Religion
I am agnostic. The question of the existence of God seems to me to be unknowable. I am such a confirmed skeptic that if God spoke to me, instead of falling to my knees I would go to the hospital for a brain scan to locate the tumor. Nevertheless I think religion, at least of the mild and tolerant sort, is a force for good in the world, and I am cheered that the country in which I live is still overwhelmingly populated by believers.Philosophy of life
My philosophy is that the purpose of life is to enjoy it as much as possible. The things I enjoy most are raising my kids and reading and studying.Children are a great deal of work but taking care of them is very satisfying. It's a trick our genes play on us to improve the odds that the genes themselves will survive into succeeding generations, but the pleasure is undiminished even if you are fully aware of the trick. So I'm not about to forgo the pleasures of family just to spite my genes.
As for reading and studying, I experience my own ignorance not as shame to be disguised through dissembling, but as a sort of pain to be alleviated by learning. So I read books, research stuff on the net, and, especially when I'm tired, watch history and other stuff on TV.
Political philosophy
I'm a libertarian. I believe the only legitimate purpose of government is to maximize the individual liberty of its citizens. As Jefferson put it, Governments are instituted amongst Men to secure the unalienable Rights to Life, Liberty, and the pursuit of Happiness.But that's not how I started out. Back when I was young and dumb I was a big hippie liberal. I even wasted my first vote for president on McGovern, when I could have wasted it on Nixon.
Then one day in the fall of '76 everything changed. I arrived early for class at CMU so I stopped by the library to kill some time. In the magazine rack near the door I spotted a copy of National Review and thought, oh, this oughta be good. My sneer soon turned to shock, however — it was good. I tore out the subscription card and never looked back.
What I had found within the pages of NR was the other side of the debate. Until then I had relied for information on the mainstream media — Newsweek, Time, Cronkite — which had kept me in the dark that there even was another side of the debate. To this smug liberal it had appeared that there was only the liberal side, although there did apparently exist some disordered mass of moral defectives who were inexplicably blind to obvious truth. Upon poking my nose into NR what became immediately apparent was that there was, in fact, another side to the debate, that it was very well-ordered indeed, and that they grappled openly, deeply, and honestly with difficult moral issues. It all struck me as vastly more convincing than the fizzy liberalism I had imbibed by default.
Over the years, however, I began to realize that I was more of a libertarian than a conservative. I don't like being told what to do by anybody, left or right, or at least by anybody who isn't paying me what I consider acceptable remuneration for the privilege.
So government should leave the burghers who fund them completely unmolested in their pursuit of happiness, whatever that may be so long as it does not actively harm others; protect them energetically from predators foreign and domestic; and treat them, when contact is unavoidable, with great courtesy and respect. Needless to say I find much to deplore in our current political arrangements.
Education
I never liked school but I reconciled myself to the boredom and bullies sufficiently to muddle through. The most valuable class I had in high school was typing.I went to college at Penn State, where I indulged my newfound liberty somewhat extravagantly. The bulk of my classes were in science and math. After Penn State I went to Carnegie-Mellon, where I got an MBA. The bulk of my classes there were in finance. I also attended law school some time later but was compelled to withdraw before the first year was out due to the burden it placed on my family.
Overall my academic career was pretty worthwhile. At Penn State I ultimately stumbled into an experimental program that allowed me to take just about whatever classes I wanted. I sampled from the entire catalog with classes in grammar, law, genetics, Shakespeare, calculus, history, economics, music, logic, statistics, etc., etc. It was great. (Later they did away with the program because too many students used it to avoid learning altogether.) At CMU I was surrounded by seriously bright students, and I was taught by a seriously impressive faculty, and I learned a great deal, particularly about the analytical tools of business management and the theories from which they are derived. The law school stuff was interesting and beneficial too. Procedure is overwhelmingly for practitioners, of course, but Criminal Law, Property, and Contracts are all broadly useful.
(As a curious footnote, the CMU business school was recently bought (!) by some tycoon named Tepper, after whom the school is now named. I used to feel bad for ignoring their fund-raising appeals. Now I just laugh. What, the tycoon's tapped out?)
Employment, the early years
The first job I remember was as substitute paperboy while my friend, the regular paperboy, was on vacation. At one point, however, I rode the bike too fast and the papers blew out and all over a huge cloverleaf interchange. But I gathered them all up, put them back together, and carried on. My dad's comment was that people should always be paid double for the first day on the job.While I was still in high school I worked for one day delivering pizzas but the owner didn't like my long hair, which was non-negotiable, so it was one and done.
I worked in the reconditioning shop of a Volkswagen dealership for a summer at $1.35/hour. They didn't like my long hair either and they threatened to fire me but didn't. But they did harass me, "boy named sue" type stuff. (A year or so later I happened to stop by and all the harassers now had hair longer than mine.) That's where I started drinking my coffee black. Coffee was the only free beverage and after a while it was just too much trouble to bother with the cream and sugar.
Throughout my Penn State years I had a number of jobs. One summer I worked as the mix-man in a refractory plant. It was hot and strenuous work, carrying 50 pound bags of aluminum and sand and whatnot around all day and mixing them in a cement mixer next to the kiln. Came close to passing out a time or two from sweating out all the salt, but a breather and a bag of chips would get me back in the game. I'd come out of there every day white from tip to toe.
For several years I ran a dry cleaning delivery business located in my home town of Butler, which was three hours away from school. I would drive the truck myself during the summers and then hire guys to do it when I was away at school.
I also tended bar at several places, the first of which was the My-O-My, a stripper bar that was owned by a gangster from Pittsburgh, and which communicated through to a gay bar on the other side. It made for an interesting environment.
From there I moved to The Rathskeller, which was a few doors down and a bit of a step up. One day when it was completely dead a couple guys came in and sat down at the bar. For some reason I was lost in my own world and didn't see them at all from only a few feet away. Suddenly I realized they were there and started over, just as one of the guys leaned forward and said, "Excuse me, are you working or are you just on duty?" Hilarious.
One summer I stayed with a friend from near Philadelphia and tended bar at the Radnor Valley Country Club. When I first got there they weren't ready to have another bartender yet, so I started off washing dishes and serving hot dogs at the golf course snack bar. But soon they were ready for my mixological services and I began tending bar. By that time, however, the other bartenders knew me as a dishwasher, which is the lowest caste in a restaurant. (One of the waitresses saw me all decked out in my bartending duds and asked me if I had a twin working in the kitchen. She was serious.) The other bartenders were less than welcoming to me, therefore, until one day a young lady ordered a tequila sunrise. I supplied that and the other drinks for her party and shortly thereafter there was this loud exclamation: "Wow, that's the best tequila sunrise I've ever had!" With that bit of startling luck I was accepted into the guild.
Another summer I spent in Sacramento and tended bar at the NCO club at McClellan Air Force Base. When I drove up to the base on my first day I encountered a guard standing there beside his little hut so I waved to him and he waved back and in I went. After many weeks of this I was eventually stopped and told by an exasperated guard that I needed some kind of official ID to get on base so I was ordered to stop at the adjacent building and get the paperwork started. But by that point I was leaving soon anyway so I stalled in various ways and never did get the proper permission. I imagine security has improved since then.
These NCO's loved their club. I would open up at 11 in the morning and when I walked in the door the bar stools would already be full. (The room was unlocked, though the liquor was not.) Rail drinks were a quarter, which was virtually free even for the mid 70's. But during happy hour they were only a dime. At last call for happy hour they would order up 3 or 4 or 5 more so they could continue to enjoy the healthy discount from virtually free.
Dishonesty amongst bartenders is endemic, of course, so to try to keep things under some control they had this amazing auditing system. Every bartender had his own stock of hooch, locked by his or her own key, and every now and then the auditors would come in and measure the levels in the bottles. The idea was to calculate the amount of disappeared booze and then correlate it with the cumulative money in the till since their last visit. Apparently it had the intended effect because the other bartenders seemed to live in fear of those guys. I thought it was laughably unworkable, however, so I continued to make sure my customers got a healthy dime's worth, and the Hennessy-loving managers loved me.
For a while I worked as a pathology technician in the county hospital, assisting on autopsies. It was almost unimaginably revolting — the odor is staggering and the visuals can induce instant blackout — but also very interesting. And yes, it was very scary. My job was to get there first, pull the stiff out of the cooler, move him over to the table, get him undressed, and hose him down. Then the pathologist would come in (the doctor was never alone with the corpse) and I would assist in various ways throughout the procedure. Afterward the doctor would clear out and I would close up, clean up, shower up, and go home.
Man it was hard to open that cooler. Initially, of course, I'd be trying to maneuver the stiff off of the roll-out shelf and onto the litter without getting too intimate, but dead people are heavy. Eventually I'd have to just go for the bear hug, arms around his torso, chest to chest, nearly cheek to cheek, and heave him up and over. Then do it again onto the operating table.
At the conclusion of festivities it was very easy to put him back onto a litter because not only had he lost a huge amount of weight (the viscera are not replaced), but I had become thoroughly comfortable around him. So I'd wheel him into the corner, cover him with a sheet, and... Darned if he didn't become the terrifying unknown yet again. That thing didn't move, did it? And I gotta shower in the corner with that thing lurking right there? Spooky.
Any time the patient presents himself zipped inside a body bag things can get really evil. One such case involved a guy who was burned to a total crisp from head to foot — which literally broke off in my hand as I moved him. Then x-rays came back showing that he was also riddled with bullets. Diagnosis? Heart attack.
That's one doozy of a heart attack to cause all that. But he had been sitting in his car, nose up on an incline, engine running to keep him warm, foot on the brake but not in park, drinking coffee and having a smoke, waiting for dawn so he can start hunting. Massive heart attack, instant death, foot off the brake, car rolls down the hill, crashes into the trees, ruptures the gas tank, the cigarette smolders, it becomes an inferno, the ammo cooks off, and we end up with one very odd case down at the morgue.
Other jobs I remember doing included new house prep (after all the contractors are gone the tubs and showers are left covered in protective goo and the place is just generally a big mess; lasted a couple weeks), janitor at a mall (keeping the trash cans from overflowing is harder than you think; lasted a couple weeks), and I tarred the roof of a building once (once was enough).
