Surreal

We have now officially entered the back stretch of 2013. The last two weeks of December take on a certain surreal character. We aren’t quite on vacation, but not entirely working either. In my case the books are about to be closed, there’s no one else to see, just a string of paperwork to complete. January will come in with a vengeance soon enough, but for now there’s a break in the action.

I’ve had a good year, and after two mediocre ones, prosperity feels better. But as always, life has cobbled together diabolical schemes to separate me from my wealth. Just last week, my son’s 1998 Volkswagen Jetta finally gave up the ghost. I had bought that car for him during the summer of his junior year in high school, and it had served him relatively well ever since. My hope was that it would make it one more semester, let me get through Kaitlin’s wedding bills before it blew up. That would have been asking too much of fate, I suppose.

So, over the weekend, I did some internet shopping on Carmax.com. I e-mailed Patrick a few possibilities. Then in a frantic five hours on Saturday, took a couple of test drives, texted him a few pictures, made the decision, secured financing, and purchased a 2011 Honda Civic. Now I have to figure out a way to get the car to Princeton, New Jersey, and myself back to RVA before Christmas. Of course, the down payment, cost of the warranty, title, taxes and fees (which one should NEVER finance), amounted to about what I had been planning to spend for Christmas. Surreal. Is it asking too much to be allowed to enjoy a season of plenty, the security of a respectable surplus in my capital accounts? Apparently so.

After the 24 hours of buyer’s remorse fades away, my good fortune becomes clearer. How blessed were we that Patrick’s car didn’t blow up on the New Jersey turnpike at 2 o’clock in the morning on his way home for Christmas? How fortunate that this should happen at a time of prosperity rather than scarcity? How much easier will it be to not have to worry every time Patrick drives his car to Newark or Philadelphia or Richmond? There is comfort in the details.

Maybe God knows me too well. Maybe he will never allow me to accumulate a suitable safety net, because in comfort I would become someone he wouldn’t like. Perhaps if I were rich I would become insufferable. Some might say I am already insufferable, a fair point. Regardless, God’s famously mysterious ways remain mysterious.

Affluenza??

Antonio grows up on the mean streets of Newark. His father was incarcerated for selling drugs when Antonio was only six. His mother is a crack addicted welfare queen. Consequently, Antonio is left to his own devices and soon turns into your garden variety thug. At age 16, on a whimsical impulse, Antonio decides to randomly cold-cock the first old woman he encounters on the street. He does so with lethal result. Unfortunately for Antonio, the attack occurs on a street that is covered by security cameras. The tapes reveal beyond doubt that he is the killer. He is arrested and tried for murder in Juvenile Court. Even though he’s a minor, he is convicted and sentenced to a minimum of ten years in prison.

Jonathan grows up in a gated community in Fort Worth. His father earns a seven figure income as a hedge fund manager and his mother is the tennis champion at the most exclusive Country Club in Texas. They don’t particularly get along very well, but the one thing they do agree on is the fact that their son can do no wrong. His every whim is indulged from the very first day that they handed him to his Hispanic nanny until his 16^th birthday, when he decides to steal a couple of cases of beer from a convenience store, then go for a drunken joy ride in his $40,000 pickup truck. Unfortunately for Jonathan, he plows into four people on the side of the road fixing a tire and kills all four of them. He is arrested and charged with DUI and vehicular homicide, and tried in Juvenile Court. Only, instead of ten years in prison, Jonathan is released into the protective custody of a swanky California retreat for therapy that will allow him to ride horses, surf, and work on his tan while getting in touch with his inner child. Jonathan’s lawyer successfully argued that he was a victim of affluenza, a heretofore unknown affliction, whose victims are insanely rich white suburban kids who have never been taught right from wrong by their upwardly mobile parents, consequently develop an entitlement complex that makes them resistant to impulse control, and therefore cannot be held responsible for their actions.

So, apparently being a spoiled brat is now a winning defense for murder. Set aside for a moment the fact that when I was a kid, being a spoiled brat served as an explanation for bad behavior, not an excuse for it. The fact that an actual sitting judge bought this argument is the real outrage here. Jean Boyd is her name. Her decision in this case is the sort of thing that historically has sent people pouring into the streets with torches and pitchforks. Her reasoning amounts to stupidity on stilts and she is a disgrace to the bench.

Everyone understands that money buys preferential treatment. It is the way of this fallen world. No legal system ever conceived on this planet has been able to free itself of its influence. But every legal system worth its salt makes the attempt at justice, strives mightily for the impartial application of the law. When this sort of case comes up, when money prevents justice so egregiously, it shakes us, or at least it should. When our legal system becomes the best legal system money can buy, the foundations of society begin to rumble. When Jonathan’s parents are allowed to casually write a $450,000 check for their son’s therapy spa vacation, but not one red cent to the families of the victims lying dead on a north Texas road, something is dreadfully wrong with our civilization.

Sleep well Judge Boyd, sleep well.

 

Stupid Cats!

They tell me that everyone dreams, every night. It’s just that we wake up with no memory of the dream most mornings. I suppose that’s true, although this particular scientific assertion seems to be on a par with global warming, that is, it’s safely unverifiable, therefore impossible to disprove. But, I digress.

Last night was the exception to this rule. I had a dream that I remembered in all of its terrifying detail the very second I awoke, and honestly am not convinced yet, 4 hours later, that it didn’t actually happen. I dreamed that I was asleep in my bed. OK, yes, I know this is a rather lame setting for a dream, but it is what it is. Anyway, all of a sudden, a tiny yellow kitten hops up on the bed, and props itself on Pam’s hip. The cute little thing then tries to engage me in cat play, which I steadfastly refused…it being a cat and all. For me, cats are only one or two species above squirrels in the evolutionary order. They make me sneeze; they poop and pee inside my house, and are generally disinterested in anything other than themselves. This particular kitten would not take no for an answer. It persisted in taunting me from its perch on my wife’s hip. Only suddenly it began to grow. Before my eyes, this tiny semi-adorable kitten was morphing into something very much like a mountain lion. With each growth spurt, it became angrier; its teeth longer and more menacing, the playful swipes of its paws getting closer and closer to my face. In desperation, I lifted my left leg and gave the brute beast a swift kick full into its fang-filled pie-hole. I immediately woke up to the angry protestations of my wife who I had nearly kicked out of the bed. The time was 4 am. No more sleep for me.

I’m certain that a trained Psychiatrist would have a field day with my dream. All I know is, I laid in bed tossing and turning for nearly two hours trying to convince myself that there wasn’t a mountain lion roaming through my house. Just before 6 I got up and cautiously went downstairs to make coffee, keeping my eyes peeled for strange movements. For a moment I felt that I was about to sneeze, then I thought my eyes were beginning to water. Once the coffee was brewed, reality had me back firmly within its grasp. Crisis averted.

Stupid cats!

Tis the Season

Today is audit day. Every year someone impeccably dressed from the headquarters of my Broker-Dealer shows up at my office door looking very official. He or she demands to see a few randomly selected client files. Then they want to see all of my compliance files. There’s the correspondence file, the checks received blotter, and the thankfully empty customer complaint file. Then he or she disappears into the conference room where they pour over it all looking for a mistake. Eventually they leave without saying anything except, “If there’s a problem, you will hear from us.”

Somewhere in the witches brew of my DNA is a molecular strain that predisposes me to rebel against authority. I have always struggled with the concept of having a boss, which is most likely why I ended up working for myself. Still, there is no such thing as total independence. Everyone has some form of a boss. In addition to my wife, and the IRS, I must ultimately answer to the suits at my Broker-Dealer. I do so reluctantly. I have never been able to buy into the fiction that they are “on my side, and that we are all in this together.” My view has always been that they perform their intense oversight of my business to protect themselves, not me. If I became a liability they would run away from me faster than a southern democrat running away from Obamacare in November.

Nevertheless, I never fear these annual audits for one very simple reason. In thirty years, I have never done anything intentionally deceitful to a client. I have never taken advantage of a client’s ignorance. I have always tried to do what was in his or her best interest, not my own. I say this not as a boast, but rather because merely as a practical matter, honesty is so much easier than deceit. Imagine how Bernie Madoff had to feel every time his office was audited. His mind must have been filled with tortuous worry. Would all of his schemes escape scrutiny? Would an indiscreet moment or an ill-filed report turn up? I cannot imagine having to endure that every minute of every day. Honesty allows for peaceful sleep. Honesty doesn’t require a good memory. It turns out that your Mom was right all those years ago when she warned you that if you became a liar, your lies would eventually catch up with you.

Now, this is not to say that I have nothing to fear from these audits. I am not the most organized person on the planet. My record keeping skills often leave something to be desired. But, administrative mistakes seldom get you carted off in hand cuffs. Better to be unorganized than a liar. I guess Bernie was the worst of both worlds…an unorganized liar.

When this audit is over with, I’ll have to get prepared for next week’s OSJ audit. Tis the season!

The REAL Zombie Apocalypse

Yesterday afternoon, I got home from the gym, like I do almost every day of the week. I proceeded to my routine of grabbing a bottle of water and heading upstairs to my black leather recliner where I grab my Google Nexus to check my email, track the stock markets, peruse Facebook, and check the news. Only, something was wrong. Something was very wrong. A troubling message flashed across the screen, “unable to open page, check your internet connection.”

Thus began a frantic thirty minutes of that most rare and hopeless exercise, me as an IT troubleshooter. The only thing I was able to discover was that none of the internet connection-reliant devices in my house were functioning. My computers were worthless, the television was out, and even my cell phones could not make an internet connection. To make this untenable situation even worse, my wife wasn’t home. See, in the Dunnevant house, there is only one person with the patience and technological savvy to get to the bottom of something like this, and she was at the grocery store or some such worthless place instead of here fixing the internet. Soon, Kaitlin got home. I asked her what to do. Aren’t the millennials supposed to be tech-savvy? She walked into my study and peered at the router thing with the blinking lights for a minute then confessed, “Who am I kidding? Where’s Mom?”

Thirty hellish minutes later Pam got home and began barking instructions. Nothing she tried worked. Apparently this outage was “ice storm related” and would require a visit from a Verizon Fios Professional who would be glad to service us Thursday between the hours of one and five. WHAT???!!! We can put a man on the moon, but let one eighth of an inch of freezing rain fall from the sky and our internet goes out? What are we to do for the next 48 hours for Pete’s sake? Don’t these people know that Christmas is coming? How are we supposed to do our online shopping, HMMM???

The rest of the night I walked through the house like one of those Zombie Apocalypse people, trying to find something to do with myself. I couldn’t watch the game. I couldn’t play Words With Friends, I couldn’t stalk my Son on Facebook. All of a sudden a bitter realization blazed across my consciousness.  I am a slave to the machine. Despite all of my efforts at independence, all of my vain conceits about being contrarian, I have been co-opted by big brother’s grid. My life has become dependent on connectivity. They’ve got me.

So I sit and wait for the nice man driving the Verizon van to arrive.   

College Football, Nelson Mandela, and a great joke

It’s Sunday morning, and it’s sleeting outside. My refrigerator is full of food, church has been cancelled, and Pam is downstairs making a breakfast casserole. Clearly, it’s time for me to pontificate on current events.

For all of the hand wringing about how college football needs a playoff system, once again the right two teams will be playing for the national title. Although my gut and my eyes tell me that the two best teams are Auburn and Alabama, I do get why Florida State is number one in the polls. Although they play in a much weaker conference, they have destroyed everyone on their schedule, and they have a terrific defense. Auburn played a much tougher schedule week in and week out and their only loss came in Baton Rouge on a Saturday night where the visitors practically never win. Regular readers of this space know of my devotion to SEC football, of my convictions, (born out by the record of the last ten years), that the SEC is vastly superior to any other conference in college football. But this year, I’m thinking that their streak of dominance may be about to end. Auburn has a virtually unstoppable running game, despite the fact that although it’s a triple option offense, most of the running plays end up being right up the gut, power football. Still, no one seems to have figured out how to slow it down, let alone stop it. However, Auburn’s defense is horrendous, especially against the pass. Florida State has a great passing game and the one thing that all of the past SEC champs used to have, and even greater defense. Count me among the old geezers who still believe that to win championships, eventually you have to be able to stop somebody. My money is on Florida State.

Nelson Mandela passed away. His death has dominated the news for the past 48 hours and deservedly so. He was a great man precisely because he was not a modern man. Mandela chose to reject Machiavellian schemes of revenge and score settling when he was released from over twenty years of political imprisonment. Instead of getting even, that most 20^th century virtue, he chose to pursue healing and reconciliation. This fact alone is reason enough to celebrate his life.

A political joke:

Nancy Pelosi and Harry Reid got together and decided that something had to be done to improve their image with “regular, middle class types.” So Nancy says, “I’ve got an idea, let’s go buy some regular people clothes, you know…jeans and t-shirts and go into a working class bar somewhere in Montana and buy everybody a round of drinks!” Harry loved the idea, but added that as a conversation starter and to better blend in with the local folks, they should bring along a dog. So, Nancy and Harry walk into a bar in Bozeman, Montana with a Labrador Retriever and start buying everyone drinks. Everything is going great for a while, then an old gnarly looking rancher walks in, goes up to the dog, lifts its tail and stares for a minute, then shakes his head and walks out. Not long after, another old rancher comes in and does the same thing. Over the next 30 minutes, another ten ranchers walk in, lift the dog’s tail, then shake their heads back and forth and leave without saying a word. Finally, Nancy looks at the bartender and says, “Excuse me. I’ve noticed these men lifting our dog’s tail. Is this some sort of quaint local custom?” The bartender says, “Lord no. Someone’s out there running around town, claiming there’s a Labrador Retriever in here with two assholes.”

My DMV Adventure

Over the past several weeks I have made quite a few snide remarks about my frustrating experience with the Division of Motor Vehicles. I have alluded to rude and incompetent employees, bureaucratic paper shuffling, and even used my experience to illustrate what we might expect once Obamacare is fully implemented. First a bit of background.

My Mom died in June of 2012. By the time Dad’s county tags for his van had to renew in October of this year, Hanover County refused to issue new tags since my Mother had passed away in the interim and her name was on the title. So, in order to get new tags issued, I had to remove Mom’s name from said title. This would involve contacting the DMV for instructions as to how to proceed. Thus began my three week odyssey within the bowels of the dehumanizing, soul-crushing world of government bureaucracy.

Anyone who has visited the DMV knows the drill. You walk in and are greeted with a sign that says that before you can join the throngs of people sitting in plastic chairs waiting for service, you must first stand in the information line. This is a line that snakes across the back of the sterile, strange smelling room where you wait to tell a bored Asian woman why you are at the DMV in the first place, to which she says, “I not sure this will work,” then gives you a piece of paper with a number…C123. Discouraging, but at least I’m now in a plastic chair.

The man next to me has mud-caked boots and smells of bourbon at 9:30 in the morning, all the while mumbling “mo***r fu**ng government.” I decide to stand. After 15 minutes, a woman’s voice announces over the cracking PA system, “now serving number C123 at station 11,” in that halting, robotic, creepy simulated human voice sort of way. I find station 11 and am greeted by an extremely pale woman, who without once looking up from her computer screen says, “What do you need?”

I proceed to share my tale of woe. I explain my two previous visits, I detail the difficulty I’ve had with all of the incorrect instructions I have been given by her colleagues that has caused me considerable angst. I lay out all of the completed paperwork in front of her, hoping to impress her with my due diligence. There’s Mom’s death certificate, a copy of my Power of Attorney, a Title transfer and change authorization form and all of the pertinent vehicle data. The pale one looks at the forms, then without explanation disappears behind the opaque glass wall behind her. This has happened on both of my previous visits. This is the place where DMV apparatchiks go to get away from me and plot their strategy for my destruction. Whenever they return from this cone of silence, it is never good news. Bad, even sinister things always seem to happen behind the opaque glass wall. She spends a full seven minutes back there before emerging, her face a mass of complete nonchalance. She says nothing to me. Instead she begins frantically typing away on her keyboard. Finally, after another four wordless minutes she grunts, “you be paying for one year or two?” Forty minutes after entering the DMV for the third time in as many weeks, I leave clutching my Dad’s county tags proudly in my hand. I immediately went home and took a shower.

The day before my triumph, my Dad got the following letter from the DMV.

 

The professional government employee who typed this letter has the most coveted possession in all of America. She has a guaranteed government job from which she can never be fired. She has very generous benefits, plenty of perks and never has to compete for anything. And this poor woman can’t even spell the street name of her employer’s address correctly. …To have you wifes name refomved has become an instant classic in my house.

Yeah, I’m sure the fears about government run health care are all overblown. What could possibly go wrong?