Friday, November 22, 2013

A Short But Accurate Day in the Life of a 4th Grader in Ohio, Circa 1972

About me, By Carroll Owen.

My name is Carroll, with two R’s and two L’s. Not like the girls’ name, which only has one R and one L. I don’t really like my name because my uncles wife is also name Carol, (on my dads side) and she smells like Pall-Malls. There is also this girl in my class (also named carol) who, I’m almost positive, has the worst breath in the whole world. My dad says “If you’re going to make a name for yourself you’d better have a good name to begin with!” I don’t think it’s a good name because it’s a girls name even with the extra R’s and L’s, and I’m not a girl. My dad says there are plenty of famous men named Carroll, but I can only think of three. Carroll O’Conner who played Archie in the old re-runs we watch on Friday nights, Carroll Spinney, the guy who plays big bird on TV, (I see his name in the credits). and Carroll Shelby, who does something with cars. That’s who I was named after. My dad calls him a great American hero. He was a race car driver I think. There is also Carol King who I thought was a boy from her picture on the cover of my mom’s old albums but she’s not. My mom doesn’t know I look at them when she’s out to the store, and I would appreciate it if you wouldn’t tell her. My dad likes cars. In fact he likes them so much he sells them. Sometimes my dad will pick me up from school and let me sit in his chair as he waits for customers out front. I like to pretend I’m in charge and everyone has to answer to me and no one can make fun of my name because if they do they are going to get shit-canned. (my uncle frank says that a lot, I don’t know what it means) If my parents wanted to name me after a great American hero why couldn’t they have picked someone with a cooler name like Columbus or Clark Kent? I think I will name my kid Columbus. We live in a house with three rooms and a kitchen and two bathrooms. I like it. Some of my friends have bigger houses, and I wish we could too, that way I could get a dog. My mom says we don’t have room for one. My mom also says I should be a doctor or a lawyer but I don’t really like my doctor very much, he smells like beef stew, so I don’t think I will be one. I would rather be a garbage man because I think it would be fun to ride on the back of a truck. My mom gets mad when I say that though so I just tell her I want to be a lawyer.

The End

            “Carroll,” The teacher said in front of the class, “can I talk to you at my desk for a second.”
“Um, sure.”  Said Carroll. It’s only the second day of fourth grade and I’m already in trouble, he thought to himself
“Carroll,” said Ms. Clark as he neared her desk, ”its about your essay. You can’t use language like shit-canned in my class.”
           
Ms. Clark lived alone in her 3-bedroom farmhouse out on Idalia road. It was her fathers and her grandfathers before that. She was never married and inherited the house and the 22 acre parcel where it sat, bordering the McKinney soybean Farm. They had offered to buy the land and the house many times to which she always replied, “not interested.” Even as year after year the price went up. She could not bear the thought of the house being torn down and an equipment shed being put up in its place. She felt home there. She felt, somehow, not alone. The three generations of her family that had lived there showed their presence in the well-worn kitchen counter, for which countless cabbages and potatoes had been cut and family meals prepared for hungry stomachs. In the marks at which every year on Easter Sunday, her father lined her and her 4 sisters up and marked their height against the banister. In the squeaky gate which her father had meant to fix but just never got around to it and then forgot about all together. All her sisters had grown and married except Ms. Clark. And but for the grace of god she would never get married herself and never have children of her own. That’s why she became a schoolteacher. And she loved each and every child as though they were her own. She did not own any cats.

    The students in Ms. Clark’s 4th grade class were to write a short essay on themselves and their families for their first nights homework. Something she always did, though the kids hated it saying things like, “homework on the first day! How dreadful.” And “this Ms. Clark is really a chops buster!” She just liked to get to know a little about her kids so she could tailor her lessons to help them a little better. It was also, however subconsciously, a way for her to feel better about her own situation. Kids will always tell you what the parents don’t want you to know. And after 23 years of teaching at Lincoln Elementary she had convinced herself that it might be, after all, easier and more pleasant to be alone.


“I’m sorry Ms. Clark.” Said Carroll. “My uncle says he has to shit-can people all the time. Every day even.”

“Well, in our class we only use language we would use in front of our mothers.”

“Ok, but, my uncle says that in front of my mother all the time. I wont use it anymore anyway”

Frank Morgan was Carroll’s uncle, married to his mother’s sister. He owns a shipping corporation that uses the lakes and canals in and around Lake Erie and Lake Michigan to ship any number of goods and supplies from lumber to grain anywhere in the great lakes region. He was a wealthy man; a fact that he doesn’t necessarily bring up and at the same time doesn’t let any one forget. He lives in Ottawa Hills just outside of Toledo, which was about 51 miles away as the crow flies, in a grand old Eastlake Victorian, which he had redone to the most modern specifications he could without ruining the grandeur of the old estate.  He was frequently in town due to the port being in north Sandusky and often took Carroll out for ice cream in one of the big Cadillac’s he was so fond of. “Nothing like American steel.” He would tell Carroll as they drove down the road to Millie’s Ice cream parlor. Carroll’s grandmother used to tell him that you can judge a man by his watch and his shoes.  Frank had a much nicer watch than his father.         
  
“Thank you. Back to your desk please.” Said Ms. Clark.

However hard she tried not to, Ms. Clark had her favorites. And Carroll, she thought to herself, might just be one of them for this year.

Carroll had gone to the Our Lady of Peace Catholic School for the last two years upon his mothers urging. Private schools were all the rage and not wanting her son to be left out, but more precisely wanting something to brag about to Jenny down the street who’s kids have gone to private schools since kindergarten, she sent Carroll off. He spent second and third grade under the strict monarchy of catholic nuns, often with bruised knuckles from rulers and sore fingers from the punishment of having to copy word for word entire pages out of the bible. Punishments which were administered for some great sins as absolutely innocent as dropping pebbles in a puddle to watch the ripples. It was just enough time for young Carroll’s self esteem and view of God and religion to be so horribly skewed that at the young age of eight he was thinking of being an atheist, or in his words possibly…  “Jewish so I can work in Hollywood.” 
Catholic School was a terrible place, a place like hell, except they preach that to you every day. The irony is they are trying to prevent hell by promising it. Carroll was transferred back to Lincoln Elementary at the beginning of his fourth grade year, so he didn’t have many, if any, friends that he remembered.
            As recesses and lunches came and went, Carroll sat by himself eating the Peanut butter and Jelly sandwich his mom packed him. It was always hard for him to make friends, which was odd because he was so easy to talk to. One Tuesday about two weeks into the school year, after he had eaten his soggy bottomed PB&J sandwich and was moving on to the animal crackers in a fold-top plastic sack, another boy came over from his class and sat down in front of him at the stationary picnic tables in the west of the schoolyard.

“Hi.” He said tentatively.
“Hi.” Said Carroll almost with too much enthusiasm.
“A bunch of the other boys are going to go play kick ball behind the library, you want come?”
“Sure.” Said Carroll, and he promptly offered him a hippo from his sack of animal crackers, the choicest of all the animals.

“I’m Ryan, I’m in your class.”

“I’m Carroll, with two R’s and two L’s.”

Wednesday, November 13, 2013

This really is terrible. Am I a bad person?


Teenagers. They are just terrible aren’t they? If you are, right now, currently plagued by being a teenager, I have some news for you. Nobody likes you. Not even your parents. (maybe a little bit your parents) Who among you has ever met a teenager and thought, “wow, his insight and intellect just blew me away?” I see maybe one hand. Teenager=prick, its just the truth, I don’t care if you’re the nicest teenager ever, you’re a pick. Hell, teenagers don’t even like teenagers. Its ok, I was a prick too, we all were. I think you might need to be a prick during those years. Maybe it allows you to emerge, like a butterfly if you will, into the land of the useful. The teenage years are sort of an “adulthood trial run”. You’re given a little room to make some decisions. If you get them right, good job! If not, well, you’re an idiot teenager. Sometimes the decisions are much larger than any teenager should ever be expected to make, most of the time they are trivial. You think you’re an adult and can make rational, mindful life decisions but its not until you actually are an adult that you realize, “I was a colossal narrow minded cock for the better part of 9 years.” (I’m counting 21 and under as teenager) the problem happens when you emerge from of the cauldron of teenagedom physically but not mentally. Sadly this happens more often than not. Why does this happen you ask? I don’t know, I’m blaming Obama, but really something needs to happen. I think I have a solution. We need to keep a constant reminder in front of our teenagers that they actually are terrible human beings and they have a lot of work ahead of them before they will be accepted members of society. Right this very moment, as I am typing these words, a youth is walking past our backyard singing as loud as she can. “She’s just being young!” you say, “Let her enjoy herself!”. Here is the thing, she is a terrible singer. Horrible. It sounds like what I imagine a wood chipper would sound like if you were feeding a steady stream of feral cats through it’s business end. Now see, nobody will ever put there foot down and say, “sweetheart, I love you but your singing sounds like pigs humping.” She is going to be one of those awful people on Americas Got Idols or whatever who are just atrociously bad singers but they don’t know it, just completely delusional. When she’s singing at the auditions she thinks “dayumn. Whitney better watch out” when everyone else just thinks, “how did her parents let this happen?” Humiliation is the key to the success of your children and this country. Humiliate your kids daily! All this “you can be anything you want to be” junk is ridiculous. Your son is not going to be a doctor, his thumbs barely oppose. I think it should be “you can be anything you want to be, within reason.”

Monday, March 4, 2013

Do or Do Not


I have recently come to the conclusion that life should be lived with dignity. This sounds like a no brainer. You might say, “of course it should be. Everyone knows that.” But why then do we constantly accept the status quo and settle for the lives we don’t want? Are we not stripping ourselves of the dignity we deserve by not doing the best we can at all times? The answer is risk. It’s risky to put yourself out there. Here is how Paul Arden puts it. “Risks are a measure of people. People who don’t take them are trying to preserve what they have.” If you are unhappy with the way your life is going why would you want to preserve what you have? Here is the thing though; people who do take risks often end up having more. The other thing is that people are afraid to make mistakes. But I give you these words, without being too cliché, from Benjamin Franklin; “ I haven’t failed, I have had 10,000 ideas that didn’t work.” What successful people realize is that failures preconditions to success. False starts are rungs of the ladder. One important thing to note is that success does not equal money. Success equals Living a life with dignity and respect for your self and earning respect from your community. Wealth is often a side effect of this. Another thing to note is that When Ben Franklin said this; he didn’t just have the ideas. He went after them and found out first hand for himself that they would not work. You could have all the ideas in the world but if you don’t set out after them it doesn’t do you one bit of good.

I started MC[Squared] Graphic Design back in February of last year. It didn’t work out as planned. I have plenty of excuses as to why not but the reality is that I half-assed it. I was working part time for the paint store and part time for myself. I was lazy, and as much as it pains me to say it, I was not diligent in my efforts. It is no other fault but mine why it didn’t work. In the immortal words of Ron Swanson (or at least the words of whoever writes his lines) “Why half-ass two things when you can whole-ass one thing?” One thing I have noticed about successful people is that they chose a path and they stick with it. They do one thing and they do it well and diligently. They make it work. They are not constantly looking for something bigger and better to come along. They are the architects of their own lives. This is the type of man I want to be and the first step to that end is realizing my own faults, way to many too many to list, and go about changing those faults one at a time.

The vision of where you want to be is one of the greatest assets you have. So here is where I want to be. I want to own a multifaceted creative "commons". I want it to be boundless. I want to do everything from furniture design to commercials, logo design and branding to social media management and creative integration. I want it to be a space where my employees can feel free to be as creative as they possibly can and where failure is encouraged as a means to success. I want to create something bold. A place where clients know they can come and get spectacular results for whatever their needs are. The only way to get there is to start at the bottom and make it work. As Yoda says, “Do or do not. There is no try.” And he’s right. There is no try.   

Tuesday, February 19, 2013

Dallas


So I went to Dallas last weekend. I had never been to Dallas, or really anywhere in Texas, before this trip and I have to say, “Meh”. Fort Worth was nothing but tract housing chain restaurants and giant malls, kinda lame. Although there was a trailer park that was called “Wheeled Estates”, I thought that was hilarious. Dallas was a little different; it had a nice vibe and lots of really great museums. It didn’t feel like there was really anything interesting about it though. I mean, when you go to London or San Francisco or Seattle or Portland or pretty much any other major metropolitan area there is a feel to the city that is different than anywhere else in the world, Dallas didn’t have that. The art museum was FANTASTIC but that’s bought culture. Someone bought that stuff and brought it there. The architecture was somewhat interesting, most notably the Perot Museum of Science and Nature. What a cool building, look it up. By the way, the grassy knoll is not even a little bit a of a knoll. It was more like a slight rise. Lets just say that if you were on a bike you would barely even notice it let alone downshift to get up it.  And that is the biggest thing I noticed. It is really freaking flat. It’s a good thing I got the navigation system with the rental car because I would never have made the flight home on account of me being lost.

The navigation system did try to kill me on the trip though. I was looking for a sort of trendier area called the “Near South” district, which is on West Magnolia Street. So I set the sat nav for ‘W Magnolia St.’, it decided to take me to ‘E Magnolia St.’, which is totally different. I knew the area was getting more and more dangerous because the amount of landscaping in front of houses was decreasing at the same rate that the amount of package liquor stores was increasing. Just as I rounded the corner onto E Magnolia, in my bright red ford focus with un-tinted windows, I see the street is lined with cars that have been ‘donked’ (you know, the old Caprices and Grand AMs with like 33” chrome rims and bright terrible paint jobs) and like 30 or so ghetto ass black guys of which about 75% to 80% were sipping on some sort of liquor, stuffed in a brown paper bag of course. First of all, people really do this? I thought the brown paper bag was so cliché that it could not have been real. Seriously, whom are you fooling? If a cop rolls by they’re not going to be like “I wonder if all these guys are drinking?” or like “that must just be gator-aid in those brown paper bags. keep it moving.”  Second I would like to clear up that I am not racist. I don’t freak out when I see a group of black guys or anything but you need to understand, these were not go to work have a 401k black guys. These were gold teeth and neck tattoo black guys. Like, if I had another black guy in the car with me he would probably be like “dude we need to get the hell out of here.”

So anyway, I’m driving right through the middle of the annual meeting of winners, in my bright red ford focus, thinking to myself, “don’t stop, just keep driving”. Every head was following my car as I slowly drove through. It was a dead end. So here I am, in my button up gingham shirt, glasses, domestic late model economy car, trying to do a k-turn at the end of this narrow street with thirty black guys staring me down. A group of youths playing basketball at the end of the street, one of which could not have been more than 15 and had his entire chest covered in tattoos, completely stopped their game to watch me. I felt like Mike Myers in Austin Powers trying to turn around the little cart in the alley. Sort of hilarious yet sort of terrifying. But how do I know, they were probably all very nice. I probably could have stopped and asked for directions and they would have been happy to help… and offer me a beer.  

So that’s Dallas. All in all I had a good time. I would like to come back and explore a little more but just remember, stay away from East Magnolia Street.