House of Eratosthenes

Just got done sending Blogsister Daphne an offline which contains a redacted version of the complaint letter that arises from the situation over here. It’s the same ol’ Morgan that got picked-on by bullies in the sixth grade: He’ll take it and take it and take it, but man, don’t back that fucker up into a corner. Must be my Viking bloodline.

And I’ve suddenly realized something about my business correspondence about such touchy subjects. I have been privileged to see all kinds of such works written by, and addressed to, other people. For a high school graduate with a 2.65 gradepoint, I have rubbed shoulders with so many millionaires. I suppose I’ve always been shell-shocked at how incredibly lucky I’ve been, in this way. All these years later I still don’t believe it. I’ve been close to captains of industry, and I didn’t get to watch them just ask their Girl Fridays to get them cups of coffee…oh, no. I watched them get sued. I watched them get audited. I watched them get blackmailed.

Maybe I’m just a jinx.

Anyway, I digress. I blame my upbringing. When you’ve been fortunate, in whatever way, you should stop to acknowledge it even if there’s no one around to thank. And this is a piece of fortune I’ve never stopped to acknowledge. My eyeballs are now 43 years old and require no visual aid whatsoever; before them has been paraded a dizzying panoply of spicy business correspondence. That’s two huge blessings. If I had to give up one of them, and keep the other, I’d absolutely be wearing glasses. I’ve learned that much from the correspondence I’ve seen. That oh so spicy business correspondence.

What I’ve realized about the correspondence I put out, is this:

I model it based on what I have seen, as any intelligent creative energy will do. But although I try to coral it all in, when dollars are on the line, the eighty-twenty rule rears its ugly head. In fact, far from drawing on twenty percent of what I’ve seen, most of the time I end up making use of only three artifacts:

There are various tidbits I picked up by reading the works of, and having conversations with, my late Uncle Wally.

When I think professionalism is the order of the day, and it is necessary to conceal my wrath beneath a thick “nuclear reactor wall” veneer of diplomacy so it requires some cleverness on the part of the reader just to figure out how peeved I am, I think of this letter from a dying Ulysses Grant to his biographer, Adam Badeau. President Grant is, in my opinion, highly underrated as our 18th President, and even more highly underrated as a writer. Consider this to be advice: Just pick up some of his stuff. At random. This is art, of a grade you don’t often see.

And when I think I’ve been pussy-footing around too much and some asshole is getting away without his just desserts — I draw on an e-mail I was forwarded from this guy, way back in the olden days when he was my boss’ boss’ boss’ boss’ boss’ boss’ boss or some damn thing. He was the President of the whole freakin’ company and he walked through the lobby of the corporate headquarters one day to catch the guard playing Solitair on the computer. Poor guard. Stupid sonofabitch. The order came down from on high to strip Solitair out of all the company computers…on Windows 95…order arriving complete with a word-for-word reproduction of the top-dog’s summation of what needed to be done — and oh, my. What fine incendiary business prose. Paragraphs and paragraphs of it. So who is to do what needs to be done? Yep. Lucky me, I’m the poor stupid bastard…not that it was that technically demanding; it ended up being my job because I was the one who had the balls. I’m glad my immediate-boss at the time had some balls too. We did what had to be done, verified what had to be verified, verified it a few more times, and then sent off what had to be sent off. Years later it’s nothing but a good story to tell.

But the point is, I draw on those three. The wise; the cool; and the napalm.

Without those three, I’d still know how to write stuff. But not nearly as well, I think; and certainly not nearly as confidently. I think I’ll be recalling all three of them on my deathbed, in the final hours. I really do.

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Memo For File XCVIIMonday, September 28th, 2009

Memo For File XCVII
Monday, September 28th, 2009