Why I'm, Doing This by Galen Green

Galen Green
816.807.4957
Thursday
January 24, 2008
(Desmond Morris’s
80th birthday)


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Why I'm Here, Doing This

(Xth Installment of Galen's Mandle-Oz Memorandum)


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Two roads diverged in a wood, and I --
I took the one less traveled by,
And that has made all the difference.

-- Robert Frost, "The Road Not Taken"

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"Is there a way to win?"
Jane Greer asks Robert Mitchum
in Out of the Past. "Well," he says,
"There's a way to lose more slowly."

-- Lawrence Raab (from a poem entitled "Faithless")

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I had rather be a doorkeeper in the house of my God,
than to dwell in the tents of wickedness.

-- from Psalm 84:10 (KJV)

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We never stop investigating. We are never satisfied that we know enough to get by. Every question we answer leads on to another question. This has become the greatest survival trick of our species.

-- Desmond Morris

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So go on, boys, and play your hands, life is a pantomime
The ringleaders from the county seat say you don’t have all that much time

-- Bob Dylan, from “Up to Me”

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"When you come to the fork in the road, take it."

-- Yogi Berra

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Dear Shannon (& Company),


It feels to me as though it's time for me to say a few words about what I "do for a living" and by what process I've made the choices I've made, over the past several years.

For the purpose of today's self-analysis, I'm going to need to condense a series of significant events in my life into a claustrophobically tiny space. Let me interject here at the outset that it's my earnest intention to eventually weave a detailed tapestry of these events at some later time, when my doing so won't present the degree of distraction from my present focus which it would unavoidably present today.

It's likewise worth mentioning that what I'm writing to you here today constitutes the tenth (Xth) installment in what I'm tentatively titling my “Mandle-Oz Memorandum.” Another man in my position might not have waited quite so long to get around to revealing his current situation. Personally, I didn't feel that what I do to "pay my bills" these days was either terribly relevant to what I've really come here to share or, frankly, all that interesting in itself. Moreover, as I believe you'll agree, once I've actually gotten around to revealing my current "occupation," that a broad range of prejudices, stereotypes and misinformation with which my work here is commonly stigmatized has only added to my reluctance to even broach the subject.

All of this counterweight notwithstanding, today's installment has been prefaced, as it were, by no fewer than nine (9) earlier installments of contextualization. Assuming that you've been reading these nine installments of my “Mandle-Oz Memorandum” in the order that I've been writing and sending them to you, it strikes me as reasonable to infer that you already know enough about my philosophy of life, my attitudes, opinions, tastes, follies, wisdoms, personal history, and sense of destiny, so as to be thoroughly fortified against any shock or astonishment which forthcoming revelations concerning my mere "career choices" might otherwise have brought on. Even so, let's take a moment to look backward over the years together to see if we can't make clearer sense out of why I'm where I am, doing what I'm doing, here in the forth act of my life's five-act tragicomedy.

The late summer of 1993 might be as apt a place as any to begin. If there's a fork in the road, then somewhere late in the summer of 1993 -- fifteen years ago, as of this writing -- would be its approximate metaphorical location in the time-space continuum. That's when I finally tumbled to the conclusion that Destiny was not pointing me toward a long-term career in either teaching or advertising. Not that I hadn't dabbled in both, from time to time, over the course of the preceding two decades; I had. Moreover, the record reflects that I possessed (and still possess) considerable aptitude in both areas. Modesty, however, prevents me from elaborating on this theme.

From the time my last teaching contracts expired (Donnelly College, Intensive English [ESL], May '92; Corporate Language Services, Private Tutor, May '93), I began to feel the presence of the fork in the road, not all that far up ahead. (Feel, smell, taste, whatever . . . ) I could sense the fork in the road growing nearer, looming larger, ineluctable, irresistible, challenging, promising. Having spent far too much of my adult life's energy swinging like Tarzan from short-term contract to short-term contract, and having resigned myself to never getting invited to linger at any one teaching gig long enough to be considered for a lift ticket onto the tenure track (a far, far commoner fate, incidentally, than most folks outside of academia allow themselves to imagine possible), and having grown up with what most folks politely referred to as "a whole 'nuther way of lookin' at things," I took the summer months of 1993 to let my imagination chart for me an entirely different course than the one I had in mind when, in 1974, I left The University of Utah carrying my master's degree in Creative Writing or even the one I had in mind when, in 1984, I bid farewell to Saint Paul School of Theology (United Methodist) here in Kansas City, hell-bent on reforming Christianity from the outside in, after throwing in the towel on reforming it from the inside out.

And an entirely different course was, indeed, what my imagination charted for me that summer, with the help of tons of journaling, miles of legwork, half a lifetime of research, and that indispensable ingredient I referred to in an earlier installment as "Dumb Luck" or "The Party of the First Part."



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Late one afternoon a few years ago, I was coming out of a Quik Trip, walking past a young KCPD officer, when I asked him in the spirit of neighborly small talk, "Are you gonna have a quiet evening out there this evening?" To which he replied with a grin, "That's entirely up to people other than me." We all know, of course, what he meant by this. By the same token, when I say that my imagination, throughout the summer of 1993, charted a new course for me, I'm fully aware of the fact that the metaphor of "charting a course" is only that -- a metaphor -- and nothing more. That summer, I came to the fork in the road and I took it, as Yogi Berra might have put it. However, I'm not so deluded as to believe that my choosing, at that critical juncture in my life's journey, to take the road less traveled gave me any more control over what then came next and next and next than did that young police officer, to whom I'd spoken briefly outside of that Quik Trip, choosing to cruise down this street instead of that street. Thus, I must admit that any causal correlation between the "course correction" I chose in 1993 and the fact that I'm where I am now, doing what I'm doing, is speculative at best.

Among the criteria I laid out in choosing the first leg of my life's "Plan B" were these:

1) The actual work environment had to be a place where I felt I could stand to be a prisoner for as long as would be necessary.

2) The people around me during the hours of my captivity had to be stimulating, diverse and educational -- if not always entirely pleasant.

3) I needed to be able to convince myself that the overall work experience was teaching me enough worthwhile new information that I could rationalize any significant sacrifice in either salary or prestige (or both) with the consolation that I was, in the final analysis, involved in yet another form of graduate-level research.

4) It had to be on the bus line, preferably in the Plaza, Brookside or Westport neighborhood.

5) It had to require less than 30 hours per week on the clock, so as to leave me with adequate free time to pursue my writing.


Standing around in the magnificent world-class Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art, as one of 20 or so lowly museum guards, several days a week, represented a radical departure from what I'd been doing, up to that point in my life (October 1993 -- October 1995). It did, however, uniquely fulfill the above-listed criteria -- which was how I came to find myself doing it for those two years, during Bill Clinton's first term as President.

But that was then, and this is now. My first two years as "a doorkeeper in the house of my God" (see: Psalm 84:10) doesn't begin to answer the question of why I'm here now, doing something entirely other than that. Nevertheless, I promise to return soon to do an entire chapter on my stint as an "art guard" at The Nelson. As a matter of fact, I was able to compose the handwritten rough draft of a memoir fragment entitled Art Guard, on spiral-bound "notebooks" of 3x5-inch notecards which I was able to sequester in the right pocket of my snappy navy-blue Nelson art guard uniform blazer and to whip out and scribble in -- if only a few words at a time -- whenever I was lucky enough to find myself alone among those priceless paintings, sculptures, tapestries, marble columns and geegaws.

Ostensibly a personal letter to the renowned American poet James Merrill (who, unbeknownst to me, just happened to be dying of AIDS at the time), Art Guard begins as a follow-up to a series of correspondence which James and I had exchanged several years earlier. It then meandered off into a kind of unbridled stream of consciousness about everything under the sun -- from some object d'arte which had captured my attention at the time to my feeble attempts to fill in the gaps for James in a recounting of the events in my life during the 6 years or so which had elapsed since he and I had last corresponded. Eventually, in the months immediately preceding my moving on from The Nelson to my next gig, Art Guard evolved into a "play for voices," in which an art museum security guard carries on what he himself refers to as a "polylogue" with several "characters" contained within the priceless works of art that he's been assigned to keep an eye on. (Example: the sacrificial ram whose horns are caught in a thicket, in Peter Paul Reubens' lavish portrayal of the Abraham & Isaac story [Genesis 22:13].) As of this writing, all 30 or 40 spiral-bound "notebooks" of 3x5-inch notecards, containing the approximately 200 typed pages of Art Guard are locked in an old briefcase in Marie's and my shared storage locker, hopefully protected from the wind and the rain.


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What I, as a writer, gained from my experiences at The Nelson was immeasurable. For now, I'll sum it up by saying that the payoff was more than worth the price I paid in the aforementioned sacrifice in salary and prestige. All that grist for the mill not withstanding, the day came when I'd had my fill of standing in and strolling through those hallowed halls and meaningful galleries. After taking a few months off to digest the feast that had been The Nelson Experience, to take stock generally, and to contemplate my next career move, I decided that any serious writer intent on writing about contemporary global society in the ways that I wished to write about it needed to spend a few years gathering field notes by working inside a hospital.

The fact that I was neither a physician nor a nurse nor a social worker nor a physical therapist nor a nurses’ aid nor a respiratory therapist, anesthesiologist, scrub tech, maintenance engineer, cafeteria worker, custodian, nor anything else which came to mind when I tried to envision a modern hospital through the very limited filter of the few times I'd visited folks who'd been patients there and from viewing several seasons of "St. Elsewhere" and "Chicago Hope," on TV a number of years earlier . . . the fact that the only skills I possessed that I felt might conceivably make me of use in a modern hospital setting had to do with advertising, public relations and marketing . . . was what finally led me to cast my fate to the wind by dropping off a "blind" unsolicited copy of my resume at the Human Resources office at Trinity Lutheran Hospital (TLH) in Kansas City's midtown area, one afternoon in April of 1996. It's worth noting that the resume I dropped off that afternoon was heavily slanted toward my advertising / PR / mktg background, so that you might well imagine my surprise when I received a phone call from the lady at TLH's HR Dept. a couple of days later, inviting my to come in to interview for an opening they had for an armed hospital security officer.

That's the short version of how I ended up packing a loaded .38 service revolver on my hip for the next eleven (11) years. Now, please let me hasten to interject here that, in those days at least, every Security Officer employed by Health Midwest (purchased by HCA in 2004) was fairly well trained, not only in firearms tactics, but also in an impressively broad spectrum of law enforcement techniques -- everything from wrestling with homicidal psych patients (without hurting them) to schlepping dead bodies to the morgue, from writing incident reports on the disappearance of unattended purses to patrolling the hospital campus and keeping an eye on our surveillance monitors and alarms systems, from letting doctors and administrator into their offices whenever they managed to lock themselves out (which was frequently) to putting the kibosh on potentially volatile situations before they could escalate into bad publicity. In brief, the job itself turned out to be approximately one-third public relations, one-third social work and one-third conventional safety & security work.

Although, between 1996 and 2005, I found myself assigned to Menorah Medical Center and Overland Park Regional Medical Center in Johnson County, as well as to (what was then) Baptist Medical Center and (occasionally) to Independence Regional Medical Center (just up the street from Bess & Harry Truman's home on Delaware Street), the Health Midwest campus I always found to be most stimulating was TLH. That was, in part, due to its being situated right in the thick of things, there in Midtown, barely a stone's throw from the World War I Liberty Memorial, historic Union Station, the sprawling world headquarters of Hallmark Cards, Crown Center, the Hyatt Regency Hotel, Penn Valley Park (and Community College) -- and nestled there at the corner of 31st & Main, beneath KC's landmark thousand-foot-high broadcasting tower.

Even more meaningful to me, however, was the fact that TLH, where I put in thousands of hours, between 1996 and the hospital's precipitous closure at the end of 2001, just happened to be situated approximately a hundred feet from the (literally!) very spot where I'd been born with the name "Wayne Slater" on the morning of April 30, 1949. That's right. Directly across Main Street (to the east), between 29th & 30th Streets, between (what later became) TLH and Union Hill, there'd once stood that "home for unwed mothers" named The Willows, which my readers get tired of hearing me talk about. A pristine, modern Residence Inn is what you'd see sitting there if you were to drive by there today. The Willows was demolished in the early 1960's -- and all of its birth records (including my birth records) -- were ceremoniously burned, out on the lawn, in a massive public bonfire.

My only point in sharing this with you here today, Shannon, is to lend a bit of existential perspective to all else that my postgraduate research on that particular hospital campus contributed to my becoming what I've become as of this writing, its having led me deeper and deeper into the attitudes which drew me inexorably toward my next destination -- and then toward the one after that -- the one where you find me now, doing this.


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When HCA (Hospital Corporation of America) acquired Health Midwest in 2004, those of us doing the actual work in the 18 or so hospitals involved soon discovered that we’d traded a localized version of corporate corruption for a far more sophisticated, far-flung, state-of-the-art version. One of the many symptoms of this disease was that a significant number of the most talented, hardworking team-players among us soon found ourselves downsized out the door as part of corporate America’s sociopathic policy of “destroy the evidence then kill the witnesses and lie about them.” I use the first-person plural here because I was among those talented, hardworking team-players downsized out (February 2005). Well, at least I could see that I was in good company. Even better, I’d made my escape from that house of horrors with enough mental and physical energy left to voyage forward to at least another adventure or two, before I was mown down by Death’s feather.

In order to provide you with a sufficiently concise explanation of how it was that I came to travel from there to here, perhaps I should back up briefly and tick off a couple of the additional career ladder criteria I’d laid out after leaving The Nelson in October of 1995. Besides the five I listed a few pages ago, these then were among the requirements for my next job, which I considered to be virtually non-negotiable when I dropped off that blind resume (q.v.) at TLH’s HR office in April of 1996. In other words, I signed onto the armed hospital security officer gig because it uniquely fulfilled these requirements, as well as the five which drew me to The Nelson:

6) I needed benefits. Therefore, as is the case with tens of millions of our fellow Americans, I was more than willing to make significant concessions in the salary and prestige dimension, in exchange for a reasonably attractive benefits package, including health insurance (with dental, ocular, prescriptions, etc.) and some sort of retirement plan (hopefully better than the one offered by Al-Qaida).

7) I needed the opportunity to actually sit and write (and/or read) for part of the time I was at work.


I’m aware that Criterion #7 may strike some as unreasonable. I would encourage them to take a closer look at what the vast majority of other armed security officers (and managers) do on the job, other than reading or writing. One of the chief attractions of security work – if one plays one’s cards right – is the downtime. While this factor is bound to attract a certain percentage of lazy, shiftless no-counts, my own experience and observation have taught me that that percentage tends to be pretty much on par with (if not somewhat lower than) that in most other occupations, particularly those occupations supposedly requiring “management skills.”

Just as Art Guard turned out to be the happy bi-product of my two years at The Nelson, so a hundred or so draft fragments of what is still in the process of becoming The Toolmaker’s Other Son turned out to be the even happier bi-product of my nine years with Health Midwest, though the happiest bi-product of that experience, by far, turned out to be the conception, gestation and birth of my Mythoklastic School of Therapy, with its myriad manifestations, including my Mythoklastic Therapy Institute, home of the Baruch Spinoza School of Realistic Expectations.

Many years ago, my adoptive brother, Kevin, (born 11.27.53, now living with his wife, Jan, and their family in Bakersfield, CA) made the astute observation that my “work history” might reasonably be compared to that of an actor or screenwriter in New York or Los Angeles who supports his or her life in the arts by holding down a so-called “day job,” waiting tables, for instance. In this respect (as well as in several others), it would seem apt that you picture the “real” Galen Green in your mind’s eye, dressed not in his “evening job” garb of a police officer (gun, holster, badge, radio handcuffs, mace, etc.), but rather in the jaunty togs of his bohemian persona (white sneakers, faded blue jeans, wool cardigan, understated dress shirt and tweedy sport jacket, accented with my signature satin teal [or sometimes turquoise or pink] pocket handkerchief). This bohemian Galen is the one I prefer that the world remember -- if it remembers me at all. Suffice it to say that, throughout human history, in all times, in all places (with negligible exception), most folks have lived a similarly compartmentalized existence, moving, as I suggested in an earlier chapter, from world to world.


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But I’m leaving out an entire dimension of the why of my being here, doing this. And I fear that, unless and until we expand the parameters of our discourse into that dimension, we won't be able to forge ahead into the final phase of my attempt to clarify why I do what I do these days. So let me begin by explaining that, when I was an acolyte and choirboy in my early teens, the head pastor at our church, Dr. Ronald Meredith, traveled to Africa with a number of like-minded pilgrims, to meet and pay their respects to Dr. Albert Schweitzer, a few years before that quintessential humanitarian's death in 1965. Thus, Dr. Meredith, both in the months leading up to his departure and in the years following his return, provided those of us in his congregation with what amounted to a graduate seminar on Schweitzer’s life and career and philosophy. And I, being then perhaps 14 or 15 and, therefore, at an especially impressionable age, philosophically, was especially impressed.

Moreover, Dr. Meredith’s homiletic inundation of Schweitzerism and Schweitzerology came at a time in my young life when Fate likewise ordained that I find myself marching in my very first civil right demonstration. This auspicious initiation into what has turned out to be one of my life’s deepest passions occurred as a result of my parents innocently leaving me one Sunday afternoon, in perhaps 1964, in the gentle chaperonage of Judith King’s (East ’67) wonderfully bleeding-heart liberal parents, who took me out to lunch with them and Judith after church and then to join with them in the march through a portion of Downtown Wichita.

These first two factors not withstanding, perhaps the single strongest determining factor in putting me here today (i.e. tonight) to do what I do is my having grown up around Black folks. As I seem to recall having said, way back in the first installment of this Mandle-Oz Memorandum, last fall: I feel that you and I were truly blessed – we and tens of thousands of our Wichita peers of the of the 1950’s & ‘60’s – to have been schoolchildren during those years immediately following the U.S. Supreme Court’s revolutionary Brown v Board decision . . . and doubly blessed to have been brought up in that somewhat isolated little city on The Great Plains where the schools had already been at least minimally nominally integrated, even before that 1954 landmark ruling. As our years together at Fairmount Elementary, Brooks Junior High and East High fade into the rearview mirror of Time’s winged chariot, I come to realize with ever sharper focus that the relative (and I wish to stress that word: relative) racial harmony which we experienced – in the classroom and on the playing field, if not so much in other dimensions of day-to-day living – has had everything to do with how we’ve ended up conducting ourselves throughout this fulltime job called “adulthood.”

While this realization isn’t, in itself, particularly daisy fresh, this thing I’ve been doing here, now, since the beginning of 2006 (approximately two calendar years, as of this writing), the “this” to which I refer in the title of today’s installment . . . that thing . . . has taught me that the Kansas City Missouri School District (KCMSD, my current employer) endured a far less harmonious 20th century than did dear old USD #259 where you and I put in our public school years. And while I’m still in the process of researching the why of this stark contrast, I suspect that we can all agree that much of the cause can be traced to the antebellum slave market which once thrived in Kansas City’s Westport Area (A plaque on the wall of Kelly’s Bar informs us that human chattel were once shackled in the basement of that very structure – back when it was owned by Daniel Boone’s son.) -- that, and the fair number of African-American Kansas Citians of my personal acquaintance, still in their 60’s (not exactly ancient), who can still recall for us quite vividly the local theaters, eateries, hotels, restrooms, drinking fountains, etc. which were clearly designated as being for “Whites Only,” decades (decades!) after the Warren Court had ordered the entire country to desegregate. What better way, therefore, for your little bitty buddy, The Happy Peasant Heretic, to investigate the vestiges of Jim Crow-ism than to infiltrate Kansas City, Missouri’s public school system?


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But I'm getting ahead of myself. Please forgive me. Let's back up to November of 2005, when, after a considerable amount of research and of what I frequently hear referred to nowadays as "inner work," I put a slightly different spin on my resume, solicited reference letters from a few people whose opinion of my professional performance I was hoping might carry some weight, went on line and submitted my application to KCMSD to work for them as a substitute teacher.

This seemingly suicidal move on my part was based in part on the seven criteria I've listed above. More than that, however, it was based on the late Joseph Campbell's maxim: "Follow your bliss." In my case, I felt, at the time, that my bliss could most faithfully be followed by my, paradoxically, building upon what I'd learned throughout the previous two decades about where I could function most effectively in contemporary American society as both a sort of poor man's Margaret Mead (researcher and interactive urban anthropologist) and poor man's Albert Schweitzer (mythoklastic therapist and humanitarian philosopher) -- while, at the same time, departing as radically as was feasible from the types of environments and personalities within which and among whom I'd worked throughout the years since leaving seminary in 1984.

As I say, it was in November of 2005 that I put in my application with KCMSD to substitute teach. Having worked for the district now for two years, what happened next is, in hindsight, simply what everyone here has come to expect from them. At the time, however, as an outsider looking in, the whole thing struck me as theater of the absurd. When a week passed and then another with no response, I began making phone calls -- although, obviously, not to the right people. Clearly, I was not going to get any straight answers from anybody within the district's HR dept.

I guess that it must have been sometime around Christmas that I received a voice message from the director of security patrol for the district, asking me if I'd be interested in coming in to interview for (you guessed it!) an armed security patrol officer position. The short version of what had happened is that someone in the HR dept., while lazily browsing through new applications, had fixated on the words "Armed Security Officer" on mine, had then ignored everything else that I'd written there, and conscientiously routed my application, references and resume to the Security Dept. It was Destiny -- just like the time before and the time before that.

As I'm sure you're already well aware, in the years since the bloodbath at Columbine High School near Denver in 1999, armed school security officers have been in rapidly growing demand. Ours is a "growth industry." You've heard me say in an earlier installment, Shannon, that I'm the luckiest man alive. My getting hired by KCMSD as an armed security patrol officer (on the evening shift: 14:30 -- 21:00 hrs.) in January of 2006 is but one case in point -- out of thousands. As it turns out, KCMSD's substitute teachers are paid less than security officers, are entitled to far fewer benefits, are treated far worse on the job, and are not as assiduously protected by our union (the AFT). Destiny? Serendipity? Divine Providence? Dumb Luck?

Because it's my earnest intention to write at great length, in the not too distant future, about the grist that's been assimilated, synthesized and processed in my personal mill, over the past couple of years, I'm not going to go into as much detail with you here as I would otherwise. Suffice it to say that each officer drives around in a marked patrol vehicle (most often one of the used Ford "Police Interceptors," purchased fairly recently from some state's highway patrol fleet. I've already alluded to our uniform and other "duty equipment." What can I say: we look exactly like cops. Specifically, we bear a dangerous resemblance to the members of several of the police departments in nearby municipalities.

I believe that I neglected to mention that I'd also worked the so-called 3-to-11 shift during most of the nine years that I was with Health Midwest -- so that I was already accustomed to beginning my work day in the middle of the afternoon and ending it in the dark. I believe that I also forgot to mention flashlights. Although we all carry flashlights, most of us on my shift and the night shift have most of both the exterior and interior of most of KCMSD's 50 or so schools memorized, so that we're able to navigate them in the dark. This is important because, in my line of work, a flashlight can provide a bull's-eye for a member of the criminal element we might surprise in the dark.

But I should probably save such tedious details for a later, more detailed, look at this thing I do. And actually, I should have put that last thought into the past tense, since this torn rotator cuff to which I alluded, nine installments ago, has transformed me into a Security Dispatcher in the district's outrageously misnamed Communications Department.

Between there and here would have been where I intended to mention the nine months (November ’06 – August ’07) during which I was assigned to the Board of Education Bldg. at 1211 McGee, in the bustling heart of downtown KCMO, “within spittin’ distance,” as my father might have said, of City Hall, the Jackson County Courthouse and the glittering, newly-opened Sprint Center. The position of “Board Bldg. Officer” is a rotating one, and I was lucky enough to have been “rotated in” at precisely that moment in history when the short-lived tenure of District Superintendent Anthony Amato just so happened to be coming to its boiling point. Someday, I hope to write a few dozen pages of worthwhile critical analysis of the version of “democracy in action” to which I was witness during those nine months. But for now, let me just say (Spoiler Alert!) that it bore little resemblance to either a Frank Capra movie or a Norman Rockwell painting.

One of Kansas City native Robert Altman’s last films – and one which I personally consider to be among his very best – is entitled Gosford Park. Its thematic dynamic invites comparison with that old British television series, “Upstairs, Downstairs,” which aired on PBS back in the days when I was too socially active to watch much TV at all (and the VCR had not as yet been mass-marketed). Like “Upstairs, Downstairs,” Gosford Park deals, to a large extent, with the tensions, disparities and hypocrisies among socioeconomic classes. During my months as Board Bldg. Officer, I was put in mind of Gosford Park on an almost daily basis. Specifically, I was reminded of how marvelously much a doorkeeper in the house of one’s deity (or in the tents wickedness, for that matter) might learn, if one keeps one’s mouth shut and strives to achieve invisibility. Once I became sufficiently adept at this game, I found that folks were apt to discuss the most delicate of both personal and political matters right in front of me, as though I were their servant – or their dog. Thus came I by a more thorough grasp of the inner workings of their lives than I’d ever bargained for. (Margaret Mead, eat your heart out!)

As I say, the gig at the Board of Education Bldg. had a nine-month run. In those last of months, though, the Demon of Diminishing Returns had begun to rear its ugly head. Therefore, in keeping with my usual streak of incredibly good luck (so far, so good – knock wood!), I was rotated out of the Board Bldg. assignment and back out onto the mean streets of KC’s urban core in early August of last year. Less than two weeks later, however, I was diagnosed with this fateful full-thickness rotator cuff tear and was forced to deplete the entirely of my accumulated sick time and vacation time. That was because of the physically demanding nature of my job as a patrol officer and because of a long list of liability concerns too obvious to mention. So it was that, from the middle of August ‘til the end of September, I found my days filled with doctors’ appointments and physical therapy, as well as with the all-too-familiar soul-searching about my next career move.

Again, in keeping with my aforementioned streak of incredibly good luck (which is going to run out someday, just as everyone’s inevitably does – and even sooner if I don’t stop talking about it), KCMSD’s security dispatcher on the evening shift (my shift of preference) quit, leaving an opening just my size. And so, to cut to the conclusion of my story: I’ve been working as the evening shift KCMSD Security Dispatcher since the beginning of October – i.e. for approximately four months now, as of this writing. Which is why there is this writing. Given the factors which add up to an average week in the life of Galen Green, it’s not an overstatement to say plainly that the very existence of these ten installments of my Mandle-Oz Memorandum is a direct result of this torn rotator cuff of mine, because, given also our school district’s persistent shortage of patrol officers on the evening shift, I probably wouldn’t have otherwise been allowed by management to move from Patrol to Dispatch. Thus have I traded half the use of my left arm for the opportunity to at least begin to finish writing The Toolmaker’s Other Son.

Only a tiny percentage of what I’ve learned as a result of my decision to be where I am, doing what I’m doing, has gone into this – and the preceding ten installments of – my Mandle-Oz Memorandum. Even if I live to be 271 (which is how old Tom Paine would be today, had he taken better care of himself), I could hope only to begin to give a voice to the inconvenient truths that I've learned along the way. Society is not what it thinks it is. Things are not as we've been taught. The so-called social sciences are still in their infancy -- and so are the language tools and other systems of representation out of which these infant sciences of ours have been cobbled. Clearly, our struggle to "wise up" is destined to prove endless. Which is why I'm here, doing this.


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The briefest way I can think of to say it is this: I’m where I am nowadays, doing what I’m doing because it affords me greater opportunity to write what I feel that I should be writing nowadays than do any of the other occupational options currently open to me . . . and because it comes closest to fulfilling all seven (7) of the requirements for occupational fulfillment I laid down in 1996 (particularly #3 & #7) . . . and because I’m convinced that, by being here, doing this, I’m able to make a far more profound impact than I would ever have been able to make as a classroom teacher or conventional political activist or social reformer.

But that's just me. If either you or Gene are ever feeling sufficiently inspired, I'd love to receive a reciprocal update from one or both of you. Obviously I've taken up a few too many pages here to explain myself. But I've done so for what seem to me to have been some pretty good reasons. And some of those reasons, I fervently hope, reveal and justify themselves within the telling itself.

Hope all's going well for you and yours. Let me hear from you when you get a minute or two. Meanwhile, here's a song lyric I composed back in 1979, when I was living in a little apartment across the Olentangy River from The Ohio State University's campus. Hope you enjoy it (the song). If you’d like to hear how it goes, I’d be happy to send you a copy of Another Think, the compilation CD on which I rehearse it with my guitar and harmonica and aging voice. Let me warn you ahead of time, however, that the technical quality leaves something to be desired. (But you were ever the graciously forgiving soul.) Anyway, let me know. OK? Thanks!

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Until Next Time, Stay Well,

Galen
Galen Green
Tuesday
January 29, 2008
(Thomas Paine’s
271st birthday)

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DRIVEN BY FEAR



He draws his courage from the fear of being late.
He jogs all the way to the office. He’s the first one there.
He handles problems as though he’s handling freight,
As he walks through walls and mountains, year by year.
He moves and the air parts with his weight,
As he draws his courage from the air.
He thinks he’s the master of his fate,
As he’s driven forward by fear.

She draws her courage from the ocean where she swam.
She jogs through the day on the path of her career,
And tells herself she doesn’t give a damn
That every night she’s playing solitaire.
She sees her life as a cryptogram,
As she’s driven forward by fear.
She measures her joy by the milligram
And draws her courage from the air.

You tune your courage like a piano string.
You jog through time while sitting in a chair.
You feel your destiny wound up like a spring.
You watch your reflection floating in a tear.
You descend like a dove on extended wing,
As you draw your courage from the air.
But you see no branch below to which to cling,-
So you’re driven forward by fear.

I draw my courage from my empty plate.
I jog in place like a Peace Corps volunteer.
I think of you and me and Maggie and Kate-
And wish that there was something more to share.
We also run who only sit and wait,
Driven forward by fear.
I swallow the hook along with the bait
And draw my courage from the air.

We draw our courage from the fear to act.
We jog on into the darkness, unaware
Of what forces drive us from feeling to fact.
Our lives swing back and forth like a chandelier,
Though the plaster sky from which it hangs is cracked.
We draw our courage from the air.
Our die is cast and our bags are packed
And we’re driven to the end by fear.



Words and Music by Galen Green c 1979



/gg