The Cool Mr. Poole

One of my pals from Triiibes, Seth Godin’s fantastically fertile social network, is Bob Poole. Bob is a salesperson with a whole lotta soul, a fine and funny man, and the author of the recommended book, Listen First, Sell Later. His blog, called the Daily Doughnut, gives bite-sized advice and perspectives on selling, but selling from a framework of two-way communication, mutual gain, and being a human being. Imagine that.

Bob gives over the Sunday version of the Daily Doughnut to guests. I hacked into his blog and replaced today’s post from Richard Branson with my own. Check it out: “Galileo and Leonardo da Vinci Walk Into A Bar …”

Thanks. No Really, I Mean It

Picture a frosty gin and tonic here in about an hour and a half

If you’ve seen some recent posts of mine, you might suspect I’ve been having a peculiar time in the Bahamas. I have the unique skill set of being able to turn a stretch of time on this lovely island into a cage of sorts. Nonetheless, this image above shows where Alice and I went snorkeling this morning.

The water was sharply clear. We saw a lovely school of blue tang romping about a big chunk of coral. (They were tangy, indeed.) I appreciated the moments we were there, and that’s what I need to keep uppermost in mind. Appreciating the tangy moments. I’m still working on appreciating those with less tang, but there’s progress there too.

Thus, with gratitude, Happy Thanksgiving to all.

Writers and Booze: Pardon Me While I Drink This Manuscript

Waiter, can you bring me a subordinate clause?

Waiter, can you bring me more ice and a subordinate clause?

Because I am the founder of the Bentley Paranoiac Dystopian Technique (BPDT), I have managed, at the one-month mark, to have made my stay in the beguiling Bahamas a time of substantial anxiety, temper and intolerance. Not only that, there was some bad stuff happening too. It is once again a lesson in attitude IS everything (almost), and that my attitude makes your basic murderous dictator look like the designer of the Princess Phone.

BPDT aside, I have noted in the past the reputation of writers as the self-medicating types. I’m talking about the storied boozy histories of Faulkner and Hemingway and of Dorothy Parker, the quarry of this quote:”Writer, thinker, drinker.”

Thus, I’ve seen that when my interpretations of this beautiful island become baleful, I’ve started longing for my gin-and-tonic bath. That usually happens around 11am. (When Alice and I were shopping in one of the local liquor stores, one of the tourists there told us that the low-alcohol version of the good native beer, Kalik, was fine for morning drinking, and provided a stepping-stone (if you could still step solidly) to the higher-proof noon-time brew.)

Links with Drinks
Well, I haven’t actually succumbed to the morning bottle-feeding routine, preferring to continue my “I’m strong enough to wait until 5” standard of excellence. Besides, I’ve got work to do, and I don’t have Hemingway’s constitution. But with all that in mind, I thought you’d enjoy my small collection of writerly links about drinks. They prove it is possible to hold a pen in one hand and a cocktail in another, however wobbly both may be.

Top Ten Drunk Writers

11 Drinks to Pair with Your Favorite Books

Greatest Books on Booze

How to Drink Like Your Favorite Authors

A Bar Pretending to be a Bookstore

Mind you, I’m not encouraging a headlong pursuit of boozy debauchery. Intemperate application of alcohol has created many a hell for many a soul. I just apply the stuff as an edge-smoother, and I’ve been edgy lately. I’m much more for the “moderation in all things” mantra rather than “why did I wake up wearing lipstick and heels?” Next time you’re in the islands, you can enroll in the BPDT program, buy me a drink, and I’ll tell you all about it.

Eleventy-Eleven-Eleven: Books by the Half-Dozen

Yeah, you're right—they were a vaudeville act in the 30s

I like to show off my smarty-pants friends now and then, and this occasion brings a half-dozen ways to do it: my estimable colleague, Joel D Canfield, is hosting a book-release party on the eleventh of November in Philadelphia. Joel (who besides making wicked pancakes) dabbles in necromancy and other dark arts, so he has scheduled his publishing party on 11-11-11, a day when normally steadfast digits and the earth itself both tilt on their axes. In order to cause numerologists to scramble to their interpretive books all the quicker, Joel has folded two other units into the numeral batter: 6/6.

Those dancing digits herald a titanic feat: he’s published six books in the last six months! And he rarely sweats! Though, as you might imagine from that kind of output, he does expound.

Four of the works are from the apocalyptic potato cellar of his own imagination, one is an immortal act of co-authorship with the stirring soul of Renaissance Man/poetic social theorist/quasi-historian/tooth-tugger Richard Wilson and one is co-authored with Change Catalyst Shanna Mann. Behold the list:

Through the Fog—An Irish Mystery

The Time is Now 11:59—Heretical Thinking for Tomorrow’s Business (with a foreword by Rick Wilson)

Getting Your Book Out of the “Someday” Box

Hits or Niches: Why Marketing is Boring, Obnoxious, & Annoying, & What You Can Do About It (with Rick Wilson)

Permission Granted: Create Something Remarkable. Start Now.

Why We Lead—Conversations on the Scarcity of Confidence and the Nature of Leadership (with Shanna Mann)

The works are available both in print form and from the aether, from the usual electronic suspects. The publishing party will be held at Cafe Nola, a New–Orleans style venue where the Bananas Foster is said to reign supreme. Along with flaming confectionary dishes, Joel will be attempting to eat full print versions of all the books. It’s unclear if famed hot-dog competitive eating champion Joey Chestnut will be vying for this literary-comestibles crown.

There’s a Facebook page trumpeting the occasion and Joel’s Someday Box page has links to buy these and his other books as well. On the whole, I’d rather be in Philadelphia that day, but I won’t be able to make it. Save me a banana, boys. (On second thought, just save me the cognac.)

Operating Without the Net: It Bites, Then It Sucks

There's a cruel jester under the cool cap

This looks like a quart of ordinary ice cream. (Ignore the fact that Haagen-Daz and its European provenance is an illusion from the get-go). No, no ice cream this. This is the price of human folly, the crucible that shows the hollow core of the soul, the stuff that dreams are made of. But how can this glop of eggs, cream and sugar be any of that?

The concept comes from the spirit of Magritte, who painted under his famous image of a pipe, “This is not a pipe.” No, this alleged ice cream is a symbol of my boiling frustration over losing control of my situation. That situation is that Alice and I are house-sitting in the Bahamas, on a 3 ½-acre compound that was a former wilderness school. There’s a main house, some cottages, and a number of dorm buildings, just a long fly ball from the shoreline.

It’s the Bahamas, right? Beautiful beaches, lovely people, umbrella drinks at mid-day. Sure, that Bahamas is here. But Alice and I came here to work and play, and work daily, since we aren’t island jet-setters, and can’t afford not to work. But our work is all Internet-based. Gotta be online, all the time. Only the Internet hasn’t worked properly here since Hurricane Irene. It might be on for 10 minutes, off for 3 hours, on for one minute, off for an hour, off for an entire day. Yesterday, I was supposed to be on a Skype call to my main clients. I was knocked offline at least 10 times, and finally knocked off for good that day. Our homeowners didn’t quite elaborate on just how squirrely the connectivity is.

The Gorge Also Rises
We are both so accustomed to the Net just working that when it doesn’t—and doesn’t in an arbitrary way, the gorge rises. My gorge. We’ve both missed some deadlines and there’s no end in sight. The Bahamian Net providers have been here 5 times in 7 days, and are supposed to be here again today. They can’t figure it out. Better yet, they had a big layoff at their office yesterday—the main tech who comes out here was laid off. Zing!

So, we can’t work. But we can scratch. The no-see-ums and mosquitoes here are murderous. Below is a picture of Alice’s thigh from a couple of days ago. When the dogs that we are taking care of here escape the compound (they have multiple devious ways), we must chase them to retrieve them, but we must chase them through a boggy zone where the mosquito is the dominant species. No applications of Off, Skin-So-Soft or rum can deter them. Speaking of rum, I was so frustrated at all this business the other day that I slapped a nice cool drink of pineapple and rum right off my chair into the bushes, followed by a fusillade of curses. Those who know me know that the day I throw good liquor into the bushes is the day The Beast has risen.

You should see the other leg

Get Back to the Ice Cream Already
What this all says to me is that I’m so used to controlling certain things that when that control is wrested from me, my inadequate coping skills don’t provide much backup. And what does this all have to do with a quart of Haagen-Daz? This: I bought this quart of ice cream out of spite. One factor is that I could control the purchase of this ice cream. The spite part is that this ice cream cost me $14.50. Yes, when I heard the price, I just laughed. These are the only bites on the island I’ve truly enjoyed.

Postscript, Minus the Sting
Last night, when I was washing the dishes, I lifted this little platform above the sink that the dish-scrubbers sit on. Underneath was a little scorpion, tail-flag waving in greeting. He didn’t actually alarm me—he was a beautiful little creature. I didn’t have the hysterical reaction I’ve developed when I roam the mosquito-zones around the house, slapping madly at the air, my face and legs. Instead, I got to study my little friend, and then was able to capture him in a wine glass and put him outside. He was a bit angry at that, stabbing his laden tail against sides of the glass. I’m hoping I made him angry enough to go sting a squadron of mosquitoes or two.

PPS By the way, I do realize that I am a large crybaby. But hey, it passes the time.