The Clean Desk Theory

A More Orderly Place, Not Now, 2003

“If a cluttered desk is a sign of a cluttered mind, what is the significance of a clean desk?”

Laurence Peter, The Peter Principle

I walked into my office the other morning and realized that it was such a mess that I had lost control of what was going on inside it. I’m pretty sure, at least, that no animals are living there, unless you count the terrier that sometimes spends the morning napping on the floor near my feet. But that’s about the only assurance I can give you.

My office serves many purposes. It serves, first and foremost, as the site where I do just about all of my “day job” work. It’s also my photography workshop. It’s also one of the places where I retreat to write. It’s not a tiny room, but that’s still a lot of competing interests. So strenuous is the tension at times that I’ve been known to push it all aside and take a nap on the old couch that lines one wall of the room.

Aside from the furniture and work-related things, this is some of the stuff you’d find on the floor of my office at the moment: two cases of picture frames; fourteen framed photos I don’t know what to do with; a portable oil heater; a stack of 1,200 completed questionnaires from a recent mail survey; assorted dog toys; chords and chargers for a variety of Apple and Nikon products; a pair of running shoes and a pair of boots.

On the desktop you’d find: a photo printer I haven’t used in a year, a potted plant that needs fertilizer, two passes to the Picasso: Guitars 1912 – 1914 exhibit at the Museum of Modern Art (that I’ll probably not get to); a car title; a Utrecht color wheel; most of my mother’s Medicare paperwork; three books I haven’t read yet; a miniature bronze winged lion of St. Mark from Venice; three copies of the physical survey of the land my house sits on; and a collection of rocks from New England. You’d also find mountains of scribbled notes, ideas for stories, revelations to share with clients, ideas for newspaper op-eds and even outlines for instructional programs.

I used to work for a guy who believed that a clean desk was the sign of an efficient executive. John reported to a CEO whose desktop was always clean and empty. I suppose he thought the CEO might wander into his office at night just to make sure John was adhering to the same efficient manner. He never did, of course. CEOs don’t usually come to you. You go to them. Besides, our office was across the street from the CEO’s office. But John still made a practice of sweeping everything into the top drawers of his desk every night before he went home. Those drawers were anything but neat. But the desktop shined.

I never bought into that idea. I tried it. It just wasn’t me. For me, a desk is a fertile place for ideas. You never know when two pieces of paper with seemingly unrelated things written on them will commingle and give birth to something new and more interesting. But lately they’re sticking together and not coming apart. (That could be because I spilled a glass of iced tea on them last week.)

I’ve had many kinds of desks through the years. For the last twenty-five years or so, though, I’ve preferred tables to desks. If I have drawers I just fill them up with stuff. Better to leave things out so that I have to deal with them.

The price of having no drawers is that things pile up on the top of the table. A professional organizer would have a field day with my office. Just reading this has probably given you some pretty good ideas about what I should be doing with this mess. But if you don’t mind, keep those thoughts to yourself for now. I’m going to let the pile simmer for a few more days before I dive into it.

Chaos of thought and passion, all confused;

Still by himself abused, or disabused;

Created half to rise, and half to fall;

Great lord of all things, yet a prey to all;

Sole judge of truth, in endless error hurled:

The glory, jest, and riddle of the world!

Alexander Pope, from Essay on Man, Epistle II

Another Thing I Probably Won't Do Again

Alicia Keys, 2008

A couple of summers ago Mrs. B and I came into a couple of free tickets to see Alicia Keys at a nearby coliseum. I can’t say we’re big Alicia Keys fans. But we knew a few of her songs and didn’t have anything better to do that night. This particular coliseum has become a popular place for acts to start their national tours. I don’t know if that’s supposed to say something about our market or that the rent’s cheap enough to make it a good place to work out the kinks in a show. Even Phish and The Grateful Dead kicked off their tours here.

I should confess that my wife and I hadn’t been to an arena concert like this since, say, 1976 (Loggins & Messina, opened by the then-unknown Fleetwood Mac). I knew a place seating 10,000 people wouldn't be an intimate venue with a woman and her piano. But to say that this affair was an aural assault on our ears would be understating the truth to an almost criminal level.

The opening act was a young man called Ne-Yo, a "post hip-hop rap and R&B singer," who seems to have borrowed a lot from the early Michael Jackson school of music and dance. He might have been good. He certainly had a flock of anorexic young beauties crawling all over his body. I took this as a sign that the right clothes can apparently make all the difference in a guy's luck with the ladies. But the way the sound was mixed you had to already know what he was singing to understand anything, sort of like when you pull up to a stop light and the car next to you is playing music so loud that the bass line causes your colon to tremble.

When Alicia Keys came on, we couldn’t hear what she was singing, either. It wasn’t that she wasn’t loud enough. It was that the sound was so loud that we could barely pick out the tune, much less the words. Every key of the piano was like a nail driven directly into the brain. Maybe we’re just too old for this kind of show. Perhaps our ears peaked when we heard Jimi Hendrix and the Stones. The friends we were with stuffed their ears with paper. We left halfway through Alicia Keys’ performance.

The evening wasn’t without satisfaction, though. I did enjoy the young lady sitting next to me. She knew every word, every hand gesture and every emotion of every song Ne-Yo sang. When he cried over love lost, she cried. When he laughed at triumph, she cheered him on. She certainly got her money's worth, and her abundant joy made the whole night worthwhile.

Take Another Little Piece of My Heart Now, Baby

31^st Street, 2011

When you’re a kid the world look so big. Distances are longer. Adults are taller. The house you grow up in seems big, even if it isn’t.

Have you ever been back to the house where you spent your youth? Did the visit live up to your expectations? I had a chance once to visit the house where I spent much of my youth. The little Cape Cod-style house seemed incredibly small, though in 1954 my parents were elated to be able to afford it and were probably puzzled as to what to do with all the space.

Back then almost the entirety of our family’s retail shopping could be done in the block shown in the photograph above. We lived just a few minutes away. Most of what surrounds the block today didn’t exist back then. The town of Virginia Beach extended no more than two or three miles in any direction from here.

There was a barber shop I visited every other Saturday morning, a drug store, a variety of gift shops (including one that ran a small lending library), an ice cream store, two different grocery stores, a bakery, dry cleaner, a stock brokerage, a florist, a liquor store, appliance store, a few doctors’ offices, a post office, clothing stores for men and women, a gas station and two restaurants.

All but the grocery stores were owned by people who worked in them. Everyone knew Wendy at Bill’s Barber Shop, Webster at Webster’s men’s shop, Joe at the Texaco, Ursula at The Ragged Robin and Ruby Rock, the straight-talking cashier at the Colonial grocery store.

This probably never was a particularly attractive stretch. The block had been developed in pieces over the years by different people. It doesn’t appear that any thought had been given to the design of these structures other than that they be cheap boxes from which things could be sold. The intervening years have done little to improve the scene. The wear and tear of age and the tug of gravity have been hard on these old buildings. Every decade or so someone would attempt to dress them up by slapping some new siding over top of the original brick or clapboard. But it didn’t really fool anyone. One grocery store closed. The other moved a few blocks “out of town.” Some of the smaller shops died along with their owners.

The biggest hit occurred when the town became a city and the boundaries of the new city extended to include almost five hundred square miles. This street was no longer a primary shopping area. The era of strip shopping centers and then malls was upon us. In recent years, a number of the storefronts were taken over by a health food store. The stock brokerage became a popular bar and nightspot. The family-owned drug store closed. A national pharmacy chain moved into the old grocery store. Bill’s Barber Shop closed in the late 1960s. Ursula, Wendy and Webster are all long gone.

Now the whole block’s slated to be replaced by a mixed-use development of “Resort Lifestyle Apartments,” “Exciting Boutiques, Restaurants and Cafes” and office space. The remaining businesses have been shooed off to other places. The development will be new and clean and modern. But if the drawings are to be believed, it will have about as much charm and personality as any nondescript suburban apartment complex.

Resort Lifestyle Apartments, 2011

This happens everywhere. New is always replacing old, and frequently for good reason. A lot of people thought this new development should have been blocked. I’m not one for fighting for undistinguished, worn out buildings, though. I’ll just miss the satisfaction of patronizing locally owned businesses. I’ll miss the hodgepodge of contrasting colors different shopkeepers used on the outsides of their stores to draw attention. But I’ll get over it.

Oh, and lest you think I forgot her, Ruby Rock survived long enough to outlast several changes of grocery store ownership and eventually retired as head cashier at the “out of town” store.

Orphan Pictures

Untitled Surf Line, 2004

Do you have orphan photographs or illustrations or paintings? They’re the ones you can’t bring yourself to part with, even though you don’t have a purpose for them.

If you’re artistic enough to have created a large body of work—photographs, paintings, novels, short stories, musical composition or whatever—how do you keep up with it?

Some artists I know consider anything that’s completed to be ancient history. They forget about it once it’s done. They sell it or give it away or stash it in a closet somewhere.

I’m a little like that, but not completely. I do put photographs away and forget about them. But every now and then I like to pull up an old group of photographs and remember the moments at which they were taken.

The experiential part of this is that it’s an attempt to relive a moment, in the case of Untitled Surf Line, above, to feel the summer heat and hear the crash and sweep of the waves. But from a photographic standpoint, it’s also a way for me to re-live the journey of my photography. Some pictures I was extremely proud of five or six years ago I wouldn’t think twice today about discarding.

Untitled Surf Line, above, is one of my orphans. It was part of a series of photographs taken from a fishing pier. I thought the other pictures I took that day were better because they showed interesting compositions of people, as in Walkers, below.

But I can’t bring myself to throw Untitled Surf Line away, even though it’s been buried on a hard drive for the better part of six years. Walkers gives off an entirely different impression. It’s about the people. It could have been story pictures. The key thing is that in Walkers the natural environment is secondary. Untitled Surf Line, on the other hand, presents a warm spectrum of colors that could be seen either as the surf line is it, or as strata or as a simple demonstration of all the colors water takes on depending where it is in the wave and what’s underneath it.

Walkers, 2004

An American Tragedy

Fall from Grace, 2011

A notice in the paper yesterday reported the death of Clyde Pitchford, who as a young man managed to swindle more than a million dollars from gullible Richmonders.

Richmond's the kind of city that has such a lingering respect for the class system that it’s ripe territory for a swindler who can throw some money around, surround himself with the trappings of tradition and give off an air of pedigreed lineage. It’s said that Richmond aspires to live in the world fantasized by Ralph Lauren. Back when I lived in Richmond in the 1970s and early 1980s, a neighbor who was the sales rep for the Izod brand told me that Richmond was second only to Cincinnati in per capita sales of aspirational brand clothing.

There’ve been a number of famous swindlers in Richmond. They feed off people who are always anxious to make some fast money, acquire some of the trappings of success and move up the social ladder. When I lived there it was the sons of an Episcopal vicar and a prominent tobacco grower who were running a gold and silver trading company. In the late nineties it was a fraudulent German Baron and Baroness who scammed Richmonders to the tune of a million dollars a year so that they could outfit a mansion with fine art and furnishings and move among Richmond’s social elite.

For my money, though, nobody quite matched the story of Clyde Pitchford. In the early 1980s, Pitchford cut a wide swath through Richmond’s high society. He came from a working class neighborhood in South Norfolk. But like Clyde Griffiths in Theodore Dreiser’s An American Tragedy, by the time Clyde Pitchford showed up in Richmond working for E.F. Hutton and Dean Witter, he’d gotten a taste of the good life and wanted more.

Just a few years out of college, his penthouse apartment was furnished with expensive antiques and Turkish carpets. He had a chauffeur-driven Roll Royce. He wore bespoke suits. He belonged to the right clubs and played with the right families. He became involved in Virginia’s Republican Party. Rumor had it that he was even considering a run for governor. As the Richmond Times-Dispatch put it, “No goal was too lofty for the financial wunderkind who was bedazzling his wealthy clients.

The funny thing about people who get taken by guys like Pitchford is that they’re so blinded by the prospect of making fast money that they never ask questions. They accepted Pitchford’s grandiose stories about a privileged background even though no one remembered having seen or heard of him in any of the prestigious schools, summer camps and other places he described. His lavish lifestyle, generous tips and donations and the lofty company he kept led everyone to believe that he was making money hand over fist. No one questioned that. Needless to say, he wasn’t making the kind of money that could sustain his luxurious lifestyle. People who come out of nowhere and start living like that rarely are.

In early 1986 Clyde Pitchford’s carefully orchestrated empire began to topple. His creditors started pressing him and pushing him towards bankruptcy. His clients and employers started to realize that they’d been had. Saying he was headed off to New York for a “business meeting” that February, Pitchford disappeared.

He stayed hidden for three months. When he realized that a nationwide manhunt was closing in on him, he surrendered to the FBI in Washington, D.C. He was charged in federal court with more than a dozen counts of embezzlement and bank fraud and ultimately found guilty of stealing over a million dollars.

In addition to a 25-year prison term, of which he actually served only six years, Pitchford was ordered to repay those from whom he’d stolen. A sale of his assets raised little more than $100,000. The bankruptcy judge let him keep some of his Brooks Brothers suits and Hermes ties.

I never knew the guy, but always thought Pitchford’ story would make for a terrific book. During his days in the spotlight, he was for Richmond what Jim Williams ("Midnight in the Garden of Good and Evil") had been for Savannah. In the right hands, it could have been a great story or movie. But no one ever seemed to pick up on the idea.

Pitchford’s obituary said he was discovered in his home in small mill town about sixty miles west of here. The police are treating it as a suicide. Clyde Pitchford was 56 years old. The funeral home obituary says he owned a recruiting firm and enjoyed “riding horses, Elvis Presley music and the company of his Doberman pincher dogs.

Hoo Baby

Late Night, 2003

A while back I wrote about my job as a newspaper circulation district manager. Today’s continuation of that story starts with an appreciation of public pay phones.

District managers were required to show up at the newspaper office early each afternoon to do paperwork and be present for sales meetings. Then you went out into your district to supervise carriers, recruit new carriers, deal with parents, knock heads when routes didn’t get carried, take kids around to canvas for new subscriptions and, in your spare time, get papers to customers who’d been missed.

In those days you had to know where all the pay phones were in your district so that you could call the newspaper's complaint line dispatcher periodically. Scanning the landscape for pay phones, especially the ones you could drive up to without getting out of your car, became second nature, a habit so indelible that many of us kept on doing it for years thereafter.

On Church Hill, public pay phones were few and most that you could find had been vandalized beyond use. Church Hill wasn’t a safe neighborhood. I was luckier, though, than some of my associates and was never robbed or hurt there. We had to be especially careful on “collection Saturdays” when we’d ride around our districts collecting route bills from each of our 50-60 paperboys and girls. By noon it wasn’t unusual to be carrying thousands of dollars in nickels, dimes, quarters and dollar bills. You had to be very conscious of your surroundings. A bunch of mostly white college students driving around the ghetto in unmarked white sedans that made us look like narcs made us easy targets.

A favorite gathering spot for district managers who oversaw the east end of Richmond was a woebegone Gulf station at the corner of 24th and Marshall Streets. There was a fire station across the street that provided a sense of security that was probably false since the firemen kept the place locked up tight. The gas station parking lot was large and open. The manager didn’t mind us hanging around. And best of all, there was a working drive-up pay phone at the corner.

When you work in circulation, it’s like being a beat cop. You’re close to the ground and attuned to the mood of your neighborhoods. You get to know the people. Among the regulars who hung around the gas station at 24^th and Marshall was a dissipated man known as Hoo Baby. He got this name because his answer to any question was “Hoo, baby!”

Hoo Baby was one of those people of indeterminate age, so ravaged by alcohol and drugs that he was little more than a wisp of a person. I never saw him sober or straight. Occasionally he got scooped up by the public health people and put in the hospital. But he always returned to the street, neither sober nor straight. So far as we were concerned, Hoo Baby was a sad and harmless, if noisy, presence, always pressing you for change.

One evening when I made a call into the newspaper office to check for undelivered paper complaints, I was instructed to get to the Gulf station at "as fast as possible." This was usually code for a robbery or some other crime against one of us.

When I arrived, I found a fellow district manager shoved up against the wall of the gas station by a dissipated man wielding a gun. The man didn’t have to turn around for me to know who he was. “HOO BABY!” “ I shouted at him from across the parking lot. “LET AL GO!” Hoo Baby turned to look at me and yelled something that I’d probably have repeated here if I could have understood it. He mumbled incoherently, occasionally turning around to shout something unintelligible at me. He never took the gun away from Al’s cheek.

It took a lot more talk and the help of a pair of policemen who finally showed up to wrestle the gun from Hoo Baby’s arthritic hands. The police took Hoo Baby off with them. We wondered whether he might go to jail or back for another hospital evaluation.

We never did learn where they took him. The next day, though, he was back on the corner, pressing me for loose change.

The Devil's Lake Heist

Devil’s Lake Live Cam 1, 2011

Willard Wright stepped out of the vestibule of the Security Trust Bank onto the front steps. The thing had gone well. No one had been hurt. He held two bags of currency that he’d checked to make sure didn’t also hold explosive ink packs. All in all, it had been easier than he’d expected. Certainly not like the convenience store over in Grand Forks.

Willard looked up and down Fifth Avenue. Everything looked normal. It was cold and not many people were on the street. He was counting on people not wasting time outside this time of year.

Spiller was right where he was supposed to be in front of the bank. His left leg bounced up and down on the floorboard. His right foot pushed gently on the gas pedal, as if that would send more heat throughout the vehicle. He was anxious to get on. The stolen gray minivan was the perfect cover, Willard had said, the kind of vehicle no one would notice or remember. If they played it right, the van would be abandoned in the shopping center parking lot at the edge of town within minutes. Nobody’d probably even notice it until later that night when the grocery store closed and it was the only vehicle left our front.

Spiller was itchy. He didn’t like the minivan. He’d have preferred something faster. He didn’t trust it to be able to outrun anyone if push came to shove. But Willard had insisted that the Trans Am was too noticeable and memorable.

In the rearview window Spiller could see a girl inside at the School Board building across the street looking out. He hoped she was daydreaming of something more distracting than the snowy street. People came and went from the bank all the time, didn’t they? What’s another nondescript mini van?

Most of all, Spiller was uncertain about Willard. Spiller looked up through the windshield at Willard, cocking his head slightly to let Willard know he had to step it up a notch. Even if they couldn’t hear anything the bank’s alarm was sure to have been tripped by now. The police had to be on their way. Devil’s Fork is not such a large town that it takes any time to get anywhere.

Willard just stood on the bottom step turning his head from side to side, ignoring Spiller’s increasingly insistent looks. The street was still quiet in both directions. He saw a lady and a little girl come out of the furniture store in the next block and race to their pickup truck. The temperature hadn’t been above zero in days. As Willard had predicted, nobody wanted to be out in it.

Willard stood on the step breathing in the frigid air, as if there was no urgency. He turned his head away from the street as if he was thinking about stepping back into the bank. Spiller reached across the steering wheel and rapped his knuckles on the inside of the windshield. But he was wearing gloves and no sound reached the outside. He didn’t see anyone from the bank looking out the window. Maybe Willard wouldn’t be noticed. Just the same, they had to get on. Spiller could swear he heard a siren in the distance.

Willard turned back toward the street and stepped down to the sidewalk. Finally he stepped off the curb to the van. When he opened the door Spiller could hear the siren better. “GET IN!” he hissed under his breath. Willard smiled and tossed the bags into the back of the van. He settled himself into the passenger’s seat as if he had all the time in the world.

Spiller backed the van out into the street. He could see flashing lights over the tops of the other cars between him and the approaching police cruiser about four blocks down the street. He pulled down the visor hoping to obstruct the view of anyone trying to see into the front of the van and pulled away.

Devil’s Lake Like Cam 2, 2011

[This bit of microfiction was inspired by the scenes above.]