The meaning of ZHAAA

It’s 3:30 a.m.

I’m asleep.

I’m dreaming.

The whole cast of my id characters is there, and they are in high form. Usually, everyone but me has big ears. I don’t, of course. My dreams are MGM Productions in technicolor. Only Donald O’Connor is missing.

This is the night I find ZHAAA. It’s pronounced Zhah as if it were the Zhah of Iran. I don’t know what ZHAAA means or why it’s in capital letters. I’m still not sure. But it’s important.

First, some psychic geography tips. My dreams often evolved fro one story to another. They often take place in a post-nuclear apocalyptic landscape where more bombs could fall at any moment. I have survived, though for no particular good reason or survival skill. In my dreams, everything bad seems well planned. Only the good is accidental and unexpected.

I’ve been in this Beetlejuician neighborhood before. The people running this apocalypse have lost my car, and the longer I search for it, the more I know it is gone for good or forever, whichever comes first. My car has been taken in at least 30 dreams. There is no escape without that car.

To get it back, I must take a number like it’s the BMV while someone with big ears claims to search for it, and I sit in the nearby grandstand of Sad People Waiting for Cars. As I head up the grandstand’s stairs to my seat, I am holding her hand. She is with me. She is dark-haired and pretty. She smiles at me as though we have always been together or should have been, but I don’t know her name, except that it seems right that we are here together. She seems to like me, which makes her different than everyone else here. Well, at least that’s good.

But as I reach the seat, the Seating Attendant From Hell says I am No. 67 which much go left, and the dark-haired girl with the soft smile is No. 68 and must go the other direction.

But, but … I say. He cuts me off. Listen, Mister Magoo, I don’t make the rules. You’re 67. She’s 68. It’s just the way it is. Move along.

So our hands part, and she goes the other direction. I’m going to miss her and her smile. I really liked her. Actually, I liked her a lot more than “liked” but dreams are torture. Your mind is unforgiving.

I now have lost both my car and her. This is an especially bad dream.

As I sit there waiting my turn, I know this dream is not going to be fulfilling. I can tell even in my dreams that I am screwed. Dreams often show your real life in only slightly altered terms.

When my row is summoned, we all stand and queue patiently to a desk far ahead where I believe word about my car will be revealed. I am pointlessly hopeful, but I shouldn’t be hopeful because this is a familiar landscape in my soul. And because I won’t awake until something really horrid happens, I’ve decided to play along with my sleeping mind and waking id.

And then I come to the desk.

Oh, it’s you, says the woman with a totally false jovial tone that often occurred when we were married.

It’s an ex wife.

Now I am really screwed because we never liked each other much in conscious life.

Well, she says, I think you’re screwed. She says this without even checking the raft of papers in front of her. The large scroll is the List of Damned Cars and The Damned Owners Who Will Never Find Them. I’m on the list. My name is underlined.

She smiles contentedly.

Sorry, she says.

I recognize that Mona-Lisa-you’re-screwed-half-smile. And I don’t think she’s sorry one bit.

And then I turn the dream in a different direction. For some reason, I am never violent in my dreams even though my direst dream circumstances would seem to call for some specific hostile reaction on my part. I am a peaceable man, even in these Tim Burton landscapes of my mind. I always say “I’m sorry” a lot for no particular reason, and I am hardly ever sorry or have a reason to be.

But this time I make a consciously unconscious effort, reach across the table and thwap her across the nose, the same way you thwap a beagle’s nose when he has just peed on your Persian rug.

It’s a mistake. and it’s wrong. I know, I know.

You always know in dreams, even if you can’t top yourself.

You are in see-wee-us twubble now, Bucko, she says through her bent nose. She always called me Bucko right before the Big Trouble started.

You know, she says, there WILL be a trial. Have you met my lawyers? she asks while pointing behind her to five Hells Angels who have suddenly appeared.

So, now I am magically transported to the trial. My trial. I protest loudly as I always do. They ignore me.

It’s just like my real life. My lawyer is that defense guy from “My Cousin Vinnie” who has a stuttering speech impediment so profound that it makes him incapable of asking questions or speaking to the jury. Oh, great. I’m being defended by the very unlikable Helen Keller.

I’m screwed. It’s The Devil and Daniel Webster all over again.

I am standing far above the pit of injustice where 50 or 100 or 1,000 jurors —  who can tell for sure? — are deciding my fate. They all are ex-wives and their close relatives.

Screwed? You betcha.

I can’t hear the words, but it’s not going well for me. I can tell that much. Every few seconds, they all turn and point at me and laugh hysterically.

But then a sound intrudes.

Far off. Faint at first. And then more distinct.

It’s music, with a thumping beat. Somebody is playing the piano bridge in Frankie Valli’s “Oh What a Night” and every few bars the sound of cheers erupts. I have never actually heard anyone say the word “huzzah” in the original use for that word, but this seemed to apply.

I follow the sound down a street that opens up before me. I see football stadium lights peeking over the trees that line the street.

“Oh what a night, Sweet Surrender what a night.” It’s the best Four Seasons song ever.

As I reach the glimmering lights, I see the crowd, thousands of them.

They are jumping to the music. Actually jumping.

Frankie is rapping the song and calling to them.

“Are you happy?” he shouts.

“Yes!” they yell.

And then again and again and each time they yell, they hop into the air, twirl like a dervish and land with a “Yes.” The music stops while they spin and bellow deliriously.

And then again and again. And each call from Frankie ends with a rhythmic, rapturous “Yes!”

A man next to me is grinning, singing and yelling YES! with a twirl after each bar. Everyone is in perfect harmony and unison.

What’s going on? I say.

You don’t know? he replies with a big smile that seems genuine and unaffected.

No, I say. No, I don’t.

Well, he says, we’ve just decided to be happy and sing and jump and yell. It’s ZHAAA.

What does ZHAAA mean? I ask.

Don’t have a clue, he says. But, he says without a hint of cynicism, we’re all happy. We’ve decided we’re going to be ZHAAA tonight. Are you ZHAAA?

Yes, I say. I believe I am. I’m here. I am happy. I can think of no reason not to be ZHAAA tonight.

And so I leap and twirl and yell Yes! to the music. I am ZHAAA -ing.

It goes on and on and on and on. We are all sweating in the summer night, and gentle insects are buzzing around the lights overhead. The insects seem to be ZHAAA-ing, too.

And the swaying leaves in the maple trees. And the grass.

And then, with sudden realization that it is over, I am awake and drenched in night sweat.

I have seldom been so distraught to awake from a dream.

And now I have spent an entire day thinking of it.

I want to go back. It’s stupid, I know. But I really want to.

What did it mean? Don’t know. Don’t care. What does that matter?

I was happy there. That’s what I know. Happier than I have ever been in my entire life for reasons I can’t describe.

Maybe it was heaven. Maybe we’re all supposed to make heaven be what it can be if we construct it as perfectly as we can.

I hope to dream tonight. I hope she is there, the girl with the warm smile though I have no idea who she is.

And I hope ZHAAA is waiting for me there on that shimmering street under the summer sky. The music calls. The tiny insects are dancing.

I’m ready.

Aren’t you?

Sailors together

We sailed the crimson sea
that’s 40 years of life
We conquered all we came upon
from victory to strife

I found you, true, but more than
that, I now know who I am
We are sailors two, lifting canvas together
On the ruby yacht of Omar Khayyam.

Was there ever any doubt
Love would be our chosen fashion
You my Persian princess
And I your prince of passion

You filled our life with loving
I sought to match your bliss
As sails now billow o’er us
I blow this whispered kiss

Wherever our craft may take us
Now, or ever more
You made it clear we’ll be together
At sea, or beached ashore

I asked for nothing else
what else is there, in our chosen role
than facing gales a’for the main’sail
always standing, soul to soul

We angle hard to starboard
Or tilt softly off to port
Are you happy, dear, for truly I am
on our ruby yacht
of Omar Khayyam

Quinn, Uncle Fester and that painter with the big hair

Am I the only one in Illinois who watched Gov. Quinn’s State of the State fireside chat and thought, hey, doesn’t he look a lot like Uncle Fester with just a little more hair?

And then I snapped out of that reverie and realized it was just the mesmerizing quality of Quinn’s off-the-3-by-5-note-cards address that allowed my mind to wander if not wonder. While I did my level best to pay attention to the important points the governor was making, I was defeated by two liabilities: He didn’t actually say anything, even though I was listening real hard. And, two, he made me sleepy.

I get nearly the same effect while watching the Bob Ross “Joy of Painting” series on public television. The fact that Bob had been dead for 15 years while his career rolled on to even more sublime heights never diminished the soothing quality of his shows. He had a voice like maple syrup, and I guess his artwork was acceptable if you acknowledged it was dumbed down enough that even I might have been tempted to take a crack at the easel. He did great clouds and mountains. He loved titanium white. His tubes of oils apparently contained no capability to paint humans.

Though Bob was hypnotic, I never had a yen to paint for longer than the 30 minutes his show ran – even the kitchen which could have used a few coats of semi-gloss latex. A noontime dip into of Bob’s art lessons and one cold Budweiser would send me right off to snooze city. It’s safer than using that leftover prescription of Tylenol 3 that you were told to throw away but didn’t because who in their right mind throws away perfectly good narcotics.

Bob Ross had the same effect as Tylenol 3. Don’t watch Bob while you’re sitting on the couch unless you’ve blocked out some midday sack time.

After watching 138 of his shows in Florida, I didn’t get much from the experience except his mantra that screwing up with errant brush strokes can be “a happy accident” if you look at it the right way. And then there was the one question about him that no one ever answered: How could a guy who resembled an incredibly white Bichon Frise get that amazing Afro hairdo? It was like this skinny translucent dude was wearing a large reddish bush on his head.

During this Quinn-induced midday reverie, I also was thinking how easy a gig it must be to be a flakazoid for a guy like Quinn, or most state politicians for that matter. The Guv can’t possibly expect his flaks and flakettes to be smarter or more vivacious than he is, so that opens up the field to almost all of us.

Though it might be embarrassing to list “Quinn spokesman” as your official employment on an application for bail, most people know your boss might be a dope, but it’s not your fault. After all, most bosses are dopes. He was a dope before you went to work for him, and he’ll be a dope when you’re working somewhere else.

In between this job and your next employment, you explain the episode to anyone who’s interested that it’s like your first marriage. Everybody makes mistakes. Some get fixed with a modest check. Others can take decades if you’re not careful. I always use the Bogart line from “Casablanca” to answer why he went looking for sea breezes and wound up in the desert. “I was misinformed.”

I often thought the various folks who appeared in public and announced what their boss, Rod Blagojevich, was up to this fine day must have viewed that job as a bit role in a new Fellini movie, replete with clowns, hallucinations captured with cameras tilted at odd angles and many large, angry Italian women with moustaches. They all looked like they wished they could be doing something else at the moment, like being abducted by anal-probing aliens maybe.

To be fair to the current governor, his amusing, docile ineptitude seems a fair compensation after what the state has endured the past few years. Any state that elected Blago twice has no room to quibble about Uncle Fester With Better Hair. And as far as we know, Quinn hasn’t had time yet to do anything of criminal nature.

And if he does, you can guess it won’t be a real crime. As with Bob Ross, it most likely will be a “happy accident.”

Sam and Conrad: Sharing

Of all the topics that gush garbage, the post-apocalyptic assessment of failed newspaper vultures in Chicago is among the most resiliently productive.

The desire to snuggle up to Sam Zell about his misunderstood grandeur never ceases to amaze. The latest in this category is Ben Johnson’s new business biography, “Money Talks, Bullshit Walks: Inside the Contrarian Mind of Billionaire Sam Zell,” which offers a favorable and totally erroneous view of Zell’s quirks.

There were those who insisted then and still do that Conrad Black was a charming, rogue genius, rather than a callous pillager of the Chicago Sun-Times Empire. Those of us close enough to Black’s various thug hirelings surely could catch the scent of mendacity on the air when they ran the Sun-Times. The interim ownership of the Sun-Times, manifested by affable but totally baffled CEO Cyrus Friedheim, was less evil than merely inept.

Sam Zell was no less a barbarian than Black. And history now suggests a willfull, dogged, ignorant barbarian whose only skill was possession of money.

But because I know a little first hand about both situations, I can tell you what the two enterprises had in common and why they both ultimately failed.

Sam Zell and Conrad Black neither understood nor cared about the people whose lives were in their hands. This might seem a simplistic can’t-we-all-just-be-chums criticism. But that’s not what good management is. And thoughtful ownership certainly requires more fundamental strengths than a warm, caring disposition. In its least pleasant manifestation, good management can sometimes seem more like surgery where the pain of the present is a necessary down payment on a better future.

That results when owners have some rational view of what the future will look like.
What Zell and Black exhibited was simply bad management writ large. They were both thumping around blindly in a dark cave, hoping to stumble into the right answers. Neither clearly understood what it was they owned, and they shielded their ineptitude inside brashness.

They’re not the first, of course. Sam and Conrad both stood on the shoulders of media dwarfs. For at least 30 years, the newspaper industry has been sliding toward a false insistence that what’s in a newspaper is a product. It’s a hideous fallacy. Even when moguls such as Black and Zell proclaimed the ultimate value of “content,” they were describing “content” as a “product” that reflects “what our customers want.”

It’s the Keebler Elf view of newspapers. We will crank out better cookies if we get more cookie dough.
But newspapers aren’t really factories. They are more like organic farms or perhaps think tanks from which a tangible result flows. And perhaps the only meaningful, useful, worthwhile – and profitable — process inside a newspaper is the intellectual vigor of hundreds of smart people linked in a common goal. That, and little else, produces profit.

And an organic farm has no point to existence if it doesn’t produce good food.

Zell and Black were simply confused about what the product was. They thought the product was profit.

But what if, and here comes the biggie, great newspaper owners are good mostly at harnessing the common will of very smart people trying to do good? Perhaps fixing the world’s evils and shining light into dark corners are the only legitimate products a newspaper can achieve. All else simply becomes a metric for how much income the enterprise can reasonably achieve.

But this is not to say that newspapers and those who toil for them don’t have responsibility in the industry’s death throes. True, it was never those inside any newspaper who demanded the profit level be 15 percent. That was an imposed, artificial value tied to stock ownership and the quarterly tyrannies of Wall Street.

As both Zell and Black found, managing real thinking people is harder than managing brick and mortar. First, it’s a simpler task to order bricks to sit still and be quiet. The bricks don’t talk back when you do something stupid.

When you announce to them that they are your “co-partners” in this grand building, the bricks don’t scoff at the smug dopiness of such piffle. In Zell’s case, he had the unctuous gall to suggest to employees he was dragging by a long rope behind his pickup truck that they actually were “Tribune co-owners.” He did not even have the courtesy to tell them that the warm, wet puddle on their shoes was not rain.

Maybe newspapers began dying when they stopped thinking. They stopped thinking in part because, at least for some time, they were earning too much money for their own good. This is a criticism that certainly no longer applies.

Against that definition, Zell and Black were not doomed by market forces or recalcitrant employees. They were doomed by their own lacks of imagination and understanding.

The Tribune properties are vastly changed now from when Zell bought them, and anyone may judge whether the changes were for the good. They are certainly leaner now which might make them more attractive to new ownership as individual parcels. But the one reality that could not be changed was how much Zell indebted the company. Tribune could never have made enough profit to pay off that $13 billion debt. Someone needed to chop up Sam’s credit cards.

The new owners of the Sun-Times group talk about the massive value of its community papers that ring the Loop. Previous owners did the same thing without any sign they actually meant it. And many signals they thought it was a joke. If you remember the human-filled pods being farmed for their energy by “The Matrix” machines, you’ll get some sense of those papers traditional relationship with the Time Lords at the Sun-Times.

Both Black and Zell failed – one because of criminal greed and the other from towering ignorance – for basically the same underlying misunderstanding.

They viewed what they owned as inanimate objects. Beyond the real estate and presses possessed by newspapers, their total value is mostly invested in humans. Not merely a rhetorical, marketing metaphor, but actually and really. They are like great universities whose real intangible value is the sum of the hearts and minds inside the buildings, less the building themselves. Put the minds of a hundred great professors and 2,000 great students inside a beach shack and it’s still a great university.

Black might have imitated human concern for others had the concept of shared values with the common folk ever intruded on his faux nobleman’s world view.

Neither of the media giants was very good at playing well with others.

But there still are those who think Zell and Black were merely misunderstood geniuses. Sic Semper Effluvium.