A Holiday Break: Arrowsmith by Sinclair Lewis

Books are always the best holiday gift for me. The only thing I like better than the anticipation of reading a long sought after title is the fondness that comes with remembering the discovery of an unexpected treasure.

As I look back on all the books I've profiled here in 2021, the one I'd most like to revisit is Arrowsmith by Sinclair Lewis, which I blogged about back in November. On the surface, it is the story of Martin Arrowsmith, a young doctor who vacillates between the two opposite poles of all physicians -- the life of the clinician and the life of the researcher. But in Lewis’s capable hands, the tension between these two objectives takes on a more universal and philosophical importance.

As Martin vacillates, the reader is presented with competing ideals and competing understandings of the world. What is the thing that matters? Practical success? Or esoteric greatness? And why is it not possible to have both? For that, as we read and enjoy all of Lewis’s prose describing Martin’s vacillations, is the underlying truth of it all. Whichever one chooses, the other has to be sacrificed in order to attain it.

For me, it is reminiscent of the same choice that Charles Strickland makes at the beginning of The Moon and Sixpence. To achieve something, something else must be sacrificed. In the most general of terms, if you want comfort, you must sacrifice art; and if you want art, you must sacrifice comfort. There’s no other way to approach it, and that may be what I like best about Lewis’s novel.

As you enjoy your holiday break, I hope you find some time to curl up with a good book. I know I will.

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This post was written by Eric Lanke, an association executive, blogger and author. For more information, visit www.ericlanke.blogspot.com, follow him on Twitter @ericlanke or contact him at eric.lanke@gmail.com.

Taming the Big Data Tidal Wave by Bill Franks

I didn’t dogear a single page or scribble a single marginal note while reading this 304-page business book.

I don’t blame it. From my distant perspective, it seems like a good overview of its subject, even though some of its content undoubtedly aging as the years keep passing by (it was published in 2012). But to be fair, I don’t think I was the intended audience.

The primary focus [of this book] is educating the reader on what big data is all about and how it can be utilized through analytics, and providing guidance on how to approach the creation and evolution of a world-class advanced analytics ecosystem in today’s big data environment. A wide range of readers will find this book to be of value and interest. Whether you are an analytics professional, a businessperson who uses the results that analytics produce, or just someone with an interest in big data and advanced analytics, this book has something for you.

I picked it up because I thought I might have been at least one of those things. If the book subsequently taught me anything, it is that I am clearly none of those things -- at least not at the scale or level that the author expected.

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This post first appeared on Eric Lanke's blog, an association executive and author. You can follow him on Twitter @ericlanke or contact him at eric.lanke@gmail.com.

Dragons - Chapter 77 (DRAFT)

Going to the clinic where Jenny saw her doctor was like going to another world -- an alien world where everything had its place and everything was in its place, even the broken and suffering human creatures that had journeyed there, often at great risk and peril to themselves. The building had four wings that spread out from a central core like the splayed limbs of a condemned man -- one, seemingly, for each of that man’s ages: birth, youth, adult, and old age, better known to the medically-literate as obstetrics, pediatrics, internal medicine, and geriatrics. The wayward and shuffling souls that each made their way through the whooshing automatic doors went first up to an enormous reception desk to make their offerings of insurance cards and co-pays, where, once recognized and registered, they would be sent down to one of the spacious waiting areas at the center of each wing, each customized for those whose ailments and concerns brought them to that temporary destination.

Lots of mothers with small children, obviously, found their way to the obstetrics waiting area, and, as such, it was appropriately decked-out with comfortable recliners, small, private lactation chambers, and, for the elder siblings of the soon-to-be-birthed, an elaborate and modular jungle gym of sorts -- a series of ramps, platforms, and slides that even toddlers could push around in order to create unique configurations of their play space.

Needless to say, Jacob loved this jungle gym. It was the thing that we could use to consistently coax him to both behave and to go peacefully to the doctor. They had a larger and more elaborate version in the pediatrics waiting area, but even the one meant for toddlers in the obstetrics area was usually enough for him. We had used it again that morning, simply reminding him of its existence and how much fun he could have with it. Suddenly, he had no longer wanted to stay home and play with his trains. He wanted to go to Mommy’s doctor and play with the jungle gym.

Not that getting there and getting settled in was any easier after that. Even with Jacob fully on board we couldn’t get to the clinic any sooner than ten minutes past Jenny’s appointment time. We hustled as quick as we could down the throat of the beast and arrived breathless at its thumping, thriving heart. There, we received a disapproving look from the school marm that sat there, her day evidently ruined by the need to wait for the tardy Larson family to arrive.

Jacob was already tugging on my arm and Jenny told us to go -- knowing both where we would be going and that he would just be a distraction as she went through the ritual of getting checked in and placed in the queue. Once we got within eyesight of the Holy Land I let Jacob go and he half-jumped, half-ran the remaining distance, too excited to do either one consistently. As I settled into one of the ordinary waiting room chairs (not the recliners, oh no; even if vacant, a man sitting in one of those was akin to parking on top of a handicapped person in one of their coveted spots), I watched Jacob immediately set about to start re-arranging the modular pieces in the way that scratched his particular itch.

There were two other kids already playing there, their parents among the half dozen or so adults scattered about. I carefully avoided eye contact with all of them, and used my kindest parent voice to caution Jacob to play nice with the others.

Soon Jenny came waddling down the concourse, a clipboard in one hand and her heavy purse slung over the opposite shoulder. She came and sat down next to me, exhaling deeply as she settled into the ordinary chair.

“How is he?” she asked.

“Fine,” I said, looking up to see Jacob in some kind of friendly discussion with another one of the children, each navigating how to compel the other to create the playzone each preferred, but apparently doing it amicably. “No screaming or tears, yet.”

“Good,” Jenny said, turning her attention down to the form attached to her clipboard and beginning to scribble the information it requested with the provided pen. It was a simple ballpoint, but it was taped to a large and long tongue depressor, which in turn was taped to a three foot length of heavy twine, the other end of which was in turn taped to the shiny metal clip at the business end of the clipboard. It appeared like an entire roll of tape had been used to create the contraption.

“Do they think you’re going to steal their pen?” I asked.

Jenny mumbled a response.

“And why do they make you fill out that same form every single time?” I asked, my annoyance springing from some unknown place. “They must have all that information already. We’ve been coming here for years.”

“It’s just their process,” Jenny said, the pen continuing to scratch its way across the form. 

“Well, their process is stupid.”

Jenny shushed me. “Alan, keep your voice down.”

“Keep my voice down?” I asked, unconsciously lowering my voice. “Why? Are you afraid of being kicked out by the stupid process police?”

She gave me a sarcastic smile. “Here,” she said, pushing the clipboard into my hands. “I’m done. Go put this in the bin for me. My feet hurt.”

“I’m sure they do,” I said, pretending to be more upset than I actually was. I got up in a feigned huff and went over to the door that led back to the various examination rooms. This was also part of the stupid process. I wrapped the tethered pen around the top of the clipboard and placed it along with Jenny’s completed form into a large document bin that had been attached to the wall next to the door. Next to the bin was a small panel with a series of lighted buttons on it, each one labelled with the name of one of the doctors that were busy working today. I pushed the button that matched Jenny’s doctor and made sure the light came on. Somewhere within, I knew, there was a matching panel, and the same little light had just gone on there, alerting whoever’s job it was to monitor such things that Doctor Mauser had a patient patiently waiting. 

My assigned task in the ritual completed, I went back to sit down next to my wife. As I passed, I happened to catch the gaze of another of the expecting mothers, waiting for the light that corresponded with her doctor to also be noticed so that she could be called back into the inner sanctum. She gave me only a passing glance, but it felt overly hostile.

Jenny was already deep into one of her magazines when I sat back down. “I just got the stink eye,” I whispered to her.

“From who?” she whispered back, not looking up from the glossy photographs.

“That woman over there,” I said, just as the door opened and a nurse in scrubs called for the very woman I was referring to. She got slowly to her feet, gathered her paraphernalia, and started making her slow way out of the waiting room.

Jenny watched her go. “You’re imagining things,” she told me, and then turned back to her magazine. “Now, sit there quietly and stop making trouble.”

I decided not to dwell on that one for very long. It seemed to me that I could either be imagining things OR I could be making trouble, not both. But Jenny, typically, saw things from a different angle than I did. In her view, two opposite things could be true at the same time.

Instead, I turned my attention back to Jacob and his playmates and settled in for what I called “the long wait.” No matter what time one arrived at the clinic, twenty minutes early or twenty minutes late, you were always left to stew in your own juices in the waiting area for at least forty-five minutes. They were either chronically behind schedule, or they had determined that patients had to marinate for an designated period of time before they were ready to be poked and prodded.

Deciding to test my theory, I brought up the stopwatch function on my watch and set it going.

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“Dragons” is a work of fiction. Names, characters, businesses, places, events, locales, and incidents are either the products of the author's imagination or used in a fictitious manner. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, or actual events is purely coincidental. For more information, go here.

This post first appeared on Eric Lanke's blog, an association executive and author. You can follow him on Twitter @ericlanke or contact him at eric.lanke@gmail.com.

Image Source

http://lres.com/heres-why-amcs-need-to-pay-close-attention-to-looming-regulatory-changes/businessman-in-the-middle-of-a-labyrinth/

Madness and Civilization by Michel Foucault

This is the second work of Foucault’s that I’ve read. Both of these works contain what I often call a “big idea” -- a way of looking at the world and our place in it (i.e., a philosophy) that provides new and intriguing explanatory powers. In The History of Sexuality, Volume 1, the big idea was that sexuality is not a science, subject to an empirical understanding of its tenets and mechanisms, but an ideology, constructed out of a particular sociological context with no other binding effects. Here, in Madness and Civilization, the big idea is similarly that madness is also essentially an ideology -- something that existed in another form prior to the Age of Enlightenment, but which was re-contextualized into its current abhorrent configuration during the initial rise of that civilization. As is well summarized on the back cover of my paperback edition:

What does it mean to be mad? In Madness and Civilization, perhaps his masterpiece, Michel Foucault examines the archaeology of madness in the West from 1500 to 1800 -- from the late Middle Ages, when insanity was still considered part of everyday life and fools and lunatics walked the streets freely, to the time when such people began to be considered a threat, asylums were first built, and walls were erected between the “insane” and the rest of humanity.

The quotation marks around “insane” in that last sentence are really doing a lot of work, because it’s not that Foucault is claiming that the insane did not exist prior to the Renaissance, just that they weren’t treated as something antipodal to the new civilization, people to be excised from that enterprise, almost like the lepers of the previous age. Indeed, as Foucault sets up the premise for his case, he will describe in the historical disappearance of the leper colony both the context and the structure for the new “insane.” As the leper was removed from the body of the Church in order to save both his soul and the souls of the unaffected…

If the leper was removed from the world, and from the community of the Church visible, his existence was yet a constant manifestation of God, since it was a sign both of His anger and of His grace: “My friend,” says the ritual of the Church of Vienne, “it pleaseth Our Lord that thou shouldst be infected with this malady, and thou hast great grace at the hands of Our Lord that he desireth to punish thee for thy iniquities in this world.” And at the very moment when the priest and his assistants drag him out of the church with backward step, the leper is assured that he still bears witness for God: “And howsoever thou mayest be apart from the Church and the company of the Sound, yet art thou not apart from the grace of God.” Brueghel’s lepers attend at a distance, but forever, that climb to Calvary on which the entire people accompanies Christ. Hieratic witnesses of evil, they accomplish their salvation in and by their very exclusion: in a strange reversibility that is the opposite of good works and prayer, they are saved by the hand that is not stretched out.

...the lunatic will come to be removed from Civilization using the same mechanisms and for the same reasons.

Leprosy disappeared, the leper vanished, or almost, from memory; these structures remained. Often, in these same places, the formulas of exclusion would be repeated, strangely similar two or three centuries later. Poor vagabonds, criminals, and “deranged minds” would take the part played by the leper, and we shall see what salvation was expected from this exclusion, for them and for those who excluded them as well. With an altogether new meaning and in a very different culture, the forms would remain -- essentially that major form of a rigorous division which is social exclusion but spiritual reintegration.

But there is more to the argument than “the insane are the new lepers.” Much more. Because, with a glance back at those quotation marks, we can come to understand that the “lunatics” of the Renaissance are not the same “lunatics” that freely moved about the landscape of the Middle Ages. No, because the very definition of insane will also change to better encompass those who are increasingly at odds with the tenants of the new civilization.

To inhabit the reaches long since abandoned by the lepers, they chose a group that to our eyes is strangely mixed and confused. But what is for us merely an undifferentiated sensibility must have been, for those living in the classical age, a clearly articulated perception. It is this mode of perception which we must investigate in order to discover the form of sensibility to madness in an epoch we are accustomed to define by the privileges of Reason. The act which, by tracing the locus of confinement, conferred upon it its power of segregation and provided a new homeland for madness, though it may be coherent and concerted, is not simple. It organizes into a complex unity a new sensibility to poverty and to the duties of assistance, new forms of reaction to the economic problems of unemployment and idleness, a new ethic of work, and also the dream of a city where moral obligation was joined to civil law, within the authoritarian forms of constraint. Obscurely, these themes are present during the construction of the cities of confinement and their organization. They give a meaning to this ritual, and explain in part the mode in which madness was perceived, and experienced, by the classical age.

That, like a lot of Michel’s writing, is a dense paragraph, but it well summarizes the ideological forces at work as the “new insane” were defined and then confined in practical “cities” of incarceration. No longer just the motley fools and village idiots of their pastoral precedents, these new lunatics would include the poor, the unemployed, the shiftless -- any and all who would be perceived as failing to properly embrace the spirit of the new age and, because of the moral force given to civilization and its gatekeepers, they, like the lepers before them, could be seen as being very properly punished for their sins of accident, ineptitude, and opposition.

If there is, in classical madness, something which refers elsewhere, and to other things, it is no longer because the madman comes from the world of the irrational and bears its stigmata; rather, it is because he crosses the frontiers of bourgeois order of his own accord, and alienates himself outside the sacred limits of its ethic.

In fact, the relation between the practice of confinement and the insistence on work is not defined by economic conditions; far from it. A moral perception sustains and animates it. When the Board of Trade published its report on the poor in which it proposed the means “to render them useful to the public,” it was made quite clear that the origin of poverty was neither scarcity of commodities nor unemployment, but “the weakening of discipline and the relaxation of morals.”

In this, it seems, we see the beginnings of one of the great moral canards of not just this civilization but ours as well: that the poor are not just morally deficient, but that they are poor because of their moral deficiency, and that we, their moral superiors, are morally justified in making them pay for their “sins.”

The edict of 1657, too, was full of moral denunciations and strange threats. “The libertinage of beggars has risen to excess because of an unfortunate tolerance of crimes of all sorts, which attract the curse of God upon the State when they remain unpunished.” This “libertinage” is not the kind that can be defined in relation to the great law of work, but a moral libertinage: “Experience having taught those persons who are employed in charitable occupations that many among them of either sex live together without marriage, that many of their children are unbaptized, and that almost all of them live in ignorance of religion, disdaining the sacraments, and continually practicing all sorts of vice.”

In 1657 in France the power to regulate these moral infractions was given to the “Hôpital Général” -- a new kind of institution that saw to the infirmities of both the body and the soul.

Hence the Hôpital does not have the appearance of a mere refuge for those whom age, infirmity, or sickness keep from working; it will have not only the aspect of a forced labor camp, but also that of a moral institution responsible for punishing, for correcting a certain moral “abeyance” which does not merit the tribunal of men, but cannot be corrected by the severity of penance alone. The Hôpital Général has an ethical status. It is this moral charge which invests its directors, and they are granted every judicial apparatus and means of repression: “They have power of authority, of direction, of administration and punishment”; and to accomplish this task “stakes, irons, prisons, and dungeons” are put at their disposal.

This is all leading somewhere. In Foucault’s estimation, this power to both define the cage and to place people within it is about more than just an expansion of our collective understanding of who is and is not insane. His chapter on this subject is called “The Great Confinement,” referring to the thousands who suddenly found themselves behind bars, but it could just as easily have been called “The Great Conflation,” since in this time two separate forces appeared to have been conflated together in a way not previously seen.

Thus we see inscribed in the institutions of absolute monarchy -- in the very ones that long remained the symbol of its arbitrary power -- the great bourgeois, and soon republican, idea that virtue, too, is an affair of state, that decrees can be published to make it flourish, that an authority can be established to make sure it is respected. The walls of confinement actually enclose the negative of that moral city of which the bourgeois conscience began to dream in the seventeenth century; a moral city for those who sought, from the start, to avoid it, a city where right reigns only by virtue of a force without appeal -- a sort of sovereignty of good, in which intimidation alone prevails and the only recompense of virtue (to this degree its own reward) is to escape punishment. In the shadows of the bourgeois city is born this strange republic of the good which is imposed by force on all those suspected of belonging to evil. This is the underside of the bourgeoisie’s great dream and great preoccupation in the classical age: the laws of the State and the laws of the heart at last identical.

This, indeed, may be Foucault’s second big idea in this short work. What we call madness and who we identify as madmen is ideology, yes, but the effect of that ideology in our age is to conflate the State with the “moral city,” and those who transgress one are, by definition, transgressing the other.

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This post first appeared on Eric Lanke's blog, an association executive and author. You can follow him on Twitter @ericlanke or contact him at eric.lanke@gmail.com.

Dragons - Chapter 76 (DRAFT)

The following day was Friday. I must have been in a deep sleep, because when the morning alarm went off at its usual 5:30 AM, it felt like a bucket of cold water being dropped on me. I woke so violently that I woke Jenny, who normally slept peacefully through my alarm.

“Whaaaaat?” she moaned groggily. 

I sat for a moment in bed, the klaxon call of the alarm growing steadily louder in our dark room, trying to catch my breath and slow my heart down. I had been dreaming. Running, I think, down a dark hallway, and being chased by shadowy figures with sharp teeth and sharper knives.

“Alan,” Jenny groaned, pushing me in the small of my back. “Get up.”

I did, dragging myself over to the dresser just long enough to switch off the alarm before flopping myself back down on the bed.

“Alan,” Jenny said again, rolling her pregnant belly over so she could face me. “Get up. You have to go to work.”

“I don’t want to,” I said. “Not today. I’m going to call in sick.”

Jenny seemed instantly awake. “Are you sick?” She reached out a motherly hand and felt my forehead for a fever.

“I’m sick, all right,” I said. “Sick of that fucking place.”

Jenny knew all about Gerald’s attempted coup, my role in it, and the fallout that I would now have to deal with. We had talked about it at length, Jenny pulling the details and confessions out of me like an experienced prosecutor. She was more committed than ever to getting me out of that place, and had been sending my resume to even the less attractive listings in the newspaper. She was still hopeful about Quest Partners, but, like me, was growing worried that I hadn’t heard from Steve Anderson or his assistant.

“Have you ever called in sick before?” she asked me, a tinge of hopefulness in her voice.

“Not that I can remember,” I said. “But I really feel like doing it today.”

“If you stay home,” Jenny said, “you can come with me to my well baby checkup. Help your fat, pregnant wife out of the car. See the latest ultrasound.”

That was all it took to decide it. In a moment my cell phone was in my hand and I was placing a call to Ruthie’s direct line -- the company-approved method for calling in sick. Checking the clock to make sure it wasn’t a time that Ruthie might be at her desk, I waited for her voicemail to pick up and then left a short and appropriate message. I’m sick. I won’t be in today.

That task completed Jenny actually gave me a kiss on my unshaven cheek. “Come on,” she said. “You can make us breakfast while I get in the shower. We have to be there by nine o’clock.”

Having just looked at the clock I knew that was more than three hours away, but I also knew that that would be calling it close. The clinic was only a few minutes from our home, but there was a lot that would need to be accomplished and organized before we could leave. Even still, I waited until Jenny was in the bathroom and I heard the water running before I even got out of bed. Making breakfast now would just mean a cold breakfast by the time she got herself dressed, so I went down the hall and peeked in on Jacob.

He was sleeping soundly -- a tuft of hair on his pillow and a pudgy calf and bare foot sticking out from under his blanket. I left his bedroom door open, expecting the noise of the house to wake him gradually in the next half hour or so, and went downstairs to use the second bathroom and start putting some things in order for everyone’s breakfast.

I didn’t feel the least bit guilty about calling in sick. Rather, I felt liberated, as if some heavy burden had been lifted from my shoulders. I suddenly decided that I was going to make the best breakfast ever, even pulling a package of bacon out of the freezer and getting the microwave working on defrosting it while prepping the other things I would need for both scrambled eggs and French toast. Jenny liked a little cinnamon on her toast, I knew, and I decided to include some of that even though I didn’t care for it. This breakfast was not about me. It was about her, my wife, my soulmate, the mother of my children. Cinnamon French toast with raspberries and warm maple syrup -- it would be like that bed and breakfast we had once stayed in, long before Jacob was born, before everything -- and I would act like it was no big deal, like it was everyday. Here you are, darling. Can I get you anything else? 

Jacob was down first, trailing his baby blanket on the floor behind him and rubbing his eyes with a balled-up fist. “Daddy,” he said. “What are you doing?”

He wasn’t used to seeing me, I knew. I was usually up and gone to work before he even got out of bed in the morning, but now the noise of my bustle in the kitchen must have brought him disoriented to my door. I saw that his sleep diaper was full and sagging under his pajama pants. Everything was prepped but nothing had started cooking yet, so it was easy for SuperDad to wipe his hands on a towel, scoop his son up in his arms, and carry him back upstairs to get him changed and ready for the day. On our way past the bathroom door we heard the shower shut off and the shower door slide open. I told Jacob that I was making a special breakfast for Mommy and that he could help me with the fruit salad.

In a flash we were back downstairs and Jacob was sitting in a corner of the kitchen where I could keep an eye on him, carefully plucking grapes off their stems and dropping them into a bowl, while I started pouring the egg mixture into a pan.

Jenny suddenly appeared at the door in her bathrobe and with her hair wrapped in a towel. “Oh my goodness,” she said, feigning surprise. “What’s going on here?”

“We’re making breakfast!” Jacob proclaimed proudly, smiling with his cheeks stuffed with some of the grapes that were supposed to be going into the bowl. 

“Indeed you are,” she said, as she came over and gave me another kiss on the cheek. “And what a breakfast! Is that bacon I’m smelling?”

“It sure is. Bacon and eggs and French toast -- just the way you like them, dear.”

“Well, I’d better go get dressed,” Jenny said. “And Jacob,” she said as she shuffled out on slippered feet, “save some of the grapes for the fruit salad.”

When everything was ready, I called up the stairs to let Jenny know. I could hear the blow dryer going so I had to shout in order to be heard over it.

“Okay!” Jenny called out. “I’ll be down in a minute!”

I got Jacob strapped into his booster seat and put his bowl of fruit in front of him as I retreated back into the kitchen in order to serve the plates and bring them to the table. In no time at all we were all around our small dining room table, enjoying the feast I had created, Jenny still in her bathrobe but with her hair dried and appropriately tousled.

“Fantastic!” she said, as she lifted her wine glass filled with orange juice and toasted me. “I think you should stay home from work more often.”

We ate in comfortable silence, Jenny encouraging Jacob to try some of the new-to-him things that I had made and Jacob firmly refusing. When she was done eating, I got up and started clearing the plates.

“Oh, I’ll do the dishes,” Jenny said.

“No,” I told her, looking pointedly at her bathrobe. “I’ll do them. You go get Jacob and yourself ready for the appointment.”

“Aren’t you going to shower?” she asked, a little bit of horror creeping into her voice.

I looked at the clock. It was a little past seven-thirty. “I’ve got time,” I told her. “I only need fifteen minutes to shower and get ready.”

She looked at me a little suspiciously, but accepted it, knowing that it was probably true. “Okay,” she said, rubbing me on the back. “Thanks for the wonderful breakfast.”

Truth be told, doing the dishes never took me as long as it took Jenny. She claimed I didn’t do them “right,” assuming, of course, that “her” way of doing dishes was the only “right” way of doing dishes. The same could be said about any other household chore she assigned, be it cleaning the bathroom or vacuuming the floors. Jenny both insisted that I help her with these chores -- which I did -- and she insisted that I didn’t do them “right.” As if there were a right way and a wrong way to vacuum a rug. What Jenny of course meant by the right way was her way.

I made short order of the dishes, making sure to hang the kitchen towels up just the way Jenny liked them, and then headed upstairs to take my shower and get ready. Jenny was still in her bathrobe, perched on the edge of our bed with a makeup mirror propped up on top of a pile of books on top of my nightstand. She pushed her eyelashes up with a mascara brush as she told me to get in the shower. Jacob’s bag was already packed and we needed to be out the door in twenty minutes.

When I came out of the bathroom a few minutes later with wet hair and a towel wrapped around my waist, Jenny told me that my phone had been ringing while I had been in the shower. I shouldn’t have, but without thinking I scooped it up and looked at its little screen.

“It’s work,” I said, recognizing the caller ID. “Someone from the office was trying to reach me.”

“You’re sick today,” Jenny said, standing up and shrugging herself out of her bathrobe. Underneath she was only wearing her bra and panties, her enormous belly exposed and glistening with the lotion she had recently applied. 

“You’re right,” I said, putting the phone back down. “I went back to sleep after leaving the message for Ruthie. And I turned my phone off so I wouldn’t be disturbed.”

“I swear, your honor,” she said, beginning to slather her armpits with deodorant.

“Mommy!” Jacob suddenly cried, barreling into our bedroom like a forgotten and out-of-control freight train. He rushed at Jenny and wrapped himself around her bare legs, almost knocking her over.

“OH MY GOD!” Jenny practically screamed. “Alan, get him out of here!”

I rushed over to extract Jacob as ordered, knowing that I had committed one of the greatest domestic crimes there was in our household -- leaving our bedroom door open while Jenny was getting dressed. Ever since Jacob learned how to crawl, Jenny had made it very clear that there was nothing more important than keeping the bedroom door closed while she was getting dressed. As I struggled to pull Jacob away, I could feel the towel around my waist begin to loosen, and my efforts were hampered by my own need to keep one hand on it to keep it from falling away. 

“Mommy!” Jacob was crying. “Mommy! Mommy!”

Jenny, for her part, was able to move closer to the bed and sit down, which both kept her from falling over and gave me the additional leverage I needed to finally pull Jacob away. Hooking him under one arm like a football and keeping my other hand on the knot of my towel, I carried him out of our room and into his. As soon as I left the master bedroom the door slammed shut behind me.

“Mommy!” Jacob continued to cry, but he wasn’t writhing like he would have been had this been a full-blown tantrum. 

In his room I put him down on his bed and took the necessary moment to re-secure the towel around my waist. “Jacob!” I said. “What is the matter with you? What do you want?”

“I want Mommy!” he said, looking up at me defiantly.

“Well, Mommy is getting dressed,” I said. “And I need to get dressed, too. We’re going to Mommy’s doctor today.”

Jacob crossed his arms and started to pout. “I don’t want to go to Mommy’s doctor,” he said. “I want to stay home and play with my trains.”

“We can play with your trains later,” I said, doing the best I could to not lose my temper and to reason with this unreasonable creature. “The doctor is going to take a picture of your baby sister in Mommy’s tummy. Don’t you want to see a picture of your baby sister?”

“No!” Jacob cried, kicking his feet out and rumpling his blankets. “I want to stay home and play with my trains!”

I shook my head. “Well, we can do that later. In a few minutes we’re leaving for Mommy’s doctor, and you’re going to come along.”

“No, I’m not!” Jacob said, his voice threatening the darkest violence.

I’m not sure what would’ve happened next had Jenny not appeared behind me.

“Mommy!” Jacob cried, seeing her and extending his arms toward her.

She moved around me, now dressed in a pair of stretch pants and a fleecy maternity tunic, and confidently told me to go get dressed. She sat down on the bed next to Jacob and wrapped him in a tender embrace. He clutched her desperately, pressing his face into the soft fabric of her top. 

“It’s okay, honey,” she said soothingly to him. “Mommy’s here now. Mommy’s here.”

I shook my head, not really understanding the why and how of anything that had happened that morning, nor what any of it might portend for the future, and left the room. 

+ + +

“Dragons” is a work of fiction. Names, characters, businesses, places, events, locales, and incidents are either the products of the author's imagination or used in a fictitious manner. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, or actual events is purely coincidental. For more information, go here.

This post first appeared on Eric Lanke's blog, an association executive and author. You can follow him on Twitter @ericlanke or contact him at eric.lanke@gmail.com.

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Our Lady of the Flowers by Jean Genet

I had a difficult time with this one.

Here’s the first paragraph of the introduction included in my edition, written by Jean-Paul Sartre:

Our Lady of the Flowers, which is often considered to be Genet’s masterpiece, was written entirely in the solitude of a prison cell. The exceptional value of the work lies in its ambiguity. It appears at first to have only one subject, Fatality: the characters are puppets of destiny. But we quickly discover that this pitiless Providence is really the counterpart of a sovereign -- indeed divine -- freedom, that of the author. Our Lady of the Flowers is the most pessimistic of books. With fiendish application it leads human creatures to downfall and death. And yet, in its strange language it presents this downfall as a triumph. The rogues and wretches of whom it speaks all seem to be heroes, to be of the elect. But what is far more astonishing, the book itself is an act of the rashest optimism.

Wow. Now that is a book I would really like to read. But is Our Lady of the Flowers that book? In the end, I’d have to say no.

The backstory here is important. Sartre continues to explain:

French prison authorities, convinced that “work is freedom,” give the inmates paper from which they are required to make bags. It was on this brown paper that Genet wrote, in pencil, Our Lady of the Flowers. One day, while the prisoners were marching in the yard, a turnkey entered the cell, noticed the manuscript, took it away, and burned it. Genet began again. Why? For whom? There was small chance of keeping the work until his release, and even less of getting it printed. If, against all likelihood, he succeeded, the book was bound to be banned; it would be confiscated and scrapped. Yet he wrote on, he persisted in writing. Nothing in the world mattered to him except those sheets of brown paper which a match could reduce to ashes.

Sartre’s rhetorical questions are important ones. Why? For whom? Because the truth seems to be that Genet wrote Our Lady of the Flowers entirely for himself, and not just to occupy his mind while serving time in prison, but also to aid in his masturbatory fantasies.

No wonder Our Lady horrifies people: it is the epic of masturbation. The words which compose this book are those that a prisoner said to himself while panting with excitement, those with which he loaded himself, as with stones, in order to sink to the bottom of his reveries, those which were born of the dream itself and which are dream-words, dreams of words. The reader will open Our Lady of the Flowers, as one might open the cabinet of a fetishist, and find there, laid out on the shelves, like shoes that have been sniffed at and kissed and bitten hundreds of times, the damp and evil words that gleam with the excitement which they arouse in another person and which we cannot feel.

And this, to me, is key to understanding what one is reading, and whether the words can approach the heights that Sartre describes in his opening paragraph. Can they, in other words, be both the scribblings of masturbatory fantasy AND the transcendent work of genius that presents fatalism in oddly optimistic triumph?

When one looks at the descriptions that Sartre chooses and compares them to Genet’s actual words and the intent behind those words…

I have already spoken of my fondness for odors, the strong odors of the earth, of latrines, of the loins of Arabs and, above all, the odor of my farts, which is not the odor of my shit, a loathsome odor, so much so that here again I bury myself beneath the covers and gather in my cupped hands my crushed farts, which I carry to my nose. They open to me hidden treasures of happiness. I inhale, I suck it in. I feel them, almost solid, going down through my nostrils. But only the odor of my own farts delights me, and those of the handsomest boy repel me. Even the faintest doubt as to whether an odor comes from me or someone else is enough for me to stop relishing it.

...one can only come to the conclusion that the genius one is dealing with here is Sartre’s, not Genet’s. For, I think, it is Sartre who sees a pattern that Genet did not intend. Remember, it is Sartre who said:

The exceptional value of the work lies in its ambiguity.

In other words, it is a canvas upon which the reader can paint any picture he desires. And remember, he also said:

It appears at first to have only one subject, Fatality: the characters are puppets of destiny. But we quickly discover that this pitiless Providence is really the counterpart of a sovereign -- indeed divine -- freedom, that of the author. Our Lady of the Flowers is the most pessimistic of books. With fiendish application it leads human creatures to downfall and death. 

As masturbatory fantasy, it ends and can only end with one object in mind: the mad, rushing relief and pleasure of self-gratification. The characters in such a play are, of course, puppets of destiny, twisted and turned into whichever contortion the unrestrained freedom of their author desires and dictates. And remember, he also said:

And yet, in its strange language it presents this downfall as a triumph. The rogues and wretches of whom it speaks all seem to be heroes, to be of the elect. But what is far more astonishing, the book itself is an act of the rashest optimism.

Yes, the characters Genet creates are doomed to suffer a single and inevitable fate, but in doing so they give their author his tremulous joy in the bleakest of circumstances. In this regard, they are heroes -- they, specifically, are Genet’s heroes -- and, if he is painting them at all, he can paint them in no other light.

Genet’s genius -- if it exists -- has to be embodied in this dual understanding of his text. There are glimpses that Genet intends Sartre’s more subversive understanding…

Don’t complain about improbability. What’s going to follow is false, and no one has to accept it as gospel truth. Truth is not my strong point. But “one must lie in order to be true.” And even go beyond. What truth do I want to talk about? If it is really true that I am a prisoner who plays (who plays for himself) scenes of the inner life, you will require nothing other than a game.

...but none of these glimpses are enough to convince me that Genet is possessed of an understanding of any deeper intention than an attempt to occupy the carnal directives of his enlightened and imprisoned mind.

+ + +

This post first appeared on Eric Lanke's blog, an association executive and author. You can follow him on Twitter @ericlanke or contact him at eric.lanke@gmail.com.

Dragons - Chapter 75 (DRAFT)

Very late that afternoon Mary stopped by my office. I was in the middle of packing things up for the day, sliding my laptop into its sleeve in my shoulder bag.

Mary shut my door and stood with her back to it. “Paul Webster is out,” she said.

My fingers froze on the zipper. “What?”

“Paul Webster is out,” she repeated. “Don and I spoke to him this afternoon and he’s agreed to resign from the Board. He’s out.”

“Just like that?” I asked.

Mary gave me a disappointed look. “No, if you must know. Not ‘just like that.’ We had to move heaven and earth to pull this one off. Eleanor is not happy about any of this, and especially since we had to pull her in to do some of the dirty work.”

Not happy. That was one of Mary’s euphemisms. It meant Eleanor was spitting mad. She had likely chewed Mary out and extracted all kinds of promises for future work and concessions. And that, I knew, made Mary more uncomfortable than any coup attempt from below possibly could have.

“You and Gerald really did a number on us, but we’ve taken care of it. It’s over.”

“Wait, Mary,” I said. “What do you mean ‘me and Gerald’? I didn’t have anything to do with this. I’m the one who brought it to your attention, remember?”

The look on Mary’s face could only be described as skeptical, but her words were placating. “Yes, I’m sorry. You’re right. I spoke in haste. This was Gerald’s doing, but you should have discovered his plans when he started concocting them, not when he was about to execute them.”

I shrugged my shoulders. “If I wasn’t doing two other jobs in addition to mine, maybe I could’ve kept a closer eye on him.”

It was a dangerous thing to say, but the words were out before I could stop them. Most things Mary said were crazy, but it was typically even crazier to challenge them. For a moment I saw Mary’s eyes smolder, but then she carefully cooled whatever fire was brewing within. 

“You’ve got three other jobs to do now, Alan. And the leadership meeting is in ten days. I told you, we’ll talk about help when we’re on the other side of that. Not before.”

I zipped up my bag and slung it over my shoulder. I just wanted to get out of there. “Uh huh. So who am I supposed to coordinate the agenda with now? If Paul is out, is Eleanor going to step in and run the meeting in his stead?”

“No,” Mary said. “We’re moving Wes Howard into the president-elect seat. You should work with him on the final details for the event.”

My heart stopped. 

Wes Howard.

“Mary!” I cried, but her hand was already on the door knob and she had already pulled it open. 

“Yes, I know,” she said, as she exited my office. “You’ll just have to find a way to work with him. There’s no other way, now.”

And quick as that, she was gone.

+ + +

“Dragons” is a work of fiction. Names, characters, businesses, places, events, locales, and incidents are either the products of the author's imagination or used in a fictitious manner. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, or actual events is purely coincidental. For more information, go here.

This post first appeared on Eric Lanke's blog, an association executive and author. You can follow him on Twitter @ericlanke or contact him at eric.lanke@gmail.com.

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Arrowsmith by Sinclair Lewis

Arrowsmith is Martin Arrowsmith, a young doctor and protagonist of this novel, who vacillates between the two opposite poles of all physicians -- the life of the clinician and the life of the researcher. But in Lewis’s capable hands, the tension between these two objectives takes on a more universal and philosophical importance.

First, the clinician, embodied best by Dr. Roscoe Geake, one of Martin’s teachers in medical school, who leaves his position there to become the vice president of the New Ideal Medical Instrument and Furniture Company. In other words, he goes into business, and is anything but sheepish about it.

“Gentleman, the trouble with too many doctors, even those splendid old pioneer war-horses who through mud and storm, through winter’s chill blast and August’s untempered heat, go bringing cheer and surcease from pain to the world’s humblest, yet even these old Nestors not so infrequently settle down in a rut and never shake themselves loose. Now that I am leaving this field where I have labored so long and happily, I want to ask every man jack of you to read, before you begin to practise medicine, not merely your Rosenau and Howell and Gray, but also, as a preparation for being that which all good citizens must be, namely, practical men, a most valuable little manual of modern psychology, ‘How to Put Pep in Salesmanship,’ by Grosvenor A. Bibby. For don’t forget, gentlemen, and this is my last message to you, the man worth while is not merely the man who takes things with a smile but also the man who’s trained in philosophy, practical philosophy, so that instead of day-dreaming and spending all his time talking about ‘ethics,’ splendid though they are, and ‘charity,’ glorious virtue though that be, yet he never forgets that unfortunately the world judges a man by the amount of good hard cash he can lay away. The graduates of the University of Hard Knocks judge a physician as they judge a business man, not merely by his alleged ‘high ideals’ but by the horsepower he puts into carrying them out -- and making them pay! And from a scientific standpoint, don’t overlook the fact that the impression of properly remunerated competence which you make on a patient is of just as much importance, in these days as the new psychology, as the drugs you get into him or the operations he lets you get away with. The minute he begins to see that other folks appreciate and reward your skill, that minute he must begin to feel your power and so to get well.”

In other words, medicine, like everything else, is a business, and material success -- money and comfort -- is its highest goal.

But contrast this with the researcher, embodied best by Dr. Max Gottlieb, one of Martin’s mentors and idols, as dedicated to discovery and truth and Geake is to success and comfort.

“To be a scientist -- it is not just a different job, so that a man should choose between being a scientist and being an explorer or a bond-salesman or a physician or a king or a farmer. It is a tangle of very obscure emotions, like mysticism, or wanting to write poetry; it makes its victim all different from the good normal man. The normal man, he does not care much what he does except that he should eat and sleep and make love. But the scientist is intensely religious -- he is so religious that he will not accept quarter-truths, because they are an insult to his faith.

“He wants that everything should be subject to inexorable laws. He is equally opposed to the capitalists who t’ink their silly money-grabbing is a system, and to liberals who t’ink man is not a fighting animal; he takes both the American booster and the European aristocrat, and he ignores all their blithering. Ignores it! All of it! He hates the preachers who talk their fables, but he iss not too kindly to the anthropologists and historians who can only make guesses, yet they have the nerf to call themselves scientists! Oh, yes, he is a man that all nice good-natured people should naturally hate!

“He speaks no meaner of the ridiculous faith-healers and chiropractors than he does of the doctors that want to snatch our science before it is tested and rush around hoping they heal people, and spoiling all the clues with their footsteps; and worse than the men like hogs, worse than the imbeciles who have not even heard of science, he hates pseudo-scientists guess-scientists -- like these psycho-analysts; and worse than those comic dream-scientists he hates the men that are allowed in a clean kingdom like biology but know only one text-book and how to lecture to nincompoops all so popular! He is the only real revolutionary, the authentic scientist, because he alone knows how liddle he knows.”

For Gottlieb, seeing the truth is what matters, not taking some veiled understanding of the truth and using it to make a buck. 

And it is between these two poles that Martin will vacillate throughout the length of the novel, moving through several positions and marriages as he tries to decide which will finally claim him.

There will be those that pull him towards practical success. Here Dr. Silva, the Dean of Medicine at the hospital where Martin is interning, talks to Martin and his first wife, Leora, about one pole.

“Your husband must be an Artist Healer, not a picker of trifles like these laboratory men.”

“But Gottlieb’s no picker of trifles,” insisted Martin.

“No-o. But with him-- It’s a difference of one’s gods. Gottlieb’s gods are the cynics, the destroyers -- crapehangers, the vulgar call ‘em: Diderot and Voltaire and Elser; great men, wonder-workers, yet men that had more fun destroying other people’s theories than creating their own. But my gods now, they’re the men who took the discoveries of Gottlieb’s gods and turned them to the use of human beings -- made them come alive!

“All credit to the men who invented paint and canvas, but there’s more credit, eh? to the Raphaels and Holbeins who used those discoveries! Laennec and Osler, those are the men! It’s all very fine, this business of pure research: seeking the truth, unhampered by commercialism or fame-chasing. Getting to the bottom. Ignoring consequences and practical uses. But do you realize if you carry that idea far enough, a man could justify himself for doing nothing but count the cobblestones on Warehouse Avenue -- yes, and justify himself for torturing people just to see how they screamed -- and then sneer at a man who was making millions of people well and happy!

“No, no! Mrs. Arrowsmith, this lad Martin is a passionate fellow, not a drudge. He must be passionate on behalf of mankind. He’s chosen the highest calling in the world, but he’s a feckless, experimental devil. You must keep him at it, my dear, and not let the world lose the benefit of his passion.”

But there will also be those that pull him towards esoteric greatness. Just a few days after meeting with Dr. Silva, Martin and Leora accidently encounter Dr. Gottlieb.

But a few days before the end of Martin’s internship and their migration to North Dakota, they met Max Gottlieb on the street.

Martin had not seen him for more than a year; Leora never. He looked worried and ill. While Martin was agonizing as to whether to pass with a bow, Gottlieb stopped.

“How is everything, Martin?” he said cordially. But his eyes said, “Why have you never come back to me?”

The boy stammered something, nothing, and when Gottlieb had gone by, stooped and moving as in pain, he longed to run after him.

Leora was demanding, “Is that the Professor Gottlieb you’re always talking about?”

“Yes. Say! How does he strike you?”

“I don’t-- Sandy, he’s the greatest man I’ve ever seen! I don’t know how I know, but he is! Dr. Silva is a darling, but that was a great man! I wish -- I wish we were going to see him again. There’s the first man I ever laid eyes on that I’d leave you for, if he wanted me. He’s so -- oh, he’s like a sword -- no, he’s like a brain walking. Oh, Sandy, he looked so wretched. I wanted to cry. I’d black his shoes!”

“God! So would I!”

And throughout it all the reader is presented with competing ideals and competing understandings of the world. What is the thing that matters? Practical success? Or esoteric greatness? And why is it not possible to have both? For that, as we read and enjoy all of Lewis’s prose describing Martin’s vacillations, is the underlying truth of it all. Whichever one chooses, the other has to be sacrificed in order to attain it.

Near the very end, Martin Arrowsmith makes his fateful decision.

“Please don’t be vulgar.”

“Why not? Matter of fact, I haven’t been vulgar enough lately. What I ought to do is to go to Birdies’ Rest right now, and work with Terry.”

Martin is arguing with Joyce, his second wife, about his decision to abandon his administrative position at the prestigious McGurk Institute and join his friend and colleague Terry Wickett at the rural retreat he has established for the pursuit of pure research.

“I wish I had some way of showing you-- Oh, for a ‘scientist’ you do have the most incredible blind-spots! I wish I could make you see just how weak and futile that is. The wilds! The simple life! The old argument. It’s just the absurd, cowardly sort of thing these tired highbrows do that sneak off to some Esoteric Colony and think they’re getting strength to conquer life, when they’re merely running away from it.”

“No. Terry has his place in the country only because he can live cheaper there. If we -- If he could afford it, he’d probably be right here in town, with garcons and everything, like McGurk, but with no Director Holabird by God -- and no Director Arrowsmith!”

“Merely a cursing, ill-bred, intensely selfish Director Terry Wickett!”

“Now by God let me tell you--”

“Martin, do you need to emphasize your arguments by a ‘by God’ in every sentence, or have you a few other expressions in your highly scientific vocabulary?”

Notice how Joyce has become the voice for practical success, wholly unimpressed with the esoteric greatness that so bewitched Leora.

“Well I have enough vocabulary to express the idea that I’m thinking of joining Terry.”

“Look here, Mart. You feel so virtuous about wanting to go off and wear a flannel shirt, and be peculiar and very, very pure. Suppose everybody argued that way. Suppose every father deserted his children whenever his nice little soul ached? Just what would become of the world? Suppose I were poor, and you left me, and I had to support John by taking in washing--”

“It’d probably be fine for you but fierce on the washing! No! I beg your pardon. That was an obvious answer. But-- I imagine it’s just that argument that’s kept almost everybody, all these centuries, from being anything but a machine for digestion and propagation and obedience. The answer is that very few ever do, under any condition, willingly leave a soft bed for a shanty bunk in order to be pure, as you very properly call it, and those of us that are pioneers-- Oh, this debate could go on forever! We could prove that I’m a hero or a fool or a deserter or anything you like, but the fact is I’ve suddenly seen I must go! I want my freedom to work, and I herewith quit whining about it and grab it. You’ve been generous to me. I’m grateful. But you’ve never been mine. Good-by.”

At the end of the novel, Martin Arrowsmith has to make the same choice that Charles Strickland makes at the beginning of The Moon and Sixpence. To achieve something, something else must be sacrificed. In the most general of terms, If you want comfort, you must sacrifice art; and if you want art, you must sacrifice comfort. There’s no other way to approach it, and that may be what I like best about Lewis’s novel.

+ + +

This post first appeared on Eric Lanke's blog, an association executive and author. You can follow him on Twitter @ericlanke or contact him at eric.lanke@gmail.com.

Dragons - Chapter 74 (DRAFT)

The leadership meeting was the same one I had attended the year before, when I had first moved into my position as deputy executive. That’s the way things worked in the company and with the clients it served. Everything was on a slow slog of an annual cycle, with the same events happening again and perpetually, with only the glacial pace of the volunteers changing positions in the leadership ranks there to provide some variety and a fresh set of political challenges.

If you remember, Eleanor chaired the meeting a year ago. She did that in her then-capacity as President-elect of her organization. That meant that the chair for the upcoming meeting was the current President-elect of the organization. And who might that be, you ask?

None other than Paul Webster.

By that time I had already had several conversations with him -- all of them before my recent run-in with Gerald. As President-elect, one of his functions was to review and confirm the leadership and rosters for the hundred or so committees that made up the byzantine structure of their organization. Like so many, it was an annual ritual, the President-elect making sure his or her hand-picked supporters were in any position that was vacant, and making sure the appropriate bonds could be forged with those who would statutorily continue into the President-elect’s term as President. My job was to make sure he had an accurate report of all the committees, to accept all his changes, to coax those changes into our membership database, and then to coordinate the appropriate invitations to the leadership meeting he would be chairing.

Fortunately, with just two weeks to go before the meeting, most of that work had already been done, and now I was corresponding daily with some portion on the one hundred and thirty-nine people that had been invited, making sure that they had the information they needed to make their travel arrangements and, shortly, that they had received the agenda materials that had been prepared for them.

There were still several pieces of information I needed from Paul before that final task could be completed, but I knew better than to contact him without speaking to Mary first.

“Mary,” I said, leaning into her office the day after Gerald had been pushed out. “I need to contact Paul Webster about the agenda for the leadership meeting.”

Mary was sitting at her desk, her fingers busy on her keyboard, but she stopped and spun on me like I had caught her cheating on a test. “Oh, Christ, you didn’t call him, did you?”

“No,” I said. “But I need to.”

“Don and I haven’t spoken to him, yet,” she said, somewhat frantically. “You had better wait until we do that.”

“I know,” I said. “Or, at least, that’s what I suspected.”

“You’ll have to wait,” she said, very much like she couldn’t hear me over the torrent of thoughts running through her brain. “We have a call set-up for two o’clock this afternoon. You need to wait at least until then.”

“Sure, no problem,” I said, backing away. “I’ll hold until you tell me it’s safe to reach out to him.”

As I left I almost bumped into Ruthie, who was waiting for me to leave so that she could shut Mary’s door.

“Is she all right?” I asked.

Ruthie gave me a quizzical look, like I had asked for something nonsensical. “She’s fine. She just has a busy schedule today.”

I nodded and went back to my office, knowing that there were a thousand other things I could keep myself busy with until two o’clock that afternoon.

One of those things was a meeting with the department heads -- our number reduced down to six with Susan, Michael, and now Gerald sacrificed on Mary’s increasingly bloody altar of concentrating productivity. Bethany was the only one who remained who was my direct report. The others -- motherly Peggy Wilcox over Human Resources, closeted Scott Nelson over Accounting, pallid Jurgis Pavlov over IT, and hydrant-like Angie Ferguson over Meeting Planning -- they all reported either to Mary or Don. The meeting was about as focused as all those intersecting lines of authority would suggest.

Our agenda included the upcoming leadership meeting, which everyone should have had a stake in. Bethany and I were trying to organize the agenda with Paul Webster and all the various committee chairs -- stalled until Mary gave me the go-ahead to contact him. Scott reported out on the latest variances of actuals versus budget -- none of which had changed since the last time we had come together. Jurgis talked about the latest patch to our membership database -- which hadn’t been in place in time for us to coordinate all the appointments and invitations through it, forcing use to rely on our own tracking spreadsheet and word processing documents. Angie had everything lined up with the luxury hotel hosting the event -- and knew there was nothing more substantial to do until we reached 72 hours out and the final catering numbers had to be confirmed. And Peggy? Peggy did everything she could to keep silent, knowing that her only contribution would be reassigning some staff to help with the logjam, which she was prohibited from doing by both Mary and Don.

They meant well. At least I think they did. Well, all except Scott Nelson, who I couldn’t stop seeing as Mary’s spy. But meaning well or not, it was clear that they were all focused on the political intrigues besieging their own fiefdoms, and were reluctant to come together under any kind of shared purpose that I dared to define.

When it was over I asked Bethany to stay behind. She had seemed unusually uncomfortable during the meeting, and I wanted to make sure she wasn’t hiding some even bigger surprise. Unfortunately, she was.

“It’s Wes Howard,” she said after getting up to close the conference room door that the departing crew had left open. “He’s causing trouble again.”

“Oh, god,” I said uncontrollably. “What now?”

Wes had been appointed to lead one of the most influential committees and, as such, he was a key player in deciding which topics would get discussed at the upcoming leadership meeting. Bethany had drawn the short straw and was working with him to confirm those details and get the right communications out to the right people.

“I think he’s trying to sabotage me, Alan,” she said, sitting down in the chair next to mine. “Like he did with Susan. He’s nitpicking everything I do. He even yelled at me over the phone yesterday. Told me I was an idiot.”

Tears welled up in Bethany’s eyes and she choked back a sob. I reached out and put a reassuring hand over hers.

“Hey, hey,” I said, “It’s okay. Don’t let that asshole get to you.”

Bethany composed herself, pulling her hand out from under mine so that she could carefully wipe away tears without ruining her mascara. 

“I know,” she said, more confidently. “I know he’s just trying to get under my skin, but he’s talking to other people, too. I think he’s calling several people on my team and telling them what he thinks of me.”

This seemed especially outrageous, even for someone like Wes, so I asked Bethany to elaborate. She said that one of her team members -- a twenty-something named Tammy -- was late coming to one of their team meetings last week, and when Bethany went to go investigate she found Tammy on the phone with Wes.

“He was filling her head with all kinds of lies about me,” Bethany said.

“Like what?”

“I’d rather not say,” Bethany replied. “But I heard them. Tammy was obviously trapped, not wanting to talk to him anymore, but unable to get off the phone. I motioned for her to put him on speaker phone and I heard some of what he was saying.”

I looked at her as if I expected her to go on, but she didn’t oblige. “Bethany,” I said as gently as I could. “What kind of things is he saying about you? If you want me to do something about it I’m going to need you to be specific.”

I tacked that last sentence on almost without thinking, but it was the one that Bethany had the strongest reaction to.

“Oh, Alan! I’m not expecting you to do anything about it. There’s nothing you can do about it.”

That set me back in my chair. The reason my comment of doing something came off so thoughtlessly was, of course, that it was empty. Whatever Wes was saying, however vile or untrue, there was nothing I would be able to do about it. I knew that, and that’s why my words felt so hollow. But clearly, Bethany knew that, too. She knew that there was nothing I could do about anything that went wrong in the company. Our experience together at Club NOW had proven that.

I gave Bethany a bemused look. “Well, I’m sorry. I wish there was something I could do about it. People like Wes Howard should be banished from polite society.”

Bethany smiled, and this time placed a reassuring hand on mine. “It’s okay. I just wanted you to know that he was causing trouble. We’ll be seeing him again at the leadership meeting.”

There was something in the way she looked at me, a strange mixture of affection and disappointment, that made me charge down an unpremeditated path.

“Bethany, can I ask you something?”

“Of course,” she said, pulling her hand back.

“Gerald said some things about me in…, in his…, in the tantrum he threw when Don was firing him. I think he’s crazy, but I haven’t been able to get them out of my mind since Mary told me about them. I’m worried that they might actually be true.”

Bethany shrunk away, folding her hands in her lap. “What did he say?”

The words were on the tip of my tongue but they suddenly felt like the most dangerous words I could possibly utter. Once out, I realized, they would never be able to be brought back. They would be out forever.

“He said I was in over my head. That I was not up to the responsibilities of my position. That I had lost the trust of my team members. That they knew they couldn’t count on me.”

I looked at Bethany and she looked back at me in silence for several uncomfortable moments. I struggled to read the expression on her face, desperate to find something like incredulity or compassion manifest there. But try as I might, her stoicism seemed absolute, perpetual, eternal.

“Do you think any of that is true?” I asked.

“No,” Bethany said after only the shortest of perceptible pauses. “I think there are people here who are out to get you, who want to see you fail, but I don’t think those things about you, and I know plenty of others who don’t as well.”

I smiled, but Bethany did not smile back. If anything, she looked more uncomfortable than ever, far more distressed than how she appeared before telling me about Wes Howard’s hijinks. I thought briefly of the difficult position I had put her in -- I mean, what would anyone say if their boss laid that kind of doubt and fear on them -- and decided to chalk it up to that. The idea that she might be lying to me didn’t even cross my mind.

“Okay,” I said. “Thank you. I appreciate that vote of confidence.”

“Uh huh,” Bethany said, quickly excusing herself and leaving the room.

+ + +

“Dragons” is a work of fiction. Names, characters, businesses, places, events, locales, and incidents are either the products of the author's imagination or used in a fictitious manner. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, or actual events is purely coincidental. For more information, go here.

This post first appeared on Eric Lanke's blog, an association executive and author. You can follow him on Twitter @ericlanke or contact him at eric.lanke@gmail.com.

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Then and Now by W. Somerset Maugham

I picked this one up at a second-hand bookshop somewhere as part of my on-going quest to read everything Somerset Maugham has written. I knew nothing about it, and my purchased copy gave no external clues, having long lost its dust jacket.

Turns out it is a neat little morality play that focuses on the plots and intrigues of Niccolo Machiavelli, the Florentine politician, diplomat, philosopher and writer in the early years of the 16th century. 

There are two primary stories.

The ‘A’ story focuses on Machiavelli’s diplomatic embroilments with Cesare Borgia (often referred to in the text as The Duke), his contemporary in 16th century Italy, a mercenary leader and politician on whose career Machiavelli based his famous political treatise, The Prince.

In many ways, it is fascinating to note Machiavelli’s interactions with a character who is clearly his equal -- or superior -- in the field of, well, machiavellianism.

This exchange occurs while Machiavelli is serving on Borgia’s court as a Secretary, a kind of ambassador, from Florence, as Borgia plots his diplomatic and military moves to conquer the whole of Italy. It’s fun in the way it personifies the maxims and the tactics later espoused in The Prince, and in the way it plays with the idea of the two characters working together.

Machiavelli sighed. He was filled with an unwilling admiration for this man whose spirit was so fiery and who was so confident in his power to get whatsoever he wanted.

“No one can doubt that you are favoured by fortune, Excellency,” he said.

“Fortune favours him who knows how to take advantage of his opportunity. Do you suppose it was a happy accident, by which I profited, that the governor of the citadel refused to surrender to me personally?”

“I wouldn’t do Your Excellency that injustice. After what has happened today, I can guess that you made it worth his while.”

The Duke laughed. 

“I like you, Secretary. You are a man with whom one can talk. I shall miss you.” He paused and for what seemed quite a long time looked searchingly at Machiavelli. “I could almost wish that you were in my service.”

“Your Excellency is very kind. I am very well content to serve the Republic.”

“What does it profit you? The salary you receive is so miserable that to make both ends meet you have to borrow from your friends.”

This gave Machiavelli something of a turn, but then he remembered that the Duke must know of the twenty-five ducats Bartolomeo had lent him.

“I am careless of money and of an extravagant disposition,” he answered with a pleasant smile. “It is my own fault if from time to time I live beyond my means.”

“You would find it hard to do that if you were employed by me. It is very pleasant to be able to give a pretty lady a ring, a bracelet or a brooch when one wishes to obtain her favours.”

“I have made it my rule to satisfy my desires with women of easy virtue and modest pretensions.”

“A good rule enough if one’s desires were under one’s control, but who can tell what strange tricks love can play on him? Have you never discovered, Secretary, to what expense one is put when one loves a virtuous woman?”

The Duke was looking at him with mocking eyes and for an instant Machiavelli asked himself uneasily whether it was possible that he knew of his unsatisfied passion for Aurelia, but the thought had no sooner come into his mind than he rejected it. The Duke had more important things to occupy him than the Florentine envoy’s love affairs.

These are references to the novel’s ‘B’ story (more on that soon) but, importantly, here, they are showing Machiavelli at the disadvantage of his “Prince.” Much of the fun of the novel is wrapped up in this idea. Machiavelli meets his Prince, and is undone by him.

The dialogue continues with Machiavelli saying:

“I am willing to take it for granted and leave both the pleasure and the expense to others.”

The Duke gazed at him thoughtfully. You might have imagined that he was asking himself what kind of a man this was, but with no ulterior motive, from idle curiosity rather. So, when you find yourself alone with a stranger in the waiting room of an office to pass the time you try from the look of him to guess his business, his calling, his habits and his character.

“I should have thought you were too intelligent a man to be content to remain for the rest of your life in a subordinate position,” said the Duke.

“I have learnt from Aristotle that it is the better part of wisdom to cultivate the golden mean.”

“Is it possible that you are devoid of ambition?”

“Far from it, Excellency,” smiled Machiavelli. “My ambition is to serve my state to the best of my ability.”

“That is just what you will not be allowed to do. You know better than anyone that in a republic talent is suspect. A man attains high office because his mediocrity prevents him from being a menace to his associates. That is why a democracy is ruled not by the men who are most competent to rule it, but by the men whose insignificance can excite nobody’s apprehension. Do you know what are the cankers that eat the heart of a democracy?”

Heed now. A real lesson in political science is about to follow.

He looked at Machiavelli as though waiting for an answer, but Machiavelli said nothing.

“Envy and fear. The petty men in office are envious of their associates and rather than that one of them should gain reputation will prevent him from taking a measure on which may depend the safety and prosperity of the state; and they are fearful because they know that all about them are others who will stop at neither lies nor trickery to step into their shoes. And what is the result? The result is that they are more afraid of doing wrong than zealous to do right. They say dog doesn’t bite dog: whoever invented that proverb never lived under a democratic government.”

Machiavelli remained silent. He knew only too well how much truth there was in what the Duke said. He remembered how hotly the election to his own subordinate post had been contested and with what bitterness his defeated rivals had taken it. He knew that he had colleagues who were watching his every step, ready to pounce upon any slip he made that might induce the Signory to dismiss him. The Duke continued.

“A prince in my position is free to choose men to serve him for their ability. He need not give a post to a man who is incapable of filling it because he needs his influence or because he had a party behind him whose services must be recognized. He fears no rival because he is above rivalry and so, instead of favouring mediocrity, which is the curse and bane of democracy, seeks out talent, energy, initiative and intelligence. No wonder things go from bad to worse in your republic; the last reason for which anyone gets office is his fitness for it.”

In the end, witnessing the Duke’s on-going words and actions to eliminate opponents and to consolidate his political power, Machiavelli is suitably impressed. Here he speaks to his friend, Bartolomeo, about the scope of the Duke’s vision and impact.

“A strange man,” he muttered, “perhaps a great one.”

“Of whom are you speaking?” asked Bartolomeo.

“Of the Duke of course. Of whom else could I have been speaking? He has rid himself of his enemies by the exercise of a duplicity so perfect that the onlooker can only wonder and admire. These painters with their colours and their brushes prate about the works of art they produce, but what are they in comparison with a work of art that is produced when your paints are living men and your brushes wit and cunning? The Duke is a man of action and impetuous, you would never have credited him with the wary patience that was needed to bring his beautiful stratagem to a successful issue. For four months he kept them guessing at his intentions; he worked on their fears, he traded on their jealousies, he confused them by his wiles, he fooled them with false promises; with infinite skill he sowed dissension among them, so that the Bentivogli in Bologna and Baglioni in Perugia deserted them. You know how ill it has served Baglioni: the Bentivogli’s turn will come. As suited his purpose he was friendly and genial, stern and menacing; and at last they stepped into the trap he had set. It was a masterpiece of deceit which deserves to go down to posterity for the neatness of its planning and the perfection of its execution.”

High praise, indeed -- especially from a character like Machiavelli who, in the novel’s ‘B’ story, attempts similar feats of deceit and treachery for another goal: seducing Aurelia, the young and bewitching wife of his friend Bartolomeo. Machiavelli pursues her with all the guile and duplicity of his Prince, but is thwarted at every turn by both circumstance and the unplanned for actions of confidants and patsies alike.

In the end, having been thwarted, Machiavelli grows philosophical, thinking it best to turn his whole adventure into a more idealized work of art.

“What is love in comparison with art?” he repeated. “Love is transitory, but art is eternal. Love is merely Nature’s device to induce us to bring into this vile world creatures who from the day of their birth to the day of their death will be exposed to hunger and thirst, sickness and sorrow, envy, hatred and malice. … The creation of man was not even a tragic mistake, it was a grotesque mischance. What is its justification? Art, I suppose. Lucretius, Horace, Catullus, Dante and Petrarch. And perhaps they would never have been driven to write their divine works if their lives had not been full of tribulation, for there is no question that if I had gone to bed with Aurelia I should never have had the idea of writing a play. So when you come to look at it, it’s all turned out for the best. I lost a trinket and picked up a jewel fit for a king’s crown.”

Maugham here is referring to another real-world work of Machiavelli, The Mandrake, a play about many of the same subjects and characters described in Then and Now. In this way, the novel tells the fictionalized account of how two of Machiavelli’s works came into being.

And in the writing of the play, Machiavelli discovers his supreme happiness.

Now that he had a plot the scenes succeeded one another with inevitability. They fell into place like the pieces of a puzzle. It was as though the play were writing itself and he, Machiavelli, were no more than an amanuensis. If he had been excited before, when the notion of making a play out of his misadventure had first come to him, he was doubly excited now that it all lay clear before his mind’s eye like a garden laid out with terraces and fountains, shady walks and pleasant arbours. When they stopped to dine, absorbed in his characters he paid no attention to what he ate; and when they started off again he was unconscious of the miles they travelled; they came near to Florence and the countryside was as familiar to him, and as dear, as the street he was born in, but he had no eyes for it; the sun, long past its meridian, was making its westering way to where met earth and sky, but he gave no heed to it. He was in a world of make-believe that rendered the real world illusory. He felt more than himself. He was Callimaco, young, handsome, rich, audacious, gay; and the passion with which he burnt for Lucrezia was of a tempestous violence that made the desire Machiavelli had had for Aurelia a pale slight thing. That was but a shadow, this was the substance. Machiavelli, had he only known it, was enjoying the supreme happiness that man is capable of experiencing, the activity of creation.

Machiavelli, yes, but I can’t help but see a little bit of Maugham poking through in those words as well. 

+ + +

This post first appeared on Eric Lanke's blog, an association executive and author. You can follow him on Twitter @ericlanke or contact him at eric.lanke@gmail.com.

Dragons - Chapter 73 (DRAFT)

What happened next will probably go down in history as the worst firing ever executed. From the walled cocoon of my office I could only rely on my sense of hearing, but that was enough to know that there was shouting, slamming doors, and, at one point, what sounded suspiciously like the scuffle of a physical altercation.

The deed was probably done in Gerald’s office, three doors down from mine, and Gerald’s voice would occasionally penetrate the various layers of drywall and unblemished paint that separated us.

“He’s a fucking liar! Alan Larson is a goddamn fucking liar!”

That was the first outburst. Through the glass of my office door I could see a handful of junior staff in their workstations, their heads first coming up in curiosity, and then hunkering down in fear.

A few minutes later, we all heard, “Take your paper and shove it up your fat ass, Don!”

Now I saw Ruthie fluttering by my office door, gathering people up and out of their workstations, and taking them probably down to the break room so that they would be out of the line of fire when Gerald was perp-walked down to the elevators.

It deteriorated quickly, and although Gerald’s voice continued to bleat like a slaughtered pig, not once did I hear the words of either Don nor Mary that must have been sticking him. They were playing it cool, I knew, having seen both of them in action before. Don Bascom was a master at The Firing, exhibiting a kind of ruthless efficiency that seemed absent from all of his other responsibilities in the company. At no point would he raise his voice, break a sweat, or show any other form of agitation. A decision has been made, and he was simply here to tell you about it.

“Take your goddamn hands off me! You stupid fuck!”

This one was much louder. Clearly Gerald’s office door had been opened and that was when the scuffle occurred, the soft and subtle slaps and grunts of grown men wrestling with each other. I was self-consciously biting off one of my fingernails when the combatants walked by my office, Gerald first, with Don tightly on his tail but with neither of his goddamn hands on the doomed soul. As he passed, Gerald struck out and banged his fist hard against my glass, rattling the whole door in its frame and, as I would discover later, cracking the glass deeply enough that it would need to be replaced.

“You’re a dead man, Alan! You’re a fucking dead man!”

In another context, I’d like to think that I would have laughed at such melodrama. Indeed, I remember trying to console myself with an imaginary vision of Gerald twirling his villain’s mustache while tying my pregnant wife to the railroad tracks, but it didn’t work. Truth be told, I was shaken and full of doubt at what I had just done. Had I misjudged the situation? Did Gerald have some secret pull that I was unaware of, something that he could use to make my life even more miserable than it was? Or was he unhinged enough to actually make good on his otherwise ridiculous threat on my life? In that lonely crucible of my own doubts and insecurity, it seemed like anything was possible, like I was no longer in control of anything that would happen to me.

I tried to busy myself with the papers on my desk, with my fingers on the keyboard, with anything, something besides those four blank walls mocking me, closing in on me like a trash compactor, compressing and shaping me into the clueless loser they and everyone beyond them knew that I was.

It was dark stuff. I don’t know what depths I would’ve fallen to had Bethany not appeared in my doorway, tapping ever so lightly on the glass that Gerald had just broken. I waved her inside and she came in quiet as a whisper, roosting herself on the edge of my visitor chair, her hands folded protectively in her lap.

“Are you okay?” 

Her first question surprised me, and made me realize that perhaps I had been crying and that perhaps she could see that I was.

“Yeah,” I said, absently wiping my eyes. “Sure. I’m fine.”

“What happened?”

“You tell me,” I said. “I’ve been stuck in this office for the last fifteen minutes.”

“They just walked Gerald out of here,” she said. 

“That much seems clear,” I said. “And he made a lot of noise on the way out.”

“People are scared,” Bethany said, leaning in closer and perching her fingertips with their acrylic nail polish on the edge of my desk. “The whole office heard him shouting. We heard some of the things he said.”

That one made me pause. I knew what I had heard, but now realized that others may have heard other things, things said at a lower volume that were muffled coming into my isolation chamber but clearly audible in other parts of the office. Not knowing what else to do, I only nodded.

“What are you going to do?”

“Now? Nothing. I’m supposed to wait here until Mary comes and talks to me.”

And, as if summoned by dark magic, with the mention of her name, Mary appeared like a beige apparition in my doorway. Without knocking she opened the door and let herself in.

“Bethany,” she said, any surprise she might have felt at finding her in my office completely masked. “Could you give Alan and me a minute alone, please.”

Bethany seemed flustered, awkwardly getting to her feet and almost falling over with her sudden movement and change in elevation. She gave me a pained look, her lips openly silently but forming no words that I could discern. She turned to look at Mary, standing at my door with it held open to facilitate her exit. Straightening her blouse and smoothing out her skirt, she left my office without saying a word.

Mary shut the door and turned to me. “Is there something going on between the two of you?” she asked, crossing her arms.

“What?” 

“You and Bethany. Is there something going on between the two of you?”

I looked at her incredulously. It was a difficult question to answer. There was definitely something going on between me and Bethany, something with many layers to it, some above, but most below the surface -- but none of them were of the nature that Mary was insinuating.

“No,” I said. “Of course not.”

She looked at me suspiciously, and seemed to be waiting for me to add more to my testimony.

“Mary,” I said, speaking out against my better judgment. “Honestly, no. There’s nothing going on between me and Bethany. She just wanted to know what I knew about what had happened to Gerald.”

“And what did you tell her?”

“Nothing. She was only her for a minute. You appeared before a conversation could even start.”

Mary relaxed her arms and moved to take a seat in my visitor chair. She studied me for a few moments in silence, but this time I knew enough to keep my mouth shut.

“Well, we’ve got a real problem,” she said, her tone switching gears towards the business at hand.

“We do?” I asked, putting extra emphasis on the ‘we’. I had not even entertained the idea that I might be Mary’s second dismissal of the day until she was sitting across from me. For a sickening moment I was almost sure of it. She was here to fire me. But her use of the word ‘we’ gave me some hope and I clung to it.

“Yes,” Mary said. “Gerald said some very disturbing things in his separation interview.”

Separation interview. Only Mary could continue to use such corporate speak after the flying fuck fest that had just occurred. 

“I heard some of it,” I said. “I know he called me a liar.”

“He called you much more than that.”

Mary then went on to describe all the things Gerald had said about me, evidently in-between the shouting and cursing I had heard. Evidently, he talked about me a lot, me and his low opinion of my leadership skills and my overall competency. I was in over my head, promoted beyond my ability, with poor judgment and a reluctance to act. He spent a long time talking about my handling of the situation with Wes Howard in Miami Beach, and about how it, above all else, had eroded the confidence that the rank and file had for me in the organization. No one trusted me. They knew I wasn’t up to any difficult task put before me and that, when push came to shove, I would throw anyone under the bus in order to preserve my own position and authority.

It was brutal. And coming so soon after my wrestling match with my own doubts and fears, it nearly unhinged me. Mary relayed the information in her own deadpan way -- just the facts, ma’am -- but still, there was judgment there. I suddenly remembered the conversation Mary and I had had in Miami, when she told me that Gerald wanted to be reassigned, that he no longer wanted to work under me, that he and others, including Eleanor Rumford, had lost confidence in my ability to lead. Mary didn’t mention that previous conversation, but when the memory of it flashed across my red face, she saw it, and she gave me a merciless look indicating that she knew I remembered it.

Eventually, she paused, and sat studying me, perhaps waiting to hear my side of the story, more likely waiting for me to step into the trap she had just laid.

“I don’t know what you want me to say, Mary,” I said, attempting an absolute Hail Mary. “Gerald was the one working behind your back to undermine the company. Not me.”

Mary slowly nodded. “I know that,” she said. “Still, the things he said about you, we know that they are not entirely untrue, don’t we?”

I had a few moments of disorientation as I tried to work out her double negative in my distracted mind, but I quickly realized that she was looking for me to confess. That’s what was going on. She wanted me to admit that I was the loser Gerald said I was, and probably ask her for absolution. Was that going to be necessary for us to move forward? Could I even do that? What would that mean for my self-respect, for my ability to hold my head up and I continued to move from thankless task to thankless task in this broken organization?

“I will admit,” I said eventually, “that things have been challenging for me. I’m still carrying three workloads: mine, Michael’s and Susan’s.”

As she often did, Mary visibly winced at the mention of Susan’s name, but she quickly pivoted in a new direction. “And now you will have Gerald’s workload as well. You’re going to need to apply yourself more effectively, Alan. Remember, we have that leadership meeting coming up in a few weeks.”

I knew the meeting she was talking about it, but the idea that I would have to take on Gerald’s workload in addition to the burden I was already carrying was overwhelming in its implications.

“Mary!” I cried aloud. “You can’t expect me to do the work of four full-time positions. Can’t someone be reassigned to start helping out?”

Mary smiled, satisfied, I think, that I had allowed my exasperation to show through. “We’re working on it, Alan. I’ve got a pile of resumes on my desk a foot high. We’re looking for the right people to come in, but it takes time.”

It was a figure of speech, I knew, but I also knew it was a lie. There were no resumes on Mary’s desk. I had been watching the want ads and I knew that the company had not yet even advertised Susan’s or Michael’s positions. 

“I know,” I found myself saying, accepting the lie for the sake of the more direct point I was trying to make. “But what about someone already in the company? Isn’t there someone on another client that can be temporarily reassigned? I’ll keep doing what I’m doing, but having someone else take on Gerald’s responsibilities, that would be a tremendous help.”

Mary’s slippery smile only widened. “I’m sorry, Alan. You’re just going to have to figure this one out on your own. I know you don’t want to admit it, but you’ve brought most of this down upon yourself. If you get us through the leadership meeting in one piece, we may be able to shuffle some chairs, but until then, there is very little that I can do. You’re going to have to find a way.”

I looked at Mary icily. I knew what she was doing. She was doing to me what she did to everyone that had become more trouble than they were worth to her. I would not be fired. No, not unless I did something horrendous or illegal, I would never be fired. Worse than that, I was going to be worked until I collapsed and could take no more. Until I was dead. She was going to suck me dry, and then she was going to throw away my lifeless husk. She was a vampire, and I, now, had become her prey.

+ + +

“Dragons” is a work of fiction. Names, characters, businesses, places, events, locales, and incidents are either the products of the author's imagination or used in a fictitious manner. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, or actual events is purely coincidental. For more information, go here.

This post first appeared on Eric Lanke's blog, an association executive and author. You can follow him on Twitter @ericlanke or contact him at eric.lanke@gmail.com.

Image Source

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