When it’s Time
This morning I have a mild headache brought on, most likely, by a stiff neck. Maybe it was from sleeping too long (I had a catch-up eight hours last night) or maybe it’s from driving a total of six hours yesterday with one full hour being in a blinding downpour. Then again, I played golf on Saturday for the first time in two years, and while the lower back stiffness has faded, I may be having a delayed reaction in my neck from the unusual and strained muscle movement. As old-guy as golf seems, it is a very strained movement and players of all ages get out of alignment from rotating their bodies in such unnatural ways. Whatever the reason, this sunny late summer or early fall (depending on your preference) morning feels less than perfect. Hunching over a keyboard to write is probably not the best thing for the neck, but it’s what I do, so carry on and stay calm.
Yesterday we drove home from Ithaca with Gary, Oswaldo and Yolanda, Oswaldo’s older sister from Venezuela. The five of us are all different, we have different paths and while we are all friends who enjoyed a pleasant holiday weekend together, it’s interesting to note where we each go from here. Let’s not worry about Sunday night because I’m sure for all of us it was time to relax in our own spaces and prepare for the next back-to-school season that begins today. Back-to-school has always been an important moment in the year to me. It signals the end of summer, even if the thermometer does not yet agree, and the whole back-to-work moment. We know we have all graduated and moved on from the back-to-school aspect of life, but have we graduated from the back-to-work aspect as well?
The age range of the participants in this example are from fifty-nine to seventy-five. Gary is off to physical therapy for his recovering hip/leg surgery, hoping to be able to lose the cane and strengthen his body. Oswaldo is back on the Staten Island gala merry-go-round as he is assigned and committed to helping the upcoming Greenbelt Conservancy launch its fundraiser at a party for donors. It is what Oswaldo does and continues to do to keep himself busy. It’s hard to tell if he cares much about the cause in this case (I’m sure he does a bit), but he is an Ever-Ready Bunny organizer and event-planner by nature. Yoli’s mission in life at the moment seems to be about shopping to take back to Venezuela all those things that you can simply not buy any more in that economically ravaged country. The Venezuela of my youth was a land of plenty that stood out among Latin American nations as the Prom Queen voted most likely to succeed. It is now a toothless hag of itself and earnest people like Yoli and her family have to struggle just to live a halfway normal life.
Kim is busy preparing for and rehearsing her show, which premiers in three weeks. She has tirelessly worked for several months on it. People do not realize how much effort goes into even a one hour simple cabaret show. This show is different because it is her first with her cabaret collaborator, Lennie. Lennie does many shows, but Kim only does a few. And this show is being billed a bit like her farewell to NYC show since she is performing it in the few months that precede our departure for California. I would normally suggest that she will be Cher, and have many farewell performances, but watching how hard she must rehearse to achieve her desired level of perfection, I can’t imagine her doing that remotely from California. Time will tell, but it feels more like a swan song than not.
I got home and almost immediately went into a two hour conference call over a failing company in which I am invested. It is not failing for lack of a good idea or even the lack of a good invention. It is failing because it actually takes a dedicated and knowledgeable business team to execute on a business plan to make something good happen, no matter what the quality of the idea or invention. We came to the conclusion that it may not yet be the right time for this product and perhaps we best pause the money burn until a better time comes around with the help of regulation. We must all choose our time.
As for me, it was time to start on one blog post and doze lightly in front of Errol Flynn and the Charge of the Light Brigade, which is most famous for bringing about provisions in motion pictures forbidding cruelty to animals like the twenty-five horses that were killed due to the use of trip-wires for the infamous charge scene. Errol Flynn himself, supposedly reported the director, Michael Curtiz, to the ASPCA. Another element about the film that was interesting was that it was shot in 1936 about a war that was fought in 1854, so the geography in this volatile region between India and Crimea was in much different geopolitical configuration. The Turks were still in the middle battling everyone, but Afghans, Persians and Indian Moghuls were more or less interchangeable and the only recognizable antagonistic groups were the Russians and the British. What starts as a war between the British forces in India against the Moghul Empire, turns into the Crimean War between the forces of Europe and the Ottomans versus the Russian Empire of the Tsars. The siege of Sevastopol was the underlying reason for the infamous charge and was more a head fake aimed at the Moghuls in league with the Russians than at the Russians themselves. In other words, it was a “clusterfuck” just like today’s situation in Crimea. It is about being time for England and Russia and even the Ottoman’s to rethink their manifest destiny. What is it about certain spots in the world that make them so symbolically important and prone to battle between dying empires regardless of whether the time is right or not?
As I wandered into the office this morning and found myself way ahead of anyone else by 8:30am, I began to wonder what back-to-school really means in today’s parlance. I know there are places down here in lower Manhattan where the beat goes on and it goes on very acidulously. Just not so in our offices overlooking the expanse and beauty of New York Harbor. Governors Island might as well be the Crimean Peninsula from my vantage point. The war rages between the forces of nature (the market) and the forces of man (our collective entrepreneurial imperative to make a bunch of money by inventing and selling something). Are we the Light Brigade riding into the Valley of Death? Or are we the Moghul and Tsarist princes sitting on a hill wondering what in the world is happening to wisdom and logic in the face of this bold attack? The age-old question hangs in the air this fine back-to work Monday morning: Is it Time?