Laboring

I have labored full- or part-time pretty much continuously since I was 14 years old. Over the decades I have worked for under-the-table cash mowing lawns, shoveling coal and at very odd jobs, such as funk band roadie. I have worked on commission, delivering newspapers and pizzas. I worked for peanuts and tips in a variety of food service operations. And as a small businessman and employer, proprietor of a commercial print shop. And as a union employee of the state, managing a college print shop. And as a solo free-lance, doing publication and web design. And as a non-union employee, working in the online-mines here at North Country Public Radio. Except for military service and indentured servitude, I have worked under just about all the available conditions of employment.

Though I have only had Labor Day off a handful of times over the years, I appreciate it when it rolls around on the calendar. It is increasingly popular these days to minimize the contributions of the labor movement to American life. Union membership is at an historic low in terms of percentage of workers enrolled, and labor's political influence is correspondingly on the wane, even within the once "party of the working man," the Democrats. But the list of accomplishments is too long to ignore: the weekend, the forty-hour work week, pension benefits, workman's compensation, widespread health insurance, workplace safety regulations, child labor laws, the minimum wage, and on and on. The post-World War II heyday of the labor movement saw the creation of the mass middle-class, and the smallest gap in our history between rich and poor.

Despite its waning influence today, anyone who works under any circumstances is the beneficiary of the more than century-long struggle of organized labor. It defined our expectations for the good life, and created a benchmark for the American standard of living. Any working person who aspires to own a home and educate a family and enjoy the occasional vacation, or who looks forward to a secure retirement, is dreaming their dream. And without their long struggle, those aspirations would be nothing more than a dream for the vast majority. So, happy Labor Day this Monday. Hope you get a chance to put your feet up. Me--I'll be at my desk as usual.

Some assembly required

It's one of those paradoxes. The virtual world gets more and more tidy and compact--my whole music library would fit on an iPod; everything I've ever written would fit into a corner of a thumb drive; a Kindle can hold every book I've ever read. But my real world becomes more and more a mess. No really--think post-apocalypse Bartertown/Thunderdome mess, think Neanderthal midden heap mess. Think boys' dorm room closet mess. I walk in shame.

My dark wood, plate glass and brushed aluminum desk, which once looked like something trendy out of  CSI Miami, is now completely invisible under undifferentiated drifts of mail, memos, printouts, poetry chapbooks, CDs, litter from munchies, and something unrecognizable, but with a familiar smell. In addition, it holds two monitors, two speakers, one phone, an LP digital turntable, a scanner, a microphone, a headphone set, a digital camera, a semi-functioning mini-disk player, a flash recorder, a stereo remote, at least one cassette tape, one floppy disk, two mini-disks, and a zip disk in a pear tree. Also, a hand-thown lidded jar containing a hand-tooled leather change purse containing three Mercury dimes (for casting the I Ching), a hammered Chinese brass box with Imperial dragons, topped by a small cast image of the Bodhisatva of Compassion, a tube containing an unknown but popular Japanese condiment, a machine-tooled pen and holder in the shape of a '50s sci-fi rocket ship, a set of itty-bitty screwdrivers, a stapler and a Sharpie.

And that's just the desk. Just to hit the high points, seven of the dozen computers in the room work. There is a full shelf of outdated manuals for outdated software, a nice selection of early 20th century illustrated books, a 1929 Atwater Kent radio transmitter, an Edison wax cylinder redording, a horn-style speaker and a condensor mike that weighs 20 pounds. Along with several rat's nests of cables for connecting devices I no longer own to devices that no longer work. I'm hoping to jerry-rig a shambolic automaton out of the spare parts that can write the Listening Post for me, leaving me some spare time to tidy up, but I can't find the assembly manual anywhere.

10,000 Hours

I have yet to read Malcolm Gladwell's new book Outliers: The Story of Success, but I was fascinated by a recent interview where the author discussed something called the 10,000 Hour Rule, to which he devotes a chapter. He maintains this rule of thumb--to become expert at anything, from arts, to professions to athletics, it requires about 10,000 hours of practice. That would be around 20 hours a week for ten years.

This is bad news for generalists and dilettantes. There aren't that many 10,000 hour chunks available in life. After one has become expert in the disparate skills of sleeping, eating, watching television and driving automobiles from place to place, the windows are few. It has probably taken me all of my 55 years to rack up 10,000 hours of writing--I may still be a little short. But by the rule, you can expect a dramatic improvement in these postings anytime now.

On the other hand, I am close to having my 10,000 hours in on video games that haven't been available for 20 years. They told me then that I was wasting my time. Ya think? And I am close to having 10,000 hours in on playing the guitar, but I'm still kind of lame at it. So one must always account for underlying talent. I definitely have 10,000 hours in on reading science fiction novels, but I search the classifieds in vain for openings that require an expertise in fictional xenosociology. I'll keep practicing; but before turning my hand to something entirely new, I'll keep the rule in mind--tick, tick, tick.

A misunderstanding

One day my brother-in-law Bill turned to my friend Paul and said, "I need a job." Paul, apparently having his mind on other matters, said "What do you mean?" Bill, counting the words on his fingers, repeated "I…need…a…job! No job, no money--no money, no go beer store. Which word didn't you understand?" This is how Main Street understands money. It's the paper you pull out of your pocket at the convenience store; it's the gas in the debit card. It's the ruinous bill from the contractor, the little bone you're thrown in the pay envelope. It's the ready, the moolah, the wherewithall, the long green.

Somehow, in migrating from the leather of the wallet to the glass and steel of Wall Street, it undergoes a transformation, becoming instead financial products, liquidity, leverage, underperforming assets. (Who knew money could dance, even badly?) And lately, we hear of "toxic, radioactive assets." Green Kryptonite, one supposes, deadly to Masters of the Universe. Everybody understands a thousand dollars, but nobody understands a trillion dollars. CNN tried to humanize the proposed Wall Street bailout number by comparing it to 2000 MacDonald's apple pies for each man, woman and child in the country. Ewwww! However you slice it, Main Street is angry, and you can bet they're gonna want fries with that. It's just a question of who to drop in the fryer.

Just in time

Back in the old economy, if it was time for a little home baking, Mom might send me down the block to Don's Market for a can of sweetened condensed milk. Don would take out his can claw and hook me down one, and blow the dust off the top. If the shelf was bare, no matter--he'd order a year's supply at a time and keep the extra cases back in the stock room. These days nothing has a chance to gather dust. They teach just-in-time manufacturing and inventory in MBA school. Fedex has offices in Papua New Guinea. If you asked people what they really wanted from the Internet, they'd tell you they want the ability to download a cup of cappuccino and a ham sandwich, because they don't have time to leave the desk. Busy, busy, busy, knocking off the to-do list just in time. (Cappuccino, by the way, generates 22,600,000 search results on Google.)

Paul Willcott was in the studio this morning, working on the audio book of his novella A Franklin Manor Christmas (which Joel assures him will be done "just in time" to accompany the print release). Paul asked if I had my Listening Post essay done yet, and I had to laugh. There were hours to go before the deadline. As usual, I hadn't a clue. He suggested something about Sundays, but writing about the day of rest requires more leisure than I have available. Besides, I had to write all the other stuff first.

Joel dropped by my digs later on, just in time to put the kibosh on a concert feature for the online section, but Kevin, also just in time, came up with an alternate feature from our reel-to-reel archive. This would have been a good time to have had a couple of essays in the can--back in the stock room, as it were. But that's 20th Century thinking. So here's a new one, just in time to make the email deadline.

Lean Regime

We would all have been living long since in communal Utopia, I am convinced, were it possible to share a kitchen without friction. As things stand, Middle East peace seems to be a less ambitious goal than kitchen comity. I have been through many schemes in a long career of communal home and work kitchens, each fine in theory, each, uhh--suboptimal in execution. There was the short-lived Procrustean democracy of seventies socialist living: from each, regardless of talent; to each, because it’s Thursday. Fasting also came into vogue about then, as I recall.

Work kitchens seem to cycle though a number of states, from Spartan disuse to competitive group force-feeding. But in all these states, domestic tranquility founders on the rock of cleaning up. It is a law of nature that at least one user will scatter food litter with the casual aplomb of a giraffe browsing the treetops, and another will always be just about to wash the dishes he/she left to soak in the sink. There will always be ancient mystery food in the fridge, waiting for someone to have the courage to pop the lid before the gases of decomposition do the job for him. These issues have once again led to an ardent round of station email, and to yet another ingenious peace plan--anything dirty will be disappeared. The Junta Plan, I call it. The kitchen, now containing many fewer items, does indeed look cleaner. But the day is not far off, I fear, when I will be stirring sugar into a mayonnaise jar full of coffee with a plastic fork.

Executive sweet

On Monday, my new desk arrived. Since 2001 I had been working at a cramped student desk I bought off my nephew, and it was getting hard to locate the mouse underneath the drifts of disks, peripheral electronics, scribbled notes and unfiled paper. I try not to sweat the small stuff, a category under which I tend to include all logical forms of organization. But my new desk should solve all that. It is a multi-level dog-legged monstrosity of steel and tempered glass. In order to accommodate its executive dimensions, everything else had to be shoved off into the corners of the office. Things are no better organized, but they are much farther away. I can now contemplate them with lordly dispassion across the shining plain of my spotless work surface.

Having a formal dinner engagement, I also wore a suit on Monday, something I do so infrequently I have to Google “Four-in-Hand” for a pictograph in order to successfully tie my own necktie. My 1976 leather-elbowed tweed jacket has graduated from out-of-style to vintage fashion. It looked sweet behind the desk. But Monday gives way to Tuesday, and now to Thursday. Stuff—and things—are starting to creep onto the outer edges of the desk. I see a coffee ring. It matches the stain on my blue jeans and untucked shirttail. And shaving appears to be among the other things on my to-do list that have just slipped by me. Maybe a bigger office would do the trick--and a wardrobe assistant.

Slack time

I seem to have been avoiding vacations lately, taking less time each year, dragging a laptop and cell phone everywhere, just in case. But I broke down and took a few days off in Maine this week, leaving the portable electronics at home. And the world seems to have kept up its regular rotation, even without me working the crank. I don't know why this should come as a surprise to me, considering that I fully expect the tide to rise and fall on schedule off Wells Beach whether I am there to watch it or not.

But we give so much to our jobs, if they engage us--all that time and sweat, all the plotting and the brainstorms. It should, by rights, all go to the devil as soon as we hit the outskirts of town. And the many places that try to do public radio without me--VPR, NHPR, WBUR, Maine Public Broadcasting, WAMU--they all (from my highway listening) seem to muddle through somehow. I can't explain it; I'll just have to rest up a little and give the matter some thought.

Looking in the mirror

If you ask somone to describe what they look like, they will usually stare blankly for an uncomfortable number of seconds, then tentatively offer a very few general details. As an organization, we found ourselves in that position recently, having engaged the services of that institutional version of the police sketch artist, a logo design firm. Like many approaching forty, we had decided that our old look was getting harder and harder to pull off, and that something saying "Twenty-First Century Me" was in order. Having worked as a graphic artist, I had some notion what a convoluted process this might become. It takes the sharp ears of a dog to hear the hints of direction, and the armored hide of a rhino to survive the feedback.

We have gone through multiple meetings and two extensive sets of sketches without getting quite there yet. But an unexpected bonus of the process has more than compensated for the angst and crossfire. For the first time in a long time, people all over the station are debating our essential identity, purpose, and meaning as an organization. And not just the usual loudmouths like me. We hope the visual fruit of the process will suit us and suit you as well. And we hope our designers will survive our zig-zagging and contradictory demands without constant recourse to whiskey. But the bull session is going great.

Harry escape

The longer I am exposed to the brutal bleeding edge of popular culture, the greater comfort I take in more antiquated and sedate pursuits. Like many parents with children of a certain age, I rediscovered the pleasures of reading aloud through the adventures of Harry Potter, wizard-in-training at Hogwart's School. The series has outlasted our daughter's residence at home, but the habit of picking up each new book and reading it aloud has stuck. In fact, we re-read the fifth book in preparation for seeing the movie released last week, and the sixth, to bring us back up to speed for the final book, due out with screaming hoopla on Saturday. We read aloud in the car, spelling each other at the wheel, and read aloud in the kitchen, trading the cutting board back and forth. We read aloud in the living room, when taking a break from the hundred channels of mind-numbing cable, and read aloud in bed--which can lead to odd dreams and the need to go back over some pages.

One of the beauties of the process is that it seems tailor-made for the long-married. After thirty-odd years, one tends to use up all possible conversational gambits. You can always talk about the day's news, but after a while, yelling at the radio and muttering obscenities to the inbox--though gratifying when shared with a loved one--is incompatible with sound cardiac health. A mutual reading session, on the other hand, shares all the features of companionable conversation, with none of the stress of figuring out what to talk about--a real blessing after a long day in the frazzle of cyberspace. When we have worked our way through to the stunning conclusion--some time next week, probably--it will be soon enough to engage one another on the pressing issues of a serious relationship. Such as what to read next.

Up with the tweeters

For me, summer does not properly begin until I have had one sunny day out on the water. Sad to say, there was no summer last year--stranded on the strand. But Jim took pity on me, calling me last Sunday to help wet down the hull on this year’s maiden voyage of the Gypsy Wind. It was pretty still for sailing, so we left the mast unstepped and tootled around Norwood Pond courtesy of a sedate 2-horse outboard. Sweet sun, puffy clouds, amiable conversation, and--as always with Jim--a steady supply of strength-giving M&Ms. It takes a minimum of gear to restore the soul. The less the better in fact, as we saw at the other end of the afternoon, watching the Chinese fire drill of monster boats and jet skis clogging up the ramp.

But already now I need another dose; all the heart’s ease wore off Monday morning as I donned my bullet-shaped helmet and silver suit, and slid myself down the barrel of the circus cannon that fires me off into the work week. Each day since has twisted the turnbuckle strapped across my shoulderblades a little tighter. I wake with the freaking tweeters—I mean the dawn chorus—and plot my next escape.

Let's meet on it

I write in haste today because, as it sometimes happens, I have spent most of the day--and the week, and large portions of my adult life--in meetings. Unfortunately, they were not meetings about what to write in my newsletter article. But then, meetings on that topic rarely go anywhere.

It is mostly in science fiction that things get done without the aid of meetings. The steel-jawed superhero perceives the need, possesses the means, and executes the necessary with laser dispatch. The rest of us have meetings. While nothing happens in them, nothing happens without them. Long-range planning, short-term planning, assessment, review, pre-meeting meetings, post-meeting appreciations. We have meetings solely to nominate those who will attend future meetings, and further meetings to ratify the nominations.

In the present moment, all one can do is breathe, refrain from strangling the breath from others, and await adjournment. All the action bullets pertain to the future, what little of it remains between scheduled meetings. From the outside the process is indistinguishable from other primate grooming behavior--hence the term nit-picking. Well--we tend to wear clothing, too. But the result is the same. By the end of the process, by some means not altogether clear, it is decided who gets the bananas and who gets the peels. New business? Do I hear a motion to adjourn?

A mountain view

There could be a whole subspecialty of psychology that focuses on the images people choose to adorn the desktops of their computers. I tend to pick paintings. For the last few months, in idle moments, I have rested my eyes on a Rockwell Kent rendition of his AuSable home, farm and studio, Asgaard. The view is across a long meadow to the barns, which are well removed from the house. Both are up against the shoulder of forested hills that rise up into the soft signature lines of Adirondack peaks. The foreground is in cloudshadow, deep green peppered with clover in bloom. The midground is flooded with sun, lambent upon the tidy miniature white barns and their lesser satellite, the home. Behind them the deep green returns, going up into dappled hills and shadowed summits. The sky is mostly overcast, with sun rays striking through.

One of the satisfactions of the piece is in its unmistakability--this is one place, in one moment, and nowhere else. And the way the landscape dominates the works of man should be pleasing to one of modest demeanor, but the way those works shine out in the sun speaks also of love and pride of hand. The foreground is dimmed to lead the eye on, the background soft to draw the eye down. The farmstead is a buttery island of work well done and rest well deserved.