Corporate America is by it’s nature insane.
Can’t really say much other than I survived. This time.

My father was the Michael Jordon of cattle buyers.
He was a city kid who grew up on the West Side of St. Paul. Which is on the west side of the Mississippi, but actually is south of Downtown. East of that is South St. Paul and to the south is West St. Paul. True. He got his training in the huge South St. Paul Stockyards, starting out as a drover, moving cattle around the yard on foot and on horseback, at sixteen. At one time he had a side business with Mike Farrel’s dad, speculating on buying and selling cattle in the yards. They called it the Emaciated Cattle Company.
When I was about five, he was offered a job buying cattle for Liebman Packing Company, which was in Green Bay, Wisconsin. Hence the Packers. The job was in the West Fargo Stockyards, just over the border in North Dakota. He worked for them until the early sixties when Siouxland decided to build their big plant. They realized that they couldn’t buy enough cattle to keep the place busy unless they hired my dad. Even with the advantage of no trucking costs, they couldn’t compete.
Here’s how it worked. The feeders brought their market ready cattle to the Stockyards and consigned them to a commission company. The commission company would act as bargaining agents for them. The buyers would go out into the yards and bid on the cattle hoping to cut an advantageous deal. The trick was to be able to look at the cattle and determine the ratio (yield) of their “on the hoof” weight to their dressed weight, hanging in the meat cooler. Then if you knew the going price of dressed beef and the profit margin you needed then you could calculate what a fair price per pound would be. Remember there were no calculators then; he had a series of laminated cheat cards, but I also think he did a lot of the math in his head. He was not a high school graduate. Dad could walk into a pen of 25 cattle, spend five minutes and estimate their yield percentage. If he missed by more than a half of one percent, he figured he’d blown it. So when Dad offered a price, you knew it was fair, so it was kind of a no haggle proposition. And if he gave you a price and you turned him down and you found out you couldn’t do better…well you’d better not come looking for him to give the original price. When he worked for Siouxland, he was the head cattle buyer and had five or six or some number of buyers working for him. He bought more cattle than all of them combined and bought them cheaper.
Mostly the job consisted of sitting around in the shacks out in the yards, playing cards, drinking coffee and smoking cigarettes until some cattle would come in. Then out they’d go take a look, cut a deal and get back to the card game. There was some bullshitting done in the bargaining process. Once he took me aside and said, “You go over there and sit on the fence and when they bring the cattle in say, ‘Kinda skaggy aren’t they?’” I could say the men were rolling in the alley, but that would be really nasty.
So the owner of Siouxland came to town and personally offered Dad double his salary and he couldn’t refuse. He died when I was twenty. The business was going to auction selling and he had trouble hearing so he figured he would be obsolete before long. The West Fargo Stockyards is a ghost town now.
That’s him in the middle with the groovy glasses.

Warning If you’re a vegan or a PETA member or simply don’t want to think about where your filet mignon comes from, you might not want to read the following.

The highest point in the Fargo-Moorhead area is the manure pile outside the Union Stockyards in West Fargo. It was huge, they drove big dump trucks on it. It had roads up it’s sides. It’s still there. Settled a bit and overgrown with vegetation, probably the most fertile soil in an area known for it’s fertile soil. The soil in the Red River Valley is amazing. The silt from the bottom of prehistoric Lake Agassiz. Black as oil, perfect growing anything, especially sugar beets.
In the early sixties, Siouxland Dressed Beef built a new state of the art packing plant across the road from the stockyards. Designed to kill cattle, sheep and hogs it was at that time one of the highest volume livestock packing operations in the world. That wouldn’t last long because that was a time when the size and efficiency of such operations was growing at an amazing pace. But at that time it was a showcase. The offices were on one side of the building, next to the kill floor. They were lined with windows so the office workers and plant managers could look out and admire the operation. Unfortunately the architects or engineers made a slight miscalculation. The conveyor for the sheep kill brought the freshly slaughtered sheep carcasses right past the window. They were swinging as they came around a corner on the line. They hit the window. So these windows that were put in so the white collar folks could admire the efficiency of their high tech plant were constantly covered by a disgusting film of sheep blood and gore. My dad was extremely amused by this.

ASAP
As Soon As Possible.
I hate that term. What does ASAP mean to you. Here’s what I think when someone tells me they want something ASAP. I think they don’t give enough of a fuck about it to care about when it gets done and what it’s priority is so why the fuck should I. I put it on the bottom of my priority list behind all the things from people who have taken the time to figure out where the work fits in their schedules. I can usually accomodate that. When you really never have any downtime, ASAP is pretty much NEVER.
This has nothing to do with my current shitty mood, though.

Do you ever want to run away and just start over?

“It’s a dog eat dog world and I’m wearin’ Milk Bone underwear.”

All the hilarious comments have cheered me up immensely and perhaps prevented a murder.

I got beaten up pretty badly at work yesterday. Square peg, round hole.

L took me to the Wolves game last night, part of my birthday present. Isn’t that sweet. Nose bleed seats but it was fun. We wandered around downtown afterwards while the traffic cleared.

My plants survived. It’s supposed to warm up now.

I’m not feeling very clever right now.

The technophobe in the cavalry uniform is Happy Easter, a character from Milton Caniff’s strip, Steve Canyon. OK so I’m old and had a comic obsessed youth.

I’m looking forward to going into work even less than a usual Monday today.

Last night I burned the audio book biography of Ben Franklin. I’d never get through it reading, so my next fifty or so trips between work and home will be dedicated to learning about one of my favorite historical figures. Printer, inventor, publisher, statesman, sex maniac, he had it all.

Like Fleener I rehearse anticipated arguments in my head. Compulsively. I say my parts outloud. Some folks think I’m crazy.

Last fall I planted hundreds of bulbs. It was hard work. They’re starting to come up now. It was supposed to get down into the low twenties last night. I was too lazy to go out and cover them. I AM crazy.

Yesterday morning there was one of those scary looking centi- mille- bunchapedes in the shower. It was about half drowned so I stepped on it and sent it down the drain. My foot went numb and stayed that way for about four hours.

No one else in the house has to get up this morning, but ollie the cat is sitting upstairs by the three bedroom doors meowing. He’s been doing it for a half hour. I’ve fed him, but he won’t shut up. He does this every day. As soon as he hears my feet hit the floor, he starts talking.

The black dog is scratching at my door.

OK a big pat on the back for the first person to tell me why I used this image. What’s the reference?

Happy Easter

It’s now snowing. Windy and cold. My bare garden is infested with slate colored juncos. Always juncos. Those tough little bastards actually fly south to here. Or the the ones who just stay here, cardinals and crows and chickadee’s. I want a warbler, damnit. How about an indigo bunting just for kicks. The hawk is back though. Good hunting brother, get those woodchucks before I have to.

So I hear some interest in the story of the big burn. It will be awhile before I get to that one. I need to do it right and that means discribing the landscape and weather conditions and how they combined to create a fire storm. And I’m a little intimidated by the task of doing that clearly. It wasn’t a big fire by Yellowstone standards. Probably not even a thousand acres. But it was very intense.
I guess I make this time in my life look all exciting and romantic, but remember I’ve been verbally polishing these stories for thirty years. They make great party stories and help me compensate for the dork I really think I am. My plan after college was to work seasonaly jobs so I could develope my art on the off season. My goal was to become a famous painter. I ended up turning my back on art, drinking very heavily, not to mention other substance abuse, having truely nasty relationships with women, getting very sick, becoming so distant from reality I couldn’t figure out how to stop my beard from taking over my entire head and generally losing all confidence in myself. All this time, driven by an insane urge to compensate for my youthful athletic failures and suddenly blessed with a new body forged by fire, I became obsessed with basketball and spent the part of my life that sane people spend forming careers, polishing my game. And for what? So I can hobble down stairs like an 80 year old when I’m 55? So I can’t straighten my legs out and there are only a few positions I can sleep in without pain? So I can be stuck in a low level corporate lacky management job that requires more organization than you could distill out of a hundred of me and where I have to deal with managers who have more organization in their toenails than I will ever have? And artists who make me look like an organizational genius? And never, ever saving a fucking dime?

On the flip side….it was often FU-UN!