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Blog in Review: Top 15 Posts of 2018

The 80/20 Rule is a basic business guideline.  It says that any business will get 80% of its revenue from just 20% of its offerings or services.  For example, we should expect McDonald’s to earn 80% of its revenue from just 20% of its menu items.  This makes sense; almost everyone orders either a Big Mac or a Quarter-Pounder with Cheese.  Really, most of the menu is revenue neutral; the only reason to even offer a lot of that stuff is to make it easier for Big Mac lovers to bring their non-Big Mac friends into the store.  It’s the Big Macs that are keeping McDonald’s in the black.

Happy New Year!

Blogging is the same but moreso.  Much more than half of this blog’s readership has come from a handful of posts, and the rest is here either to entertain me as a writer or to give legitimate fans of my writing a reason to come back on a semi-regular basis.

#SBRLLR: Afterword

My wife Sally and I conceived this book as a joint project.  We wanted to show off our partnership as one of the world’s great love affairs.  I gradually came to realize, though, that Sally doesn’t quite have the time to write a whole book about her formative years, and even if she did, the resulting two-volume biography would read like The Winds of War.  Part of me still wants to do it that way, but I wonder who would read two hundred thousand words about a couple who are not famous and not looking to become famous.  

It seems like a tough sell.

#SBRLLR: Losing My Father (Part 1)

 “Cowards die many times before their deaths; the valiant never taste of death but once.”

― William Shakespeare, Julius Caesar, Act 2, Scene 2

“You need to come home,” my mother said during a phone call in early February 2007.

Again? I thought.  “What’s going on?”

#SBRLLR: Building a Life (Part 3)

My mom came up for ten days right after we brought Hannah home from the hospital.  I don’t know why I thought this would be a good idea.  She second-guessed our every move, tried to undermine Sally’s confidence as a mother by insisting that Hannah liked my mother more than she liked Sally, complained endlessly when we made her go out onto the fire escape to smoke her cigarettes, and generally drove us as crazy as she possibly could.  She refused to cook, got inexplicably angry when we tried to eat healthy, natural foods instead of pre-processed crap out of cans, and complained constantly about having to walk up the three flights of stairs to get to our apartment.  By the time she left, Sally made me promise that we wouldn’t have to see her again for a good, long while.  I had little choice but to agree.

#SBRLLR: Building a Life (Part 2)

My wife fell pregnant about a week after we got back from our honeymoon, and we decided that she should take some time off from teaching once the school year ended.  This wasn’t meant to be permanent, but the way things worked out, she never made it back into the classroom.  

I was on out one night working on a hit utility pole in the North Bronx when Sally called me hysterically to tell me that she was bleeding.  I rushed home, thankful for once that my boss had been on the scene with me.  I held my wife in my arms and wondered helplessly what I could do.

#SBRLLR: Building a Life (Part 1)

 “Life isn't about finding yourself. Life is about creating yourself.”

― George Bernard Shaw

Sally and I had dinner at a little Italian restaurant called La Scalla a couple of months after she got back from Romania.  We weren’t sure where we were going to get married, but we knew that it would be a small ceremony.  Neither of us had a lot of friends in Hoboken, nor did we want to waste money on an event that we were most certainly going to have to finance on our own.  I studied La Scalla’s menu, decided on a steak topped with gorgonzola cheese, and looked up to find Sally staring at me expectantly.

SBRLLR: Choosing Something Real (Part 3)

Time passed in a blur.  Sally and I met at Pier A, hung out, and then got smoothies at the local shake shop.  We met again the following Friday for a dinner date at one of the local Italian places, Sally in a slinky black dress.  The owner brought out complimentary shots of some Italian liqueur that left us both stumbling onto the sidewalk afterwards, and from there we walked back down to Pier A, kissed on the park benches, and decided to go to a New Jersey water park the next day.  Sally showed up for that wearing a black string bikini, and I was astonished to realize that I hadn’t even noticed her pin-up girl’s figure until our fourth date.  We spent a glorious day splashing aimlessly alongside the park's various slides and fountains before coming back to my place, putting on a movie, and falling asleep in one another’s arms.  

In mere days, Sally had become a fixture in my life.  She was the piece I’d been missing.  We’d both gone through rough patches, but together I thought we could take on anything.

#SBRLLR: Choosing Something Real (Part 2)

I showed up to the Hoboken Running Club wearing shorts and a tank top.  I was intensely happy to have something athletic to do in the company of other people.  Though Ugly American Night had frequently been memorable, the happiest I’d been in the Army had been at PT.  I’d enjoyed running in formation all the way back to Beast Barracks, and I’d trained for SFAS with Joe for no better reason than because I enjoyed it.  I didn’t go to SFAS, and Joe didn’t need me pushing him.  I just liked running with my friend, and I knew that the feeling had been mutual.

#SBRLLR: Choosing Something Real (Part 1)

“Most folks are as happy as they make up their minds to be.”

― President Abraham Lincoln

My buddy Joe rescued me in the way that only an old Army buddy can.

Joe and I had met back at Ft. Knox.  The Armor Captain’s Career Course ended with a capstone exercise, a brigade defense fought via computer battle simulation.  The event was primarily a staff exercise for which we were divided into four notional armor battalions with me and Joe serving as the leads on the same notional staff.  I served as our battalion’s operations officer, developing tactics and drafting the bulk of our group’s tactical orders.  Joe ran the staff itself as battalion XO.

#SBRLLR: Welcome to New York (Part 3)

While I was struggling to adjust to life in the big city, my father was coming unraveled back in Tennessee.  My mother had finally left him, forcing the sale of their home in Lawrenceburg and upending Dad’s his life from top to bottom.  I don’t think he even argued in his own defense.  Rather, he just let her take whatever she wanted, allowed her to set up their soon-to-be-separate finances to her own best benefit, and--at some level--accepted responsibility for destroying her life and his.  He raged, sure, when he was drunk, but he never actually defended himself nor stopped loving my mother.  For that reason, he let her take advantage of him and of the situation.

Or maybe he was just so drunk that he didn’t notice.

#SBRLLR: Welcome to New York (Part 2)

It turned out that my new company had lost two complete substations, something like five hundred million dollars’ worth of equipment, and that this had blacked out Wall Street and much of Lower Manhattan.  We had one killed-in-action, Dick Morgan, a recently retired executive who’d been at the Trade Center that morning for a meeting with the Transit Authority.  I’d never met Mr. Morgan, but he was famed for being the only “nice guy” executive in the entire company.  For months afterwards, folks said, “They got the only good one.”

#SBRLLR: Welcome to New York (Part 1)

“Cut off as I am, it is inevitable that I should sometimes feel like a shadow walking in a shadowy world. When this happens I ask to be taken to New York City. Always I return home weary but I have the comforting certainty that mankind is real flesh and I myself am not a dream.”

―  Helen Keller, Midstream: My Later Life

I spent two weeks in temporary corporate housing while I familiarized myself with my new home.  They put me up in Jersey City, New Jersey, down by the PATH station near the banks of the Hudson River.  From there, I spent time exploring various parts of Manhattan and trying to decide where to live.  I toured Trump Tower, decided it was far too expensive for what it offered, and finally settled on a one-bedroom basement apartment in a brownstone in Hoboken.  My landlord turned out to be the local judge.  Her husband was a powerful corporate attorney working out of an office in Manhattan.

#SBRLLR: Loneliness

“Because you can’t trust freedom when it’s not in your hand,

when everybody’s fightin’ for the Promised Land…”

― Guns ‘n’ Roses, “Civil War”

I drove over the Kosciuszko Bridge and into the heart of urban New Jersey late in the afternoon on August 5, 2001.  After almost a year out of uniform, I’d been offered a job in New York City and—with some trepidation—had decided to accept. The drive up from Tennessee had seen me through the rolling farmland of western Virginia and rural Pennsylvania, but population had picked up steadily as I worked my way east.  Halfway through New Jersey I began seeing the unique urban cityscapes I remembered from my Academy days.  It wasn’t until I hit the bridge, though, that New York Harbor came into view alongside the Statue of Liberty and Liberty State Park.  The glass and steel skyscrapers of Manhattan’s skyline emerged when I crested the next rise, beckoning me forward as they have so many others looking for a fresh start.  

I was badly in need of one.

5 Things on a Friday: Showing Your Work

Good morning, folks!  It’s Week 3 of the preseason, which means we might see some actual starters in uniform tonight, and college football kicks off tomorrow!

Hallelujah!  Our long national nightmare is almost over.

#SBRLLR: Duty - Honor - Country (Part 5)

Whether it was my newfound work ethic or just simple physical maturity, cow year was my best in the pool by a wide margin.  I won my event at Navy for the third time, leading a trio of Army butterfliers to finish something like first, third, and fourth.  We lost the meet, decisively this time, but I found some peace with it for once, content in the knowledge that I’d at least done all that I could do.  I also scored a dual-meet win in the 100 Fly against Harvard later that same season, the only individual win for the Army team in the entire meet.  This was important because I felt like it proved that I hadn’t given up too terribly much in the pool to pursue my other dreams.  About midway through the season, Ray Bosse posted a list of top national collegiate times, and I saw myself ranked something like 90th overall in the 200 Butterfly.  

#SBRLLR: Duty - Honor - Country (Part 4)

While I’d been a yearling, my father had served as the Operations Officer (G-3) of the Third Marine Division, located in Okinawa, Japan.  Call sign “Warlord.”  He went a little crazy.  Drank the way they used to drink back in the 1960s and 70s and kept a full-time in-house mama-san³⁵ among many other personal indulgences.  He remained one of the best operational planners in the Corps, but his time at Special Operations Command had put a serious dent into whatever commitment he’d once had for “clean living”.  By himself overseas, my father degenerated into a legitimate party animal.

#SBRLLR: Duty - Honor - Country (Part 3)

I passed all of my classes, even Russian, but that semester was hardly a tour de force of academic excellence.  I pulled out a B- in Russian and C+ is Statistics, earning a grade point average of exactly 3.0, even with an A+ in “German History from 1848 to 1945.”  With that, I squeaked onto the Dean’s List.  I was still on track to become a second lieutenant.  

That was good enough.

#SBRLLR: Duty - Honor - Country (Part 2)

We marched back from Camp Buckner a day before the plebes returned from Lake Frederick, and in no time, my classmates and I settled back into Academic Year rhythms.  I watched my own plebe struggle through Reorganization Week, eventually pulling him aside that Friday afternoon as my own team leader had done with me the previous year.

“Cangolosi!  Go take a shower right now!  That’s an order!”

#SBRLLR: Duty - Honor - Country (Part 1)

“Duty-Honor-Country. Those three hallowed words reverently dictate what you ought to be, what you can be, and what you will be. They are your rallying points: to build courage when courage seems to fail; to regain faith when there seems to be little cause for faith; to create hope when hope becomes forlorn."

― General Douglas MacArthur

Swim season ended with the Patriot League Championships, and suddenly I didn’t know what to do with myself.  A handful of swimmers also played on West Point’s water polo team, and although I knew that my playing polo might raise eyebrows with the swim team’s coaching staff, I found myself wanting to throw the ball around more than I wanted to participate in the swim team’s anemic offseason training program.