Eves and Holidays

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If you stop in to this blog for reading about horror movies, don’t worry, there’ll be plenty of that to come.  One thing everyone who knows me knows is that I believe in holidays.  Capitalism has been killing us for centuries, but since I began having to do a 9-2-5 job, I feel the grim reaper’s approach more steadily.  Day after day after day being eaten up by work and leaving so little time to be who I really am.  I invest a lot in holidays because they break, if only temporarily, capitalism’s death-grip around our throats.  And today is Christmas Eve.  Not technically a holiday, I’ve worked for employers who, Scrooge-like, don’t consider this a paid day off.  You want to mentally prepare for Christmas (the only paid holiday in the season), you cash in a vacation day.

Image credit: Sol Eytinge, Jr., The Ghost of Christmas Past. Public domain via Wikimedia Commons

As influential as Charles Dickens’ A Christmas Carol is, late capitalism simply doesn’t get  the message.  Studies show, consistently, that work in this era is more efficient when workers have more time off.  Now, I’m not so naive as to realize that some professions require work on holidays.  After all, I trained for ministry for many years, and Christmas is always a work day in that profession (even if nobody comes to church).  Emergency workers of all sorts have to be at least on call for holidays.  Police can’t assume citizens will behave just because it’s a holiday.  But such professions, I profoundly hope, have other payoffs.  I entered a profession (professoring) partially because of the division of time.  (And it is one of the few things I’m very good at.)  People should have fallow periods.  Why is Christmas Eve still a work day?

Scrooge is clearly still in charge.  I, for one, will not shed a tear when capitalism dies.  I’ll predecease it, I’m pretty sure, but even so, I welcome a world where people’s needs come before the plutocrats’ profits.  A friend of mine always insists on saying that we don’t live in a democracy but a plutocracy.  Seeing the election results last month only confirms that he’s right.  As I recently wrote here on this blog, the howling is most fierce before the new dawn.  And lasting change must take place slowly.  Sudden shifts only lead to more sudden shifts.  Stable growth is slow.  I’m sure influential people don’t read this blog, the humble musings of an unfluencer, but if they do, there’s a simple plea here.  Consider the holidays.  Read Dickens, and have the courage of your convictions afterwards.  And yes, a blog post (unpaid) will appear on Christmas.

Thankful Time

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Thanksgiving’s late this year, for which I’m thankful.  I must be nearing retirement age because I really could use a little more time off.  Of course, I’m a big fan of holidays and I wish our late capitalistic system might throw a few more bones to the dogs.  Autumn is always my favorite season.  In September I feel the migratory urge of the classroom, but that’s an unrealized desire now, so I set my eyes on Labor Day and Indigenous Peoples’ Day.  Some of the more progressive employers give the latter off.  From there I can see Halloween, although it’s often a working day.  Still, it’s Halloween.  It’s yet a long stretch from there to Thanksgiving, but if I’m careful with my vacation days I can take a few long weekends as stepping stones to this four-day weekend.

I’m not being sarcastic or facetious at all.  I don’t believe I could survive the calendar year without the holidays and I am deeply, deeply grateful for them.  Capitalism seems to have a death grip on the idea of people as “assets”—a brand of thinking that should be buried with a stake through its heart.  People are people and we work for a living.  We don’t sell our souls for health care and a roof over our heads.  The internet has increased productivity immensely, but most companies are reluctant to consider the costs of overwork.  When you can check your work email from 6 a.m. to 9 p.m., for those of you who can stay up late, don’t you think that a few more holidays might prevent burnout?  Do assets burn out?  Engine parts have to be replaced when they wear out.  Why are we so slow to learn the lesson?

Today we reflect on the things for which we are thankful.  Even in difficult times there are many.  I’m thankful to live in a world with books in it, for one.  On those rare days off I read, trying to catch up with an ever-growing stack of intellectual stimulation.  And I try my best to contribute to literary life, although my books appeal to few.  I’m thankful for hope.  Without it this last year would’ve been impossible.  And I’m thankful for family and friends, whether actual or virtual.  This is an interesting world that I’ve come to inhabit.  The more I learn the more there’s left still to learn.  And with Thanksgiving so late this year, Christmas is less than a month away.  I look ahead and I’m thankful.

Hungry Eyes

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They’re watching.  All the time.  I may be a quasi-paranoid neo-Luddite, but I have proof!  Who’s the “they”?  Technology nameless here forevermore.  So my wife and I attend Tibetan singing bowls once a month when we can.  It’s the night I get to stay up late even though it’s a “school night” and get bathed in sound.  Our facilitator is a kundalini yoga instructor.  To those of you with experience, you know what that means.  At the end of each session we sing the “Longtime Sun” song.  Each and every month the next morning I groggily look it up.  I know it’s a recent song (hey, I’m in my sixties) but I can never remember by whom.  So for the record it was written by Mike Heron of the Incredible String Band and it’s part of a piece called “A Very Cellular Song” on the 1968 album The Hangman’s Beautiful Daughter.  (Now I remember!)  Okay, so I’ve got that out of my system. (I must add that this is disputed, with some claiming it’s an old Irish blessing. But note, AI only complicates the issue because it doesn’t do actual research.)

Incredible String Band: Image credit—Bert Verhoeff / Anefo, under the Creative Commons CC0 1.0 Universal Public Domain Dedication, via Wikimedia Commons

So how’s that proof?  Well, there’s an unconventional website I check daily.  Are you surprised?  Really?  To get headlines I have to reload it daily and the ads sometimes refresh.  I checked this site a mere five minutes after searching “Longtime Sun” for maybe the fifth time and the ads in the refreshed page were for singing bowls.  Just five minutes earlier I’d been searching a hippie tune and already they were preparing ads for me.  You see, “Longtime Sun” is a standard of many (I gather from the interwebs) kundalini yoga classes.  So much so that it’s commonly said that this is a traditional Tibetan song.  Well, I suppose to call it “Very Cellular,” or even “Hangman’s Daughter,” might harsh the experience a bit.

Kundalini yoga is very esoteric stuff if you read a little more deeply.  For me such reading is an occupational hazard, so I’ve read enough to know that many respectable people might be a bit shy upon hearing the details.  That’s not to say that it’s ineffectual on the level of singing bowls.  I have great respect for esotericism, although Hinduism isn’t in my background.  But if “they” know what kundalini teaches, what kinds of ads might begin to show up on the websites I visit?  What’s truly amazing is that a web search for a specific song brought up an ad for something that would be puzzling, were a reader innocently wanting to find out about “A Very Cellular Song.”  For academic purposes, for instance.  Of course, they know, you can merch anything.  You can trust the internet only so far. And they are watching.

Mere Eagles

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One of our summertime jaunts was to the small town of Eagles Mere in the Endless Mountains region, north of the Poconos.  Growing up in western Pennsylvania, I often heard of the mysterious Poconos out east, and now that we live just south of them in the Lehigh Valley, they are weekend-getawayable.  As are points north.  Eagles Mere was an early resort town built on the second highest natural lake (“mere”) in Pennsylvania.  In the early days it was accessible mainly by a slow moving train that took visitors up the mountain.  Today, of course, everyone drives.  It’s a town of about 150 people but the population increases to 3,000 in the summer.  It’s also known for its winter sporting opportunities.  It’s fully dependent on tourism.  I got the sense from walking around that it’s the kind of place you need to stay in to appreciate fully.  Once there were four major historic hotels, all of them gone now, so visitors stay in more modest accommodations, or like us, far enough away to be affordable.

I often wonder what it must be like to live full-time in such a place.  I mean, the rest of us slog away at daily jobs until we can get away for a few days, perhaps to Eagles Mere.  I can’t imagine having to draw in your entire income during a summer with lesser business in the winter, and a smattering of visitors in the fall.  What must life be like in the off-season?  Is it better than the 9-2-5 sitting in front of a computer screen?  At least they have a beautiful, clear lake.  And peace and quiet.  One of the things that struck me—we were there on a drizzly, somewhat chilly August day—is just how silent things can be when we get away from the sounds of civilization.  Perhaps this is the pay-off to not getting year-long pay.

Such places exist because the rest of us need to escape what is it we normally do.  Work, at times, seems mainly to be dealing with other people’s frustrations.  These build up over time until we need to forget about it for a while.  In other words, getaways are interludes of fantasy.  Imagining how it must be to live with so much money that you could afford not to work, but just to paddle out on the lake, watching for eagles, and listening to silence.  Every time I visit a resort town I wonder what it must be like to live in one.  The docent at the museum said many of the 150 are descendants of those who ran the grand hotels.  Even in, perhaps especially in, the off-season this is home to dreamers.

The Unpersistence of Memory

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Perhaps this happens to you.  It’s a creepy feeling, regardless.  You’ve heard a lot about a movie and you decide to see it.  Since you’re not rich you decide to wait until it comes to a streaming service to which you already subscribe.  So far I’m sure you’re with me.  One evening, when the timing seems right, you sit down to see it.  You don’t know how it will end, but some scenes look familiar to you.  You nevertheless enjoy it—the jokes are fresh to you and you laugh.  You figure that you must’ve seen the familiar parts in the trailer.  You think the movie is quite good, and your spouse agrees.  Haunted by that uncanny feeling that parts were memories instead of just a trailer, you do some investigating only to learn that you did indeed see it before.  And it was only five years ago.

My memory is still reasonably good, I think.  I can recollect various movies from different ages of my life—including five years ago—but others failed to stick.  I hate to admit it, but this has happened to me more than once.  I’ve watched a movie, written a blog post on it, posted it, only to discover that I’d seen the film before and had even written about it.  Perhaps there’s too much stimulus entering this limited brain I have.  I can’t help but think it has to do with my work schedule; I started having such things happen when I was chained into a 9-2-5 day.  Before that, life seemed much more easily handleable.  As proof I would put forward the fact that my memory for movies, books, etc., before being dismissed from my calling is much better than it is for the years since.  Career malfunctions can have lasting effects.  A therapist once told me I was suffering PTSD.

Of course, I might just be getting older.  Still, it seems that memory works better in some circumstances than in others.  Movies have been an important part of my life, especially since being forced out of academia.  It’s troubling to find myself forgetting them.  As much as I enjoy cinema, I have limited time for watching films, and if one I rewatch wasn’t very good the first time, I’ve just used up a valuable Sunday afternoon when I could be researching my next book.  That’s the human dilemma, I suppose.  I Just can’t get over the idea that it has to do with work.  If it weren’t for that, the next book would be done already.  I’m sure this happens to everyone.  At least those with 9-2-5 jobs, if I remember correctly.

Photo by Denise Jans on Unsplash

Science of Convenience

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One thing I’ve noticed about employers is that they’re all for science, except when science contradicts capitalism.  Then they become all mystical.  I had a situation illustrate this particularly well with one of my many employers.  Touting everything to be “evidence based,” they liked to refer to the science behind their reasoning.  Then a study came out demonstrating, scientifically, that more breaks actually increase efficiency in learning and working.  Suddenly silence from management. Crickets chirped.  This observation was just as “evidence based” as daily operations, but it was ignored because, well, it would be giving too much to employees.  You see, science that benefits the upper levels of management is one thing, but by the time it trickles down, well, you know.

American culture is based on the premise that you need to drive people to work as hard as possible.  Perhaps anecdotally, the Covid-19 pandemic showed that workers at home were just as, if not more, productive than they were after enduring an often horrendous commute to get to the office.  Once pandemic strictures began to lift, however, it was all “we want you back in the office.”  Bosses like to look out over seas of employees in their cubicles and feel the surge of the galley master with his whip.  You need to keep workers in line, you understand.  That’s the way capitalism works.

I often wonder where the world would be if superpowers didn’t have cultures based on greed.  One of the seven deadly sins, or capital (!) vices, the worship of personal gain stands behind capitalism as we know it.  And we’ve seen the results.  A shrinking middle class as those with all the wealth make plutocracy out of what was intended to be a democracy.  (Of course, the wealthy founders of the country probably didn’t have a real grasp of what life was like for the poor, even at the start of things.)  Capitalism is good at using aspects of all human endeavors in order to increase its reach.  Science is one such tool.  Religion is another.  Science says more time off is good, and can increase productivity in our current world.  Religion says greed is evil.  These are the parts we’d like to ignore.  Even the Harvard Business Review suggests a four-day work week is beneficial.  Business leaders are skeptical, of course.  Skepticism is one of the elements of science.  And science can be very profitable, if it favors those who hold the reins of power.

Photo by Alex Kondratiev on Unsplash

Slow and Spry

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Businesses seem to want to move at light speed.  At least some do.  When I see that happening I think, “their strategy must be to make a fortune quickly so that when the unthought-through idea collapses they can move on to the next thing.  When I hear words like “agile” being tossed around I translate “reckless.”  Just over a century ago my ancestors were scraping out a living farming, and they got along okay.  Our acquisitiveness has outstripped our sense.  I read quite a bit about being satisfied with little.  Of course, I work in the “business world” where such ideas are anathema.  Even universities have decided to jump on the Titanic.  What could possibly go wrong?  My experience at Nashotah House was decidedly mixed.  One thing I always appreciated was the contemplative (i.e. slow) pace of things.  I may not be orthodox but I’m hardly reckless.

Perhaps buying the farm isn’t such a bad idea.  I’m afraid that I don’t have enough practical knowledge to raise my own food, even though I’m a vegan.  You see, for the things you can’t raise in the soil you need to sell surplus so that you can buy things.  Or rent movies.  And that takes business sense.  And businesses want to move at the speed of light.  I may be neurodiverse, but it takes me a while to process things.  I watch older movies.  I read slowly.  I think things through.  I do believe that businesses that last a long time have survived by moving a bit more slowly.  Like a tree.  By thinking things through.  The Vatican has been in business for a couple thousand years and they seem to be doing okay.  I could be Catholic were it not for doctrine.

I’m not the smartest guy around—not by a long shot—but I am a strategic thinker.  Strategic thought can be deep.  And counterintuitive.  And it doesn’t always lead to the desired results.  (I don’t even have a small college post, so that much is obvious.)  I’m content to let people pass me on the highway.  I don’t have to be first to market, as the saying goes.  I’m more in it for the long haul.  It hasn’t landed me wealth or fame, but I can spend a little time writing every day.  I get to watch movies that make me feel good.  I even get a book or two out the door.  Being agile is fine, but only, imho, if you think it through.

Free Word

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“Anything free is worth saving up for.”  That’s a line from one of my favorite movies of all time.   Free, though, can mean many things.  The “free cookie” is something good to entice you to buy more.  It often works.  Free, for a person, indicates the ability to do what we want (within the constraints of capitalism, of course).  But “free” can often mean cheap, overly abundant.  I like to decorate our lawn with rocks, which are often free, but if you want decorative rocks you’ve got to pay for even the ground beneath your feet.  So it is that when I attend book sales I marvel about the fact that Bibles are nearly always free.  It occurred to me again when I attended a spring book sale a few months back.  I always look through what’s on offer—call it an occupational hazard.

I used to attend the Friends of the Hunterdon County Library book sale in New Jersey.  I believe it is the largest I ever visited.  I used to get there early opening day to stand in line.  One year, one of the volunteer friends came out and announced that they had a really old Bible (only 1800s) that would be $100.  People do, however, tend to donate Bibles to book sales in great numbers.  I suspect organizers are reluctant to put Bibles in the trash.  They also know that people aren’t going to shell out money for them, so they try to give them away.  What does this say about being free?  Is it desirable to be so abundant that you’re left on that table in the back while everyone else is leaning over the more exciting items on offer?  There’s perhaps a message here.

Of course, Trump is selling Bibles for $60.  That’s a bit steep, even for an academic Bible (which his is not).  It might be suggested that this $60 is cheaper than free.  Now, I work with Bibles that are sold at a profit.  One thing I’ve learned is that Bibles sold are always for profit. Those who are honest admit what they do with the lucre.  Although he’s tried to keep it under cover, the Trump Bible does funnel profits to the GOP hopeful.  Yes, he is making money off the Bible and wants to be elected.  If that happens, freedom will disappear.  He’s said as much at his rallies.  Looks like stormy weather to me.  There are organizations that give away Bibles.  Somebody, however, pays for them.  In this strange experiment of a country, anything free is worth pondering.  Nothing, it seems, comes with no strings attached.

Mad Homework

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Watching movies can be studying.  It’s all a matter of what the exams are.  I studied enough when I was young to know that Vincent Price was a horror star.  Probably I had no conscious idea what “horror” was yet, contenting myself with terms such as “scary movies” or “monster shows.”  The Mad Magician was one of his earlier efforts and not really a great film.  The Prestige, of course, makes any magician film pale in comparison.  Still, many special effects were new in 1954 and gimmicks could be used to lure audiences in.  Many of these movies, such as Mad Magician, are ironically difficult to locate these days, having had their distribution rights bought up by various companies who know that some of us still have homework to do.

Although classified as a horror movie, there are really only a few tense moments in the whole.  It seems pretty clear who’s going to be magiced to death before it happens.  One does wonder how you avoid massive blood splatter when cutting someone’s head off with a buzz-saw.  (It might’ve made quite a 3-D effect, had they decided to put it on camera.)  Audience tolerance (and the Hays Code) wasn’t up to that level in the fifties.  It seems there was a lot of learning going on in the day.  How to make a movie frightening without violating strict rules regarding what might be shown?  Of course, the combination of writers, directors, producers, and actors have to combine just right to make a winning film and stories that rely too much on 3-D tend to show.

The villain in this case, as is often true in early Price movies, has justification.  The murders begin because his sponsor insists that any trick he invents, on or off company time, belongs to him.   Many modern employers try to institute similar terms—their salary buys you, in essence—while claiming to offer a good work/life balance.  That’s a new and foreign concept to our farming ancestors, I suspect.  People (and corporations) like to own other people to do the hard work for them.  Our awareness of this too-human tendency led to the necessity of unionization and other ways for employees to push back against the machine.  In other words, there is a bit of pathos in this early Price horror film.  There isn’t much horror but there is some social commentary.  And, of course, Price would move on to other films that could better showcase his talents.  Not all studying feels rewarding, but it’s necessary.

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.

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

Planetary Thinking

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It’s Monday, and I’m feeling like a holiday.  Good thing it’s Earth Day.  Many businesses (who still don’t consider Earth Day important enough to make it a paid holiday) are emphasizing being green these days.  Really, with global warming proving itself no myth it’s just good business to try to adapt to sustainable practices.  Those of us who are vegan find more and more companies offering animal-free options—our dependence on beef is a major environmental hazard.  It’s still a challenge finding shoes that aren’t leather based, but things are improving.  And more and more hybrids and electric cars are on the roads.  We are making progress.  We still haven’t, however, gone so far as to declare a day dedicated to preserving our home an official holiday.

I’m not jaded or capitalistic enough to think our only hope is to find off-world parking.  To raise the future of humanity elsewhere.  It’s just that people fall in line after bullies and bullies only think of themselves.  And who, thinking that an afternoon on the links can be counted as work, would consider giving mere employees a day off?  A day when we might shut down commuting schedules to save power?  A day to rest from the brutality of constant commerce.  After all, a typical weekend consists of a day for chores and a day for church.  (Still, that is, for many people.)  And then back to the office not really feeling refreshed but knowing that you can’t long survive in a pandemic-ridden world without more cash coming into the coffers.  Inflation may be going down but grocery prices aren’t.

From NASA’s photo library (public domain)

A day to celebrate home seems like a no-brainer.  Especially when it comes on a Monday or Friday.  Ah well, we’ll do our best to celebrate it around work, shall we?  We’re moving late into April.  There’s been a bit of sun mixed in with April showers, as is typical around here on this planet.  Days are growing longer and the trees are leafing out.  Spring welcomes us back to the outdoors (after work, of course) where green now predominates over brown and gray.  While we may not have the day off, we can at least take a moment or two to consider how we might be better to our planet.  How we might drive less, use less electricity, generate less waste, spare a few cows.  Who knows, it might become a habit?  If that were to happen maybe every day would become Earth Day.

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.