By Daniel B. Kline
As my friend's approximately 20-year-old son, Cody, waits until the recurring brain tumors that have tormented his life kill him, he wants exactly one thing. Were he dying as a boy, he might want a trip to Dinsey World or to meet his favorite ballplayer, but as a grown man, his dream is for a woman to have sex with him.
While the movement to legalize medical marijuana has gained traction in some states, nobody ever suggests legalizing medical prostitution. Perhaps that's because I just made up the term or maybe it's because the therapeutic benefits of hookers are not quite as obvious as those of smoking some pot.
Still, whatever you feel about prostitution, you have to consider that there are certainly situations when sleeping with someone for money might actually be a public service. Cody is essentially immobile and fairly difficult to transport so he has no prospects for having a relationship with a girl in a physical sense and the best he might hope for would be an Internet chat pal.
It's hard to consider him wrong for wanting the experience that most of us (no matter how inept we were in high school) have had by the time we hit our 20s. Since he has no charitable friends (or at least charitable in the Biblical sense) his only option would be paying for a professional.
Unfortunately, the "Make A Wish" folks won't send you on a trip to Nevada or Amsterdam even when your endless battle against your illness has left you developmentally delayed, semi-paralyzed, blind and wearing a diaper. Of course, this young man's family could round up some local "talent" to fulfill his wish, but that seems a little dangerous along with it being illegal.
This young man will never have a normal life and he has had precious little joy in his time on Earth despite his loving parents, brothers and family's best efforts. He has also lived with the knowledge that more tumors might grow at any minute or one of the weakened blood vessels in his brain might snap, killing him or giving him another stroke.
The first stroke left him unable to walk and a recent aneurysm took away his vision and some of his memory. He may recover his memory and he may regain his vision, but likely sooner rather than later he will lose what has been a valiant struggle.
In recent years his main joys have been movies, toys and some of the saucier pleasures of the Internet. Those small bits of fun remain impossible for him since his aneurysm and though he continues to fight, he has precious little reason to want to continue the struggle.
In reality it may be too late for Cody as in his current condition sex would be unlikely if not impossible even if a willing partner or a legal prostitute were possible. Still, for his sake, why don't we consider looking at all our laws and whether we need to make exceptions for humane reasons?
Medical prostitution makes sense and it might provide a little joy in the lives of people who have very little. Of course, deciding who gets a prescription might be a challenge, but the potential good outweighs the obvious hurdles.
Daniel B. Kline's work appears in over 100 papers weekly. When he is not writing Kline serves as general manager of Time Machine Hobby New England's largest hobby and toy store, www.timemachinehobby.com. He can be reached at dan@notastep.com or you can see his archive at dbkline.com or befriend him at facebook.com/dankline.
Tuesday, August 18, 2009
Tuesday, August 11, 2009
Give me some free money too
By Daniel B. Kline
Tired of complaining about President Barack Obama's free money for people who behaved irresponsibly economics, I have now decided to request some dough for myself. I plan on writing my congressman, faxing my senator and sending the White House a text message demanding a bailout plan for reasonably responsible double-income families with two car payments and a mortgage.
By buying things that we could more or less afford at the time we needed them, my wife and I missed out on huge government payouts for doing things we had to do anyway. We didn't by a house or car to stimulate the economy, we bought them because we needed a place to sleep and a way to get to work.
We purchased the house (actually a condo) over two years ago with no tax credit or any other sort of government assistance. We bought my wife's car (a one-year-old Ford Taurus) after the death of her previous car.
My vehicle, however, was a sadder story as I bought a fuel-efficient Saturn Ion at the height of inflated gas prices when everyone was scrambling to find cars that got good mileage. I paid a premium for the car and, once again, got not cash from the government.
Call it bad timing or my not realizing that if Democrats got into the White House and controlled Congress than there would be free money under the guise of economic stimulus. Had I planned better, we could have gotten an $8,000 housing tax credit and $4,500 for the clunker we traded in when we bought my wife's car.
Of course, bitterness aside that none of Uncle Sam's dough made it into my bank account, if Obama had just left well enough alone, the economy would have sorted itself out. Much like my wife and I did, people would have bought homes and vehicles when they actually needed them -- one of the key components of a free market economy.
Incentivizing these purchases with tax dollars simply robs sales from the future and puts them into the present. The same thing happens in my store if we run a sale. We might have a better weekend than average, but a certain percentage of those sales were just borrowingfrom the next week.
Obama may have appeared to jump start the economy, but, really, he just ran a sale that caused people to trade in old cars a little sooner than they would have. Government, be it a Republican led one or one helmed by a Democrat, never chooses to simply leave things alone.
Had George Bush let the banks fail and had Obama let the auto companies fail, eventually, better companies would rise from the ashes. Instead, we continue to prop up diseased industries letting failures succeed on the public dime and making the public feel like everything is going great while we push doom off another day or two.
President Obama needs the courage to do nothing. Stop wasting taxpayer dollars and start realizing that the economy would be just fine if he simply left it alone.
Daniel B. Kline's work appears in over 100 papers weekly. When he is not writing Kline serves as general manager of Time Machine Hobby New England's largest hobby and toy store, www.timemachinehobby.com. He can be reached at dan@notastep.com or you can see his archive at dbkline.com or befriend him at facebook.com/dankline.
Tired of complaining about President Barack Obama's free money for people who behaved irresponsibly economics, I have now decided to request some dough for myself. I plan on writing my congressman, faxing my senator and sending the White House a text message demanding a bailout plan for reasonably responsible double-income families with two car payments and a mortgage.
By buying things that we could more or less afford at the time we needed them, my wife and I missed out on huge government payouts for doing things we had to do anyway. We didn't by a house or car to stimulate the economy, we bought them because we needed a place to sleep and a way to get to work.
We purchased the house (actually a condo) over two years ago with no tax credit or any other sort of government assistance. We bought my wife's car (a one-year-old Ford Taurus) after the death of her previous car.
My vehicle, however, was a sadder story as I bought a fuel-efficient Saturn Ion at the height of inflated gas prices when everyone was scrambling to find cars that got good mileage. I paid a premium for the car and, once again, got not cash from the government.
Call it bad timing or my not realizing that if Democrats got into the White House and controlled Congress than there would be free money under the guise of economic stimulus. Had I planned better, we could have gotten an $8,000 housing tax credit and $4,500 for the clunker we traded in when we bought my wife's car.
Of course, bitterness aside that none of Uncle Sam's dough made it into my bank account, if Obama had just left well enough alone, the economy would have sorted itself out. Much like my wife and I did, people would have bought homes and vehicles when they actually needed them -- one of the key components of a free market economy.
Incentivizing these purchases with tax dollars simply robs sales from the future and puts them into the present. The same thing happens in my store if we run a sale. We might have a better weekend than average, but a certain percentage of those sales were just borrowingfrom the next week.
Obama may have appeared to jump start the economy, but, really, he just ran a sale that caused people to trade in old cars a little sooner than they would have. Government, be it a Republican led one or one helmed by a Democrat, never chooses to simply leave things alone.
Had George Bush let the banks fail and had Obama let the auto companies fail, eventually, better companies would rise from the ashes. Instead, we continue to prop up diseased industries letting failures succeed on the public dime and making the public feel like everything is going great while we push doom off another day or two.
President Obama needs the courage to do nothing. Stop wasting taxpayer dollars and start realizing that the economy would be just fine if he simply left it alone.
Daniel B. Kline's work appears in over 100 papers weekly. When he is not writing Kline serves as general manager of Time Machine Hobby New England's largest hobby and toy store, www.timemachinehobby.com. He can be reached at dan@notastep.com or you can see his archive at dbkline.com or befriend him at facebook.com/dankline.
Wednesday, August 5, 2009
Nothing ventured, nothing gained
By Daniel B. Kline
Sleeping the normal amount of hours at night stopped weeks ago, replaced mostly by sweating and running various success/failure scenarios over in my brain. On a good night I'd catch a few hours before heading into one store to catch up on email, paperwork and other correspondence before making the hour-plus ride to our about-to-be second location.
The inability to sleep coupled with a manic desire to work has always been part of my package of mental quirks as launch day for a new venture approaches. There's an enormous amount of stress involved in trying something different and the pressure I put on myself has gotten worse as the personal stakes have risen.
When I was a major part of launching a men's lifestyle Web site in 1999 with very little money and founders who seemed somewhat intent on replacing me right up until we actually launched, I had little to lose. My then girlfriend (current wife) and I rented an apartment, had no child and had not even gotten our first cat. I didn't know enough to be scared and, frankly, failing in the Internet crazy days of the late '90s would have just meant taking a higher paying job at some other new company.
Now, my company, under my direction, has decided to launch a new store during the worst retail economy since the 1920s. Worse yet, it's an entirely different kind of store than our first, very successful location. Whereas our current store is the largest of its kind -- carrying pretty much all of everything -- the new one will be 1,000 square feet carrying a very focused selection of everything.
The new store is based on my theory that most local hobby shops and gaming stores close because they have too tight a focus -- usually only selling whatever the owner collects or plays. Our new store (hopefully stores) will combine traditional hobbies like model building and trains with games, radio control planes, helicopters, cars and trucks along with collectible gaming and plain old toys.
Since nobody except us in a pretty different setting has used this exact mix of products (hobby and toys or hobby and gaming sometimes get mixed, but not usually all three) I am either a genius or an idiot. It's, of course, the fear that I may be an idiot that keeps me up at night running through various mental spreadsheets as to what it will take to break even and waking up sweating in fear that we will build it and nobody will come.
The night before launch day was particularly sleepless as I became mentally convinced that no customer would ever come to our store. This made no sense as we had a visible location that had until its owner's recent tragic death had housed a successful hobby store. I also had commitments from local model, radio control and gaming clubs to show up and I was pretty sure my wife intended to stop by.
Nerves aside, there's a certain thrill to doing something contrarian. Opening a store in the worst economy since the 1920s often strikes people as foolish, but the rational part of me (as opposed to the panicky part) says that we sell quality products that people want and demand for toys, games and hobby items increases in a recession.
Of course, rational thought, does not occupy my mind in the middle of the night and I'm rapidly becoming a vampire who has a day job. If this store works, I hope to open hundreds more over the next few years. Someone should probably get a pot of coffee started.
Daniel B. Kline's work appears in over 100 papers weekly. When he is not writing Kline serves as general manager of Time Machine Hobby New England's largest hobby and toy store, www.timemachinehobby.com. He can be reached at dan@notastep.com or you can see his archive at dbkline.com or befriend him at facebook.com/dankline.
Sleeping the normal amount of hours at night stopped weeks ago, replaced mostly by sweating and running various success/failure scenarios over in my brain. On a good night I'd catch a few hours before heading into one store to catch up on email, paperwork and other correspondence before making the hour-plus ride to our about-to-be second location.
The inability to sleep coupled with a manic desire to work has always been part of my package of mental quirks as launch day for a new venture approaches. There's an enormous amount of stress involved in trying something different and the pressure I put on myself has gotten worse as the personal stakes have risen.
When I was a major part of launching a men's lifestyle Web site in 1999 with very little money and founders who seemed somewhat intent on replacing me right up until we actually launched, I had little to lose. My then girlfriend (current wife) and I rented an apartment, had no child and had not even gotten our first cat. I didn't know enough to be scared and, frankly, failing in the Internet crazy days of the late '90s would have just meant taking a higher paying job at some other new company.
Now, my company, under my direction, has decided to launch a new store during the worst retail economy since the 1920s. Worse yet, it's an entirely different kind of store than our first, very successful location. Whereas our current store is the largest of its kind -- carrying pretty much all of everything -- the new one will be 1,000 square feet carrying a very focused selection of everything.
The new store is based on my theory that most local hobby shops and gaming stores close because they have too tight a focus -- usually only selling whatever the owner collects or plays. Our new store (hopefully stores) will combine traditional hobbies like model building and trains with games, radio control planes, helicopters, cars and trucks along with collectible gaming and plain old toys.
Since nobody except us in a pretty different setting has used this exact mix of products (hobby and toys or hobby and gaming sometimes get mixed, but not usually all three) I am either a genius or an idiot. It's, of course, the fear that I may be an idiot that keeps me up at night running through various mental spreadsheets as to what it will take to break even and waking up sweating in fear that we will build it and nobody will come.
The night before launch day was particularly sleepless as I became mentally convinced that no customer would ever come to our store. This made no sense as we had a visible location that had until its owner's recent tragic death had housed a successful hobby store. I also had commitments from local model, radio control and gaming clubs to show up and I was pretty sure my wife intended to stop by.
Nerves aside, there's a certain thrill to doing something contrarian. Opening a store in the worst economy since the 1920s often strikes people as foolish, but the rational part of me (as opposed to the panicky part) says that we sell quality products that people want and demand for toys, games and hobby items increases in a recession.
Of course, rational thought, does not occupy my mind in the middle of the night and I'm rapidly becoming a vampire who has a day job. If this store works, I hope to open hundreds more over the next few years. Someone should probably get a pot of coffee started.
Daniel B. Kline's work appears in over 100 papers weekly. When he is not writing Kline serves as general manager of Time Machine Hobby New England's largest hobby and toy store, www.timemachinehobby.com. He can be reached at dan@notastep.com or you can see his archive at dbkline.com or befriend him at facebook.com/dankline.
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