging opened cat food cans to keep my cats alive, wearing a red Comp USA shirt, squirming through Saturday morning sales meetings at Mountain States Toyota, and living in a satanic suburb.  

Songlab, The Milkmen’s magnum opus and my greatest individual achievement, wouldn't exist without the (unwitting) "kindness" (ha!) of Safeco Insurance Company. No matter what vicissitudes life has in store for us, The Milkmen will always have Songlab ... and we wouldn't have Songlab without Safeco. 

 

The United States Treasury Department by order of The United States Department of Labor through an act of Congress
The conglomerate of improbables that became the seventh unsuspecting entity to foster the artistic exploits of Lory Kohn and The Milkmen—The United States Treasury Department (USDT) by order of The United States Department of Labor (DOL) through an act of Congress—stands out as both a mouthful and our least likely champion. That elongated name is actually truncated; as we’ll see, other government agencies got in on the act, too.  

The backstory boils down to a tale of two songs: “Love Won’t Listen,” financed by Marijuana, Inc., which was included on the soundtrack of Revenge of the Nerds, Pt. II, Nerds in Paradise released in 1987, and “Vote Them Out,” envisioned as a "rallying cry," which foresaw a “big blue wave” breaking over the 2020 elections. The latter—a triumph by any sound recording metric—went virtually unnoticed. 

Stop me if you’ve heard this before, but those major productions, which demanded and were allotted heaping helpings of time and focus by yours truly, didn’t have the look of contenders about to bring home commensurate amounts of compensation—the polar opposite all those windfalls I’ve recounted, the ones that had seemingly materialized out of the ether, yet had rewarded me, richly— despite receiving minute apportionments of those same commodities.

The same lingering questions I had about this state of affairs in 1987 persisted in 2020: Was it really so terrible that I’d been well-compensated for my demonstrated songwriting excellence in roundabout fashion? Would I be better served to quit resisting "what is" and just accept it? Would I ever bring home the bacon for my advanced songsmithing skills through conventional means—say through ASCAP, the performing rights organization that distributes royalties to other deserving songwriters and music publishers—and sever my dependence on the accidental largesse of Fortune 100 companies, venture capitalists, and insurance underwriters, once and for all?  

Let’s take a closer look at the ASCAP royalties. In 2018, after assiduously working my way through the ASCAP Board of Review’s protest process, the organization agreed with me that I should have been collecting royalties from penning "Love Won't Listen" for the past 30-odd years. They’d been mistakenly paying Lory Kohn's split to another writer named, get this—LeRoy Kohn—even when the guy was dead! What sort of do-re-mi are we talking about? Oh, some $33,000 for my one-third share (even though I wrote all the music and lyrics, another story). Great, right? Wrong. ASCAP’s bylaws state that even when you prove a point like that so convincingly that they’ll admit you’re right, they still only have to back-pay you for the past six quarters—which you’re welcome to fight, that is, if you want to go toe-to-toe with their battery of killer attorneys, ultra-experienced at squashing just such claims. Basically, they’re saying, “What took you so long to notice that?” In my case, the miserable excuses were ignorance and stupidity—songwriters from the hinterlands rarely know there is a music publishing game, much less how to play it.

But better late than never; as we'll see, it was extremely fortuitous that I noticed that my career earnings were $33,000 short at all! The takeaway from all that jousting with ASACP: my 2019 tax return showed that quarterly royalties I'd collected on "Love Won't Listen" totaled a whopping $153 for the fiscal year 2018. Hold that thought! 

In 2020, I was hardly the only baby boomer who considered the removal of Donald Trump and his Republican cronies from office a life-and-death imperative. I was, however, one of the few ex-hippies, now in our late sixties, capable of producing a modern protest song that encapsulated the feelings of a majority of Americans in a catchy, singalong rocker. While it’s true that I was capable of penning an uplifting anthem for our phantasmagoric times, I’d have to dig deep, really deep. Why? What I thought I'd be doing at this stage of my life, pre-pandemic, was getting out and about, a guy and an acoustic guitar, performing stripped-down versions of my greatest misses at discriminating listening rooms from Asheville to Big Sur. Tackling an epic studio production—with a political theme, no less—was about the furthest thing from my mind. I’d recorded a few basic demos here and there, to capture song ideas, but I hadn’t taken a crack at serious recording since Songlab wrapped in 2017. I was out of practice at every aspect of songwriting and recording I could be: composing music, writing lyrics, arrangement, production, performance, singing, tracking, editing, faking instruments, et al.  

One big reason I’d taken such a long break was—don’t laugh—I’d developed “audio editing PTSD,” from infusing Songlab with megadoses of compulsion. Fortunately, for the end result (not my mental health), I’d learned to compensate for unnoticeable-to-most-people-but-there timing and tuning fluctuations. I'll spare you the minutiae; let’s just say that I’d tacked together a “makeup kit” consisting of various time-consuming editing techniques I could resort to anytime a need arose to “put my face on”—the one I wanted the world-at-large to see. 

Why would I go to such great lengths that others would call overkill? Well, while I may have a good sense of rhythm for a normal human being, every one of the studio cats who plays on Songlab with me has abnormal—read perfect—timing, which has the effect of making my good timing seem wayward in comparison. Ditto for staying on pitch; mine’s decent for your average homo sapien, but it doesn't hold a candle to an elite backup singer like David Steele, who’s sung on a half-dozen #1 hits. Since I did so much of the playing and singing on 30 mission-critical productions, there were plenty of blemishes to touch up. Mine's not a methodology I'd wish on my worst enemy, but, if you're forced to wait and wait and wait for as long as I did between major recordings, you just suck it up and do what you have to do—that is, if you happen to be obsessive about creating timeless recordings. As the saying goes, “it takes a lot of hard work to make it seem like it took no work at all.”  

PTSD or not, these were extraordinary times. I was weary of standing idly by, feeling powerless, while racist misogynist creeps tore the country apart. Things came to a head in June of 2020, when, under a COVID-19 stay-at-home order, I had plenty of time on my hands to watch all those souls marching in the streets for Black Lives Matter. I never thought I'd see that kind of activism again in my lifetime. There was always some kind of music playing in the background —although none of it was purpose-built. It occurred to me that the dump-Trump movement could use a "rallying cry," if you will, that supporters could sing along to at massive indoor and outdoor rallies in the lead-up to the November elections. 

Meanwhile, I had the music for a song with a strong Native American "pow wow" beat in my back pocket. It cried out for a big production, but I hadn't come up with just the right thematic spark to spur me into action. One day, I turned on MSNBC, just in time to catch pranksters merrily painting “BLACK LIVES MATTER” on a city street in 35-foot high yellow letters—clearly, I wasn’t the only citizen with an urge to do something demonstrative with my emotions, rather than just sitting around stewing. The network cut to a field reporter interviewing a black Democratic congresswoman. The first question was, "What can people do to express their frustrations with all these do-nothing Republican lawmakers?" “Vote them out,” the Congresswoman replied, for which she received a smattering of applause. Then she responded more forcefully, “We will vote them out this fall!” and got a resounding response.

That was it!

I was in business, with an ideal subject for the times, one that could conceivably kill three birds with one stone: 1) Provide a dynamic, timely subject for my unfinished song; 2) Give me an outlet to work through the feelings of helplessness and despair that anyone with a shred of compassion had to endure under an increasingly autocratic administration; and 3) Offer me a real shot at collecting music licensing fees from some obvious players. 

I’ll name those obvious players in a moment, but, before I do, I have a confession to make. Hint: it concerns my previous marketing efforts. I’m aware what some of you who’ve made it this far must be thinking: “So, you say you’re disappointed that you didn’t get the renumeration or appreciation you wished you did and feel you deserved from putting all that sweat equity into your productions. But, while you’ve talked repeatedly about how much effort you've devoted to the creative process, how much energy have you really put into selling the fruits of your labor? Perhaps if your determination to sell your existent work equaled your drive to create new work, maybe you'd have cashed in through conventional means, as so many other artists have somehow managed to do. Then you wouldn’t be lamenting that your financial life has somehow been inverted by unknowable forces.”

Um ... what can I say? That is valid criticism and I can’t dismiss it. I haven’t been as strong at letting rejection roll off my back as I could have been. There, I said it. I’m guilty, guilty of having inordinate faith that if I crafted a tune until it was as immaculate and soulful as it could possibly be ... it would just sell itself. Well, as I sit here in March of 2022 with a "Silo of Hits" that isn't, with the aforementioned exception, producing residual income, I know now that’s not the way it works. No matter how great a song is, someone still has to sell it. I could raise a few salient points in my defense; instead, I’ll just cop to the truth—I haven’t prized commercial success nearly as highly as artistic success—much to my own detriment. 

That deceptively simple-sounding concept finally permeated my thick skull; consequently, this licensor took a proactive approach, jotting down a list of promising licensees, while "Vote Them Out " was still in the early stages of production: 

• The Democratic National Committee
• The Lincoln Project 
• Network TV,  in particular MSNBC and CNN 
• Documentary makers 

Those were all hittable targets—provided I could fire at them while they remained in range. Easier said than done! In the normal course of events, if I haven't recorded seriously for a while, I start off with more basic productions, then work my way up to more demanding ones. But it was already late June of an election year; there was no time to dilly-dally around. I'd have to go for it right away—whether I was in top form or not.

When I finally set to work in earnest, the self-imposed pressure was ... nerve-wracking. The more I tried to push things along, the less I accomplished; when you’re playing most of the parts yourself, changing just one of them more often than not means that you have to go back in and change all of them. Alter one lyric, and you have to re-record the six voices in the chorus. And so on. Trying to rush things had become counterproductive. I’d have to revert to my usual snail-like pace—which is what it is, thanks to a longstanding tendency to keep auditioning different approaches until I settle on the one I feel is most likely to stand the test of time. 

By August, I was making significant progress; unfortunately, so was the COVID-19 virus. That forced me to face the music—this presidential election was going to take place entirely in the virtual realm. Ugh! Candidates were not going to be appearing at the usual election year whistle stops and rallies I pictured back when all that BLM footage called me to action. No rallies meant no pressing need for a “rallying cry.” I could cross my #1 prospect, the Democratic National Committee, off the list. 

While that was damaging to my licensing prospects, which I couldn’t completely control, something else weighed on me that I could: the concern that “Vote Them Out” might be my last major production. That was hardly paranoia; I was turning 69 in a month! At some point, destiny was bound to replace me with another plaything. In case it happened sooner than later, I was going out with a bang. 

After struggling mightily for a good two months—hardly the first time I’d spent that long refining one song—I caught fire toward the end. The various song elements congealed, Marcus Cliffe's mix blew everybody away, and arguably the best production I’ve ever been associated with was completed in the nick of time, a scant seven weeks before election day. 

Sticking to my pledge to market the tune as planned, I emailed everyone associated with The Lincoln Project, a group of ex-Republican and pro-democracy campaign advisors and talking heads who’d cranked out a fierce series of anti-authoritarianism videos that had gotten under Trump’s skin and rattled him—drawing a lot of attention to themselves and their website in the process. In addition to linking themselves with a certain patriot whose likeness is chiseled on Mt. Rushmore, the site doubled as a conduit to process a flood of donations streaming in from the group’s celebrity and small-fry admirers. I had every confidence this media savvy lot could cook up a viral video, rolling a montage of telling images over the impassioned strains of “Vote Them Out.” But I couldn’t have picked a worse time to come calling—The Lincoln Project was about to become a disgraced group of ex-Republican pundits and prognosticators. 

It had come out, to the delight of the same opposition politicians they’d satirized, that a) their hierarchy set aside a suspicious amount of the donations they received for "administrative expenses"— which was really just a euphemism for the slush fund they used to enrich themselves to the tune of tens of millions of dollars apiece, and b) their male leader was in the habit of forcing himself on their male interns, and, what's more, had been predatory for some time. The rest of the staff knew about these transgressions, yet had looked the other way—to hush things up, lest the disclosure gave all those outraged libs pause and their tyrant deposition-sized gifts stopped pouring in. In any event, I never heard back from any of The Lincoln Project's newly-minted millionaires. That meant I could also scratch my second-best prospect off my list. I fared no better with my other prospects; try as I may, my attempts to engage major networks and documentary makers at this late juncture revealed that their dance cards were already full. I had the sinking feeling that I was going to be shut out, again. Or was I?  

Not so fast! On a parallel track, I'd spoken to a friend in Taos, Burton, a singer-songwriter who was on food stamps, had health concerns, and could never seem to find the money he needed to buy silver and gemstones to keep his jewelry business going. He surprised me with the revelation that he’d just received an infusion of government money—enough to buy silver in bulk, afford a medical procedure he’d been putting off, and relieve any worries he'd have to sell his house. What obscure government program could have bailed him out of all those exigencies? Burton couldn’t tell me, he said, because his nephew was the one who told him about it, had filled out all the paperwork, and kept up-to-date filing claims on his behalf. Hmm. 

Then I ran across online testimony from another musician, whose tax return only showed a few hundred dollars of reportable income, but had nonetheless qualified for a nice chunk of government change as well. Were we talking about the same program? Genuflecting before the Google altar, I found that, in addition to passing the CARES Act—which authorized USTD to issue $1200 stimulus checks to every taxpayer—Congress had also directed state unemployment divisions, through the Pandemic Unemployment Assistance Act (PUA), to ramp up their creaking legacy systems to allow persons who were out of work because of COVID-19 to start receiving weekly benefits. 

That’s where DOL comes in; it administers unemployment insurance programs for all 50 states. Traditionally, the New Mexico Department of Workforce Solutions (NMDWS) needed to see a certain amount of reportable W2 income in order to qualify someone for benefits. At Congress' urging, DOL decreed that if you didn’t have any in a pandemic, you weren’t necessarily SOL. If you were out of work for any of eight possible COVID-19-related reasons—perhaps you were a caregiver for someone who had it or your business was shuttered because of it— you qualified, even if you were an independent contractor or self-employed, which was new and different. It would have been swell if any of those eight original reasons applied to my situation; none did. DOL added two more qualifying scenarios; those didn’t apply to me, either. I pretty much gave up on PUA, or I did until I checked the qualifying requirements one last time a few weeks later and and came across this encouraging development: 

The Secretary of Labor has also provided guidance for an eleventh reason: 

11. An individual who works as an independent contractor with reportable income may also qualify for PUA benefits if he or she is unemployed, partially employed, or unable or unavailable to work because the COVID-19 public health emergency has severely limited his or her ability to continue performing his or her customary work activities and has caused the individual to suspend such activities. 

Aha! Was I an independent contractor? Check. Did I have reportable income? Check, albeit it was only that $153 in ASCAP income—enough for one tank of gas on the day I’m typing this, 3/25/2022—which I had a great deal of difficulty believing qualified me for entrée in this club. Did the COVID-19 public health emergency … severely limit … performing customary work activities … and cause me to suspend such activities? Well, this is how I phrased my response on the application, tailoring it to the ASCAP songwriting and music publishing income shown on the 1099 tax return I was required to submit: “COVID-19 has made it impossible to interact with others in the course of performing customary musical activities like co-writing, working out full-band arrangements, performing, recording, and producing—especially since I've been placed under a stay-at-home directive.” Check!

What’s key here is what’s not here: an amount of reportable income required to qualify—as in there’s no minimum amount. Was USTD, under the guidance of DOL, actually going to start paying me some $679 a week because of “Love Won’t Listen,” a song written some 40 years ago, that ASCAP had finally gotten around to grudgingly paying me royalties on? 

Why yes, they were! And not only was Congress>DOL>USDT>PUA>NMDWS (excuse the acronym salad; did you really want me to spell that out?) going to start paying me some $679 per week, they made it retroactive (unlike ASCAP) for the six months that I’d been eligible without knowing it! My eyeballs almost popped out of my head when I discovered, a few days later, that some $18,000 had been direct-deposited into my checking account!!! WTF?!?!?!

Now, If I ruled the world, the Democratic National Committee would have cut me a $25,000 check for the rights to use "Vote Them Out" to their heart’s content in the dwindling days preceding the election. Ten weeks of regular $679 weekly payments later (round it off to $7,000), PUA had basically just paid me that same $25,000 ($18,000 + $7,000 = $25,000)! The result was the same as if I'd sold the song. Miracle! I'd been compensated fairly for my heroic effort, albeit in what had become my trademark roundabout way.

But the munificence didn’t end there. Even after the weekly PUA benefit was slashed to $429/week, when all was said and done, I was the lucky recipient of another $20,000 in unemployment benefits before the PUA program was discontinued in September of 2021. If I squint a little, I can see that figure covered a hefty portion of the royalties I never saw from licensing “Love Won’t Listen.” And here I’d been thinking that I’d taken a beating in my battle with ASCAP, that I’d never recoup any of the lost royalties dating back to the 80s when HBO and Showtime kept airing Revenge of the Nerds Pt. II round the clock Thank God I kept fighting the good fight long enough to eke out that $153 in royalties for my contribution to the camp classic … which had just providentially morphed into some $45,000. 

A nimble mind could also look at this windfall from another angle: The International Karma Commission had paid me in full for “Love Won’t Listen” ($33,000) and had also seen to it that I was taken care of, with $12,000 in accounts receivable, to ease my pain for “Vote Them Out.” If the DNC had offered that figure, with only double-digit days left to exploit the tune before Election Day, especially, well, there's every chance I would have grabbed it ($33,000 + $12,000 = $45,000! 

And that, friends, is how an acronym salad of government bureaucracies became inadvertent sponsor of Lory Kohn and The Milkmen #7. Milkmates and milkmaids on five continents salute you!

to be continued...