Last Tuesday, the damned cat kept my wife up all night.
Wednesday? I kept the cat awake all day. You ever try to keep a cat awake? You can't just whisper something scary in its ear, like "If I should die before I wake". No. You gotta get out the laser pointer and play with the sumbitch. And keep the upstairs door closed so he can't haul his 25 pounds of gray fur and bad attitude up there and sneak a nap.
That night, everyone in the house slept peaceful and quiet and long.
Follow me over the fold for a ramble about furniture and some unfocused worry.
Apology: I've been trying to post this series on Mondays, however, yesterday I had a killer headache and was unable to do anything but sit on the edge of the bathtub in the worshipful position. So sorry.
Scene One: Furniture After two months of unemployment, I am starting, slowly, to recover a bit of gumption. It's like the ambition was burned out of me by the betrayal of the company who asked me in my initial interview what I saw myself doing in five years. Wonder what they would have said if my answer had been, "I plan to be sitting across a conference room table from the Director of IT and the COO while they tell me that while I'm very very good at what I do, the company no longer desires my services."
The middle third of my working life, so far, was spent in manufacturing. One thing that I liked about being on the line/running the press/etc was, at the end of the day, I had something concrete to point to, to say "I made that, and someone wants or needs it." Most of the last decade I have dealt in intangibles.
Last week, I built a shelf. I wanted to build it fully in the Craftsman aesthetic (which my wife turned me on to) but was not successful -- the bottom half ended up being nailed together. But for a first attempt, not so bad. I built that, it's in my kitchen, and it's something real.
This week I will be building a DVD shelf. This time I will be able to do it with mortises and dowel pegs and glue. Wood is a strange medium to me, I am much more suited to metal. Metal allows you to impose your will upon it, within its own inherent limits of tensile strength and malleability. Anyone who has ever spent more than an hour with me will know that is something that makes sense to me. Metal is like language. It does what it's told.
Wood? Wood is a partnership. Grinding a groove in a piece of angle iron is a matter of precision and application of force. Chiseling a mortise involves asking permission, reading the soul of the tree, and finesse.
I think I am going to like wood. It requires persuasion and reflection.
Scene Two: Worries or No Worries I am still, every day, more and more convinced that the entire economy is going to crash. After reading about the coming small business crash, and hearing a rumor that the FDIC may well be insolvent (which has been both verified and debunked, go figure), I worry. On the other hand I generally go to bed every night half-convinced that an asteroid will hit the Earth while I sleep, so my concerns are probably at least partially the result of the tinfoil hat my OCD built.
But I am re-evaluating my plans of starting my own business. Not discarding them by any means. Just making sure that if I decide to jump that direction, I don't find myself depending on credit to survive. The key, it seems, is to not have a payroll, to be stictly owner-operated.
I don't think it's impossible that by this time two years from now we could be hauling wheelbarrows full of Grants and Franklins to the bakery for day-old bread. On the other hand? Obama's handling of the farm subsidy issue gives me a little hope, hope that the family farm will again become a sustainable concern, and the agribusiness giants will go the way of the dodo. I can see a future where local, small, green farms can provide the urban market with supplies while the cities manufacture the durable and transient goods the farms want and need.
Society, as a whole, needs a radical restucturing. I hope that we are the ones to restucture, because if the radical elements of the right get to be in charge again, via election or revolution, my family and I will probably be first against the wall. My wife's wiccan, my sister is openly gay, my child has Asperger's, I am essentially a Socialist -- we're pretty much everything the right wing hates.
Scene Three: What's Real? To someone who is clearly not a financial expert (I balance my checkbook by not writing any checks for a week and hoping nothing from last week bounces), it seems like fantasy. Billions of dollars are lost in the markets. What money? Did someone get those billions? When I lose money, I generally can recover it by taking the cushions off my couch and digging around in there. In all other cases, if I end up in a situation where I had money and then don't have it, it means someone else now has the money. Either I traded it for a good or a service, like popcorn and a movie (yes, I liked Watchmen quite a bit, sorry if you didn't) or 1X6 planks, or a pack of Camels, or I gave it to someone as a loan or a gift, or someone took it from me through subterfuge or outright robbery.
Money doesn't just disappear. If money is lost, either someone else has it, or it's under the couch, or it never existed at all.
It never existed at all.
It. Never. Existed.
The billions lost in the stock market? How much of it was real money? Is this whole thing just a case of an entire society counting chickens before the eggs are even laid?
I sympathise with people who were tricked into putting their money into the shredder by assurances that it was safe as houses. People who were offered 401k plans instead of IRAs and told by the people who they were supposed to trust (like the CFO of the company who explained that the company match was free money for the employee) that they were insuring their retirement, when in actuality they were buying risk.
I worked for an ESOP company. Part of my compensation was in the form of privately held company stock. Since I left before I was 59.5 (and, by the way, I could have very easily stayed with this company for the rest of my working life, had it not changed into the monster it has become now that the beancounters are in charge), I'll get my stock buyback payout in 3 tranches over 3 years beginning 3 years after I was removed from the payroll. If the business stays in business.
If they fold, my ESOP is worthless. Not just mine, but everyone who thought they were being rewarded. Turns out we were being given, not retirement funds, but risk.
The entire fortunes of our nation seem to be founded on the buying and selling of risk. Not goods, not service, not ideas, not compassion, but, it becomes more and more clear to me, risk.
Do you undertand risk? Do you know what it's worth? I sure as hell don't. But we were all players in this giant swindle, and we're going to pay the bill.
Who are we paying the bill to? That's the question. The basic test of any conspiracy theory is, Qui Bono? Who profits?
Who is profiting from this? Somebody has to be. Money doesn't just disappear.
Unless.
It never existed at all.
I am going to spend this week building a shelf. I'll be chiseling grooves in planks, setting boards in place, drilling holes and gluing pegs. When I am done, I will have exchanged a piece of paper with no intrinsic value for some partially finished raw materials, added value to it by virtue of my labor, and I will have a place to put things. If it's good enough, I may go exchange another piece of intrinsically valueless paper for more materials, add value to it, and sell it to someone else who wants a place to put their stuff. If no one wants it, I will still have gained a shelf. But the only way that I will have less value than I started with is if I screw it up so radically that it can't be salvaged, if I end up with nothing but shreds of wood too contaminated to burn or use for mulch.
It would require actual work to screw it up so badly that it has no value at all. It would require deliberate destruction beyond mere incompetence.
When I put on my tinfoil hat at night, I wonder how these experts screwed thing up so badly that nothing of value remains. I wonder if there's more at work here than greed and incompetence. But these are late-night thoughts.
When the sun shines, I will be in the garage with a miter saw and a chisel and a 5/8" drill and a tape measure and a T-square and a hammer and a bottle of wood glue and a cup of coffee and a tiny notebook and a funny-looking pencil.
I will have something to show for how I have spent these hours.
Unlike the 12,000 hours I spent over the last five years letting other people profit from my skills, my labor, and my loyalty.