Musings

General-purpose musings

There are 780 posts filed in Musings (this is page 26 of 78).

The crowded gas pumps


I’ve been amused at how crowded gas pumps have become recently. It seems there is now every kind of vending machine stacked next to the pumps. How did we get here?

Back in the mid 80s, the pay at the pump gas pump made its debut, giving customers the convenience of purchasing gasoline without having to wait in line in the store. While this has been great for customers who only want to refuel, it’s been horrible deal for the station owners.

Station owners make very little money from gasoline sales. Their largest profits come from selling groceries and junk food. Sell a few gallons of milk for 6 bucks each and you’re doing pretty well.
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When the lights move on

At tonight’s CAC meeting, several neighbors brought up stories of people in their neighborhoods who have lost everything. These are folks who are on food stamps and have no renter’s insurance. The water bottles the Red Cross was handing out seem ludicrously wanting when one doesn’t have a roof over one’s head.

It was a sober reminder that once all the power crews and the debris crews and the news crews move on, there will still be folks here with nothing left but a pile of bricks.

Nothing by yourself

I was speaking the other day to a friend who’s one of the City of Raleigh’s leaders. He was telling me about the book he’d been reading, Malcolm Gladwell’s Outliers. Though there are many insights in Gladwell’s book, my friend was particularly taken with the point Gladwell made that no one does it alone.

“It’s true,” he told me. “The people who think they made it themselves are fooling themselves. Everybody, everybody who’s ever ‘made it’ did so with someone else’s help.”

I completely agreed. All my youthful naivety about how America is supposed to work – how we’re a classless society and ‘all men are created equal’ – has always been sheer fantasy. I look at some of the kids in my side of town, growing up in some of the toughest situations imaginable. The deck is so overwhelmingly stacked against them that it’s a wonder anyone manages to escape the cycle of poverty and violence.
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Biting the hand that feeds

I’ve never understood how some people who’ve made their living serving in the military can turn around and proclaim that government is bad. Especially when they continue to enjoy government-paid health care and other benefits.

It makes me glad that I made it out of the military with my ability to think intact.

Ignoring the have-nots in a digital society

Want to use a computer? Take a number

We took the kids to the Cameron Village library last Sunday and loaded up on the kids’ books. As I usually do (being the curious sort) I took note of the crowd making use of the library’s computers. I always like to see what kind of folks are depending on the library’s computers. Like many of my visits there, I found a crowd at the computers. There wasn’t even a single workstation available.

As my kids were checking out their books, I listened as a mom and her 10-year-old son pleaded with the librarian to get a computer. I guessed that he had a school assignment he needed to complete.

“What if they’re not doing anything important – playing games or something?” the mom asked. “Could they give it up then?”

The librarian shook her head. “As long as they’ve got time left on their reservation, they can use it however they like. Now, if they get up and walk away, leaving it unattended, then you could step up and use it.”
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A year without Gerry

Gerry Reid

Gerry Reid

Tomorrow marks the anniversary of a dark day for me. One year ago tomorrow, my close friend Gerry Reid was fatally injured in a horrific wreck on I-40. Gerry was like a brother to me and his sudden death shook me to the core.

I remember telling my brother, Jeff, and my friend, Scott, in a moment of misplaced optimism outside of the Duke ER, that one day we would look back on this and laugh. Well, that didn’t pan out. For months afterward, I would collapse into sobbing fits at the thought of my friend. Other times, thoughts of him would frequently pop into my mind during the day. “I wonder what Gerry would think of this” was always a popular saying among his friends. That didn’t change with his death.
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Public personas

A few weeks ago I was running an errand around town when I happened to spot graffiti on a telephone pole. As I’ve done perhaps a hundred times, I whipped out my phone and dialed Raleigh’s Graffiti Hotline. After giving my name and the graffiti location, we got into an impromptu conversation.

“Hi Mark, this is Elaine. It’s been a while since we’ve talked.” I’ve often said half-jokingly that I’m on a first-name basis with the Graffiti Hotline staff but it’s becoming less of a joke. “How are you doing?” she asked. “Everything all right? Your job going well?”

“Oh, sure,” I answered. “I work from home now and love my job.”

“Oh, that’s good,” Elaine said. “I remember you had lost your job and I wondered how you were doing.”

I laughed, thanked her for her concern, and said goodbye. Afterward, though, I marveled at how Elaine had remembered that I’d lost my job. It was over two years ago but I obviously had mentioned it to her and it obviously had made an impression. It blew me away that someone I’ve never even met would care about that – about me and my welfare.
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Red flag rules poorly enforced

We went camping Saturday night at Falls Lake’s Rollingview campground. I’d checked the forecast before we went and saw that the dry air and wind conditions were likely to result in a ban on campfires at the park. Sure enough, when we arrived the winds were whipping around so much that the tent was blowing away before I could assemble it.

After the family and I put our tents together, our friends arrived and mentioned seeing a small sign at the entrance about the fire ban. I was surprised that we hadn’t seen a sign when we arrived: it must have been a small sign. Later, we saw an 8×10″ sign taped to the wall of the restroom building and it wasn’t very prominent. It said “Red Flag Warning: no fires except charcoal or gas.” The place it was posted was right in the middle of the building, though the restroom doors were on either end.
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Feedback from the airport

Like many people, I like to pass the time while waiting for my flight to board by doing a little people-watching. Where is this person going? Where’s home? If home’s not here, what brought them to the Triangle? I find it fun to speculate on these things.

What’s really insightful is to hear departing visitors talking into their phones. Last week I overheard a man apparently describing the Triangle area to the person on the call. “You’d like it,” he said. “There are lots of trees. It’s really beautiful. Lots of trees.”

I smiled, because that’s not the first time I’ve heard a traveler rave about our area’s beautiful, abundant trees. We tend to take that for granted, I think.

Raleigh and Durham invested a lot of money in renovating RDU Airport’s Terminal 2, knowing that for many travelers their impression of Raleigh and Durham starts right there. The airport can also be a great source of feedback, too, when those travelers depart. Just listening how they describe their trip can show where we’re doing well and where we can improve. It can also show what assets we possess that we could be better in publicizing.

As a proud citizen of Raleigh I love hearing others’ impressions of the place I call home.

Coming of age in America

I have often thought that in America we do a lousy job at bestowing adulthood upon our children. Coming of age rituals for Americans are all over the map, with no rhyme or reason. Instead, we have several milestones scattered throughout various years in a way that leaves kids wondering when they’re officially grown up.

The first big milestone is becoming able to drive. Even that varies in age from state to state but definitely by the age of 16. After one gets one’s driver’s license, there’s another two years before one gains the right to vote and be drafted into the military.
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