One of the biggest projects has been creating a book from my blog entries about my retail job, tentatively entitled “19th Nervous Breakdown.” Here is the opening chapter, written over the past few months:)

This customer, at least, was only in the early stages of emotional meltdown as she approached the information desk. Her long black hair flowing over an equally black, perfectly tailored jacket and black silk blouse, the legs of her elegant pants (also, of course, black) flapping behind her in the wake of her stride, she came to an abrupt stop at a search station.

As I came around to the front of the information desk, I saw her poking at the keyboard, mostly at the Backspace and Enter keys. She tried a wide variety of misspellings of “Judaism” before clenching her right fist. It looked like she was going to try to punch some
sense into the computer.

“Can I help you find anything?” I asked.

“No, I’ve got…Well, no, it’s…You know what I need? Can you find me a book that tells me why I keep ending up going out with Jewish men?”

That was a new one. “Well, we can try a few different searches. You might find something in the relationships section, or maybe under Judaism…” I could picture a book that might be useful, but not clearly enough to spot what it was. (Later, I discovered that I had been remembering Vicki Weiss and Jennifer Block’s What to Do When You’re Dating a Jew.)

“You see, the thing is, I’ve always gone out with Jewish men. And when I was a kid, sitting on the curb, it was always me and the Jewish boys. I wonder if it’s that I view the whole world through business. I think Jewish guys…do you think Jewish guys are ambitious in business and that’s what attracts me?”

“Well,” I said, “this Jewish guy dropped out of high-tech after a couple of decades and is now working in a bookstore.”

She shrugged and sighed. “I guess that kills that theory.”

We wandered over to the Religion section. She took copies of Judaism for Dummies, a book on intermarriage, and a book on Jewish business ethics. I started to suggest more things, but her Blackberry summoned her to a higher calling and she strode off to the coffeeshop, arguing with someone over her Bluetooth connection. (At least I hope she had a Bluetooth earpiece under all that hair — she didn’t seem to be prone to talking to invisible people without the use of technology.)

I probably wouldn’t rank very highly on anyone’s scale of ambition, at least if they were measuring it in financial terms. At almost fifty, here I am, scrambling along in an expensive city on a bookseller’s wages after a moderately extravagant life as a technical writer and programmer. Where I had once had a three bedroom house to myself in Dallas, I am now living with several others above a ramshackle monastery outside San Francisco, with my own bedroom crammed with boxed and unboxed stuff that spills over into our common room. Where I once had a CD buying habit that had me buying at least a disc a day in stores, plus about a hundred dollars in CDs every couple of weeks by mail order, I now have developed a knack for finding great things (at least according to my own eccentric musical tastes) in the dollar bins at the used CD joints in the city. Where I had eaten practically every meal at restaurants or take-out places, I’ve now gotten down to a schedule of eating good, quick breakfasts at home, cooking a huge dinner once a week (I can knock out a sumptuous meal for four for under ten dollars, if needed) and freezing leftovers for the following week’s lunches (though I do eat my midnight dinners out more often than would be perfectly frugal).

But on a more important scale, I’ve achieved my ambitions. I get to hang out in a book and CD store all day, talk to people and help them find things that make them happy, and I even get paid for it. After jobs that had me spend every waking hour chained to my computer, I am ordered to go home when my shift is over, giving me time to work on my writing, other creative work, and to relax (if I ever learn to do that). After years of piloting a desk, sitting in a box and yelling at a box, I’m in constant motion, walking around the sales floor (as well as up and down hills on the way to and from the store), in better physical shape than I’ve ever been before. I’m noticed for doing work that I’m actually good at, rather than living with the constant worry (that still pops up in nightmares) that people would notice that I really didn’t know how to do my jobs and was continually improvising hacked together kludges to get things done.

Most of all, taking a breath and looking at my life in general, I can say that I’m happy. I still have frustrations and disappointments, but I can go to bed most nights with the sense that I’ve done something to make someone’s life better.

Doing this work has put me in a different social class than I had been before: I’m now one of those people wearing a name tag, ringing up purchases or answering questions at the information desk, that people often don’t see or recognize as people until they need us (and they often make it seem that we have offended them by being in a position to help).

I can understand where they are coming from in this. In my previous life, in the extravagant phases when I was paid too much for tech work and in the extended stretches of near-penniless unemployment that often came between jobs, I think I’ve been each of the people that I now find that I have to summon some compassion to handle:

• I have been the arrogant dot.com guy, sure that the cashier to whom I was speaking must be some kind of pitiable failure to be working a cash register late at night.
• I have been the guy stomping around the sales floor, certain that the employees must each be personally incompetent because they haven’t dealt with my search immediately, sometimes trailing too closely behind a worker who is helping others so that I can pounce once he is free, sometimes tempted (but only tempted) to stand dead center where the aisles meet and yell, “Does anybody work here?”
• I have been the guy who glares blankly or barks at a store worker who has approached with an eager offer to help when I just want to be left alone.
• I have been the guy who, having finished what he came for, stands around inside the front of a store, not wanting to venture out to walk home in the rain.
• I have been the lonely, lost guy in a new, strange city, scraping together pocket change to buy his hometown newspaper.
• I have been the guy in the bookstore coffee shop, sitting with a foot-tall stack of magazines and a single cup of coffee for hours, sometimes dozing off, sometimes failing to put the magazines back where I got them.
• I have been the guy flipping through the CD racks all evening, not ready or able to buy anything, but not ready to go home and face an empty house.
• I have been the guy following a worker around, talking nonstop about irrelevant matters while he tries to help others or get his tasks done, not quite admitting that I am there not because I need a book but because I need a friend.

Trying to establish more of a web presence in the days after my last dot.com job ended, I started a blog in September 2001. At a variety of web hosts, using a variety of programs, I’ve been blogging ever since. I’ve built this book from blog posts, starting soon after I came to the San Francisco area in mid-2002. I’d written these posts either on my weekends (which happen midweek) or upon coming home from work, usually after midnight, unable to sleep until I’d blogged about the surprises, joys, sadnesses, and the sheer weirdnesses that I’d encountered that day.

I work the closing shift most of the time now, shutting things down and reshelving books and CDs after the customers have gone. As I recall, I ended up reshelving most of the books with which the customer with the earpiece wandered off. I think she got Judaism for Dummies, leaving the rest in the cafe along with a stack of business and fashion magazines and some general trash. Sometimes I find customers exactly what they want; I hope that sometimes I find what they need. And helping the store make a profit is probably a good thing, too.

But what I look for is the human contact, the communication, the chance to help people leave the store happier than they came in. Here are some of the stories of some of these people, and what happened when our lives crossed on the floor of this large and often crazy store.

I’d been looking for a new angle from which to write, since, after over five years of blogging, I’ve been getting tired of writing about myself and my own experiences, and wanted to write from another point of view.

I also wanted to get into writing about some emotional issues which were difficult to express from my own point of view (especially when they involve other people who also would have their own emotional stakes in the situations). I was stuck for how to do that, until I thought of a story that I had heard: a writer was upset about the political situation in the McCarthy era, but wasn’t able to write anything directly about it for fear of being red-baited himself. His editor suggested a story line that seemed entirely irrelevant — but said that if he wrote that, he would safely express exactly what he thought about McCarthy. (Later: a quick search confirms that the writer was Theodore Sturgeon and the editor was Horace Gold.)

The Bible seemed to be the best source of suggestions for characters about whom I either already knew a significant amount (having had a strong Jewish education and parents who both taught Hebrew school leaves a strong impression) or could research easily. Louis Ginzberg’s multivolume Legends of the Jews is freely available and easily searched online, as are a plethora of other commentaries and writings. And, if no nifty stories appear, I can take the fiction writer’s prerogative and just make stuff up.
Rather than making a list of people about whom I’d like to write, I decided to use chance operations. I downloaded a reasonably good and easily read translation of the Bible (the World English Bible — though, since I was primarily using it just to search for names, just about any translation would do; I could probably have just grabbed the Hebrew text, but it’s harder to search it with the tools that I have, and harder to spot names), and loaded it into a text editor. I then had an online random number generator create a list of 100 numbers, between the line numbers of the beginning and end of the text of the Jewish Bible in that file.

For each selection, I go to the line corresponding to the next random number, and find the first name in that line. (If there aren’t any, I keep going into the lines that follow it until I find a name.) I skip names that I have already used until I reach a new one.

I suspect that the results will have a disproportionate number of well-known people towards the beginning, since they get mentioned the most. It may also be heavily tilted toward characters in the Torah, since they are referenced by the later books.

I’m also waiting until I’ve completed each text before I discover the subject of the next one. This feels like it will give me more flexibility than I would have knowing what characters were and were not going to appear.

So the texts on the first three characters, Moab, Aaron, and Sihon are already online. Abraham is up next.

The page has the usual links to subscribe to RSS feeds, and you’ll be able to comment on the posts. I look forward to whatever feedback and conversations may happen.

By the way, I’m doing much of the writing on my Sony Clié PDA — sort of like a Palm device but niftier. And I’m using the very cool Note Studio software, which is like a very flexible personal wiki for the Palm and Windows. (No Linux version yet, though there are rumors that it may be released Real Soon Now.)

This project is continuing from the Moses project, thought that text was formatted as poetry rather than as prose. (I would like to think that the new ones, though formatted in paragraphs, are just as rewarding to read aloud.) The suggestion of focusing on the emotional moments in Moses’s story gave me a hint of how to proceed with this.

The performance of that piece, by the way, came off better than I feared but not as well as I hoped. The audience and orchestra loved it, though, and the leader of another orchestra, who was at the performance, wants to perform it in the fall. She and the players also gave me some good suggestions for revising the score.

The performance and recording weren’t quite of a level where I’d want to put the result up for public access. But if anyone is really curious as to how an amateur orchestra in challenging circumstances did with the piece, drop me an email and I’ll give you a link to the MP3.

It’s been a process that’s taken over twenty years, counting from the conversation that I had with him that sparked the book, as we sat in a plaza in Tel Aviv in the summer of 1986. While the first draft of the book was complete about ten years later, a wide variety of delays had led it to only being published now.

The official publication date was November 7, the one-year anniversary (according to the Jewish calendar) of my father’s passing. I had let the family know, but held off on a public announcement until I had received a copy of the finished book from the printers. (Fortunately, my father got to see and hold a proof copy in his last days, though he was too tired to look at it for long.)

It’s a spy novel, concerning a coalition of American, Russian, and Israeli agents working together to combat a complex web of nuclear terrorists. It’s a good read, if eccentric in its worldview. But (to paraphrase what my mother said of one of my own books) anyone reading it will get a clear idea of who he was.

We’ve put out the book under the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 2.0 license. The entire text can be downloaded for free from the Internet Archive, where they promise to keep it available forever.

You can also purchase printed copies from Lulu.com. All proceeds, such as they are, will be donated to a Holocaust archive (as yet undetermined, but probably Yad Vashem).

On a tech/business/whatever note: it doesn’t have an ISBN number, and won’t be available in stores. Lulu.com has an unfortunate limitation (apparently imposed by someone upstream from them and out of their control) that books getting wider distribution and getting ISBNs may only come from PDF files created by Adobe Acrobat. We created this book in Adobe Framemaker, and I unfortunately have an old version (and couldn’t afford an upgrade) that generates buggy PDF files. To get the file into a format that Lulu would accept, I had to process it further using outside, open-source tools. Ironically, the very last stage of the production (done by my niece after I complained about it in a blog post) was done in Acrobat — but by this time, everyone had agreed to do it without the ISBN.

(Bill Bowman has pointed out in a blog comment today that he has successfully published his book via Lulu, ISBN and all. It looks intriguing, and I hope to read it. But I’m also guessing that it will have a much larger audience that we might expect for Troika.)

This project has been somewhat of an albatross for all concerned, and I regret that it’s taken so long. But it’s out now. Take a look — you might enjoy it. And the thought of people reading and enjoying his writing was my father’s dream.

Update: John Cowan asks in a comment about typos and punctuation errors in the book. At this point, I think I’ll consider the text to be immutable. We (my father, another editor, and I) spent much of the past decade shooting down typos and restraining his tendency to put commas after just, about, every, word. I think we’ll, at the very least, take an extended break before thinking about Troika 2.0.

As it is, I’ve found a problem with the text version up on the Internet Archive. When Framemaker exported the supposed ASCII of the book, it used those @#$%^)(* “smart quotes”, which turn into question marks when viewed in Firefox and were shown as octal codes when I looked at it late last night in Emacs. I’m not clear if (or how) one can submit an updated version of a text to the Internet Archive. And the process of getting the file from my version of Framemaker to a usable PDF was insane (figuring it out was one of the things that slowed the project by several months), and I’m loath to try it again.

Maybe I should open a Bugzilla project on the text, so we can collect typos and punctuation errors for a second edition.

(And now, having followed a stream of consciousness in pursuit of a gag that I ended up not using in this post, I’m off to Wikipedia to fix a glitch in their mention of John Cage in their entry about Finnegans Wake. )

I now see that it has dropped out of copyright, and the Gutenberg Project has it! It’s online at several sites in several formats.

It’s definitely landing on my “gotta read this” list.