Perils of Caffeine in the Evening

Well, I tried.  I wanted to handle it with grace and sensitivity.  Then I get this today from the old coot’s attorney:

Dear Sir:

“Eddie” has retained me as counsel for his planned age discrimination and wrongful discharge legal actions. He maintains he has been damaged, (and desires remedies to make whole) by lack of an official Policy and Procedure manual the absence of which establishes an enforceable employment contract which cannot be severed by a sole party (”defendant”). It is also noted that the primary state of his residence does not recognize legal theory of employment at will.

Further to his complaint for remedy, he states his deteriorating physical condition is the result of being denied access to EAP (Employee Assistance Program) and also as a consequence of defendant’s agents (aka Northwest Airlines) groping him improperly and subjecting him to harsh environments for sustained periods of time, often in ergonomically incorrect positions. Having worked a large percent of his career in federal airspace, he is also subject to FSLA regulations and now desires back pay for overtime hours not paid or recorded.

Now therefore, access is requested to all corporate records pertaining to travel of the business during the period of his employment to include any and all videotapes he has been subjected to of adults engaged in suspect activities. The time frame for delivery satisfaction shall be two weeks hence from date of notification.

I leave on a business trip tomorrow, and before I do, I have to find a way to fire one of my oldest and closest associates. Let’s call him “Eddie”. “Eddie Bauer”. This individual has been my faithful companion for nearly 5 years and, like all of the best lieutenants in business, has discreetly hidden, when necessary, any dirty laundry that my business ventures may have generated.

Lately, though, he’s started to let himself go physically, showing up for duty with an increasingly slovenly visage. I began to worry a bit about his ability to continue to perform his tactful office seamlessly. Then, on my last trip, the wheels (one, anyway) literally came off and, even in the dulcet confines of seat 3A, I could not relax for fear that he would leak something valuable down in steerage.

When we met after the flight, I was heartened to learn that he had managed to hold it together, and I walked him gently to our homebound shuttle.

He can probably sense my imminent departure tomorrow, noticing the unaccustomed absence in the closet of his less capacious colleagues. While it’s true that it will require two of them to do the job he used to do, we’ll all just have to pull together and try to cover.

I wanted to throw a more opulent going-away party. I tried to gen up one of those US maps that other bloggers have been posting showing states they’ve visited, but the link doesn’t work, at least tonight. It woulda done him proud, all those colored-in states.

He’ll get to stay around a few weeks, taking up space and enduring the euphoric whispers of his peers as they return to the closet festooned with fresh destination tags. He’ll get outplacement counselling, and we’ll eventually place him with another firm, Salvation Army or, better yet, Community Services for the Blind. He’s still got something to offer to the right firm, it’s too soon for the landfill. But he’s probably seen the last of his favorite carousels, #2 at Milwaukee’s General Mitchell, or the crazy shell game they play at Detroit’s new McNamara Terminal. He’ll probably never again sport the “Priority: World Business Class” sticker on his handle.

I’ll let him keep his “Heavy! Get help to lift” tag - I wouldn’t want to be party to that final emasculation. In better days, he’d proudly weigh in at just under the 50lb limit, leaving checkin agents gnashing their teeth at the near-miss of additional revenue, and not smiling at my “Careful! That’s my mother in there!” admonishment as they struggled to flop him onto the conveyor.

Vaya Con Dios, buddy. It’s been a great run!

Looks like I underestimated our city’s voters.  Let’s hope my electoral pessimism is just as wrong in November!

While I was crabbing about Washington’s over-reliance on the sales tax, events in our alternate universe, Oregon, were sounding even more dire.  Oregon has an income tax, but no sales tax, and the refrain coming from there is eerily familiar to the one you hear here in Washington - that revenue shortfalls are overaccentuated during recessions.  Oregon had an income-tax increase measure on its ballot yesterday, and it went down in flames.  Because the measure’s failure automatically triggers $545 million in budget cuts, Oregon is left with some hard choices about cuts in education, health care and other social spending.

The mirror-image between Washington and Oregon is illustrated thusly:

From the Portland Oregonian:

No state relies more heavily on income taxes, which tend to rise and fall even faster than the economy. As a result, the state tends to bring in much more than it expects in good times and much less during downturns.

From the Seattle P-I

Since Washington has no income tax and relies heavily on sales taxes for its revenues, our state government goes quickly and deeply into the red during hard times. That is not true in other states with more balanced tax systems. Our reliance on sales taxes, moreover, is regressive, hitting hardest the lower- and middle-income citizens least able to pay.

Is there an echo in here?  Which statement above is right?  I presume that the problem is the total reliance on one or the other instead of a balanced menu of taxes.  It appears that neither state will move toward that balanced approach any time soon, as any mention of even the slightest change in taxation (unless it’s a tax giveaway) brings forth hyena-like howls of protest, not to mention a shitstorm of initiatives and referenda.

Today we did have an election in Washington state, although it wasn’t a presidential primary.  No, there were only two items on the ballot, both of them school property tax levies (in Seattle at least).  The first was a renewal of an “operating levy”, which no one had any serious opposition to.  The second was a capital/maintenance levy.  To understand the opposition to this one, you have to know about the $35 million budget shortfall discovered last year that drove the current superintendent out of his job.  Opponents say that the second levy is an attempt by the school system to fund the shortfall from taxes instead of cutting their budget in proper contrition.

My feeling is that the schools are so strapped that, even if they had anticipated the shortfall, there was no place to cut anyway, and the lapse in apprehending it merely gave students and teachers a one-year reprieve from the particularities of “no child left behind” and its progeny.  Under this assumption, the $35 million was money the system should have had in the first place, and I have no problem giving it to them retroactively.  It comes as no surprise, then, that I cajoled my kid to the polls, and we both voted for both levies.  My property tax bill includes a hefty assessment to fund the Port of Seattle, basically subsidizing businesses like fucking cruise ships that should be pulling their own weight, and I have no direct electoral influence over this assessment.  My preference would be to charge Grandma from Peoria another $5 a day to subsidize the Port, and leave the levy headroom for schools.  But that’s another kettle of dead or dying fish.

My gripe about these levies is that a lot of what they are paying for is “basic education”, which is constitutionally the responsibility of the legislature through the state’s general fund.  The idea is that, buy making more of public education the state’s responsibility, there is less tendency for rich communities, high in property tax base and low in expensive and problematic poor and bilingual kids, to create education theme parks for their kids while inner city schools rot.

In the 70s, the Seattle city schools sued the state to force it to accept and pay for this constitutional responsibility.  They won, and the result was property tax levy lids designed to prevent the aforementioned disparities, coupled with a charge to the legislature to fully fund “basic education”.

Of course, they’ve steadily reneged over the years.  They’ve been too concerned, since Republicans have surged to within a hairsbreadth of controlling the state, with tax cuts and the almost impossible calisthenic of running a progressive state budget without an income tax of any kind.  Hundreds, maybe thousands, became fabulously wealthy here in the dot-com 90s, but paid nothing back to the state.  Instead, the poor, the young and middle class support the state’s general fund through sales taxes and property taxes. 

Anyway, I can’t fix the state’s fiscal mess, but I can directly help my local schools by voting for these levies.  They have a nearly impossible gauntlet to run today.  Property tax levies require a 60% “supermajority” to pass, plus, since this is an off-year election, the number of “yes” votes has to be at least 24% of the entire number of notes cast in the November election.  I’m not holding my breath.

 If you’re a parent, there are certain indelible moments in your child’s upbringing:

• the first time he makes it down the driveway without training wheels
  
• winning his first game as a little league pitcher after getting lit up for 10 consecutive innings and actually being nostalgic for his old position in right field that he begged to leave
  
• the first prom, his date made up in full Goth, black combat boots under long black dress, carnation corsage on the wrist
  
• high school graduation

just to name a few (and embellish them a bit). 

Yesterday was another of this sort.  My son’s W-2s arrived last week, and he was anxious to know what his refund would be.  In previous years, I’ve mostly prepared his returns myself, discussed them quickly as he signed them and mailed them off.  This year, however, I plopped my laptop in front of him and had him go through the Turbo Tax questionnaire himself.  As each question came up, we discussed the issue being raised a little bit - questions like why I get to claim his exemption instead of him (I pay over 50% of his support, it’s worth more to me at my tax bracket than it is to him, I’VE GOT IT COMING, DAMN IT!!!), how itemizing vs. the standard deduction works, what are all those other boxes on the W-2.  There aren’t that many instances where my arcane professional expertise (CPA/CFO) applies directly to an issue in his life, and it was sort of fun to be the smart one just once.

On a day when the Seattle area was plagued with all kinds of weather-induced traffic mishaps, including a 20-some vehicle pileup on I-5 and this pant-wetter at Deception Pass, I think a town on Taiwan wins the prize for the most spectacularly disgusting traffic mishap.  A 60-ton dead whale being transported from the beach where it died to a university for postmortem analysis exploded from a buildup of gas in its stomach as it decomposed, showering the vicinity in whale meat well beyond its pull date, even for a fish-loving nation like Taiwan. 

My concern with this is that terrorists will latch onto this as a new suicide bomb technique, imperiling whales as they become a weapon of choice.  It will be interesting to see how TSA reacts to the new threat as it trains its airport personnel to detect sperm whales in its baggage scanners.

Too bad this happened so close to the Super Bowl - it might have inspired an ad that could have blown away the Bud Light “Barbeque” ad, which featured a mere horse-fart.

Thursday my wife was listening to KEXP and heard an interview with the two principals of a band called The Soul of John Black and liked what she heard, so we went to hear them at the Tractor Tavern that night.  They were comprised of a standard kit drummer, a hand drummer, a turntable/sampler and the two principals, JB on vocals/lead guitar and CT on electric bass.  They had driven up from Los Angeles on tour, and that day’s travel had undoubtedly been through the same sheets of rain that were drenching the street outside the Tractor, and were keeping the turnout low, at about 25 – 35 people.  You could tell they were underwhelmed.

Nonetheless, they played an energetic set of original, contemporary R&B tunes.  The performance was tight and polished in a way that only assiduous rehearsing could make it, and I thought, “good for them, a new band making a sincere effort.  I hope they get some mileage out of it.”  I was thinking that they were engaging ingénues.  It was only after coming home and reading the resumes of the two principals that I was reminded of the grueling nature of the music business.  Among their separate experiences were gigs with Miles Davis, Betty Carter, Macy Gray, Marianne Faithful and Fishbone.  These were no neophytes by any means, but here they were playing to an enthusiastic but sparse audience on one of those Seattle winter nights that reminded you of the inside-the-sub scenes from the movie Das Boot.

This feeling that the live music scene is a constant flirtation with futility was reinforced when the bass player from a terrific jazz/funk group we’ve stalked the last few years, The Living Daylights, stopped by our table briefly, sounding just a little forlorn.  The Daylights made a real run at “making it”, touring ceaselessly all over the country.  I guess the wheels have sort of come off, as they’re only occasionally performing in town, and the band members are pursuing other projects. 

We love going out to small venues to hear these wonderful musicians, arguably doing a better job at their music more consistently than I do at my job, for a fraction of the remuneration.  I’m so glad they do it, and I consider it an act of faith to pay their covers, buy their cds and vociferously return the love.

As it turned out, John Black was the opening act for a jazz group from San Francisco called Will Bernard and Motherbug. These guys have been playing together quite a bit longer, and their command and professionalism was apparent as soon as they struck their first note.  One of the four of them played a Hammond B3 organ.  The B3 is wooden and is paired with an improbable-looking spinning disk that is used to make its distinctive tremolo.  The console was open, and disclosed glowing vacuum tubes that must be the very devil to replace.  The whole thing looks like a piece of 50s furniture that some amateur has converted into audiophile stereo equipment using some kind of Heathkit contraption.  But it plays righteously.