It must be bug season

I’ve been staggering around with a cold the last couple of days. My computer’s been hit with something, too, though I have no idea what it is yet.

I’m hoping we haven’t reached a stage of technological evolution where computers and their owners can come down with the same germs.

But whatever we have, my digital system and I, it’s affecting us in different ways. My computer has taken to its virtual bed and refuses to access certain addresses, as if it were some Victorian lady of refined society who suspects she has been slighted by some of her acquaintance and will no longer go calling to those homes where she is not sincerely welcomed. Her software consequently has the vapors.
I, on the other hand, being merely a laborer in her mansard-roofed house of microchips, may not lie abed genteelly flattened by my ailment, but must carry out my duties regardless of my weakened state and stuffy nose.

I had dismally resigned myself to operating in something like third gear yesterday morning and was succumbing to a last few moments of anguished immobility before flogging myself out of the sack, when I was suddenly struck by such a profound fed-uppedness at the stagnation of everything – the economy, my finances, the things in my house I can’t afford to fix, my business plans, me – that I arose from my mattress as if a spring had popped right under me, inexplicably determined to change some things I’ve been putting off out of sheer inertia and cowardice.

I had not realized before now that Disgust was one of the Muses.

But even though what it moved me to perform was not exactly creativity and innovation, what I finally got around to today – the first steps of reorganizing and redirecting some vital parts of my business – will allow me to be creative more effectively in future, if for no other reason than I won’t be fretting about the reorganization chores instead of thinking up ideas.

I may, however, still be debugging the computer. And sneezing.

Radio bedhead

Hey, there. Sorry I’m late. I had a bit of an adventure this morning.

A number of weeks ago, Cleveland’s Council of Smaller Enterprises (COSE) sent out an e-mail message inviting member businesses to apply to be on the COSE Spotlight segment of the Lanigan & Malone Morning Show on WMJI/105.7 FM. The station takes five minutes every Monday morning to put a representative of a COSE company on the air so the drive-time hosts can try to guess the nature of the business and then give the visitor a chance to talk about the company’s products or services. 

I responded to the e-mail promptly and was lucky enough to be chosen – really lucky, considering that COSE has about 17,000 members. 

The only drawback was having to get up at 5 this morning in order to get clean, dressed, fed and more or less conscious and still make it through I-480 traffic in time to arrive at the station by 8. I am, shall we say, not a morning person.

But I so overcompensated for delays and my own native sluggishness that I got to station-owner Clear Channel’s office in Independence at least 15 minutes early. Not even the receptionist was there yet, so I sat around fighting the seductive gravity of sleep until two COSE staff members showed up to oversee the event and keep me awake with genial chitchat.

The actual Spotlight is truly brief. First, John Lanigan and Jimmy Malone ask you to state your name and give them a clue about your business. Then they make a good-natured stab at guessing what it is. But mostly they let you describe it, chiming in with a comment or two and making sure that, before you leave, you’ve told listeners the company name a couple of times and explained how to reach it by phone or internet. 

It’s a nice service for local small businesses. I mean, free advertising – it’s like getting an early Christmas present, especially in a year when there are going to be fewer presents than usual. With luck, a lot of people in WMJI’s listening area have now at least heard of Geniocity.com and a few may even visit the site.

And all it cost me was the admitted agony of getting out of bed in the dark. I lived. And maybe I’ll prosper, too.  Thanks, COSE and WMJI.

When take-out is better than homemade

So much of what we need and want has become available in stores, ready-made, that Americans have developed a reverse snobbery about anything made from scratch.

This didn’t used to be the case – only a century ago, people oohed enviously over decorated bakery cakes and department-store clothes, while putting up their own canned goods and knitting their own lumpy sweaters because they had to. Only the rich could afford the fancy stuff made by professionals.

Now, however, we get such a staggering percentage of our goods and services from specialists in the business of providing them that the rare loaf of home-baked bread or the even rarer hand-crocheted baby blanket is greeted as if it were a Faberge egg. It’s become normal for people to have less time than money; consequently, made-it-myself stuff – from kindergartners’ Halloween costumes to crown molding - has become special, chic, the best.

Except in business. I’m not talking about the products, I’m talking about the business: Who in the world thinks keeping the books herself and writing the press releases herself and managing the inventory herself and teaching herself e-marketing late at night has any cachet?

I sure don’t. My artist contracts are not more glorious because I fill them in and print them out myself. I wish like hell I had all kinds of money to rent a big office away from my home and pay experts to speed brilliantly through the jobs I’m still struggling to figure out.  I dream of advertising and sales managers and a real staffed newsroom the way the Cratchit children dreamed of gleaming toy-shop presents and a 30-lb. roast goose.

No, a homemade business operation is not something to point out with shy pride to your dinner party guests as if it were a mahogany breakfront you’d just built or a beer you microbrewed in the basement. A homemade business operation is something you stay abashed and quiet about until you finally get capitalized and can bring in the best, most effective, already assembled, solid-thunk-when-you-slam-the-door type support your cold hard cash and good credit can buy.

Quiet, that is, unless you’re a blogger.

Have yourself a locally made little Christmas

“I don’t want an orphan’s tree,” said Tootie Smith.

The littlest character in Sally Benson’s sweet novella, “Meet Me in St. Louis,” was dismayed at her grandpa’s mock-serious warning that Christmas might not be much that year, just some fruit in their stockings and an evergreen trimmed with berries and nuts. The prospect made Tootie start to cry.

The holiday turned out better than that for the Smiths, in spite of money always being tight in their family of five children. But the rest of us may not be that lucky: The economy is so bad, a story in yesterday’s New York Times said, that Wal-Mart will probably be the only retailer in the nation to wake up to a big, glittering package of profits on Christmas morning.

I don’t want an orphan’s tree, either, though it’s logical for people with little to spend on presents to buy only what’s practical, cheap or both. Still, who wants to find nothing but econopacks of tube socks and bargain DVDS in her brightly wrapped gift boxes? 

The truth is, shopping at a giant factory depot like Wal-Mart may be smart if necessities and mass-produced stuff are what will make your loved ones’ holidays brighter. But it’s also simply unimaginative. Dull. Not to mention destructive to local economies, which depend largely on the jobs, goods and services generated by local entrepreneurs and small businesses.

And the truth is that everyone wants to give and get something a little special on a special occasion – not something you can find 100 billion cheap, identical, factory-made versions of.

So how do you get special and affordable? Get creative: Make things yourself, or buy locally made creative goods. There are so many kinds, no matter where you live – art, crafts, foods, clothes, toys, books, tickets to live performances, useful things and purely enjoyable ones, all unique and all devised by talented people who make your community a more interesting and economically healthy place to live. Just look around and you’ll start discovering endless gifts that could turn the holiday into a standout instead of an assembly-line copy. 

I admit I have something to gain from urging you to be more inventive with your small budget. The Geniocity Shop sells original glass, jewelry, films, pictures and more, many of them costing between $10 and $50, and nearly all of them by artists local to my company’s Northeast Ohio community. The artists are the ones who benefit most from Geniocity Shop sales. But if my shop doesn’t have something you want, dozens of other locally-owned and -stocked shops in your area will, whatever area that is.

So go ahead and buy your cost-effective, mass-made utility presents from the big-box stores, if they save you money. But for the special little gifts that will thrill, delight and turn into lifetime treasures and memories for the people you value, step into the stores owned by your neighborhood entrepreneurs.

Tootie will be happy you did.

Or does it explode?

Yes – in joy, when the dream’s deferred no longer.

Congratulations, America. Change has already begun.

Vote for your future

Today is it, ladies and gentlemen of the United States. You will have no better day on which to exercise your creative nerve than on this Election Day 2008.

Humankind has two talents besides channel-surfing that set us apart from other living creatures. One is the ability to understand that there is a future and that what we do now will affect how well we survive later. The other is the capacity to understand and invent the metaphorical, to see how a thing can represent something else, even something that doesn’t physically exist. 

Let’s use both of those skills today and imagine a nation and a world that are better than this one. Let’s Imagine a life we can start bringing about now, with the flip of a switch or the punch of a stylus. And let’s imagine that switch or stylus as the key to our own minds, minds we have to open like boxes to let the light of new ideas in. We need that light so we can create the wiser, kinder, more responsible and just culture that will allow all of us to thrive peacefully on a healed and restored planet.

No one on TV can spoon the solutions into our brains. We have to think them up ourselves. And we have to choose someone to lead us who will encourage thinking.    

That’s a lot of need and creativity to invest in a vote. So every one of them counts.

Go use yours.

Magic. Or, random panicked adaptation

I’ve been thinking of many analogies lately (most of them unpostable) to describe what I’m having to do to cope with running a start-up during the worst U.S. economic crisis in maybe 80 years.

This one seems most apt:

Wizards’ Duel

Mim represents the economy down the last treacherous flameout. Now, if only I could be sure of turning myself into the germ of success ….