HOMEPAGE

THE CliffR PROJECT

By Clifton Starr Livingstone

PART 1   - Chapters   1 – 25  ‘THE INCESSANT KNOCK OF OPPORTUNITY’

PART 2   - Chapters  26 – 33, ‘THE SALAD FLOWER DAYS’ 

PART 3   - Chapters  34 – 39, ‘THE KARMIC KAR CYCLES’ 

PART 4   - Chapters  40 – 42, ‘THE IRIDESCENT COLORS OF NATURE’

PART 5   - Chapter   43 -     ‘THE TERRIFIC TRISECTION TRIBULATIONS’

© CliffR Projections, Canada, 1998-2006.

PART 1

THE INCESSANT KNOCK OF OPPORTUNITY

 ‘LIFE IS LIKE A KOSHER BURRITO’

CHAPTER 1 

   It was a dark and stormy night. I always wanted to do that and get away with it. I mean if a pooch can do it why can’t I. Besides, if poetic license can beget a little poetic gain, why not also a little poetic pain.

   Rhetorical aspects aside, the real matter at hand is that on this particular evening I had been happily surfing on my computer when I suddenly discovered that all my Internet domain names had been stolen.

   Normally this would not be a problem. In this case however, one of the domain names currently appraised at over four million bucks and the butler didn’t do it.

   Posh tish you say, no doubt gearing up for a good one, but let me explain. In April of nineteen ninety four, my brother and I purchased domain name Look.com for a fledgling antivirus business called Look Software we were running at the time. Over time the antivirus business went kaput. Those of you in the know about the Internet business though, know that the value of Internet domain names eventually went ballistic.

   Those of you in the know, also know that because of its potential high popularity factor and the unbridled popularity of dot com during the ensuing years, Look.com in particular would have grown to became one of the most valuable and prized domain names on the Internet. If you’re into the Internet at all, you know whereof I speak.

   In short, the name eventually became so valuable somebody outright went and stole it. So if the butler didn’t do it, who did. As that’s a rather long and complicated story, perhaps I should start at the beginning.

   Simply put, the CliffR Project was my euphemism for a decision made years ago not to wind up on a cot at the Sally Ann by the time I’m sixty five. Cliff is my first name and R is my middle initial. Not that hard to figure out.

   Have I make it. The jury is out on that one. I’m now sixty seven, still haven’t made the big score, and until recently actually lived six blocks down the street from the stupid Salvation Army for over two and a half years. And don’t think that didn’t cause a nervous glance or two over my shoulder. I mean talk about having your future glaring right at you.

   To add insult to injury, my brother and I own the very large paper fortune sitting just at the other end of a very long and very unlit legal cigar over the stolen domain name.

   The other side of the coin is that ever since I turned sixty five, I’ve had the pleasure of receiving a minimum of Old Age Pension, tax free and Government sponsored. The upside is that rent and groceries are now always paid every month for the first time in over twenty three years. The down side is that I can’t go anywhere or do anything cause the pension is all she wrote and the groceries and rent are all she gets.

  To say the least, life at the moment is both rosy and vexing at the one and same time. Some would call that a Kosher Burrito. On the other side of the coin, once the legalities over the domain name get all straightened out my brother and I are on easy street big time for the rest of time.

   They say what goes around comes around. No kidding. Twenty four years ago I came to Ottawa Canada at the age of forty one to sell flowers in restaurants, bars, clubs, and taverns. I stopped a year and a half later. Exactly twenty one years later, circa, May, two thousand and three, I headed out the door again with a bucket full of posies to start all over again from scratch. The ‘Flower Dude' lived again.

   The first time around I had a good reason for selling flowers. I had arrived in Ottawa without a penny to my name. This time around I had no excuse. I let a rogue business partner clean my brother and I out of everything including look.com, and the handwriting was on the wall.

   If I haven’t mentioned it yet, my twin brother Greydie is my identical twin brother, peas in a pod. Greydie and I had bought Internet domain name Look.com in April nineteen ninety four for thirty bucks back when the Internet was les than a year and a half old. And who would have thought. The frenzied dotcom craze of the late nineties at least benefited those of us with a half decent domain name to use.

   The partner and I had gone together in a search engine website called www.look.com, which I had started developing in two thousand and one as a wise and practical use of look.com given the ideal suitability of the name. Once properly developed the website itself would have been worth many millions more, since the big money is on the Internet these days is in search engines and the name look.com is as good a search engine name as it gets.

   Ironically therefore, as a friend likes to call himself, I’m now the king of the paupers because I have a golden crown to reclaim, yet still don't have a penny to my name which I can lay my hand on.

   The reason for that is that in the fall of two thousand and three, my stupid partner went episodic and stole look.com in order to keep the whole website project for himself. That left my brother and I completely hung out to dry for cash as our eggs were all in that one and only big potential basket.

   Actually, ‘absconded with the domain name’ it is more like it, using identity theft on the Internet. Where abscond means to move about in mysterious ways, usually with the property of another.

   Worse, because of my imposed impecunious status I was forced to try and get everything back by acting as my own lawyer with no prior legal experience whatsoever. They say whoever acts as their own lawyer has a fool for a client. No kidding.

   I started out cold turkey and ended up getting even colder clucked. Courts apparently don’t like self litigators. Something about class snobbery. At any rate it was a bit like a Galley slave trying to litigate their way out of Sunday rowing. After almost two and a half years of trying to plead on bended knees before the courts, I was still out there rowing seven days a week.

   In situations like these, you either snivel, whine, and mooch which usually ticks everyone off in a total state of impatience, or you do what you gotta do. I figure I own the world's record for 'You do what you gotta do'. I mean like how many other high end executives do you know who would cram a pile of flowers in a bucket, and head out the door to the bars to keep the show afloat instead of getting lit as soon as the going gets rough.

  Actually selling flowers as a solution instead of calling in the Mob on a hit wasn’t as spur of the moment as you might think. My flower selling days actually started more than thirty years ago with a couple of friends on the back roads of Montana and a big shiny waste paper basket full of roses and carnations.

  From Missoula, our week long flower selling blitzes would take us down through to Helena the Capitol City. We would then head back up towards Butte and Anaconda. Altogether over a year, we went through Butte twice and Anaconda once.

   Like brother and sister, Butte was the mine, Anaconda was the smelter. Anaconda was at one time, maybe still is, home to the world's largest freestanding smokestack.

   The smokestack was red brick and enormous. It almost kind of made you think of Jack and the beanstalk because it was a whole city block wide at the base and went way up there. It was also quite the belcher. Talk about a finger up to the environment.

   Likewise, the mine itself wasn’t all that hard to detect. It sat at the time smack dab on half of downtown Butte. As the mine encroached into the city day by day like Pac Man relentlessly knocking off your good stuff, the city was being moved by engineers a street at a time to a new location way out of the way of the shovel. A perfect example of the good old American dream of making money at all costs.

   Anaconda itself was way off the beaten path. The only thing to do in Anaconda apparently was to work and drink, because the only thing in town besides the five square miles of smelter were a few houses and a whole lot of bustling little bars.

   On the trip through, my friends dropped me off with a full load of flowers around seven in the evening on one of the town's more promising strips. The cue up was that they would pick me up again at eleven.

   The strip looked like any small residential commercial zone away from the principle main drag in any reasonably small sized town just about any where in the country. Namely, a few storefronts and the rest houses.

   At every intersection though was a hot spot watering hole or two. A flower seller's dream come true.

   I had already finished plying up one side of the street and had been  working my way back down the other side. It was around nine o'clock. The next place up was a really neat looking little place, quaint, with weathered barn siding and a liberal festooning of wagon wheels and lanterns all over the front.

   "Ah", I said to myself in eager anticipation, "a Country and Western bar". At any given moment on the planet, the two things you could always count on were that taxes will go up and you would sell a flower or two in a Country and Western bar. It was either something about smelling the roses along the way or that all the males suddenly saw the answer to the problem.

   At any rate, well pumped before I even got into the place, I burst through the door and headed straight towards the first table asking if anyone would like to buy a flower. My plan had been to do a few tables first on the way up to the bar to get a buzz going, then see the manager for permission to do the rest of the place. A common and well honed practice.

   I stopped in mid sentence. Actually I stopped in mid stride. I had stopped so abruptly my right leg was still frozen halfway up in the up cycle.

   Then in what is surely one of the peppiest little bromides ever uttered in the annuls of flower selling history, I answered myself out loud by saying, "Nope, guess not", and went straight back out the door in the exact reverse order of the way I had come in. Literally, a video tape in reverse.

   What had stopped me so suddenly in my tracks was the fact that I had looked up to see nothing but a sea of black tee shirts, black caps, black beards, lots of tattoos, and big round white eyes staring out at me from blank slack jaw faces like a momentary stoppage of time. It was a goddam biker's bar.

   In the twelve odd years I eventually sold flowers around the country, that was the one and only time I ever beat a hasty retreat. I think what had probably tipped me off so abruptly was the sound of about a hundred and fifty or so rattle snake tails snapping instantly to life when I first came bursting through the door carrying the big waste basket full of posies.

   How I wound up selling flowers in bars and taverns all across Canada and into the Northwest United States during the whole of the seventies and into the early eighties, is a story unto itself.

   How I ended up over twenty years later starting flowers all over again in Ottawa with a multi million dollar asset swiped behind me and the huge potential fortune to regain sitting in front, but absolutely nothing in my pocket except holes and a mountain of legal problems for trying to get it back, is another story yet again.

   Plus, you have to understand, this was not my first time at looking over the counter at the big enchilada. In fact, you're probably looking at the only guy in the world who turned down the exclusive rights for McDonalds for all of Canada, twice. Not just for a wimpy little outlet down the street, the whole friggin kit and caboodle for Canada.

   The first time around was when I was still a snot nosed kid at the end of my first year of university in nineteen sixty one, and the McDonald’s sign said over one million sold. The second time around was at the end of my fourth year, when I was a slightly older snot nosed kid and the McDonald’s sign said over a million and a half burgers sold.

   That’s just for starters. In fact I have come 'that' close to hitting the big one on so many occasions over the years you have to wonder just how dumb can a guy get. Like opportunity just kept knocking and I just kept walking.

   Like I once had the exclusive rights to thousands upon thousands of prime Athabasca Oil Sands leases in my pocket, and didn’t even know it. That was back in the mid sixties before the first big shovel full of the lucrative guck had been thrown in the hopper.

   In my defense though, let me say that all the good ones I've punted over the years wasn't so much for being dumb as it was for a total lack of alacrity about those hard nosed business matters at the moments when they mattered the most. Well ok, it was for being dumb too.

   At any rate, the truth of the matter is that I’ve let opportunity slip through my fingers more times in a month than most people see in a lifetime. King Midas was my nemesis.

  The section called 'The Incessant knock of Opportunity' kind of gives you the whole picture about what was going on with me all these many years about why I never seemed to make it in a financially distinguished way and certainly should have.

  The alternate title 'Life is like a Kosher Burrito' reflects my predicament for the other side. For example, look at the first few paragraphs at the top again and figure it out. If it still doesn't click in, the point is that I'm potentially worth millions of dollars on the Internet on the one hand, and was selling flowers in bars and restaurants just to get by on the other. If you still don't get it then maybe you should take up knitting.

   Like I said before, I made the decision twenty four years ago to have enough money by the age of sixty five as to not end up on a cot at the Salvation Army. I am now sixty seven. And like I said before, the stupid place sat exactly six blocks down the street from my recent domicile in Ottawa. I mean literally, like drawing me in. Talk about a self fulfilling non fulfilling prophecy.

   Actually, the magnetic pull of the Sally Ann started eight years earlier in October, nineteen ninety seven. After being President of a mining company, manager of a promising rock and roll band, and co-owner of a computer antivirus company, I wound up with Greydie parked in a public trailer park and campground about fifteen miles south of Ottawa. We were holed up in a beat up twenty foot rented trailer. Parts of the trailer were all but derelict.

   The campground itself wasn't all that bad. A director of the Banco D'Mexico pulled in beside us one day in a colossal land yacht on a three week Eastern Canada holiday trek with his whole family. Actually, he spoke English rather well. Tells you who the banks were friendly with.

   We had been forced by current economics  to hole up in the place which had a glassed in porch that basically saved the day. We each had a computer at opposite ends of the porch. The TV was in the middle. The wood was rotted out in three out of the four corners of the floor though which kind of spoiled the allure.

   Greydie slept on a Futon mat along one side of the porch by his computer. I slept on a sort of bed in the trailer's sort of a bedroom. I'm exactly five foot six. My head lay hard against the headboard, my feet rested hard against the footboard, and my legs rested bent at the knee somewhere in the middle.

   The problem was that a foot and a half deep cupboard and shelves sat at one end of the bed taking up what precious little room there was across the trailer’s width. How on earth six footers were supposed to sleep in there I have no idea, except to say they probably pulled their knees up to their chins and had to stick their hands under their armpits to keep them from falling off.

  Seems as though we’re destined for fetal existence. We start off in a fetal position. After nine months we're ok. Then if you buy a small house trailer, and you're any taller than five foot five, you're back in a fetal position again for the remaining portion of your life. If the designers of these things were any taller than five foot five, then the term 'bent a bit' has a whole new meaning.

   We had been holed up in the trailer since the beginning of July nineteen ninety seven. Near the end of October, the park was closing for the winter in less than a week and we still didn’t have a new place to go. We had both just applied for welfare.

  To add insult to injury, it had just snowed an all time record snow for Ottawa for that time of the year, and the snow tires on our old beater were completely bald.

  Even though it may sound like I'm caved in to sniveling and whining a lot about all this anyway, actually I'm not. On the contrary, I’m just telling you like it was. Nor is this intended to be your standard 'Poor little old me' my parents never had a million dollars to get me started type hard luck story. The exact opposite. It’s to laugh at. You have to laugh at adversity because it's the only thing in the world adversity doesn't like.

   For example, Greydie and I had founded a software company 'Look Software' in the late eighties. Ergo, Look.com. The company had eventually migrated into a PC computer antivirus product called 'Virus Alert' Virus Alert had gained world name recognition circa, mid nineties.

   We had even copped the all important Editor’s Choice award in a nineteen ninety three edition of PC Magazine. Unfortunately in Italy, completely in Italian, though the point was made. We were hardly chopped liver.

   Our problem was that even with juicy perks like this, we couldn't get Virus Alert up into a world class maker of bucks. No backers and not enough cash flow to take it to the all important next step. So we passed the day to day operation along to another party in the mid nineties to run.

   We still retained a major piece of the action so we should have been set. The problem was that up until the end of nineteen ninety seven, the action still hadn't become anywhere near as good as the retaining. We were supposed to have a weekly draw to keep us going while the other party built the company. By late the previous winter even the draw had stopped.

  So we humbly had to move out of our not so humble rented house, into the humble and more than humbling old trailer.

  The company still had not gone into critical mass. Despite the efforts of our front end party, it was still struggling to complete final touches on a new line of products geared for the Internet and the Windows 98 styled operating systems. Sales of the older Dos styled versions which had got us originally started had all but dried to dust.

   The front end guy kept insisting that the company was currently undergoing a supposed ambitious process of financial restructuring. Nearly completed or so we were constantly being told, with supposedly really big bucks on the line. So just hang in there. Hope springs eternal.

   To say that the company's cash flow at the moment was therefore a little tight, was the understatement of the century. In situations like this either the upper management gets the money and the rank and file get stiffed. Or the rank and file get the money and the upper management lives off their other assets.

   In our case, the rank and file were getting the money and Greydie and I didn't have any other assets. The great dotcom boom of the late nineties still hadn’t started yet and look.com was still just a little unknown domain name. Hence the trailer.

   Worse, Greydie and I had done the one thing you should never ever do, namely we had put all our eggs into the one basket. Everything had gone into the one little antivirus nest egg for the bringing in of the bucks. The ever present hope of course was that the eggs would eventually hatch at any given minute and the rest would be history.

   What was most galling about the situation, except for money to work by and eat with, we were not that badly off in the potential department. For example, I had a patentable design for a Nitinol based heat engine sitting on the back burner. I likewise had a patentable Ohmwatt twaddler for hi fi loudspeakers sitting on the other back burner.

   The name for the hi fi gadget of course was tongue in cheek, but the invention wasn’t. It was actually a new design for Hi Fi loudspeakers. I had a patent granted for it in nineteen eighty four which was a bit like patenting water for drinking. And who would have foreseen the irony of that. Think cooler at any convenient Seven Eleven on any really hot day and you get the point.

   I didn’t have the money for the patent so it’s still on my list of  things to do. The idea from the loud speakers migrated over into hi fi amplifiers. I can tweak up the fidelity of any amp in minutes without complex test equipment. I don’t have to patent that because no one in a hundred million years will ever figure out how I’m doing it.

   Not forgetting too, my more recent idea for a major new Internet web site with revenue generating potentials which caused websites like www.GeoCities.com to sell for two point four billion dollars in less than two years at the height of the dot com craze. And aren't those days gone forever.

   Likewise, not to mention my idea for making E-commerce completely safe on the Internet for merchants and consumers alike. Talk about a brainstorm. The idea came so suddenly and was so complete, I not only saw the light bulb going off, I actually heard the click in my brain like someone had clicked on a wall switch. If the idea hadn’t come when I heard the click, I seriously suspect I would’ve become seriously concerned about the state of affairs going on up there.

   Our big royal plan had been that the money from the anti virus business would finance all these original projects into life. Then the website and internet security ideas. Hence the singularity of the egg basket. Now instead, everything’s sitting on the backburner like soup on the simmer waiting for the x-lax to hit the pipes and money can start flowing again. For some, tomorrow never dies. For me it’s like tomorrow never comes.

   Not to be outdone in the ideas department, Greydie for his part had a Webb site up and running, currently upgraded in two thousand and three as www.visitastronomy.com and now cosmicastronomy.com. Not exactly commercial, it’s nonetheless the largest astronomy website of it’s kind in the world.

   The irony is that during the cycle at the trailer, Greydie wasn’t able to connect to the site for over five months for the lack of a modem line for the lack of the money for a phone. There's no getting around it, when you're down for the count you're out of the money.

   Likewise, in the latter eighties Greydie had designed an all inclusive text editor called Ring World. Ring World is also still on a back burner waiting to be converted into a patch for Word and Word Perfect as an ultra simple word processor for students and beginners.

   Plus it could whip through in a few seconds some of the tasks that Word and Word Perfect take up to three years of running to accomplish. I still use it at Dos for things Word can’t even think about doing. As does Greydie. As does a friend. Ring World lives, even today, but just by a thread.

   As you can see therefore things were not actually all that bad. Just backed up a tad in the money department. I had never been in better economic potential than I was at the moment, but never broker.

   Thus it was not a matter of being down and out, just the irritating little fact of being outright out of cash. Which I'm sure is just about near the top of everyone's all time favorite 'bin there did it' shit list.

   Besides, there was also a compelling kind of arabesque about all this which was just screaming to come out of the closet. Which I could no longer ignore and eventually started writing down as this worldly tomb before you.

   For example, exactly the day before the record snowfall, a very snazzy forty foot land yacht showed one evening and parked about fifteen feet away from our dinky little trailer.

   'Whoopee do', you may be wont to comment. Combine this though with the fact that the very same couple, in the very same land yacht, had been parked in a very similar trailer park in Victoria BC., just the winter before when Mother Nature coughed up a world record four feet of snow in downtown Victoria.

   Combine that with the fact that, if you didn’t know already, that Victoria BC., never, ever, ever, gets snow. I lived in Victoria myself one winter and every square inch of Canada was covered in snow one morning except for two square miles around Victoria.

   Likewise, who ever gets snow like we had just had in the middle of October. Even when there's a ski tow overhead. Now don't you think that's just a wee bit coincidental.

   Either this had to be the Mr. and Mrs. Jack Frost we've all been hearing about, or there were some really really strange things going on here in the confluences department. I mean the obvious issue which kept getting begged was, 'What are the odds'.

   What are the odds indeed. Such ‘What are the odds’ and other such smatterings of life is also what this whole little knit and toil of doilies is all about.

   Some people spend their whole life in boring stultification. Mine has been a non-stop romp, morning, noon, and night. I have been in more hairy situations in short order than most people in a year's worth of TV sitcoms.

  My adventures cover every contingency from passing up huge fortunes or getting them stolen, to falling off a steep cliff and saving myself only by catching the microscopic tip of a prospector's pick on a tiny little branch. Indiana Jones had a secret partner.

   I even drove for a whole day once at highway speed in a raging blizzard, and no nut was holding the steering wheel to the steering column. It really kind of warm and fuzzyies you up to the big Guy when you suddenly white flash onto something like that.

   I even claim uncontestable ownership to eight additional World's records, including 'Government runaround', 'The wrong place at the wrong time', and everyone's all time favorite, 'Cant' win, can't loose, can't quit'.        

   At any rate, one day at the trailer I finally decided to commit all these living little peep holes to pen and paper by presenting them as vignettes. Together, the vignettes work like a running montage of my life up to the start of this writing at fifty nine years of age.

   Now, nearly eight years later, they’re continuing still, with yet even more wild ones under my belt as grist for the mill. What the book is not, like the North Koreans say, a story about pleasant and unpleasant things.

   The rules are simple. A good portion of the book deals with the incessant parade of juicy business opportunities which passed me by while I just stood there looking agape in the other direction. Other stuff deals with the numerous and irreverent ways in which fate has always seemed to wind things around for its own amusement in my direction. Like the Jack Frost caper above.  

   The remaining bits are humorous and situational stories too numerous to mention. All are absolutely true as well as I remember them. A few are even other people's stories as told to me by themselves. When a story is second hand, it is true to the degree that I at least believed the teller.

   Literary license aside, I've also juiced up the works a bit with reflective comments and dry asides for the sake of the moment. I even hyperbolate a bit just for the fun of it.

   I've even let loose and pontificated shamelessly on occasion. Never less than tongue in cheek though of course. Sort of. You’ll kind of have to judge that for yourself.

   I was eventually forced to divide the book into four parallel sections. Too much was happening during any one of the time sequences to keep the segways, a really self explanatory term, coherent for the reader during the given period of time. Generally speaking, each different section reflects a different take over the same time frames with convenient overlaps when all else fails.

   'The Incessant Knock of Opportunity’' is the actual basic memoir. This part is enough material for the first twenty five chapters. Five more chapters called, 'The Salad Flower Days', covers my flower selling escapades of the seventies.

   The third section goes a bit more out in left field. Well all right, a lot more. It’s a five chapter section called 'The Karmic Kar Cycles'.

   I've invoked the writer's right of poetic license in this one and beefed it up with a lot of pretty patented metaphysical whimsy. Couldn't resist. Besides, without some kind of outside help, this particular collage of stuff could easily have wound up reading like dry cornflakes. You'll see why once you get there.

   I’ve also included a couple of chapters of animal stories for devoted nature lovers the end. We all know that the only thing in the world more off putting than someone's last years vacation videos, is someone's favorite pet stories. The Disney Corporation has sneaked in at least a couple of good ones over the years though so I thought I’d try my luck with 'The Iridescent Colors of Nature’.

   I’ve kept all four sections as a constant succession of romps. My rule of inclusion for each romp is simple. The story either makes you laugh or it makes you wonder. If it doesn't make you laugh or make you wonder, it should make a statement. If it doesn't make a statement then you should at least find it interesting or informative. If it doesn't do any of those, then sorry about that. You can get your money back as long as you haven’t torn off the wrapper.

   Finally, in my one and only condescendence to protocol, if someone, or a company is directly instrument in an action, then only their first name or an innuendo of the name is given. If they were strictly tangent to the action I give the full name unabashedly.

   I do this for two reasons. The first is the obvious practical one of saving me from the potential nuisance of dealing on the hot seat with someone who might have taken too much umbrage or pride at their inclusion herein. The second is for the likewise practical reason that for all but about .000000000001% of you, you wouldn't have the foggiest idea who the particular party was anyway.

   The reason for this book today and not tomorrow is simple enough. The compelling romps had finally became far too compelling to ignore. Plus of course, the even more compelling possibility of some happy lettuce. When you’re cold sober broke, all bets are on.

   For years I had thought that some day the romps would make a pretty good book. Now that I was stuck sitting cold sober broke in a miniscule derelict trailer, the prospect of the money had started looking pretty darn appealing.

   Also, I had reached the point with respect to some of the more illustrious moments of my past where the irony of the moment had finally reached the nuclear point of outright critical mass. For example, I have a pair of signed 'Thank you ... wish you all the best Cliff', letters. Both are on official White House stationary with appropriate White House seals.

   One is from the then US President Bill Clinton. The other is from the then US Vice President Al Gore. So there I sat, probably the only guy in the world with a matched pair of these and I’m also living in a derelict trailer on welfare. Now if that isn't a world record kosher burrito there isn’t one. Mexican is one of my favorite dishes. You should be getting the picture.

CHAPTER 1, CHAPTER 4, CHAPTER 26, CHAPTER 34