The Little Words Mean the Most

My entire mental health program

Oh, Lord, I just realized (this is why I read the Bible): My entire current mental health program comes down to a single quote from Dale Carnegie, which I cannot verify. "You'll have more fun and success when you stop trying to get what you want, and start helping other people get what they want." Very Buddha: abnegation of self. What rushes in? Concern for others, a happy conclusion to many itching desires. And so, Saturday morning troopers ... well, this is where my faith fails. If desire is bad ... is it right, or heaven-upward-pointing, or re-incarnatible if you actually help others pursue a desire? Desire, say Buddha, basic bad. Oh gasp oops don't know me disappear now. So me gone.

Car repair in the winter sucks

It's the title of my next novel. In an unheated garage, as a cold front pushes through; trees whipping. A blazing, safety-yellow worklight hangs from the inside of my basic transportation's hood; in its embrace, an electrified chiaroscuro that mocks me.

No part in this engine cavity has been moved for five years. The engine has never been cleaned. Wearing gloves, I prepare to swap out my headlamps, the low beams. Say the instructions: as easy as changing the bulb in a desklamp. I've waited 4 days for the parts to arrive. By FedEx. The driver magically produces a dog biscuit from thin air, to placate the black Lab that showed up at the same time. I paid extra for something better than OEM bulbs.The technical discussions on the Internet made the repair sound easy, too; like upgrading the RAM on a computer.

But history, misery, poor roads, pioneering, treks, deceased life (more than you might imagine) happen beneath a hood. I once extracted a dead and declining morning dove because it stunk up the place.

And inside the hood of a Honda Civic hybrid is crowded. It's not a Humvee; maybe you could build a child's imperial train set in a Humvee. Inside the hood of a 2005 Honda Civic hybrid: think urban nightmare a century from now, when regulation has finally been defeated and the per-square-mile population of earth has reached kill or be-killed density.

To work inside this space, you need the delicate, Swiss-watch hands of a cottontop tamarin monkey. Combined with the finger strength of Mighty Joe Young, one of the legendary fictional apes. I've double-checked every dimension of the replacement part with my micrometer. Once upon a time, I was a machinist. It was the only time when angels' wings screwed into my shoulder blades.

The top god, I do believe, loves crafts and craftspeople.

Everything is as it should be. Yet, WTFooey: Nothing fits.

A typical Friday night

It's 9:13 PM. Simone is shouting, conducting a webinar with Anchorage, AK. My clients this week: a school in British Columbia, a hospital in Nova Scotia, an opera in Texas, a global charity based in the US, and a school in Silicon Valley. Hobby: exploring coffee-brewed dark ales.

How to write a novel about redemption

Write the middle toward the end. As I change the middle, I change the end. It's pretty sweet, though. What I learned in the Bible today: people used to live to 800 and 900 years and have kids at the young-old-age of 120, people like Noah. I learned that the "gods" (more than one I'm telling you) would cohabit with the ever-easily-impressed humans and "devise" offspring. Total wreck. Get the Big Eraser. The Flood. Noah, my man, build the boat. Be the float. Two by two. The rest is you.

This is my new book project

Reading the Bible for the First Time, by Tom Ahern. Copyright now, 2011.

Know, in the Biblical sense

It means "mate." To "fuck with the possibility of progeny." I just found it in the Bible. Genesis 4.1: Now the man knew his wife Eve, and she conceived and bore Cain, saying, "I have produced a man with the help of the LORD."

I've started reading the Bible

Genesis 101. It's easier than science. I suspect that's why fundamentalists prefer the biblical version of "Where did we all come from?" You never have to worry about being the smartest person in the room when your science originates in tales told around a campfire in the desert.

Sure, I'm despairing. Who isn't? Yes, reading the Bible may be just to annoy Simone. Someone urged her to write her memoirs, "Growing up existential."

Self-euthanasia: Greatest Invention of the Next-to-Greatest Generation?

You're facing three buttons.

One says, YES. Push this and relax.

One says, NO. Push this and you go back to your former life, which is probably old, alone, bored and beset by physical ailments, one thing after another.

One says, OH, HELL, WHY NOT?

It's the last great frontier of medical science: making a good death. Hospice is today's answer for the debilitated and helpless. But ... putting aside the ancient legal and moral prohibitions that surround the act of suicide ... what if you could choose a painless, lovely, immensely entertaining death; a death that might even extend years, if you're hopelessly ill-deliberate; a death that made you see how important you had been to so many others; a fascinating, ever-unfolding, highly sensory death complete with gourmet pharmaceuticals ... a death that gently hands you off to heaven, nirvana, whatever? WHAT IF ?!?!?

Would you at least consider it? I think the Baby Boom will. I think they'll have to. And know what? I think it's highly appropriate that the final narcissistic act of a famously self-absorbed generation, my generation, SHOULD be self-euthanasia. Nothing says "It's all about me" more than picking the moment of your departure: "Okay. I've had enough. Let's do this sucker." Life is a consumable. When you've had enough, you should be able to simply call it quits. And if you so choose: with great booze (zero consequences), with great drugs (ditto), and with your friends (you've always loved them).

Look, God said, "Be fruitful and multiply, and fill the earth and subdue it; and have dominion over the fish of the sea and over the birds of the air and over every living thing that moves upon the earth." Genesis 1.28.

Well, done and done and done. Now we have 300 million plus of us trying to wring an existence inside the US alone. Enough already. We're running out of fish. The birds of the air turned out to be surprisingly easy to extinguish. And if it moves? Shoot it, baste it, roast it. Has anyone figured out how many people the earth can actually support, without epic warfare? We've got to be close to the brink.

People wonder about the Baby Boom, "What happens next?" Well, three things: (1) the younger they die, the richer they die; (2) they're used to forging new norms; and (3) we don't have the health care systems in place (or even close) to handle the coming medical tsunami of Boomers Falling to Pieces.

Richmond NGO: Waste of time?

Welcome to the world premiere of my Five Realizations approach to writing a case for support, a case for support that will (and here's the difference from the usual, ordinary, typical, commonplace case for support) effectively sell donors on your...

> projects
> programs
> endowments
> initiatives
> buildings
> renovations
> and shockingly bright ideas.

I developed this Five Realizations approach for a major research university.

But the same Sacred Way to Donor Nirvana applies equally well to all kinds of charities. Actually, small and young charities sometimes "get" this faster than large institutions; where even a bad day is a good day, relatively speaking, because the volume of gifts can become a narcotic. If you're an old-guard charity making millions by swinging at low-hanging fruit decade after decade, why improve? Yes, certainly, idealistically, you could do more good if you had more money. But institutions tend to hire functionaries; people who are capable of keeping the status quo treadmill going. Is there vision within? Often, at the mid-level; powerless but yearning: visionaries who ultimately grow dissatisfied with an institution's pace/lack of change. I speak with hundreds of dynamic, kinetic, impressive fundraisers a year. My guess? Institutions extinguish far more stars than they nourish.

The 5 realizations? Patience, my love. Coming soon.