Notes on the Grand Experiment: nothing but a twisted ankle will get me down...

 In forgiving an injury be somewhat ceremonious, lest your magnanimity be construed as indifference. - Ambrose Bierce

Buster Keaton, Steamboat Bill, Jr., (1928)

Somewhere between trying to forget that I hate washing dishes and trying to remember that I do, in fact, like cheese*, I've been remiss in my writing and podcasting duties. Catering, maybe more so than any other job I've had (other than teaching) is more than a job. It is a universe entirely unto itself. It operates on its own time and at it's own speed regardless of and in spite of what speed the Earth is spinning on its axis. It reminds me a lot of life in theater, too, except for the absence of wrap parties. It's driven by a chaotic energy** that doesn't quit and it requires a certain steel backbone and a particular emotional acquiescence in order to enter it.

As it happens, I am a dishwasher. Being a dishwasher requires a respect for the absurd futility of life.

It also helps to be fast.

One of the things that helps, other than I get to listen to loud music and being nice is considered more of a liability than an asset in a working kitchen, is that I keep the image of Sisyphus firmly in my mind. No matter how many hotel pans I wash, there will always be more. No matter how many times in any given work day I wash the 3 foot tall mixing bowl that the bakery uses to mix batter and the hot side uses to make mashed potatoes, it will always come back and will always need to be washed. No matter how many times I wash cutting boards...

you get the idea.

It never stops. Not really. The goal isn't so much to finish as it is to get things looking like everything isn't one dirty sauce pan away from collapsing under the weight of the gravitational chaos the entire catering cosmos is built upon.

Of course, it would happen during what  is probably the busiest week of the last half of the year that I fall and twist my ankle. I didn't even fall at work, though I'm sure a few of the people I work with have been surprised that hasn't happened. No. I fell in my driveway Because life is basically absurd and futile and it never stops.

Well, Dear Readers, there's always tomorrow. And I'm scheduled for a double. Thank God for over the counter painkillers.


If you like what you're reading here, I have work for sale on my amazon author page:
www.amazon.com/author/mickparsons

_______________________________________________________________________
*I wash so much cheese sauce in any given week. On the other side of nearly being broken of my love for cheese, they make maybe the best Kentucky Hotbrown I've ever eaten.
**Working in a busy catering kitchen is pretty much like signing yourself into an insane asylum. Just take your medicine and enjoy the ride.

Roar of the leisure class warrior - something towards a draft manifesto (Or a more thought out explanation for my daughter)

What we spend our time on is probably the most important decision we make. - Ray Kurzweil

In our production-oriented society, being busy, having an occupation, has become one of the main ways, if not the main way, of identifying ourselves. Without an occupation, not just our economic security but our very identity is endangered.  - Henri Nouwen

My kids are in hock to a god they call work
spending their lives out for some other jerk. - Utah Phillips

Lately I've been thinking about the indicators people use to define success.

This topic is not a new one for me, and those of you (if indeed, there are any among you Dear Friends and Readers) who have been reading me for more than a few posts and more than a few blogs have probably picked up on that.  If you're one of those who used to read my American Re:visionary blog* and have followed me down here by the river side, you know good and well that I rejected the specter of traditional success, along with all of it's pomps, circumstances, and traps and dropped it somewhere between Butte, Montana and Boston Massachusetts.

Some men** define their success on their income. Some on the kind of house they live in. Some on their golf swing, or what percentage of -- or how many -- cases of beer it takes before they get shit-faced. I've known men who define their success within the parameters of their level of education, their lack of formal education, the length of their beard, and the size of their gut. I have seen men who I suspect define success based upon how big their truck tires are ***. I've known men who defined their success based on how little they slept.  Fathers sometimes mark their success by their children's general happiness and appearance of "success."+

The problem I find with these measuring sticks of what is and what is not success is that they don't really change, and I have found that success -- like every other aspect of life -- changes.

I have at various times, defined my success by my education; by the number of political figures I have annoyed and offended; by the number of bosses, department chairs, and people in socially constructed positions of authority over me I have pissed off; and by the ability to play the trumpet well.++ I thought I reached a measure of success when I was writing for the local-dining-and-concert-guide-that-shall-not-be-named-here.+++

Time is the only yard stick that matters, and the only currency that has any real value. While it's true that I'm not employed^ at the moment, my time is occupied with those things that matter most to me: my art, my family, my garden. I've never particularly felt the need to maintain regular employment as a condition of deserving dignity.  I agree with the idea that a man needs to DO something. But I question the assertion, often made by people who are terribly concerned that they are doing all the heavy-lifting for humanity^^ that everyone needs to go out and "get a job." I see that sort of noise a lot, generally in regards to anyone panhandling. The long history of vagrancy, anti-vagrancy laws, and people general  ooky-ness about people living in some other reality other than that of a worker bee for the capitalist state aside, I have chosen to reject the yard stick for success that measures me against the number of zeros in my pay check -- or, indeed, if I make a paycheck at all.

Yes, I have to find a way to make a living and meet my obligations to the home I'm making with Amanda (love you!) and to my art. Yes, I do like to have a little cash on hand to buy a cup of coffee, to rent movies, buy books, or go argue politics^^^ at the neighborhood watering hole. But I don't need to make piles of it prove anything. And I don't need the trappings of success as defined by the larger cultural imprint that would have judged me as a failure years ago if I had bothered to listen.

I do have my methods of measuring my success, though.

The first is whether I can sleep soundly at night. Most of the time, I sleep pretty well.

My other measure, at least lately, is whether or not my nosy, rude, and overall obnoxious asshole of a neighbor, Chalkline Larry, spies on me. He spies on us a lot. Just this morning, I caught him watching me as I watered our front yard garden. The expression on his face was one of disgust.

From this, I can only conclude that I am living right.

______________________________________________________________________________
*Sorry, no link... it's indefinitely archived until such a time when art, science, and religion can somehow figure out a way to reanimate the corpse of the American Dream without it turning into another zombie.
**While many things are true of all people, I am, probably to my detriment, sticking to a group I feel I have some understanding of. It's true that I have met men who claim to understand women; but as far as I can tell, they are either deluded or liars, or both.
***More often than not, I feel sorry for their love partners. Not because size matters -- but the inability to understand proper proportions leads to someone going to sleep unsatisfied.
+It's the rabbit hole. Success is, in the way, often described with the same terminology as pornography,  i.e.,  "I know it when I see it." And generally, in both, someone ends up getting screwed.
++I was a pretty good trumpet player once upon a time, back in high school. I had trouble picking it up after high school, though. 
+++Yes. I hold grudges. It's a failing, but I'm working on it. You can google it. I wrote some pretty good stuff that they didn't, in the long run, deserve.
^ According to the powers-that-be, I am one of the great unwashed masses. But don't worry. I'm sure that Bevin's inhumane policies will somehow lead me to a better billet. These things just take time, I guess.
^^Martyrs All. Without their self-crucifiction, the homeless could use the wood for heat. 
^^^ Or sports. Around here, that pretty much boils down to the same thing.

If you like what you're reading here, I have work for sale on my amazon author page:
www.amazon.com/author/mickparsons
Donations are also appreciated, and help keep the critters in kibble and the lights on. Thanks for reading!

Losantiville Lines: Down River Chorus, Version 1

The world is already cut up and we are snarling over scraps
deliberately dropped by a pale paternalistic hand
to keep us wanting and to keep us from wondering
what it is on the table we're not supposed to see.
--'Philosophy of a Dog', Cincinnati Daybook

The semester is over at NKU... or, over for me, at any rate. The last class meetings were this past Friday. Endings are always a bit anti-climactic; at least they are for me. In a writing classroom, all the real work is done well before the official clock runs out.

I enjoyed being back in the classroom again, and hope to do more of it. Of course, I also hope to dig back into some good old fashioned honorable muckraking. And I am preparing for another jaunt -- the sometime ago writ of toot off to the northern country, North Dakota and maybe Montana. Specifically, I'm making plans to visit Williston, ND, and maybe Rigby which, according to some map or another, is the geographic center of the North American Continent. I would also like to visit the northern part of Montana I didn't get to see when I was out there last year -- that vast part of the state that's on the northern side of the Rocky Mountains, sweeping up to and past the abstract line that has been determined to be the Canadian border.

Travel enough and you begin to realize that the lines on the map are more of an idealized abstraction than a reality. It is our insistence on making them hard lines that they become and stay hard lines. Ask the Dakota Indians, the Lakota or Sioux where the boundaries are, you have a very different map.

The truth is that maps are constantly being drawn and redrawn. The maps in our heads, private and collective, are always under revision, and are under constant threat of erasure. We map out our individual landscapes and change them based on changes in employment, marital, relational, and any other number of personally significant mile markers, totems, and landmarks. We redraw collective landscapes based on war, and the exchange of property and the delineation of those multi-national corporations whose arbitrary lines are not the same as those inscribed on geopolitical maps.

These revisions and erasures happen all the time.

And yet there is no end to the call to defend these lines. I can't help but notice among Facebook memes the harbingers of doom and death. So much money is made on the backs of our cultural fear and paranoia, and yet rather than look to see who is profiting (Defense Industry, gun manufacturers, makers of better police gear, private security and private army corporations, big oil, lobbyists, and the politicians who are more effective beggars than any panhandler I have ever seen or met.) we perpetuate the cultural death march.

Though I have spent the winter more or less stationary, I have spent the time wisely; and I am looking forward to what life has to offer and to teach me. Being a traveller is not always about being on the move. Sometimes it's about standing still and feeling the rhythm of the world as it reverberates in your bones, calling out those ancient songs and poems that only your voice can give life to.

Location:Louisville, KY

An Altogether Different Time Table

He drove through the rain and the night because he didn't want to be late. The only thing worse than being late was being later than that. Schultz was a man understood and accepted that all aspects of life function in complex levels of degrees and exceptions. Except that none of the exceptions ever seemed to apply to him.

The rain picked up and so did the wind, which was making it more difficult to see the road in front him. Schultz hated driving at night; he didn't see so good at night to begin with, but there he was, driving through the middle of nowhere in god fuck forsaken Iowa where they didn't believe in street lights, or in keeping the roads paved and even. Various parts of the road were in such need of repair that it felt like he was driving on one long washboard. He'd driven through so many pot holes that he was waiting for the axle on his car to snap in half; at the very least he expected to blow a tire. And just what the hell will I do then? he thought. Change a tire in the middle of fucking nowhere during a rain storm on a road with no shoulder? He didn't think it likely that he could call AAA in the event of something happening. He wasn't sure if there was even a mechanic nearby, and if there was, he wasn't sure that he would trust his car to any mechanic he might find.

It was, after all, a Fine German Automobile, not just some piece of crap Ford.

Even though he was careful to only go five miles below the posted speed limit, for the sake of safety, a large pick up truck had been riding his bumper for the last 10 miles or so. The high set lights made it even more difficult to see; they were a back light against the rain, reflecting off the drops in the sky and wetness of the state route in front of him. He thought of his grandmother, who went blind from cataracts. Is this how it starts? Am I going to wake up one day and not see anything at all? He could go to an optometrist and find out, he supposed. But Schultz didn't like doctors, or any ilk. Liars and pickpockets, his Uncle Carl used to call them. And Uncle Carl would know. He had been an insurance adjuster for over 30 years before he died of thrombosis.

After a while the truck sped up and passed him, splashing water all over the windshield, almost causing Schultz to wreck. The tail lights of the truck soon disappeared, swallowed by the darkness ahead. Schultz thought maybe the darkness was swallowing him, too, that maybe this was what it was like for his grandmother. Not all at once. So slow that you don't notice it. Not until there's nothing left to notice.

He looked at the clock display on his radio. He had a half hour to go and no real idea of how much farther it was. There were no markers, no signs. He wasn't even sure he was still on the same road. For all he knew he'd passed into a different state altogether. It all looked the same, even during the day. How in the hell was he supposed to find his way at night?

And Counting

Christ. 388 days and the tundra

is still expansively contracting.

Fields of green and brown corn

have turned shit and soil brown,

laced with remanded snow

and lingering ice. It was once

explained to me when I was

very young: in the winter

the world sleeps

and the soil rests

to prepare for the spring

for what was once a plow

but is now a machine that cuts

more and better; plus, the cost

is more and better than most

houses and has taken the place

of hundreds of men and

man hours. It's big business here

and the corn is owned by companies

and seeds, like our future is copyrighted

by the anonymous holding company

that bought our parents' futures

cheap with promises

of a peaceful old age replete

with fat corn fed dreams.

The Inner Workings of Nostalgia

The best part of my day
is walking out to the mail box
because the neighbor lady
watches me and wonders
what a man my age
is doing at home
at that time of day. Then

I walk to the bar
and catch up on the local news
not covered in the paper
between Rotary Club check presentations
and JV and Varsity Sports
and the ever growing obituaries
that corresponds creepily

to the growing number
of houses for sale
and the emptying store fronts.
Once in a while
the old men include me
in their conversations
but that’s only because

there’s no one else there
to talk to. Mostly I nod
and laugh and when
I get home I wonder
how long these small towns
have left
before all the old timers die

and all the grandkids move
to where the jobs are
and the farm fields are sold
and spliced into house lots
and the bricks that cover Market Street
are recycled and built into a monument
for a town whose name
no one knows how to spell.