Sweet Tooth

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Often our luxuries come at someone else’s cost.  I personally don’t have much of a sweet tooth, but I do enjoy dark chocolate once in a while.  (Milk chocolate tends not to be vegan.)  My wife had discovered Moka Origins chocolate at a local health food store and then learned that their location is in the Poconos, just outside Honesdale.  We visited their facility, small but growing.  We learned how they’re committed to fair trade and sustainability.  And they’re gaining a reputation in a world where scale is everything and as scale increases quality declines.  We all know that to be true but we still support the big guys.  The visit to Moka Origins made me reflect, once again, how we prefer low quality and cheapness to something that’s really well made but costs more.  It’s one of the realities of our economic system.

There is a small but thriving vinyl market for sound recordings—the quality is better, and many are willing to work with the inconvenience of turntables and discs than simply streaming whatever.  I took a lesson from Moka.  The cofounder told us that large companies come into places like Africa paying low prices to buy in bulk.  They buy improperly fermented cacao beans in huge lots which probably includes some beans that aren’t even cacao.  Mixing these large lots with enough additives, they can get away with the chocolate taste most people have grown accustomed to having.  If, on the other hand, you scale down and pay attention to what you’re doing you can even tell the country of origin of chocolate by its taste.  Since Moka sells only single origin chocolate, we were given samples from three different African countries and they were obviously very different, even to someone without a sweet tooth.

Economic scale often drives quality down.  In a company where the owner comes in on a Saturday morning to personally lead a tour and where the chocolate bars they sell are literally wrapped by hand, you know you’re not in Hershey.  Or at Nestlé.  Or any other corporate candy giant.  These companies make astronomical profits.  The owners of Moka Origins spend time in Africa, developing fair trade farms to grow quality produce.  I also learned that cacao pods are technically fruits.  It’s a food.  We tend to overlook that in our quick snack culture.  This was a very educational half hour, even for someone not inclined to food tourism.  So, if you happen to be in northeast Pennsylvania on a Saturday morning, stop in to try chocolate that’s really a food.  Or you can order it online.  Just know that you’ll pay for fair pricing for those who are doing the work to raise and process cacao beans as they should be treated.  You can tell the difference fairness makes.

Oh, and I should mention they also do coffee…

Discovering Ordinary

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I wasn’t quite sure what sense of ordinariness to expect from Robert J. Wicks’ The Tao of Ordinariness.  I would say as a whole it is about becoming ordinary you.  I found the whole interesting, but it was chapter four that really caught my attention.  It’s here that Wicks starts to address those whose damaged childhoods have created a false (and frequently re-affirmed) sense of our ordinary selves.  I’ve always known I have issues—it’s pretty obvious that I’m not quite like other people I know.  I often lack confidence and, thanks to my career and publishing history, have had that sense pounded in even as an adult.  (Poundedness is not a protected category, however, and it won’t get you any special consideration.)  Up until that chapter I was thinking, “This is nice, but it just doesn’t match my experience of things.”  Then I learned why.

It is possible to change your outlook, of course.  It’s not an easy thing to do.  Our culture isn’t set up to allow for it, what with 9-2-5s and all that.  You see, my personality really fit the teaching mode and lifestyle.  I loved the work, although it was hard.  And I loved the fact that if you had free time during the day you could, if you needed to, run an errand or two.  I guess I’ve never been one to invest in that capitalistic idea that your employer is buying your time.  For some jobs, yes.  In fact, my first employment experiences were of that sort.  I started at nine, did physical work until five, with a lunch break in the middle.  Now work begins early and doesn’t really end.  Days off are few and they fly by quickly.  Changing your outlook requires time to think.  That, it seems, is what’s missing.  It makes it difficult to find out what my ordinary is.

Wicks’ book is a hopeful one.  His optimism comes through page after page.  He gives practical advice.  The subtitle reveals why the book is important: Humility and Simplicity in a Narcissistic Age.  (That last adjective is so common now that spell-check completes it automatically.)  Politicians have frequently been narcissists, but Trump has made it into a high art—care only for yourself and tell people the lies they want to hear.  You can see the calculating cynicism in every glance and gesture.  And yet, here we are.  Books like this are important.  We need to be told that there’s another way.  If only it were also possible to get your horse to drink.

The Teenth of June

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It’s only really when they have no choice.  The Wednesday holiday, that is.  No convenient weekend a day away.  So Juneteenth is actually celebrated on Juneteenth.  I believe in holidays.  I think they’re more than just time off work, and Juneteenth celebrates freedom.  And it reminds us that our African-American siblings aren’t yet truly free.  We still have much to learn and having a holiday to underscore that is important.  Capitalism does a good job of disguising freedom, of course.  Your worth is weighed by how much value you add to the company.  Taking a day off from that is an opportunity to reflect on how daily living could be improved for all.  Juneteenth is a necessary holiday.  We need constant reminding.

I don’t see many African-Americans flying flags on their houses declaring themselves “not woke.”  We prefer to believe we’ve reached perfection already.  Capitalism is great at spreading myths like that.  The basic premise behind it is greed, and people are easily divided into groups because of skin tone.  It’s a dangerous combination.  Somewhere along the way, “justice” came to be a swear word.  Particularly among one political party that has decided power, at any cost, is the sine qua non of human existence.  If that means oppressing others systemically, or if it means invading a neighboring sovereign state because you have nukes with which to threaten the rest of the world, it’s all the same.  Power is far more addictive than any opiate, but we  don’t have any laws preventing those unsuited to holding it from doing so.  Juneteenth uncovers a host of problems still to address. 

Slavery was hard to let go because it cut into profits.  Human beings love wealth more than each other.  Ironically, without others to compare with, wealth means nothing.  If money makes someone happy I have no problem with that, but it has to come with responsibility.  One way to handle it responsibly is to insist that only so much can be had before the surplus goes to insure that all people have enough.  Of course, where Supreme Court justices openly accept bribes we can’t wonder that there are legal loopholes to help the wealthy circumvent their civic duty.  We need constant reminders.  We need holidays like Juneteenth.  We need to give our African-American siblings the same rights and privileges all people should have.  It’s appropriate to celebrate small steps in that direction.  Even if it means giving a Wednesday off of work.

Empowerment

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Recommended as a worthwhile contemporary gothic novel, Alix E. Harrow’s The Once and Future Witches is a feminist tour de force.  Set in a world similar, or perhaps parallel, to ours, it follows three witch sisters in 1893.  The sisters are estranged, having been raised by an abusive father, and each has found her own way to New Salem.  The old Salem had been destroyed after the witch trials.  The three find their lives drawn together, not even knowing the others are there.  But there are also still witch hunters.  None worse than Gideon Hill, the leading candidate for mayor.  I’ve long known that books written after Trump are often fairly obvious for the hatred that oozes from political leaders.  This is one such case.  The story is one of female empowerment in the face of constant male opposition.  It goes fairly quickly for a book its size.

It’s an enjoyable read but it grows, well, harrowing towards the end.  You come to like these three very different sisters and appreciate the gifts they offer to their world.  Men, however, make the rules and often they feel that women have no place in making decisions for the public good.  I’m amazed at the number of people who still believe this.  It makes novels such as this so important.  Women with power are crucial examples to present.  The three sisters may cause mayhem, but it is generally good for the city.  When men are in charge, things tend to get repressive.  Sound familiar?

Conveying the gist of a 500-page novel isn’t a simple task so I’ll simply say that this isn’t a conventional witch story.  There’s never a question that witches are good, but capable of doing bad things.  In other words, they are pretty much like all of us.  That’s not to deny that some people become evil and that such people will gain ardent, blind followers.  The characters are memorable and likable in their very humanness.  As far as genre goes, this is a magical realism novel.  As you get drawn into Harrow’s world it becomes believable.  It’s a book that should be widely read and its plea for tolerance must be heard.  I can think of other comparisons—others have also conveyed that an unquestioning religion may become evil unintentionally.  Such conversions aren’t the kind publicly discussed, but they do fit with human experience.  I’ve intentionally left out spoilers since I want to encourage readers.  It certainly has left me thoughtful.

Mystic Thoughts

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Those who know me primarily from my writings on horror are perhaps whiplashed when I muse about spiritual matters.  I don’t mean just religion, but spirituality—the two are quite different.  If life had unfolded differently I would likely have ended up as a mystic.  The problem is “rational mystic” is an oxymoron in most minds.  Either you’re one or you’re the other.  To become a proper mystic, in any case, you can’t be bothered with such things as secular work.  Mysticism—direct encounters with the divine—requires development and practice.  You can’t always control when a trance or vision might hit you.  What if it comes during a meeting?  Say your performance and development review at work?  You see the problem.

I seriously considered becoming a monastic as a young man but I had a problem.  I was a Protestant.  Protestantism was based on the idea that Catholic practices, such as monasticism, were wrong by default.  Miracles don’t happen—haven’t done since New Testament times—and God is a biblical literalist.  Why spend valuable church funds, then, on establishing monasteries?  Still, mystical experiences happened to me.  (You’ll have to get to know me personally to find out more about that.)  I talked to my (Protestant) professors.  “You don’t want to become a mystic,” I was told.  “They always have trouble with the church.”  Eventually I became an Episcopalian, a tradition that was more open to mysticism.  It became clear in 2005, however, that the Episcopal Church wanted nothing more to do with me.  Besides, I’m a family man.

Monasteries for married folk is an idea whose time has come.  Monasticism is based on the idea that you need to isolate yourself from the world’s distractions to grow spiritually.  To me, as I noted recently regarding sacraments, the “distraction” of marriage isn’t the problem.  It’s the constant need to earn money.  More and more money.  Monasteries became wealthy because other people were glad to pay money so that someone else could do the spiritual heavy lifting for them.  You can get into Heaven on borrowed virtue.  (Even Protestants believe that.  If you doubt it, get a degree or two in theology and you’ll see.)  So why not provide monasteries for those poor souls that just don’t fit into the capitalistic ideal?  I have the vision that such places would become havens for artists of all stripes.  And that, with the goodwill of society, locations where your needs were met for an exchange of goods—building good spiritual karma for a world where most people are content with trying to get rich—might just work.  It’s an idea whose time has come.  Who’s with me?

Photo by Luís Feliciano on Unsplash

Saint Material

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Miracles don’t often make the New York Times.  The Gray Lady was reluctant to release stories about verified UFO cases, for crying out loud.  But the story about a twenty-first century saint made me pause.  Well, Carlo Acutis isn’t technically a saint yet (at least he wasn’t at the time of the story), but you can’t become a saint without miracles.  Miracles are difficult situations for which to set up a control group.  Often they involve human beings and we really don’t understand ourselves well enough to say what might be supernatural from time to time.  All we know, at least from the “educated” establishment, is that materialism accounts for everything so miracles don’t happen.  QED.  That’s why I found the account of Carlo Acutis so interesting.  A story about a young person dying from leukemia is always sad, but this report doesn’t end there.

In his brief life, Acutis tried to bring good into the world via the internet.  In this shadowy realm where trolls and hatred thrive, here was a young man trying to spread positive things through this collective of anybody who can afford connectivity.  That does make a remarkable news story in and of itself, but that miracle.  Two, in fact.  Catholic practice is not to assign sainthood without out two very carefully studied miracles.  The Vatican has been involved with science for many decades.  The idea of the Big Bang, after all, derived from Georges Lemaître, a Catholic priest and physicist.  Controls are set up for miracles, and the church even used to use Devil’s advocates to try to disprove miracles in such cases.  Skepticism was an essential part of the process.  In its own way this is the scientific study of miracles.

The miracle that may put Acutis over the top, according to the Times, is a spontaneous remission of a brain hemorrhage after a prayer was made to the young man.  Such things happen and doctors can’t explain them.  We as human beings have no way to determine what actually causes such unconventional healings—miracles—often deemed impossible by medical science.  A saint is as good an explanation as any other.  What’s fascinating here is that this miraculous recovery in all likelihood would’ve been overlooked by the New York Times, had it not been for this pending sainthood case.  Such cases as this aren’t everyday occurrences, but they reflect realities that modern people may be very slow to acknowledge.  They still do happen, whether they make the papers or not.  Perhaps our world would be a bit better if they did get reported a little more often.

Politicking

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It was weird seeing my face on a 27 x 40 poster.  When I went to give my campaign speech I was wearing dress clothes that I’d bought at Goodwill.  My “campaign manager” said I did a great job, being witty and somehow confident.  I didn’t win.  Still, my stint in politics was not yet over.  The next year one of the presidential candidates asked me to be his campaign manager.  I took on the job with gusto, and, claiming no credit, I would note that he won.  So where was all of this politicking going on?  At the United Methodist Church Conference Youth Council.  I ran for council secretary one year, and lost.  I kept the poster with my face on it for a few years but the ink faded and the paper was cheap, and besides, I’ve never considered myself much to look at.

Thinking about the resources allocations (I didn’t pay for the poster—couldn’t have if I’d wanted to), I have to wonder about the priorities of the church.  Of course, it was only much later, after I’d gained significant seminary experience myself, that I realized just how political a job “ministry” is.  Yes, I had students while I taught in seminary, already strategizing on how to become bishop.  It was a political game.  Such games are no fun without power.  And money is power.  So maybe the Western Pennsylvania Conference was funding some learning experiences on the impressionable minds of the young.  It just took me a few extra years to catch on.  (Some things never change.)

I dislike politics.  Even now I wouldn’t feel compelled to do anything beyond voting my conscience were it not the clear and obvious danger that we’re in, courtesy of what used to be a conservative political party.  Any party that can’t keep a demagogue from receiving its nomination has embraced fascism and that’s a perilous road to travel as Germany and Italy discovered about a century ago.  My dislike of ecclesiastical politics certainly played a large role in my decision not to pursue ordination.  I’ve been a church insider, and what happens at board meetings?  Politics.  The person in the pew often doesn’t realize just how political religion is.  I learned Robert’s Rules of Order from church meetings.  My nomination to elected office in the organization led nowhere.  I was left wondering if there’s anywhere left that politics don’t apply.  The print on the poster faded.  The very last time I unrolled it, it was completely blank.

Downtowns

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I recently wrote about the movie Peeping Tom.  I mentioned a scene, particularly creepy, where a news agent sells a girl a candy bar after selling an older man pornography.  Writing about this reminded me of my own youth.  After we’d moved to Rouseville, the nearest town with shops in western Pennsylvania was Oil City.  It had a reasonable downtown then—a couple of blocks with a Woolworth’s, Thrift Drugs, a movie theater (the lamented, lost Drake), stationary stores, and the like.  By the time I was in fifth grade I’d begun to discover books.  (Ours was not a reading family, being much more of the television crowd.)  Finding books in Oil City was a bit of a challenge.  There wasn’t a bookstore.  The nearest regular bookshop was all the way over in Meadville, and Mom didn’t want to drive that far too often.

I’ve noted before that I bought used books at the Goodwill up in Seneca (where we bought clothes and household items as well).  If you stayed downtown in Oil City, though, you could find books for less than a dollar in a bin at Woolworth’s.  (I still have a few of those cheaply printed and bound “Easy Eye” editions on my shelf.)  There was, however, just a door or two down, a mysterious shop where I’d spied a rotating wire rack of paperbacks.  I was curious and although Mom never forbade us to go in, she certainly didn’t encourage it.  I was a tween ravenous for new reading material.  This shop also sold magazines and tobacco products.  Some of the magazines had their covers obscured, and although on the cusp of puberty, I was really only after books.

One time I went in to give the wire rack a whirl.  I seem to recall that the owner gave a rather wry look when a minor, myopically focused on books, wandered in.  The fare there was not what I was used to.  There was a novel about Bigfoot, I recall.  I thought maybe that would be of interest, but I didn’t buy it.  When I walked out, I had that creepy feeling that seedy places seem to leave palpably on your skin.  I guess it might’ve been the feeling of that innocent little girl wandering into a shop selling nudie pictures to buy a candy bar—probably because it was the closest shop to home.  Such downtowns, and undoubtedly, such stores still exist.  They’ve become rare.  Downtown Oil City is no longer recognizable when I go there.  Now, it seems, there’s nowhere to buy books at all.

Ordinary Heroes

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Mothers sacrifice to give us life.  Sacrifice lies at the heart of much of religion, so it may be that women resonate with this theme naturally.  Without mothers none of us would be here to read this right now.  Mothers are mortals, however, like most heroes.  Naturally I’m thinking of my mother today and how much like a hero she was.  Like many heroes, she was prepared to die.  Her love, however, lives on.  It’s difficult, if not impossible, to count all the ways a mother influences our lives.  Not all are gifted at it.  It’s a difficult job, and one for which there’s no “economic” benefit—you don’t get paid for supplying the world with future contributors to this human experiment.  So we pause to think of how we might show our respect today.

I try not to involve family or friends on this blog—I don’t like giving the internet everything—but the other mother in my daily life, my wife, has said it’s okay.  This week we received the news that her cancer is in remission.  This joyous news came just in time for Mother’s Day and gives us yet another reason to celebrate.  Mother’s Day keeps on taking new shades of meaning as life unfolds.  Nature both takes and gives.  Sometimes in rapid succession.  We need to appreciate all that mothers, women, contribute to our lives and society.  I’ve never been able to figure out why this is such a difficult thing to figure out.  Some men seem to think it’s not as important as things like making money and making war.  We couldn’t do anything, however, without mothers to put us here.

My thoughts are just a touch scattered today, being pulled this way and that.  Since my mother’s death last year we’ve passed Christmas, Easter, her birthday, and now Mother’s Day.  There have been plenty of occasions to stop and remember.  I know that my choices in life have been profoundly influenced by her guidance.  Her wisdom.  She always said that she wasn’t smart, but intelligence doesn’t come only from finishing high school.  Life is a teacher for all who are capable of learning.  Having come through a dysfunctional home life herself, and two difficult marriages, she managed to show how to exist in the world with grace.  And she taught the value of sacrifice through her own example.  We honor our mothers by treating women more equitably everywhere.  And guys, there are lessons to be learned here.

Wachet auf

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I have a proposition.  Some folks in town have a big “Anti-Woke” (aka, “asleep”) flag on their house, along with various Trump paraphernalia.  Since the Republican Party has largely become reactionary and would, admittedly, still prefer to be asleep, perhaps Democrats should adopt Buddha as a symbol.  I know this would be dangerous in a nation that prides itself as being the city set on a hill, but “buddha” means “awoken one.”  I’m not a Buddhist but I have no problem with it.  The Eightfold Path makes a lot of sense to me.  In any case, a good symbol is something to be cherished.  I think of Gordon Deitrich having a Qur’an in his house, even as a gay man, in V for Vendetta.  Symbols are important.  The anti-woke seem to have forgotten Matthew 24.42 “Watch therefore: for ye know not what hour your Lord doth come.”  The Bible generally advocates wakefulness.

Photo by Mattia Faloretti on Unsplash

Trump-branded Christianity is a strange beast.  Certainly the use of a Buddha symbol would become a cudgel.  Ironically so, for a faith that promotes nonviolence.  The “foreignness” or “not-Christianness” outweighs the positive outlook it entails.  Any religion that advocates violence should reassess its principles.  Buddhism isn’t perfect—no religion is.  The basic ideas of right view, right intention, right speech, right action, right livelihood, right effort, right mindfulness, and right concentration work well enough with Christianity, as Thomas Merton discovered.  For some, however, the Asian outlook (overlooking that Christianity began in Asia) is a deal-breaker.  Strange for a global religion.  Not so unusual for those who prefer to be asleep because Fox News sings them a lullaby.

One of the most stirring Christian hymns is “Wachet auf, ruft uns die Stimme,” based on a Bach cantata.  Perhaps better known as “Sleepers Awake,” the words take their origin from Matthew 25, the parable of the ten virgins.  If I recall correctly, the virgins ready to be woke are those who fare better in this tale.  They’re less concerned with condemning other religions and more interested in being able to wake and trim their lamps swiftly when the time comes.  As I told a friend the other day, I’m an unrepentant idealist.  I do believe that we have it within ourselves to treat all people as having inherent worth and dignity.  The real draw to having Buddha is a symbol would be the introspection.  Instead of telling other people how to live, the principles are applied at home.  Of course, a person has to want to wake up for any of this to work.

Just Ask

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I see a lot of headlines, and not a few books, that puzzle over something that there’s an easy way to resolve: why do evangelicals (I’m thinking here of the sort that back Trump despite his pretty obvious criminal, predatory nature) think the way they do.  The solution is to ask evangelicals who’ve come to see things a bit differently.  I’m not the only one, I can assure you.  Many professors of religion (particularly biblical studies) and not a few ministers came from that background.  If they were true believers then, they can still remember it now.  At least I do.  I was recently reading a report in which the authors expressed surprise that evangelicals tend to see racism as a problem of individual sin rather than any systemic predisposition society imposes.  To someone who grew up that way, this is perfectly obvious.

I’m not suggesting this viewpoint is right.  What I am suggesting is that there are resources available to help understand this worldview.  To do so, it must not be approached judgmentally.  (I sometimes poke a little fun at it, but I figure my couple of decades being shaped by it entitle me to a little amusement.)  I don’t condemn evangelicals for believing as they do—that’s up to them—I do wish they’d think through a few things a bit more thoroughly (such as backing Trump).  I understand why they do it, and I take their concerns seriously.  I know that many others who study religion, or write articles about it, simply don’t understand in any kind of depth the concerns evangelicals have.  It’s only when their belief system impinges on politics that anybody seems to pay attention.

Maybe this is a principle we should apply to people in general.  Pay attention to them.  Listen to them.  Care for them.  Relentless competition wears down the soul and makes us less humane.  Religions, for all their faults, generally started out as means for human beings to get along—the earliest days we simply don’t know, but there is a wisdom in this.  In any case, if we really want to know there are people to ask.  Who’ve been there.  Whose very profession is being shoved out of higher education because it doesn’t turn a profit.  Learning used to be for the sake of increasing knowledge and since that’s no longer the case we see guesswork where before it would’ve been possible to “ask an expert.”  I often wonder about this, but as a former member of a guild that’s going extinct, I simply can’t be sure.

Technologies of Hope

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Having an immediate family member with cancer means that you look for hope everywhere.  Those who’ve brushed up against this family of diseases hopefully know that support groups abound.  Given my schedule, I don’t get out much on workday evenings, but we recently attended a survivors’ event hosted by the Andy Derr Foundation (donations accepted).  Two prominent local oncologists spoke and their tone was hopeful—always hopeful.  What really struck me was how much cancer treatment has progressed even just in the last five years.  The “cure for cancer” does not yet exist, but many technologies of hope do.  I sat there awestruck.  There are women and men spending their lives working to treat what used to be nearly always a fatal condition.  It was inspiring.

On the way home I was musing about how much we could advance in human health care if we had the budget of the military.  A vlogger we follow, John Green, happens to be a bestselling fiction author.  He is now writing a nonfiction book on tuberculosis.  This disease, for the most part, is completely treatable.  His efforts have led to lowering the cost of supplies to treat it for cash-poor countries.  I suspect he knows the same thing.  Our government decides which priorities it will fund.  Our fear—let’s be honest about this—funnels billions and billions to military budgets.  (And you wonder why I watch horror movies?)   I’m a dreamer, I confess.  But what if, world-wide, we put our money into medical budgets?  Can you even begin to imagine where we’d be by now?

I know most medical personnel are paid quite well.  My family member’s cancer medication costs more than she makes in a year, per single dose.  The technologies of hope those doctors were describing would be phenomenally expensive.  If only as a nation we had trillions of dollars at our disposal.  If only.  None of this, of course, should overshadow the tremendous work being done by nonprofits like the Andy Derr Foundation.  Channeling hundreds of thousands of dollars into research and treatment, they are making a difference.  Those beautiful survivors there that night are proof of the lives they’re helping save.  We have the ability to do amazing things.  If we support, and love one another, we can overcome a scourge that many, many families will experience, if they haven’t already.  Good work is being done.  And the good will behind it is cause for great hope.

Why Not Love?

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I learned a new word the other day: incel.  I’m not too proud to say that I had to look it up.  Although I’m on the internet quite a bit, I’m not really part of “internet culture.”  Incel is a shortened form of “involuntary celibate.”  It refers to an internet culture of mainly white, heterosexual males who consider themselves unable to find (generally) female companionship.  They often lash out at women, and sometimes at any sexually active person.  In general it seems to be a self-pitying, hateful crowd.  They tend towards misogyny and racism and, one suspects, conspiracy theories.  They apparently suffer what a friend of mine called “DSB” (deadly sperm buildup).  But the thing is, love would seem to be the cure.

Certainly women aren’t to blame.  Look, if I managed to find a woman willing to marry me there must be hope for the rest of my gender.  I’m no catch.  And why is it frustrated men take it out on women?   And underplay the achievements of women?  The Women’s March in January 2017 was the largest single-day protest in history.  Accurate numbers are difficult to attain, but it has always struck me that the U.S. Park service agents, with feet on the ground, estimated a million and a half in D.C. alone.  So we were told.  It’s almost as if nobody bothered to count because it was women.  Why is this still an issue?  How incelular are we?  Is it so difficult to give credit where credit is due?

I wonder if anybody foresaw that the internet would develop such subcultures.  Yes, Neal Stephenson’s Snow Crash gave us a metaverse where individuals lived virtually online, but did we fully realize then that sexually frustrated guys would eventually merit their own title and that some of them would perform acts of real life violence based on their own rhetoric?  Rogue males have been part of human culture all along, but the internet has offered a place to band together and become radicalized.  I, for one, had no idea that such subcultures existed.  It took reading an academic work about female leadership to learn about them.  And it makes the world a less comfortable place knowing they’re there.  Learning love is our only hope.  There are people who sublimate their frustration to hate.  What if we tried to make the internet a place where love, with or without physical entanglements, became the dominant meme?  Even those of us who work largely in isolation can see the hope in that.

Photo by Mayur Gala on Unsplash

Adulting

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Young professionals that I know often say adulting sucks.  Quite a bit of the time I tend to agree with them.  The 9-2-5 makes just getting along difficult, at times.  I’m sure there’s software to ease some of the woes, but you have to learn how to use it.  And that takes time.  Time I’d rather spend writing or reading.  For example, to get a small break on state taxes, if you work from home, you need to calculate your office space and then how much it costs to exist in your house for the year.  When I remember to do so, I can look utilities and mortgage up in Quicken.  Sometimes, however, when a book in my mind is distracting me I just tot all this up on the back of an envelope.  Then I need to type it in so my accountant can see it (taxes are far too complicated for mere mortals) and, I can’t underscore this too many times: numbers are adulting.

Photo by Tyler Easton on Unsplash

I’m an idea person.  The 9-2-5 (numbers!) that keeps you in front of a computer all week long means that things pile up.  Weekends seem too short to spend on numbers.  But you’ve got to balance that checkbook.  And even tot up the number of hours you give to “the man” each day.  What could be more adult than accounting?  Don’t get me wrong—at times numbers can be interesting.  Numbers, at their best, are philosophical.  One squared is one.  When you square any number greater than one, it increases.  One doesn’t.  And you can’t divide by zero and get zero for an answer, as handy as that’d be from time to time.  These abstract concepts come in useful but adulting involves serious numbers.  Numbers that imply liquidity.  Cash flow.  

Time is made up of numbers too.  If a social event comes up on a weekend, there goes your grocery and cleaning time.  And writing a book takes a tremendous amount of time.  It’s a second job on top of the other one you work 9-2-5.  All of this makes me think of those TIAA-CREF ads that showed prominent professors and captions that said “Because some people don’t have time to think of money.”  Or something similar.  That’s what I’m talking about.  Adulting is all about money.  And money must be taxed.  And you have to keep track of where it all goes.  I’m sure Quicken could help me with this, if I had time to learn it.  (We pay for it after all.)  But I’m kind of busy writing this book…

Learning to Write

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It’s a reciprocal relationship.  Ideally a symbiosis.  The publisher has a reach, and know-how, that an author lacks.  An author provides content the publisher needs.  Yet publishing is a business in a capitalistic world and has to (unless subsidized) turn a profit.  As an author who works in publishing I’m skewered on the horns of this dilemma.  It’s heartbreaking to see the lengths some authors go to only to find out their book is priced the same as a week’s worth of groceries.  Or three tanks full of gas.  Who buys a $100 book?  Libraries.  Well, some libraries.  Occasionally a publisher will run sales, if you order direct, but by then interest in your book (which may be timely) has passed on.  You become just another name on the shelf in the Library of Congress.

I’m looking for a publisher for my sixth book.  This has to be someone who understands that even $45 is beyond the reach of most intelligent readers.  “What the market will bear” feels like the death sentence to the years of your life you’ve put into writing the thing.  A friend once asked me, “Why do you do it?”  For authors the real question is “How can you not do it?”  The need for the validation through publication runs very deeply in some people.  More deeply than our national love for Taylor Swift.  It has to do with meaning.  Purpose.  A sense of what we’re put on earth to do.  

Image credit: Codex Manesse, public domain via Wikimedia Commons

The standard “wisdom,” and practice, is to publish in hardcover, priced for the library market, and if it sells well at $100, perhaps offer a paperback.  Hopefully priced lower than $45, but don’t hold your breath.  “What the market will bear,” should be your mantra.  It’s a wonder that civilized people ever got educated.  I grew up on cheap books from Goodwill, which is all I could afford.  College, on borrowed money, taught me the price of reading seriously.  It was a lesson I never forgot.  I’d begun my faltering steps to writing books while in high school.  I started writing short stories even earlier than that.  It has been a life of writing.  Even series books, I’ve come to see, are too easily exploited in this way.  My shortest book is priced at $40.  At least I know that I’ve written some collectors’ items.  Take heart, my fellow writers trying to emerge from academe.  There are other ways of being in the world.  And some of them may even be symbiotic.