It's official

Well, I’m now an old white man driving a Cadillac with Florida plates. How the hell did it come to this? Not only that, but I’m reading the New Yorker in the DeLand public library. This must also be a sign of something unintended.

I was going to write this yesterday, so I took my netbook with me to the Blind Pig around 3:30, but they had 2-for-1 pints of Yuenglings for three bucks, plus I had a Montecristo on me. Unfortunately smoking, drinking and typing are just one too many simultaneous activities for me. I don’t know how Faulkner, Hemingway the other big boys did it. In my case the writing had to wait until today. Doc warned me that living in Florida is a little like slitting your wrists in a warm bath. It kind of feels comfortable and relaxing at first.

I do get out however. I just visited a place near here where more than 200 Manatees spend the winter in a warm spring that flows into a local river. The spring stays a constant 72 degrees during the winter, so they hang out under the Spanish moss covered, spreading limbs of live oaks in a wide part of the spring. The setting looks like a Monet painting – all deep greens and blues. I’d never seen a Manatee before. They are gentle, massive things; 8-10 feet long and I’d guess a half ton, huddled together by the dozens in a kind of aquatic group hug. Meanwhile, a solitary alligator floated with just his eyes and snout above the water, maybe 50 feet downriver, watching. I couldn’t help but think of Captain Hook.

It’s definitely harder to focus on politics down here. I’m not sure if that is good or bad. I think it’s just a function of not knowing anyone well enough to get engaged in those kinds of conversations. I have, however, been following the news in the European Union with interest, as Greece, Portugal, Ireland, and maybe a couple of other smaller EU countries are in danger of economic collapse. It now looks like Germany is going to have to step in with their version of a TARP plan to keep the union from broader damage. It was Germany that drove the process towards a unified European currency, and opponents of the idea warned of exactly this kind of problem down the line.

This has led me to add to the previously published list of rules in the June 29, 2009 post: “How to survive in business.” Actually, there are two. The first is already out there, “Great is the enemy of good” and is self-explanatory.

This one is mine: “Big is the enemy of good.” Many good ideas are killed in business before they are ever tried because some strategic-thinker decides the idea was not big enough. As if Jim Brown was born 6’2” and 235 lbs. And then there are Wall Street, New Coke, DaimlerChrysler, and an endless list of other examples of commercial disasters following an unrelenting, unrealistic, drive to get bigger. German politicians probably thought they just weren’t big enough to compete economically in the 21st Century with the U.S. and China, so they wanted an EU. It might have worked if they’d hitched themselves to 4-5 other German economies; instead they got Greece and Portugal which are now dragging them down. Small is beautiful.

RIP Charlie Wilson. A true American archetype.