History has shown that recessions last about two years. This one started in 2007. We hear pundits talking about a recovery, albeit a jobless one (which is an oxymoron to me). They say the recession is officially over. Why? Because they think it is? Do you think it is? As the New York Times postulated Sunday: “Is this recovery just in our minds?” Even if it is, I will be thankful.

People tend to believe what they want to believe. Reality tends to be what it is. When reality runs counter to what people want to believe, what happens? Who knows? But I will be thankful, nevertheless.

Today I will join the last-minuteers and shop for a dead. The good dead birds will probably be taken. I will likely be left with a subpar dead bird. And that’s okay. I will still give thanks. Things could be much worse. We could be turkeys.

Chapter 13

“Was this a sniper shot?” Ritko asked, flashing his badge to different people, expecting the answer to be yes. He was wrong.

“Best we can tell,” said a nurse at the door, “A woman walked in, called for Agent James and pulled a pistol on him right in the lobby.”

“Caught him in the face, as you can see,” said an EMT covering Agent James’ face with a towel. “Won’t be an open casket at his funeral.”

“Witnesses?” said Ritko. “Got to be some witnesses in an ER.”

“Shit happens down here so fast nobody really knows anything. Got their own problems,” said the nurse. “Or they wouldn’t be in an ER.”

“By the time we start asking, they ain’t talking no more,” said a deputy, walking up with a pad of scribbled notes of his own.

“Mind if I ask around?” said Ritko. “Maybe I can get a few answers you guys missed.”

“Have at it,” said the deputy. “Start with them over there in the corner. They were apparently the ones in here when it came down.”

Ritko turned to the nurse, “Mind if I recharge my cell at the desk while I’m asking around?”

“Forgot to charge it?” she said. “You’ll fit right into the news around here lately. Should I go ahead an measure you for a body bag, too?”

Ritko managed a smile and dabbed a trickle of sweat from his temple. “Give me a day or so, then order me a large with double fries.”

The nurse looked over her glasses at him without emotion. “And an extra large smart ass shake?” She waited for him to one-up her comment.

He did. “Sure. I’m not on a diet. Chocolate. I love chocolate. Goes with just about anything.”

“Your friend is dead on the floor and you make jokes? Damn.” she said. “Some kind of loyalty you boys have up north.”

“Agent James was not my friend, he was a co-worker. I hate he’s dead, but I didn’t shoot him. And you started the conversation,” he said.

“I’m from Florida, by the way,” he added. “So considering geography, check a map. You’re the Yankee here.” He had an odd way of flirting.

The nurse left. He approached five people sitting in a corner, looking captured. “My name is Agent Ritko, FBI, Can I ask a few –”

An old woman cut him off. “Ask this, ask that. Ask me did I see what happened. No. Your man got shot up close. That’s what happened.”

“Did you see the shooter? Can you describe him?” said Ritko. “Tall? White? Black? Clothes?”

“White woman. Had on clothes,” she said. “She had a .22 or a .25. My husband had a .25 once. Spanish. The gun, that is. Not my husband.”

The group looked at her and then at each other as if there would be danger in the truth. Ritko waited. “Anything else?” he asked.

“Yeah,” she said, leaned in close studying his face, sucking her false teeth in a chirping sound. “Plenty.” Her breath smelled of snuff.

“She was calm,” said the old woman. “Done it before I bet. A killer. A cold, heartless woman, lonely and suffering. Dead eyes. Manly arms.”

“Did she walk away or leave in a car or did someone pick her up?” said Ritko. “Any details will help.”

“She walked out the slider over door there and was gone,” she said. “Still held her gun beside her like she might use it again. Soon.”

An old man with a cast on his arm suspended by a sling from his shoulder coughed and said, “Bullshit.”

The old woman turned to glare at him. “What do you have to say, sir?” said Ritko. “Did you see something different?”

“The shooter was a tranny. A man dressed like a woman,” said the old man. The others turned away from him. “It’s the truth. You know it.”

“Why do you think it was a man dressed as a woman?” said Ritko. “The manly arms?”

“A wig. Hairy. Needed a shave. That wasn’t no woman unless she was here to get hormone shots or something,” said the man.

Ritko didn’t need to write these details down. They were easy to remember. “Anything else unusual?” he said.

The old man adjusted his sling. “A man wearing a dress shows up in an ER and shoots another man in the head is not unusual enough for you?”

“It is, but did you noticed any specific detail that might help ID this shooter?” said Ritko. “Any marks, tats, piercings?”

“Had hands like a man. Not a man who is just out dressing up like that for the fun of it, but hands that told a story. Dangerous hands.”

“And the story? Got any thoughts about that?” said Ritko. “It may help save others lives.”

“Don’t BS me, Mr. I know fertilizer. I worked in a manure plant for years. No lives will be saved in this. Count on it. That’s the story.”

“We can help stop that,” said Ritko.  “I can help stop it, but I need your help to do that. I just need more info. You understand?”

The man did not understand. Understanding was not part of his makeup. He was genetically confused, possibly insane – or just sadly normal.

“The woman looked like a woman I knew from a different place,” said the man. “Like my wife, maybe. Except she’s been dead for five years.”

Ritko put his pad away. This was worthless. The ER was filling with Deputies, FBI, doctors and nurses. Agent James lay inside a chalk line.

“I’ll tell you about the shooter. Big, course hands. Tight-end hands,” said the old man. “Had a wrist tattoo of a snake. It was all red.”

The old man’s eyes were jerking, either from fear or meds. Ritko had his first clue. “Red like fresh and raw or red ink?” he asked.
“Red ink,” said the man. “With three letters around the snake’s head: R.I.P.” Seems like an odd name, don’t it? Rip. Like that actor.”

Ritko knew exactly what it meant. The shooter was, indeed, not a woman. He was a man named Fussell Duware – Ritko’s ex-partner.

There was only one problem. Duware was dead. Ritko had been with him when he died; or so he thought. He actually never saw a body.

Duware was hit by friendly fire in a raid on a dockside warehouse south of Panama City on Saint Andrew Bay. Ritko had pulled the trigger.

In his business, when a guy goes down, no matter how it happens, it doesn’t happen. There are no records. It’s like he disappears.

The memory of seeing Duware in the water ferreted around in Ritko’s head until a squeaky voice cut through his thoughts.

“Jimmy Gantt will be here soon.” The old woman stared at Ritko like he owed her money. “Or Jolene will. And your snake man will die.”

I buy Crest. I have an Apple. I shop at Target. I eat chicken. I use toilet paper. I drive a Nissan and a Chevrolet and a Honda. I have a story about each of these things. They are characters in my stories. We all have stories. Go to a sports bar and pay attention. You’ll see.

Your product is a hero or villain, leading man or ingenue. It can save the day or be a sidekick. Is your product the star or an extra, muting along without a speaking part in the background of the scene?

Just because you do not allocate enough budget to tell a great story (times are tough, right?) and give your product a great script and compelling direction and a killer editor, it doesn’t mean your customers have not spent the time and money to put your product in a story of their own. And they are distributing it as you procrastinate and plan and have meetings about whose internal silo will get a bit part in the story you don’t even realize is being told. Even the meeting tells a story. And it certainly has characters.

Customers tell stories about your product every day. They cast it as the funny guy who wins in the end. Now and then they put it in peril at the hands of what they perceive as a better product or a more convenient villian. Perhaps they give your product a herculean task to accomplish  and it either nails it or blows it. Then again, they may have just killed off you product in the first scene because it’s role was so unimportant to the larger story. You may have missed it. It happened while you were in a meeting about who will be running the next effort to make sure your brand is not telling a story.

Our products are in stories whether we tell them or not. They are characters whether we cast them or not. So what are you doing to be the director of your product’s performance? Where is your script?

Companies talk about their products like the products belong to them. How preposterous. Once your product or service is out there, it belongs to others. People buy it. It becomes their property. And that is the goal, or should be, right? Selling your product. That is why you are in business. This transfer of ownership is a funny thing in branding. We often only see it from the company’s POV. Social networking and the Web, have made word of mouse the leader of the conversation about your product. Your audience helps you write the story because they buy your product or service. Without any real storytelling on your part, your product’s fate is in the hands of others. From Mr. Whipple to the PC guy, you product is cast in a story. You just may not be telling that story.

When a woman goes to the Apple store and buys an iPhone, it no longer belongs to the Mac guy from the commercials. It belongs to her. It is her product. She is the Mac girl. It is now a character in her story. She writes the script. She is the director. And Mr. Jobs is smiling. That’s how he planned it.

This is not news. It has been going on for years. Certain products are the stars of their stories. Some are obvious. As mentioned, Steve Jobs is the Alfred Hitchcock of product storytelling. He is Scorsese, Woody Allen and the Coen Brothers in a black turtleneck. The reason he is so visible and mentioned so often is simple: He understands that business is a story and his products are characters and he’s not afraid to admit that and use it.

Is General Motors not in the middle of one of the biggest stories in American history? There’s a ginormous struggle. There are good guys and bad. There are heroes and enemies and bit parts and breakout performances. In some scenes of this ongoing story, major players get offed, others get injured and have to fight back. Who will survive? If that is not an awesome story, then I have never seen one. It is The Godfather meets Braveheart and The Shawshank Redemption. That is how GM should be rebuilding – like a novel or movie. That is how it is playing out in the minds of the audience.

It’s not just about your marketing and branding and commercials and ads telling a story. You products are the story. They tell their own story. For your product to be successful, it has to be a self-contained character, always ready to tell its story or take a role in your customer’s story. Your products are already part of the conversation, like it or not. That is what is going on with social media – people are telling stories. Sometimes they are personal, sometimes general, sometimes informational. Sometimes they are random and frivolous. Will your product be Lindsey Lohan or Captain Sully? It is up to you.

The economy is tough, to be sure. But when the selling gets tough, the tough start telling great stories. I bought your product last week. Want me to send you the script?

Chapter 12

Jimmy Gantt slapped a mosquito into a splotch on the back of his neck. He knew every cop in the southeastern U.S. had his picture memorized.

Being hunted felt normal. He sipped the bottle of sweet tea and tried to remember when it wasn’t so. Even as a teenager, he was a suspect.

That is how he ended up in Vietnam. But his skills proved to be a talent in a place where death was routine and delivering it was rewarded.

Recently, it had only been rewarded with suffering to those he had come to love. His son, Ab: dead by ambush. Gus: hanging on in a hospital.

It was his granddaughter, however, that he thought about as he sat in the truck along the swampy area off highway 29 in south Alabama.

Jimmy waited for a call from Ritko. It had been a day since his last update on Gus’ condition. It ached in his head like an abscessed tooth.

The humidity boiled sweat from his back against the seat and soaked his shirt. Her felt trouble like a barometer sensing pressure.

Something was wrong. He cranked the truck and waited, thinking about of Gus and Jolene and his bent life. He had to fix what he had broken.

His ex-wife was a drunk. Ab was dead because of him. Gus never trusted him. Jolene could not believed him even when he told the truth.

Jimmy felt regret for the first time in his life. He knew it would come eventually, but he never expected it to take his rationality.

Should he go the hospital and check on Gus, risking his life and Gus’? Should he trust Ritko? Should he try to find Jolene?

Jolene was so much like Jimmy it concerned him. She didn’t have the benefit of Uncle Sam’s training or the discipline and experience.

She just had the instincts and serial calmness that pulsed in his veins. It was not a lack of morals as much as a ruptured sense of justice.

Jimmy looked at his cell and called Ritko. No answer. That confirmed bad news. He wondered what form it had taken.

Chapter 11

Drinking a diet Coke, Ritko scribbled thoughts on a small notepad. His writing was only legible to him.

The abductors wanted Bren alive, but damaged. Maybe they wanted her to know fear like her father had put into people in Jersey.

Ritko knew about her father, Lemuel, and her brother, Zeke – arms dealers. He knew about the stint in prison for Lemuel. Zeke was clean.

At least he was clean on paper. He had a file with the bureau, but no convictions. Matter of time, thought Ritko.

Bren’s family had many enemies, but so did Gus and Jimmy. Maybe the enemies were the same people, maybe not. “Zapata family,” wrote Ritko.

He drew a circle around the names on his pad, then a question mark. Ritko always thought clearer when he could see the words in writing.

Someone wanted Jimmy dead, no doubt, and they needed Gus as a decoy while they dangled Bren. More scribbling and lines drawn between names.

Someone probably wanted Gus dead. But they wanted Bren alive. They could have killed Gus easily when they took Bren from his hospital room.

Her father would send someone for Bren. Jimmy Gantt might emerge. Mr. Zapata might even send Jimmy. Jimmy would leave a mess to clean up.

Ritko wrote his own name. He was in the middle of this because Jimmy asked him to watch Gus. It was wickedly tangled for such a small town.

Ritko rolled the scenarios in his head. The kidnappers would not kill Bren. She was worth something – either money or something else.

Bren’s father, Lemuel, was a careful man. Zeke, her brother, was less so. Ritko figured Jimmy would never walk into a trap. Then it hit him.

All the characters were lining up except one – Jolene. Ritko wrote her name. The wild card. She had taken a lot of money and disappeared.

If they wanted Jolene, taking Bren would be a good way to stir the pot, cause Gus to react stupidly, which would draw out Jimmy.

Jolene had Jimmy Gantt’s blood in her veins that was a fact that required no scribbling on his pad. If she showed, trouble came with her.

Gus’ murdered brother, Ab, had Jimmy’s genes. But he was careless. That’s why he was dead. Hard to ambush a careful killer. They got him.

Why was Gus such a true, blue believer in justice? Why was he so void of the family tendencies? Maybe Gus’s mother was the good one.

But she was a drunk, not a murderer, so it was hard to tell what coursed in her arteries beyond any kind of liquor she could fanagle.

Ritko’s phone rang at the same time the nurse walked in with a message. The call and the nurse delivered the same news, and it was not good.

The nurse looked shaken. “Excuse me, Agent Ritko,” she said. “You need to go to the ER, now.” She left before he could react.

He watched her walk away, almost at a trot out the hallway exit, then continued listening to his cell. “Agent Ritko here,” he said.

The woman’s voice on the phone said, “We have a package for you. It’s wrapped in an agent’s uniform. I hope you like it.” Click.

The screen on the phone gave no number. It read, “Restricted.” Ritko ran down the stairs that emptied into the lobby of the screaming ER.

Two women wailed in a corner, one on her knees, blood splotching her face and blouse. The other stood, crying and heaving into the room.

A young man sat in a chair, blank-faced and ashen white with his mouth agape. Nurses ran diagonally, threading the connected seating.

Three nurses huddled over a body. One yelled medical terms he did not understand. Agent James lay in the door with a bullet in his head.

Black and white images of Bobby Kennedy – wide-eyed and soaking in a bloody pool on the floor of the Ambassador Hotel – filled his memory.

The difference was the color of this horrible scene, vibrant and yet washed in fluorescent pain, sweaty and yet air-conditioned cold.

Ritko felt of his gun from instinct as if everything and everyone was a threat. He regretted arguing with Agent James. It did not matter now.

Ritko speed dialed the Mobile, Alabama field office on his cell. “Agent Mikal Ritko here.” He waited, then gave his 12-digit badge number.

Sirens approached outside. People ran through the parking lot. The urgent activity around Agent James slowed and ceased. He was dead.

“Get me Agent Emanuel,” said Ritko. “I need a trace.” He walked briskly out a side door into the frantic approaching of sheriffs’ cruisers.

“Emanuel here,” grunted the voice on his phone. “What’s going on up there, Ritko? We’re picking up chatter even down here.”

“Agent James was shot at the hospital,” said Ritko. “He’s dead. I got a strange call about the time of the shooting. I need a trace.”

“I’m checking it now,” said Emanuel. Ritko heard keys clicking in the background. Emanuel whispered to himself. “A restricted number.”

“That’s why I need the trace,” said Ritko, impatiently. “Tell Mobley and Ord to get here now. Local officers are already roaming the place.”

“Got it. The number is –” Ritko’s cell went dead. He glanced at the screen. He had forgotten to charge the battery the night before.

Sail Cat Road, the sequel to No Good End, continues below. It is being posted tweet-by-tweet daily on Twitter (http://twitter.com/ttaylordude). I will post each chapter here on Posterous (in chronological order). Thank you for your time.

Chapter 10

Mama Jean called a cab for Jolene. “The bus might be a good option,” she said. “People don’t ask too many questions on a bus.”

Jolene hugged her and went back to collect her things. “I will try to repay you somehow,” she said. “May take me a while, but I will.”

“Consider it a gift,” said Mama. “I’m a generous person. Take advantage of it.” She burped a belly laugh that echoed off the purple walls.

Jolene extracted her bag from the locker. Two men entered the front of the strip joint. Jimbo knew them well and stretched out his arms.

“Boys, you probably want a nicer class of entertainment tonight,” he said. The man on the left flipped a $50 bill at Jimbo’s chest.

Arch Strung had a violent reputation. The man with him was the nephew of Juco Marinez. Both men smiled as they shoved past Jimbo.

He left the $50 on the floor and used the intercom to call back to Mama’s office. “We got trouble coming your way,” he said.

Mama was not in the office. She had walked Jolene to pick up her things. The two men roughly brushed by a stripper about to go on stage.

Mama turned in time to see them. “Awe hell no, you two ain’t coming back here,” she said. “I paid my monthly to your asshole boss.”

“This ain’t about that,” said Strung. “This is about that blonde bitch you got working back here; Jolene Skunker. I think you know her.”

Jolene was in the corner room getting her stuff together. She slipped the 9 mm out and eased to the edge of the brick wall and listened.

“She left,” said Mama. “Twenty minutes ago. Cab from one of your slime ball flunkies picked her up. Now get the hell out of my place.”

Juco Marinez stopped and rubbed the back of his neck. Arch Strung kept coming. “Then we won’t find her if we looked around,” he said.

Mama stopped Strung with a meaty left hand to his throat and pressed her .38 snub-nose into his ear. The motion caught him by surprise.

“If you can’t hear too well, maybe I can clean out your ears with this .38,” she said. “Back the hell off.”

Jolene knew it was going south. Arch cut another red-faced glance at Mama. Juco grinned and clapped like he was watching a performance.

“Arch, you going to let this bitch muscle you like that?” said Juco. “Maybe I should hire her to do your job.”

Rain began to roar on the metal roof above them muffling the music in the main room. Strung took a deep breath and backhanded Mama hard.

A table collapsed under her weight as she bounced off the wall, her .38 spinning across the floor. Juco kept clapping and laughing.

“You pancaked her,” said Juco. “Damn nice move. You haven’t lost your touch.” Neither man saw Jolene step from the dark hallway.

A muscle twitched in Strung’s cheek. Juco stopped clapping. His grin faded. “Jolene,” he said. Unlike in the movies, she said nothing.

The first 9 mm round caught Strung in the throat, jerking his upper torso back at a twisted angle and spouting a red gush down his shirt.

He stood choking and grasping his pouring neck. Mama kicked his feet out from under him. He fell beside her. She kept kicking him.

Juco dove forward in the narrow hall, trying to get to the floor. Jolene put the second round into his face just to the right of his nose.

Jimbo plowed into the scene, falling over Juco’s body and landing on a struggling Arch Strung, heaving against the bleeding for air.

You okay, Mama?” yelled Jimbo. She nodded and wiped her bloodied nose. Jolene walked up and fired into Strung’s head, ending his struggle.

Mama and Jimbo were stunned at how quickly and calmly Jolene had killed two of the most dangerous men they knew. Jolene took Juco’s gun.

“Jimbo, see if he has an extra clip,” said Jolene. “I’ll probably need it.” She went back and got her back and pulled it over her shoulder.

Mama got to her feet. Jimbo rifled Juco’s pockets and handed Jolene an extra clip. “Damn. Damn.” He was left with only one word. “Damn.”

“You sure are Jimmy Gantt’s granddaughter,” said Mama. “And you better get the hell out of here before the cops show up.”

“They already did,” said Jimbo, nodding to the crumpled bodies. “These two have badges.”

A new idea is floating around Wall Street. It involves investment companies buying your life insurance early and cashing in on it when you die. Can you say reverse mortgage? Yeah, like that.

Let’s say you have a $250,000 life insurance policy. They would give you $75,000 immediately in cash for your policy. When you die, they get the $250,000. If you have a million dollar policy, they’d give you, perhaps, $400,000 and collect a million when you’re safely in the box. Interesting concept.

The terminally sick would be especially targeted since they’ll be dead sooner than later and probably need the money right now to pay for exploding expenses involved in the long, dark, six-foot slide.

It get’s more convoluted. Once they make the deal with you and thousands of other people near the exit, they’ll package these deals into some type of fund or an auction rate security-ish instrument and sell them as investments. If such a deal sounds like the derivitaves that got our economy into trouble to begin with, you win the prize.

Life insurance companies will clearly have a say-so in this latest gamble since the person they are insuring and they company that owns the policy would be two different intities. But if people with MBA’s can find defendable ways to give a $750,000 mortgage to a person making $17,000 a year for a house that is probably worth $230,000, then I guess investing in death doesn’t seem so farfetched.

Twitter is not the salvation of your branding. There. I said it. Even though I spent a lot of time on Twitter in the last 3 months, writing a novel and a short story  Twitter will not save your business from the lack of a story. But it can help you tell your story.

First, you need to find your story. Having people monitor and manage your brand on a social network site (Twitter, Facebook, MySpace, LinkedIn, for instance) are necessary parts of any social media plan. These mediums are the connective tissues of interactive culture, no matter if it is friendship, branding or business. A compelling story, however, is the brain. Your story guides all of your social media efforts. Social media is like having an amazing vehicle. It will take you anywhere. Your story is the thing that guides your vehicle. That means people, not machinery.

This is where it gets tricky. Social media is really just people talking with each other online. No one wants to be friends with a corporation. They want to have a relationship with people. That’s why Ford’s Twitter page has names and faces attached – real people, not the corporate mission statement. Considering that 78% of people trust their friends versus your ads, social media is the main conversation for your story. Your customers are part of that story now and in most cases, they are telling your story better than you – certainly faster. Since 98% of your future customers (Millenials) are in a social network right now.

Should you write a blog? Should you post videos on YouTube? Should you comment on movies on Flixter? Should you be on Facebook? What would you tweet about every day anyway? If you have your story, you have the cohesive glue that holds all of your messages together across all of your media, social or traditional. At the end of the day, most people will still rather check their Facebook to see what their friends are doing, not what your company is doing. So you must make it interesting. A good story lays that foundation.

Stories have plots and characters and conflict. That last one there is usually an issue. Often, companies that are used to traditional branding (and even savvy social media practioners) want to avoid conflict at all costs. Conflict means something has gone wrong. The branding landcape is a place where wrong is not welcome.

Try to imagine a movie or a book or a TV show without conflict. Wouldn’t be much of a story, would it? Conflict does not have to be your CEO caught in a three-way love tryst with a politician and a suspected terrorist. It can be a real life struggle to make it against the odds. It can be a person inside your company who did something extraordinary to help a customer. As long as the conflict is in the context of your overall story, it works, so don’t fear conflict, use it.

Stories have heroes and villains. So do brands. Luke versus Darth, Dorothy versus the Wicked Witch ­ heroes and villains pull people through the story. Without contrasts what do we see? Nothing. Again, think about your story in relation to the plot of a movie you love, no matter if it is, from The Notebook to Inglourious Basterds.

When you have your story, you can tweet and follow and network – and make your brand as powerful the friendship between two people.

“Once upon a time…”

I have been in hurricanes all of my life, so I understand what is involved. They are unpleasant and destructive and kill people. Hurricanes are horrible things. My family lives on the Gulf Coast, so this time of year, I spend a lot of time watching The Weather Channel. But like it or not, hurricanes are a part of the natural cycle of life on earth and when one churns across the Atlantic, it gets a lot of airtime.

We give them names like Isabel and Ivan and Bill. With so much time being allotted to these swirling storms, why not name them after brands? Corporate sponsorships flood our TV, Web surfing and sports. Why not get companies to sponsor hurricanes? To be brutally honest, generator and chainsaw manufacturers, large hardware stores, bottled water and battery companies already profit from hurricanes (not that it is their business plan, it just happens). All types of brands run commercials and Web banners inside the blustery confines of hurricane coverage by every media outlet. Why not take the next logical step?

“Because it is a disaster, you cruel bastard,” you say.

Is that why we give hurricanes random names out of the phone book? We are not worried about women named Fran and Camille or guys named Floyd and Mitch. This year there will be a Hurricane Fred. Do you think Fred is happy about this?

Race cars and speedboats covered in logos have horrendous wrecks all the time. That doesn’t scare away sponsors. How many logos were on the car that just hit the wall and flipped twelve times?

If we get corporate sponsors for hurricanes, we can use the money generated to help the victims (sorry FEMA). Think about it, how many times is a hurricane mentioned once it cranks up off the African coast? 500 million, a billion times? The Super Bowl cannot hold a candle to the airtime of a single hurricane.

Since the stock market is nothing more than a risky, blind, dart-throwing exercise for most of us, go ahead and give hurricanes a spot on the big board as well. If humans will bet on canaries fighting (and we do), then we will gamble on the value of hurricanes to see which one gets the most corporate sponsorships. I can think of several companies that would have done no worse by slapping their logo on a 130 mph spinner. I invested in my share of them.

Currently, no one benefits from a hurricane named Opal or Dennis. Felix and Gustav and all the others have cost us trillions, all combined. Name one after a soft drink or beer company and see how much good we could do.

{ NOTE: Before anyone gets the urge to write me and complain about the callousness of this blog, just know that I was in Camille as a kid and my family lost three houses to Opal and Ivan in the last 10 years. We find a way to profit from all kinds of suffering in this world, perhaps if we think hard enough, we could find ways to mitigate that suffering. }

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I have lost my tomato war with the squirrels. I admit it. I tried to fight the good fight, but I am beat, whipped, defeated. My plants grew the size of trees, yet furry-tailed thieves stole every tomato but two runty lumps, which I ate like a cave man right off the vine while staring at them in anger. After that small taste, the minute a little tomato appears, so do three hungry-ass squirrels.

Worse than my defeat is Rudy’s defeat. It had to be tough for him, being a Jack Russell and all. The squirrels just gangsta’d up on us and overtook the place. They flaunted their fruitlifting, too. A group of them sat on the deck rail this week, brazenly munching away so Rudy and I could see them. One of them flipped me off, I swear.

Only once did we have a chance at justice. It was last Monday afternoon. I came home and saw three squirrels on the rail again, doing their culinary damnedest to eat the few green tomatoes that had sprouted. They were lined up like at a Chinese buffet and were going at it.

I snuck to the door and let Rudy out. He charged. They leaped. It’s almost 15 feet to the ground from that rail. Rudy galloped down the stairs. Two squirrels dropped their booty in free flight, landed and took off. The third squirrel held his tomato tight, catching it in the gut. Hell, yeah, it knocked the breath out of him. He struggled, heaving and gasping for breath. Rudy was on him like stink on a plumber’s friend.

I jumped into the air, arms pumping, yelling like it was a Super Bowl tackle. But the squirrel sucked in enough breath to contorted into a wiener shape and was gone in a scramble, leaving Rudy with a snout-full of tail fuzz and a confused look on his face.

We were both deflated. Adding insult to indignity, Rudy injured his back in the attempted apprehension. Now he is limping around, tail-tucked, mopey-faced and embarrassed, schooled by a gut-punched squirrel.

At eight, Rudy is old enough in human years to get his AARP card. He’s not as fast as he used to be. His back hurts and his joints ache when he runs too much. I can hear him moan in his sleep. Even jumping on the bed is getting difficult at times.

He has outlived his two neighborhood archenemy cats. The birds he used to lord over are gone. He is physically restrained from the Dyson Animal vacuum he deeply despises. Now these tomato-chomping tree rats taunt him into gimpiness. He has one last beatable adversary: The water hose. Even it has a downside.

When we turn on the hose. He attacks it like Shark Week on Discovery. When he is finished gulping a belly-full, he heists his leg a hundred times and pees for hours on everything in the yard. All of the leg-heisting causes him more pain, more limping, more moaning. Yet still has his Jack pride and gives it all a first class try. Deep down, however, he and I both know that he is running out of things to hate.