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I was standing on the deck in my bathrobe, throwing rocks at a cat, when I realized I was standing on the deck in my bathrobe, throwing rocks at a cat. I paused as I was about to launch the third one, but the cat had disappeared behind the pine tree. I piled the leftover rocks on the railing and retired indoors. I had been sitting at the table, trying to read The Missoulian, when Zuzu had made the discovery that there are other cats in Montana, after all. Her ongoing observations through the sliding-glass door, the window behind the couch, and window in my office had so far reassured her that, however unpleasant the move from Baltimore had been, at least we had left all other cats in the world behind. But suddenly, in the gray light of dawn, here was another cat, white-socked and arrogant, just standing down there on the grass and looking blandly up at the window while Zuzu – unable to abide the thought that she is not the sole representative of her species on this earth – huffed and growled her displeasure.

At first this was funny. It always is. How unfortunate it is for cats that their expression of utmost, deepest anger sounds essentially ridiculous to human ears (not to mention that the little mewing sounds they make for attention sound like the brattiest imaginable whining noise, so that while they are telling you they wish you could all spend a little more quality time together, you are trying to remember where you put the drowning sack).

But it got old. It always does. I kept shooing Zuzu off of the back of the couch, hoping to divert her attention, but she kept bounding back up, back arched eight inches above her head, otherworldly wails issuing from her mouth.

I realized the only way I was going to get any peace, so that I could continue reading the front-page article about local city-council candidates being forced to perform the chicken dance at a local pre-election event “aimed at [the] younger generation” (aren’t you old folks jealous?), would be to temporarily take up arms in Zuzu’s name. I went out the front door in my bathrobe and gathered some of the “river rocks” that the condo association keeps stocked in the flower beds next to each unit’s driveway and walked back through the house and out onto the deck. The cat was still standing next to a fence a few units down and looked curiously up at me. Zuzu had followed me to the sliding-glass door. Kill it! Kiiiillllll it! she wailed, or noises to that effect. What had I gotten myself into, I wondered, my hand shaking, sweat beading on my brow. Was this really the right thing to do? Or was Zuzu manipulating me to do her evil bidding?

I picked out my first rock and raised my arm. As soon as I did, the cat took off running. (Someone must have thrown rocks at him before.) It wouldn’t be long before the cat would reach the cover of the large pine tree out behind the units, but I had lost my stomach for grim violence so early in the morning, and so my throw was halfhearted and half calculated to miss. My second rock also went wide, and I cannot say I was sorry, although Zuzu looked at me suspiciously as I reentered, as if wondering just how committed I really was to the cause.

I ignored her, sat back down at the table, and turned to an article about hunters reloading their own ammunition (i.e., they pick up their old shell casings, buy new bullets, i.e., the little thing that actually gets fired out of the barrel, and then repack the shell with powder), which apparently saves them quite a lot of money, in addition to letting them customize how much powder is in each shell in order to, say, reduce wear and tear on the barrel of an antique rifle, or increase the striking power for large game, and so on. The headline was “Adding Life to Bullets.” I take this as yet another sign that we really are in gun country. Other signs spotted so far include:

• The fellow we met on the Canyon Falls trail near Hamilton a few weekends back, striding along with his kids (excited four-year-old boy clutching a small container of water that, from the way he handled it and gazed into it, probably contained some specimen of the local fauna that he had scooped from the creek; excited eight-year-old boy dragging several massive branches behind him; and tragically bored twelve-year-old girl bringing up the rear, listening to an iPod), wearing a large, silver revolver in a black nylon shoulder holster. I asked one of our hiking companions – not a local, but someone who has lived here for a while – if this was, strictly speaking, legal. She shrugged and said, “as long as it’s not concealed.” I offered that the Forest Service, whose land we were on, might have a different opinion. She told me that “gun laws in Montana are mostly theoretical.”
• The sign at the front door of Sportsman’s Warehouse, a huge sporting-goods (a term which, in these parts, heavily implicates hunting) store in one of the Reserve Street strip malls: “If you plan to remove your handgun from the holster while in the store, ensure that it is unloaded and the breech open before entering.” (Is it my imagination, or do I hear something of an implied threat behind those words, sort of similar to the way the gunner’s mates at the Coast Guard shooting ranges – their fingers lightly caressing the butts of the sidearms they habitually wore – sternly advised us not to turn from our firing lanes with an unholstered weapon in hand?) Meanwhile, back behind Sportsman’s Warehouse’s gun counter, veritable acres of wall space were given over to row upon row of handguns hanging from hooks, easily several hundred of the things in view, in dozens of shapes, varieties, and colors.
• The full-color ads in the daily paper, touting rifles, handguns, and ammo. Only today, I noted that a “great junior or women’s rifle” was available from a local outfitter for only $319, while apparently a basic Remington twelve guage gauage gauge (WHY can I never remember how to spell that word?!) can be had in these parts for around $250.

Later in the day, I spent an inordinate amount of time trying to get Gmail to let me choose between two different “signatures” (the little block of information, usually containing one’s title, email address, phone number, etc., that appears automatically at the bottom of a new email you are composing). Why, you might ask, do I need two different signatures? Because a client of mine would like me to use an email address based on her business’s internet domain when I do work on her behalf, so that, essentially, I will look like an employee of hers when I email her clients.

But I didn’t want to have to check a second email account, worried that I might forget and therefore miss some essential message. (Also I am just lazy.) So I had this client set up my account (which we’ll call “me@GenericBusiness.com”) to forward to my Gmail account (which we’ll call “me@gmail.com”). This meant that any message sent to my GenericBusiness.com address would show up in my Gmail inbox, where I would be guaranteed not to miss it, since I check my Gmail inbox approximately every thirty seconds throughout the day.

Next, I was able to set up Gmail so that I could respond to these messages as “me@GenericBusiness.com” as well (as opposed to “me@gmail.com,” the usual return address). The basic framework of what I needed was now in place. The problem was that I also wanted a different signature for each account, so that, (1) when I send a message as “me@gmail.com,” the signature block will include my personal contact info and web site, but (2) when I send a message as “me@GenericBusiness.com,” the signature block would include GenericBusiness.com’s contact info and web site. Strangely, Gmail does not offer this option; as far as they are concerned, the only way to use more than one signature would be to type or paste them in each time I compose a message. (I guess they’re too busy planning to colonize the moon to come up with useful features like this.

But since I use Firefox’s web-browsing software, and since Google’s products are “open source,” meaning that they publish the nuts and bolts of how these products work, meaning in turn that thousands of geeky computer types can create add-ons and modifications to these products, I was able to add what’s called a “script” that changes how the Gmail web site behaves for my email account. First I had to add the Firefox script manager, Greasemonkey. Then, via Lifehacker, a wonderful blog that covers “tips and downloads for getting things done,” I found the “Multiple Signatures in Gmail” script written by a developer who goes by the on-line moniker of “Choonkeat.” This was easy enough to install – like any of these add-ons, you just click on a link – but, because it had to generate my specific signatures, I did have to open the script (sort of similar to the source code of a web site) and insert my signature information, which was extremely frustrating until I realized that you cannot use an apostrophe in the text of your signature, since whatever scripting language is in use reads apostrophes as programming language, not text, and it bollocks up the whole process. After an embarrassingly long time, however, I finally figured it all out, and now I can easily switch identities and signatures within my Gmail webmail browser window.

So I was definitely ready for a Pabst Blue Ribbon (ah, Natty Boh, how I miss you) and episode two of this season of “The Office,” still essentially the only television show A. and I make any effort to watch. (I mean, I’ll turn on “Family Guy” from time to time, but if the baby or the dog are too long coming on-screen, I tend to get bored. And we can’t seem to adjust to tuning in “The Simpsons” at seven p.m., which is when it comes on out here in the hinterland if you can believe it. But on a related note, one could easily get into watching the various “Late Shows” out here, because they all start around ten p.m. I mean, I haven’t gotten into it, but one could.) Two of A.’s Bird Camp colleagues joined us. Really, the only reason A. stopped and bought PBR on the way home was because one of these colleagues is known to prefer “cheap beer,” so it was like something out of O. Henry’s “Gift of the Magi” when they turned up with a six-pack of a local microbrew, purchased only “because A. likes fancy beer.”

Anyway, “The Office” was good, although I wonder if they are overdoing it with these hour-long episodes. As short as the show used to seem, the hour-long ones can feel a little indulgent, and the rhythm and pace seems to fizzle after a while. Don’t get me wrong, the show is still top notch, and it’s not like I wasn’t happy to look at the clock at eight thirty and see that there was still another half hour to go. I wouldn’t say that the show is currently at the peak of its comedic powers, but the writers seem to me to be doing a good job maneuvering the extremely tricky point they are at in the overall story arc and the various characters’ development (i.e., the Jim-and-Pam romance, which, if mishandled, could really easily turn the show maudlin and pointless).

No word from my parents, who I think should have reached their hotel near Glacier National Park last night. We join them Saturday, in preparation for which I have been brushing up on my bear-fighting techniques. I might even buy some pepper spray today. I really don’t think I’m being paranoid, but I’ll put off briefing you on local ursine news until tomorrow.

One thing that’s been keeping me busy over the last few days has been putting the finishing touches on my professional web site. Check it out here if you’re interested, and please pass my name along if you hear of anyone looking for a freelance writer/editor.

No, not that one.

Author Linda Hirshman has an interesting post up at TPM Cafe on “Liberal Principles” (it’s part one of three). Or at any rate I find it interesting, because I’ve been spending a lot of time over the last couple of years thinking about what my principles are, and it’s interesting to hear some thought about what the actual philosophy of modern political liberalism might be. As intriguing as her arguments are, I sort of like what one commenter proposed: liberals are simply for democracy and the rights of man.

I can go with that for now.

“So what sort of business do you run from out of your home?” asked the chimney guy. We were in the check-writing stage of his visit, and I’d earlier told him to yell for me when he was done because I’d be downstairs in my office. He didn’t seem very impressed by “writer and editor,” and the conversation wended its way to my recent arrival here in Missoula. “How’d you know I wasn’t from around here?” I asked. “Just a guess,” he laughed. But really, how did he? The story of the move included my now-standard refrain that the reason behind it had been “so that my wife could take her dream job.” Naturally, he wanted to know what that job was. “Wildlife biology research,” I said.

“Wolf lover, huh?” he asked.

Interesting.

Yesterday was a class day, i.e., the Montana-history class I’m “informally auditing” at the university. I left home a little early, though, so that I could drop the car off at the mechanic again. We’d brought it in last Friday because of a rubbing noise in the front wheels that had been growing louder, and the Master Tech – Toyotas Only guy had called back after a few hours to ask, “is this car from the east coast or something?” He could tell by what he described as “rust everywhere” underneath, including – the source of the rubbing – such badly corroded brake rotors that the rust was in constant contact with the pads. (This is a gift, I guess, of Baltimore’s practice of utterly coating the roadways with corrosive salt at the first sight of a snowflake, which, thank god, I guess they don’t do out in these parts.) But the rubbing sound was still there, I noticed early this week, so I dropped it off yesterday and then walked to class, by way of a little pizza place where you can get $1 slices. (Too much sauce, though.) The walks to and from class suggested to me that I need to take some time to get out and walk the streets of some of these downtown neighborhoods. Interesting old houses, some of them dating to the 1880s (according to a plaque I noticed), plus after only a few minutes of walking I found myself starting to get a feel for the city – a feel of both actually living in it but also a sense of the city’s personality – that’s been missing so far, since I’m mostly confined to our compound up on the hill.

But someone has to guard the compound.

In class, we’re up to 1900, when the population of Montana was around 243,000, up from 143,000 only a decade earlier (and up from only a few thousand not much longer before that). Yesterday’s class was, among other things, “myth-dispelling day,” the professor keen to shatter two stereotypes that exist about early Montana (and which he admitted believing himself when he first moved here, five and a half years ago): that the state was originally a backwoods backwater, and that it was settled entirely by “white Americans.” Apparently, Montana was a very urban society at the time, in the sense that the vast majority of residents lived in cities (“cities” that were as small as 1,000 people, but, as the professor rightly pointed out, a city with a 1,000 people in it was a significant accomplishment on such a remote frontier). (And, by the way, it is still the case that the vast majority of Montanans live in cities: this professor claims that a higher proportion of Montanans live in cities than the proportion of New York state residents who do, although good luck convincing anyone that this makes Montana “more urban” than New York.) Next, Montana was mostly populated by the “foreign born” or their children, who made up just over 50 percent of the population. When you count just the “foreign born” themselves (excluding their children who were born here), they still constituted fully 28 percent of the population. By way of comparison, the nationwide rate of “foreign born” residents was only 13 percent. So, in this sense, Montana in 1900 was much more diverse than the nation as a whole. They even had 13 Koreans.

This is the state that mining built, so here is a short history of mining in Montana: the first mineral mined was gold (first discovered here in the 1860s), which exists in nature in pure form and so can be found in significant amounts by independent miners and small operations, particularly in Montana where it was basically just lying around on the ground or in the bottom of streams. As gold was tapped out, in the early 1870s, miners switched to silver. This is found mostly underground and does not exist in pure form, so extracting it requires a somewhat larger, more technologically sophisticated mining and then smelting operation. Once the silver started running out, miners switched to copper, which is buried deepest of all and isn’t worth as much as the other two metals, by far. So mining operations needed to become immense in order to take advantage of economies of scale. The most significant mining operation out here was the Anaconda mine (it had its own town, which still bears that name today); at one point, more than half of the state’s residents got their paychecks from Anaconda. Anaconda followed the pattern of corporatization followed by all industries at this time, first going public and then starting to “vertically integrate,” again necessitated by the low cost of copper: they built a railroad to transport their ore to market, bought their own timber tracts (for mine-tunnel bracing material), bought their own coal mines for fuel for their smelters, etc. By 1900, Montana mining was virtually all for copper, dominated by a small number of massive companies, as opposed to the rag-tag early independent miners who came for the gold.

All of this led to quite the transformation: Butte, the main mining city (Missoula developed a little later, mostly driven by the timber industry) was described in 1870 by one historian as “a scattering of wretched buildings.” By 1900, it had electricity, streetcars, an amusement park, streets lined with handsome brick buildings that still exist today, skyscrapers (i.e., steel-frame buildings that could therefore be taller than four stories), the second-largest red-light district in the country (after – natch – New Orleans). (This last tidbit allowed the professor to remake what seems to be one of his favorite points: the high rates of prostitution in the old west didn’t exist because the people were any more “immoral” than anyone else, there was just a massive shortage of women compared to men, resulting in the commercialization of “domestic chores” through the establishment of boarding houses, laundries, restaurants, and houses of prostitution. Interesting way of looking at it.) And forty-two languages were spoken on the streets of Butte in 1900…

Toward the end of class, the girls (which really seems a fair description of this particular trio, even if they are 18) started whining and shifting in their seats. “It’s time to go,” one of them called out, about a minute before the hour (which is when the class ends). I’d heard them fidgeting and complaining about not being able to keep up with the professor’s lecture in their note-taking (and let me just say this is a very easygoing lecturer), calling him a “dork” when he said something about “trying like the dickens” to locate some historical fact, etc. I guess I wasn’t so different when I was their age (which is one reason I had the sense to leave Bard early: no sense being in that much debt if I could barely be bothered to pay attention), but it sure is strange to be sitting in that class as a non-paying interloper, fascinated, wishing the guy could talk longer, only to hear these paying students behind me both barely able to function and also just desperate for the class to be over.

I had just left class and was walking over to drop by A.’s office when Will the mechanic called. The car was really, really fine he told me. The rubbing noise, it turned out, was the result of whoever had installed our new tires forgetting to apply a lubricant where the edge of the tire meets the rim, and so what I was hearing was just a constant “squeak” of rubber on metal. It wouldn’t cause any damage, he said, and, since the only way to fix it would be remove the tires, he didn’t recommend taking any action “unless it’s really driving you crazy.”

It isn’t.

On my way home from the mechanic, I stopped to buy a new DVD player (our old one didn’t survive the move, one of the few casualties) and some fireplace tools. At the first place I stopped for the DVD player, I was reminded – in the course of a conversation about our A/V “setup” – that our TV will no longer receive open-air signals after March, when it all goes digital. The guy who was talking to me simply assumed that this meant we would need to upgrade, at least by getting a digital-translating “box,” but inwardly I was thinking, “sweet, no more temptation to watch television.” As I type, however, I’m remembering that “The Office” is on tonight, which I’d hate to have to miss. Ah, the conflicts, the duality of man.

In the evening, we tried out the fireplace while tweaking the financial spreadsheet. Zuzu the cat seemed to think we were out of our minds. The new poker worked great.

What’s my problem? What’s so difficult about jotting a few notes here from time to time? I guess one problem is the new freelance lifestyle, which on the one hand theoretically gives you more free time (in the sense of time that isn’t planned for you), yes, but on the other hand it’s hard to let yourself not work. Not that I’m cracking the whip all the time, but, when you’re planning your own time, sometimes it’s hard to plan time for things that don’t feel productive.

Excuses, excuses. (Though, just for the sake of the record, I’ll point out that the involved diary entries I was doing in the spring and summer took about two hours a day, and I do have some other personal projects going. All right. Enough.)

I heard from my parents last night. They were sitting in the train station in Cumberland, Maryland, at the start of their old-world-style journey by train to San Francisco by way of Missoula and back again. They’ll arrive at the train station near Glacier National Park on Thursday, and A. and I will drive up to meet them and stay a night or two on the weekend. I’m not sure if A.’s and my difficulties with air travel this summer are their only inspiration for using the train, but it was ironic that, when they called, their train was delayed an hour and a half.

The fall has turned cool here, with temperatures dropping down into the thirties at night due to an influx of “cool, Pacific air.” Told you we’re really in the northwest, at least weather-wise. Yesterday we had the chimney cleaned, and, in the evening, I spent an hour driving around looking around for some place that sells bundled firewood. Turned out to be a little early in the season for this to be a feature of “every shopping center,” as I’d blithely assured A. would be the case, but I finally found some at the Albertson’s on Reserve, close to the highway.

Then we forgot to light the fire because The War was coming on, and we barely had time to heat up some soup and toast some bread before the first haunting strains of Wynton Marsalis’s theme music were coming over the television’s speakers. What a series, or “film,” as they insist on calling it. We missed the first three episodes, although it seems they will be replaying the series on Wednesdays for the rest of October. Does that start tonight? I’ll have to check. If you missed it, I recommend tuning in. Just think: you can become steeped in facts and sensory details from this important period without even having to crack a book. And there is something about the careful accounting of battle after battle – with casualty numbers – that helps you get past the cartoon of “the good war” and realize that one war does not vary much from another (though I was struck by the film’s final salute to the men and women “who fought and won this necessary war”; they do vary in that sense, but, as they say, “elections have consequences”). Yes, this would be a good series for the kids to watch, to get across the idea that war – even a “good” war – is still just about noise and terror and fire and blood and maggots everywhere, with no one knowing what’s going on (including, sadly often, the generals ordering their men into a meatgrinder). As my grandfather told my mother, you just hide and try to survive until the guy next to you gets shot and then you go berserk.

I will say that I don’t know how many more times I can stand to hear Tom Hanks (now settling comfortably into his incarnation as the personification of “greatest generation” smugness) intone, “Al McIntosh, Rock County Star-Herald.” The New Yorker compares Mr. McIntosh’s columns to “the monologues of the Stage Manager in Our Town,” but this is clearly just a bone the magazine is throwing to the red states out of a reflexive fear of being perceived as eastern and effete. (Too late!) I found most of the quotes from Mr. McIntosh’s columns to be pure self-satisfied country pabulum (particularly – and how apt! – his sneer at the exuberance with which New Yorkers reacted to the news of victory in Europe, as compared to the “dignity” with which Luverne residents simply closed up their shops and went home for the day). It’s like someone sent James Lileks back in time. Don’t get me wrong, I like me some James Lileks from time to time (I’d even point to his on-line diary as something of an inspiration for this one), but he’s not exactly the person you’d want making pronouncements for the ages sixty years from now. (As opposed to me, of course.)

We’re not the only ones with something to watch. A. finally hung her bird feeder near the deck, and I moved Zuzu the cat’s bed over to the sliding door so that she can recline in comfort while staring intently at the birds’ comings and goings, an activity that keeps her occupied for, seemingly, hours at a time, although no doubt with frequent nap breaks. This is in between episodes of howling mournfully as she wanders from room to room; then there is her frequent practice of thundering back and forth across the living-room floor, which is directly above my head when I’m sitting in my office. Who knew an eight-pound cat could make so much noise? I have no idea if these activities are new, or whether she always used to do this when the house was empty. But I’ll keep observing her, and you’ll be the first to hear what I find out.

Al McIntosh, Rock County Star-Herald.

(And I believe we were.) From his autobiography:

“My notebooks began in the very early days in Paris. I think, in those days, I always carried one with me. I was like a reporter at large. I made notes so conscientiously you’d think I was being paid by a big, important newspaper. I made notes of everything… Now, very often, I make no use of my notes, but I enjoy making them. They fire me.”

Monday was my deadline for a freelance project that had me working like a madman throughout the weekend. I’d thought I was over the hump on this project when I’d completed most of the text. “All” that was left was document layout, a thought that did not strike as much fear in my heart as it should have, especially when the software specified by the client was Microsoft Word. I have no particular respect for Microsoft products, of course, but I had not a clue just how badly things were about to go for me. The main problem was the fact that this document needed to include about 90 informational graphics, sized precisely and positioned neatly on the page. Anyone who has ever wrestled with image or table placement in Word knows where this is going. I’ve complained about Word here before, so I won’t repeat myself. Suffice to say that, at around 3 p.m. last Friday, I was almost done making last-minute changes to these graphics and actually thought that layout would only take another hour or two longer. I worked on it until almost midnight, went to bed, got up early Saturday, and worked for the next 17 hours before I was done. Then another 13 hours of rereading, another 8 or so hours of correcting the mistakes discovered by that rereading, and, finally, delivery of the finished document late on Monday.

So goes the freelance life: work through three weekends in a row, madly scrambling to make a deadline. Then, suddenly, it’s like you’re a student after finals, free to get more than four hours of sleep in a night, free to actually make plans for a Saturday afternoon with your wife. I would say free to structure your days however you want, but of course that’s really up to the boss, my conscience, who wants me to have everything complete on my freelance portfolio and professional web site by this coming Friday, so that I can commence a campaign of bothering several dozen prospective clients with the news of how great I am and how great it is that they will no longer have to struggle along without me. Plus another project is already commencing… We’ll see how it feels when the work gets really lean and the wolves are at the door, but for now I can say that I can’t imagine a better way to live. I’m starting to see how I can fit a decent amount of my own writing into each day (this hasn’t become an established pattern yet, but it’s starting), and it feels simply wonderful to be able to head out for the afternoon to, say, a seminar at the Montana Festival of the Book, which blew into town on Thursday, or, say, the thrice-weekly history lecture (history of Montana) I snuck into for the first time this week and which I hope to make a regular thing. (The boss allows this use of time because he feels that, the more I know about this state and its history/challenges/undercurrents/riptides, the better able I’ll be to find freelance work in the area.)

For similar reasons, last week we also started a daily subscription to the Missoulian, the local newspaper. In addition to the important local news that might actually help me get work (e.g., the state of the schools, public-health issues, the city’s master plans for development, etc.), this also helps me keep abreast of truly interesting items, such as the fact that the first grizzly bear in some 30 years was recently spotted in the Selway-Bitterroot ecosystem, which happens to be our ecosystem as well. Not to worry, though: (1) said “ecosystem” extends all the way into Idaho, which is where the bear was spotted, and (2) the person who spotted it shot it, too. He’d been hunting black bear, which is legal to do, and, when a bear-shaped animal wandered into his scope, he just pulled the trigger. Species identification was made post-mortem, so to speak. The fish and wildlife officer quoted in the article said the hunter “seemed to be really sorry.”

Another interesting news item concerns the continuing mystery surrounding the disappearance of a middle-aged woman while hiking near the Bear Creek Overlook, west of Victor. She was there with a male companion, who says he turned his back on her for less than a minute to take in the view from the overlook. When he turned back around, she was nowhere to be seen and has not been seen since. Police are keen to talk to two young men seen driving an older SUV in the area, though they emphasize that they have no suspects or leads. But then they would say that, wouldn’t they?

Taking the paper also means getting to read the comics every morning. It’s a small paper with a small comics page, but the selection is decent. No Get Fuzzy, but at least the page offers Pearls Before Swine. Since we’re in a red state, though, the page also carries Mallard Fillmore, the dull-witted wannabe-political-cartoon. The subtext of the “humour” in pretty much every strip seems to be something like “there are liberals in the world and they are stupid.” This past week’s strips included one that managed to both express disapproval of the youth fashion of baggy, sagging pants and suggest that Iranian spies are at work within our borders, stealing our secrets. (Of course, Iranian spies are at work within our borders, just as are British spies, Israeli spies, Russian spies – but for MF to pick Iranian spies for the particular, non-Middle-East-related joke being made shows a little too much fondness for White House-brand Kool Aid for my taste.) And then there was one about how, on September 11th, we said “everything would be different,” but then recently the New York Times printed news of a plot to “blow up planes at JFK airport” on “page 37” (possibly because the “plot” had been hatched by mental defectives without the capability to actually do anything they were planning to do) so, when you vote this fall, make sure you vote for someone who knows “what changed.” (These aren’t exact quotes, but I’ve thrown out the paper and the online archives for last week aren’t available yet.) In other words, yet another expression of the tired view that holds that there are two kinds of people in America, (1) those who understand that the country faces considerable threats from some very nasty people, and (2) Democrats. Thanks, Mallard, nice living in civil society with you.

Friday night found us at our second BBQ since arriving in Missoula. Like the first, this one also included a bear. We were at A.’s boss’s house, far out from the city in an undeveloped area of hills and forests and sparsely scattered houses. A. and I and a couple of others were in the basement admiring the professor’s temperature-and-humidity-controlled “wine vault” when the word came: “there’s a bear outside and it’s coming around the back.” We all rushed out onto the back patio for a look (I made sure to keep plenty of people between me and the bear). According to the professor, it was a yearling, just old enough to be on its own but not yet old enough to know better than to approach human settlements like this. It stood only a little taller than my parents’ German Shepherd. The humans and the bear watched each other for a minute or two before the visitor headed off into the woods and we headed back into the kitchen for more wine.

Sorry for the dearth of posting, but I’m wrapping up a freelance project that’s due Monday.

Pretty much since I got here, it’s been…

work…

work…

work.

Rough life, eh?

(I did find time to scrawl the below post, however.)

I step onto the balcony – the “deck” – before dawn, a cup of coffee in my hand. It is not unusual to smell smoke on the air here, but the campfire-like whiff I first detected through the open living-room window seems closer, more urgent, than usual. Could a forest fire be raging its way up the hill? (It would be more of a subdivision fire, I suppose.) I stand on the balcony sniffing at the wind and scanning the darkness for flames, but, after the first few seconds, I can no longer recapture the scent, and the darkness is broken only by porch lights on the hill side below and tiny headlights blinking through the trees all the way down on Route 93. The rising sun is just hitting the clouds above me, and they glow faintly, marshmallow-like in color and texture, more the idea of clouds than the real thing. From a neighbor’s yard comes the staccato build, climax and repeat of a sprinkler.

There is a Safeway here, just as there was one in Baltimore. (I hear they have them all over.) But this Missoula one has achieved the upscale, country-store aesthetic that the one in Baltimore only gestures at: the faux hardwood floors and sleek service counters are the same, but the Missoula Safeway is smaller, the aisles are narrower, and the shelves of wine next to the display of summer sausage and gourmet cold-cuts just make me want to spend money. They’re ready to take my money, too: there is a Starbuck’s kiosk with cafe seating; there are extensive prepared-foods displays (including “China Express,” offering chow mein, pot stickers and egg rolls); and of course there is all that beer and wine. But we are on a budget and must answer to our spreadsheet, so none of that for us.

Well, maybe just a little.

At a rough estimate, I’d say that the Missoula Safeway is about a third the size of the Baltimore Safeway. Maybe half. Let’s say half. This will be useful for comparison’s sake, for the sake of what the comparison can tell us about the differences between Baltimore and Missoula. For instance, in a store half the size of the one in Baltimore, we find approximately the same amount of produce but less than a third of an aisle of chips, pretzels, popcorn, etc. (with the aisles being shorter here, anyway). The meat department looks about the same size here as in Baltimore, if you take away the big floor bins that the Baltimore store has. The soda display stretches about the length of an aisle, not the whole length, the last tenth of the aisle given over to those pretend-it’s-not-soda “juices” and “sport drinks” and that sort of thing. Definitely a smaller overall proportion than in Baltimore. For what it’s worth.

Noted in passing: “Frosty Paws Dog Ice Cream Treat,” $4.19, in a special cooler in the pet-supplies aisle. Also, the floral department is called “Poetry in Bloom.” (I can’t remember if the one in Baltimore has a name.)

Most of the checkstand clerks and baggers and self-stockers here in Missoula are either in or were just in high school, maybe college, which just feels right, somehow. It also feels as if they actually mean it when they ask if you are finding everything you need. To my recollection, only people wearing ties ever ask you that in the Baltimore Safeway, but here the squeaky-voiced teenager in the apron balancing an arm load of canned tomatoes does it, too. He understands that it’s for the team, and who doesn’t want to help out the team? (The checkstand clerks also ask, for that matter, only in the past tense: “did you find everything okay?” What will they do if you say “no”? Send someone to look for it?)

On a Sunday afternoon, we park on the university campus and walk across the Clark Fork River on one of the foot bridges to Wow, a “wingery” and micro-brew pub plying the student trade. Across the river, we watch two cops approach two sunbathing women in a pincers-style “contact and cover” formation. They all talk briefly. The women remain sitting on their blanket. The cops leave, having determined whether or not the women have a thing for uniforms.

As we stroll back across the foot bridge, we are treated to the gentle singing of the hobos from their camp on the river bank.

(Seriously.)

Labor Day, and A. and I have driven to Jerry Johnson Hot Springs, an hour and a half along a winding two-lane blacktop through fir forests, just over the Idaho border into Pacific Time. We are sitting in a soaking pool, leaning back, looking at the tops of the tall cedars waving gently against the sky, listening to the serenade of the angry red squirrels, the water in the main creek burbling loudly away on its thousand-year rock-smoothing mission, and I’m thinking, one day I’ll get used to this?

I must say that doesn’t feel likely.

1. The Cult of Customer Service

When I talk about “how nice the people here are,” what am I really saying?

How not nice the people are somewhere else, I suppose.

Maybe also how different people’s lives are somewhere else.

I notice how nice the people here are when I bring my broken cell phone in to the Verizon store to find out if it’s still under warranty, and the happy-looking blonde woman behind the counter seems as enthusiastic about helping me with this problem as she would about the prospect of a commission sale. I notice how nice the people here are when I have to call the Vann’s Outlet store because I (mistakenly) think there is something wrong with our new washing machine, and the grandmotherly voice on the other end of the line not only spends time troubleshooting the problem with me but, when we are done, positively beseeches me to call back if her suggestions don’t help.

I notice how nice the people here are, among other times, when someone with whom I am doing business appears genuinely glad to be doing business with me. What I am noticing is the thing popularly known as good customer service, and I am noticing it because I had gotten used to not encountering it when I lived in Baltimore.

These days good customer service is more commonly talked about in its absence, like the woman traveling with her husband and two children who arrived at her gate a little late recently at the Denver International Airport, only to learn that United did not intend to let her board. (At least there was still a gate agent she could yell at.) At the end of her tirade (which got her onto the plane, by the way), she concluded with something that, it was clear, she felt United and its representatives would not want to hear: “Worst customer service ever!”

I hear this sort of thing all over. The man behind me in line talking on his cell phone, critiquing the customer service he is getting as though he were a management consultant paid for his opinion. My friend, frustrated at a disagreement with an auto dealership’s service department over the warranty protection for his brakes: “Where I come from, the customer is always right. I mean, that’s just basic customer service.”

When did this idea of “customer service” take such a strong hold over us all? When did we start to believe that we deserved only the best treatment, by default, at all times? (Increasingly, we also have a taste for rich foods, like asiago cheese and Haagen Dazs ice cream, although this may only be a coincidence.) I’m not saying we don’t deserve the best treatment (though there is a certain amount of self-worship in believing so), but, either way, I’m pretty sure we never used to talk about it as much.

Perhaps we make a mistake by assuming that everyone wants our business, that businesses exist to serve us. (Perhaps this is a tale we tell ourselves to survive in a world that does not seem to care whether we do or not.) On average, businesses do exist to serve us, of course, if they want to – on average – make money. But there are a lot of us, so it’s not necessarily true that they exist to serve me or you, specifically. And what’s cheaper: providing everyone the level of customer service worth writing home about, or treating most people like the cattle they turn out to be and making it up to the handful who complain? If you were running a business, particularly a national business with tens of thousands of employees, your stockholders would want you to answer this question – really answer it – before deciding how to proceed.

When people talk about “good customer service,” especially when the point they are making is that there isn’t any anymore, they may also be talking about the way things used to be. The way things used to be, a man got up a little earlier than his neighbors, walked or drove to his shop, unlocked the door and turned the lights on, and waited for his neighbors to come buy things. When this man felt a twinge in his tooth or wanted to plan a vacation, he left his shop early and sought out his neighbors at their shops and businesses. And while he did so, he left his shop in the hands of another neighbor’s son or daughter. And when he closed his shop at the end of the day, as he was holding the door open for his helper to leave before locking up and counting the receipts, he said to his helper, “say hello to your parents for me.”

I think people are thinking of this man when they say that there isn’t good customer service anymore, which means that what they are really saying is that they are unhappy with the way the world is turning out. They are happy to buy the Haagen Dazs and the asiago cheese, they just want the person selling it to them to feel more like the old familiar cheddar.

Like all fundamentalists, they miss the way they think the world used to be.

2. In the Temple of the Free Market

Some people believe we live in a world controlled by big, impersonal forces. Some people call these forces the market. What the market will do can sometimes be predicted but more often must be reacted to, these people find, their market occupying a similar place in their minds as a pantheon of gods in the minds of the ancient Romans or Greeks. The god known as the market can be appealed to and even mollified with ritual sacrifice, and it stands always ready to pass judgement on our mortal strivings.

We must never think we are bigger than the market.

But the market is just a metaphor, as were those ancient gods. Passively leaving the course of human affairs up to the former makes as much sense as leaving it up to the latter. A very few people in any time can see behind the curtain; some of them inevitably join the relevant priesthoods, having decided that the best position to be in is one that allows them to tell the rest of us what the gods want.

In all ages, what the gods happen to want is usually the steady delivery of fatted calfs to their temples.

That these temples are where the priests happen to live and work (and eat) is of course merely a coincidence.

Another thing the priests tell us now is that we must wait for the market to fix things, that, if the market doesn’t “correct” something, that thing is not in need of correcting. All this really means is that we are supposed to wait until most people decide they do or don’t like something. The things they do like – the products, the processes, the businesses responsible – will become successful while the rest fail, the priests assure us.

But either the market does not work as advertised or it has some uncomfortable lessons to teach us about ourselves. (In the way of such things, it may be a little of both: just because the market is a metaphor doesn’t mean it’s a bad one.) Either the market does not work as advertised, or we enjoy, for example, dressing our ten-year-old daughters in tight, revealing, provocative clothing. Either the market does not work as advertised, or we enjoy sitting stalled in airplanes on runways for hours after the “departure time” printed on our tickets. Either the marketplace does not work as advertised, or we find “reality” television to be the ultimate refinement of that medium.

The priests tell me I am being impatient. That “the hand of the marketplace” moves slowly. In a few years, if it is really true that we do not wish to, for example, dress our prepubescent daughters like harem members (and here the priests’ eyes narrow with suspicion, for – after all – the market so far bears out that we do), then eventually the businesses offering children-sized miniskirts the width of ace bandages and tiny sparkling t-shirts carrying printed messages such as “Future Porn Star” will see their sales drop, and, chastened, they will vigorously seek to learn what we do want so that they can start selling that to us.

So sit back and wait, the priests tell us. Everything that needs to be corrected will be corrected, and to rush things would throw the market off its rhythm.

We must not think we are bigger than the market.

And so we live as if life and human interactions are nothing more than the birth and death of stars on the far side of the galaxy, and we nothing more than astronomers watching through a telescope, with no investment in any particular outcome other than whatever outcome occurs.

One recent outcome: a store called The Limited, Too will gladly sell your ten-year-old a padded “push-up” bra designed for girls with nothing to actually push up. Over this they can wear a t-shirt, available in the same store, that reads “I left my brain in my locker” and is bedecked with sparkles. But don’t worry. The market should have this all corrected within at least a decade or so.

3. It’s Later Than You Think

In the late 20th and early 21st century, the citizens of the richest country on earth gradually came to the realization that, for all of their fabled wealth and power, they had no more say in how they would be treated in the airport security line than a cow on her way to slaughter. Panderers circled their children, dazzling them with bright colors and sparkles and the heady suggestion that they deserved to “be their own people” even before they needed deodorant (with this metaphor available only as a result of the earlier victories of those who follow the creed first create a need, then fill it).

The clerk at the Seven Eleven counter refused to smile as he made change.

As it became clearer that there was less and less they could do to affect the experiences they were having, that they were expected to pay their money and then take whatever ride someone else felt like giving them, the people of turn-of-the-century America began to talk more and more about good customer service. Some people understood good customer service as something that businesses were virtually obligated to provide, something that businesses were constantly striving toward. These people were amazingly quick to spot problems with the customer service they encountered; they were amazingly articulate about what was wrong and how to fix it. If they had been paid consultants of the businesses in question, they would have quickly fixed the problems.

First, of course, it would have to have been established that the businesses cared, that poor customer service actually drove people away, that the businesses paid a price. Such was the logic of the market, and it’s a logic that made a certain cold sense: make them pay for what you don’t want them to do, and they will tend not to do it. But the people who cared how they were treated found that there weren’t enough of them to make a difference – that most cows will just keep walking, doing their best not to think about the man with the bolt-gun up ahead.

People were reduced to praying to the market to fix everything, to remind the businesses that they were human beings, and that a little kindness would go a long way.

But the market turned out not to be listening, never having asked to be put in charge.