The Revenge of Scobie

I'm sitting alone in a conference room in the Marin County Civic Center, possibly the most beautiful and unusual county administration building in the country. It was designed by Frank Lloyd Wright and it feels like it's a mile long crazy layer cake. I'm working/not working, at the time of a mediation where both sides are percolating in their own conference rooms on the ideas we are batting around. The time component is a necessary part of any negotiation but it too is like a baked good. There is a perfect amount of time for a souffle to bake or a loaf of bread to rise but if you wait too long, it falls apart. It's only mid-afternoon, so it hasn't been too long yet. I traveled all day yesterday back from Alabama and I'm having a little whiplash turning around to work right away. That's how cushy my life is: I can usually build in a day of resettling before I'm back at it. This was a real whirlwind tour, though. We flew into Birmingham on Thursday, checke...

 In high school, I became friends with a kid named David Lantham Reamer. He was just about as cranky as you can imagine someone would be who had to hear "Reamer? I hardly know her!" on a daily basis. We used to drive around in his Honda Civic, sharing cigarettes with the windows rolled down even on the coldest nights, listening to the mixtapes he was an expert at making. Not just song choice, either. He made elaborate tape cases with liner notes written in tiny letters in his distinct handwriting. He wrote me lots of letters too, typed out in lower case or spaced all over the place sometimes, in the manner of his favorite poets, ee cummings and Lawrence Ferlinghetti. He wrote poetry and took lots of photographs with an old Canon.  Before he died, he was a photographer. Specifically, he was a food photographer  and a damn good one. Before that, he was a chef. He did some other stuff too, but the main thing he did was collect really cool stuff. He had a voracious appetite f...