What to Do, Where to Live?

In 1971, around the time my daughter Holly was born, I was working in Hereford, Texas for a small company mismanaged by a total nitwit as a division of a larger company that was headed for corporate oblivion. However, the upside was that I worked for one of the best supervisors would ever experience, although it was an industry for which I had absolutely no interest at all, and all of that was at the very beginning of what would become my career. One of the people I worked closely with was a WWII-generation machinist born and raised in west Texas, but who had spent a bit of his life sampling other parts of the country; especially during WWII. His name was Carl [forgot his last name] and he was a source of a lot of wisdom at a time when that was a rare commodity in my life. Late in my time in that job, he and I were talking about the difficulty of figuring out life’s big questions: like where do I want to live and what should I be doing to make a living? His simple-sounding advice was “If you want to live a happy life, figure out where you want to live and live there. Figure out what you want to do and do that.”

It might sound easy and it was for Carl. He’d grown up in a small farmhouse between Hereford and Amarillo in the early 20th Century. His brothers and he rode Indian motorcycles between the two towns when there were no roads, paved or otherwise. They fixed what they rode and anything else that needed fixing. Carl told me that when he was a kid there were no flies or many other flying insects in West Texas and they would hang a butchered steer from their windmill and carve off what they needed, leaving the sun to “cure” the open wound till the next time they needed some beef. When the WWII draft came along, Carl was told to apply his mechanical skills to the military-industrial complex and he moved to San Diego to do just that. He built machine and airplane parts for Consolidated Aircraft Corporation and when the war ended, he modified his Ford to be able to run on naphtha, since gas was in short supply and rationed, filled up the tank and put a 55 gallon barrel of the stuff in his trunk, and drove back to Texas. He got married, worked at a few different manufacturing companies in the area, and ended up in the ag industry company where I worked for a few years before he retired. That was what he wanted to do and where he wanted to do it.

For most of us, those two questions are not so simple, but it’s mostly because we overcomplicate our expectations. We’re either looking for the impossibly perfect place or a totally-fulfilling forever job, neither of which is likely to ever occur. A good rule for most everything is “pretty good is good enough.” Perfect, on the other hand, is highly unlikely.

Carl was pretty clear in his instructions, though. The first step is “where.” Finding a great job in a rotten place will never be satisfying. In fact, a mediocre job in a great place (assuming it pays enough to enjoy the place) isn’t a terrible situation. Most of us have some idea about what kind of place we’d like to live. Some of us know exactly where we’d like to live because we’ve spent our lives in that place, our friends and family are there, and we are comfortable with the climate, culture, and opportunities. Some folks are so set on the place that they are willing to sacrifice everything else about their lives to live there. No matter how you picked the place, what to do comes next. If you never settle on a place, I think the odds are good that you’ll never be happy with what you’re doing with your life.

One thing many of us neglect or outright screw-up in our early lives is not taking some kind of career planning seriously early enough. All of the smart people I have ever known came up with career goals fairly early in life, at least by high school, and they let those goals drive their first 4-10 years of adulthood. They usually changed those targets several times over their lives, but when they did they set new goals and aimed for them. Some of us take half of our lives to figure that out, some never figure it out and just wander through their lives wondering “why nothing wonderful ever happens to me?” The only thing that is likely to ever happen to you is life, which will happen whether you make plans or don’t but making the attempt to obtain some kind of control and to maintain self-direction is pretty much the same as driving a car vs letting go of the wheel on a mountain road to see what will happen. You might get lucky, but you probably won’t.

You can catch up, if you don’t get started sensibly, but it’s a lot harder. Mark Vonnegut, Kurt Vonnegut's son, is my overwhelming favorite role model for late starters. He started off his adult life as a hippy commune holdout, after being diagnosed with severe schizophrenia and having been committed to Vancouver mental hospital for a time. After providing on his own cure (for what he later decided was bipolar disorder), he graduated from Harvard Medical School at 32 years old and started his pediatric Internship and Residency. That was a lot of territory to cover after being a non-starter in his prime learning years. Your mileage will most definitely vary from Mark Vonnegut’s. Still, my own experience might demonstrate that if you keep at it you might end up doing work you care about with people you love and respect, even if the business is run by self-destructive, selfish and narcissistic idiots.

The trick, as I see it, is to get started on deciding where you want to live, including the kind of home/apartment/tent/cabin it will be. That might include who you want to live with, but that is not critical. While you’re sorting that out, find some kind of mission for yourself because if you don’t someone will find one for you and you probably won’t like it.

How to Know if Your Lawyer Will Work for You

A while back, I wrote a bit about using the existence of non-existence of Unitarian-Universalists congregations in a neighborhood/city/state to determine from a distance if the place has a decent quality of life (How to Know if your State Is an Armpit). A recent experience in one of the nation's hellholes, Texas, taught me another and similar simple stereotyping trick. Stereotyping is about as politically incorrect as a modern American can get, but it's still a natural and useful tactic for making general assumptions about almost anything related to human behavior. Exceptions don't prove rules, but exceptions are rare because many stereotypes are generally accurate.

In my case, I was tasked with finding a lawyer for an estate settlement that was guaranteed to become a stereotypical family battle. The "family" was my wife's father's second-marriage catastrophe and I would have bet the will, if he'd bothered to write one, would be a clusterfuck directed by his pack of inbred hillbilly step-children under duress from his constantly complaining and rapidly declining wife. When the hospital called us to tell us that Bob was dead and that my daughter and my wife were listed as his emergency contact, we traveled to Texas to deal with his mess of an "estate." We knew the step-brats had tried to corral Bob in a care facility in Arkansas a year ago and had conned the old man into signing over power of attorney in an attempt to imprison him in that facility so they could control his expenses and burn through his savings as rapidly as possible. My wife and the manager of that facility worked together to help him escape Arkansas and return to the retirement apartments he'd lived in before the highjacking. Other than a surprise visit, that required the step-brats slipping past the Texas apartment security, that scared the crap out of Bob and sent him into a paranoid panic for a couple of weeks, he managed to avoid contact with the step-family for three-quarters of a year. Knowing his history of delusion, racism, sexism, and retired military sense of entitlement, I figured he had avoided rewriting his will as an act of self-delusion and avoidance. However, after searching his apartment, talking with the complex manager and the lazy fools the Wichita Falls Air Farce Base calls their "Legal Services" deadzone, and contacting his three godawful bank account managers (Wells Fargo and two different disasters with Chase Bank), we determined that no one knew of a will. Still, I expected crap to appear out of Arkansas (isn't that the only thing that ever comes from Arkansas?) and tried to search out a lawyer for my wife.

I had some good advice from Minnesota legal friends, "find an old lawyer with a private practice near the county court house," but after calling a dozen Wichita Falls lawyers and getting a callback from only one in the week we were in Texas, I settled for a young guy "with a private practice near the county court house." He's been ok, but passive and mostly acts as a conduit for information between my wife and her step-siblings.

A few weeks after coming back home, I realized that a straight-forward simple question would have extracted everything I needed to know about a Texas lawyer, "Are you Republican or Democrat?" From Minnesota, that might seem irrelevant, but in Texas it would explain a lot and fast. Texas Republicans are as common as fire ants and about as useful. Years of Karl Rove, G.W. Bush, and Rick Perry and the kind of carpetbagging and corporate-ass-kissing that produced those vicious scumbags has polarized Texas into assholes and people who surrounded by assholes and are either trying to put their shit together so they can escape Asshole Land or who are making a last stand to remind the inbred morons that Texas used to be a place that produced liberal or progressive politicians like Speaker of the House Sam Rayburn, Senator Ralph Yarborough, Governor Ann Richards, and big-balled characters like Jim Hightower. There are a few progressive Texans left, but they are overwhelmingly in the minority.

Finally, I come to my point. When you are looking for a lawyer, you want someone who will stand up for you in the face of overwhelming odds. Obviously, that won't be a Texas Republican. So, the first step in the decision process has to be finding someone who is independent, courageous, and willing to piss into the winds of a grossly corrupt political and legal system; a Texas Democrat.