It’s Friday. I don’t have a regular, M-F, 9 to 5 job. It’s just another day.
Lots of people are like me now. People in what used to be very rigid walks of life now keep the schedule of a wino. The world is always a better place when it lets you reach your full potential without crushing you with obligation and stultifying rigidity. But sometimes you look longingly at people who can look at the clock on Friday at 4:55 and say Whoohoo!
Why the hell not dance anytime, anywhere? It’s Friday somewhere.
I like wandering around the online MFA. I like wandering around the actual MFA, too — don’t get me wrong– but it’s not exactly right down the street. Even if it was, I’m kinda busy here. 11:30 pm suits me fine.
Online archives are wonderful in this respect, because they don’t close and don’t sleep and don’t charge you, generally. The Museum of Fine Arts in Boston has a fine online archive, filled with interesting things.
Now, my favorite painter is John Singer Sargent. I know you’re really not supposed to have a favorite painter, as this might lead to fantasy art leagues being formed, and paint spreads being published in the newspapers every week before the big exhibition.
I didn’t just write that, did I?
At any rate, old Sarge could daub, I’m tellin’ ya. And the MFA always has a bunch of him, as John Singer Sargent used to be their housepainter, sorta; and since the stuff is painted right on the walls, they can’t sell it when they’re hard up for money to buy pictures of blue broads with three ears and a nose on the side of their head. They’re stuck with it.
I don’t know why Sargent painted this picture of a 1950s wrestler. I think he’s Irish, what with the harp and all. The girls are wearing too many clothes, but they’re pretty all the same. It’s nice of one of them to hold that dish behind Gorgeous George like that. Looks heavy. It looks like there were half a dozen muses in Boston at the time of the painting, but only one hairdresser. Times have changed since then, I see. Now there are thousands of hairdressers in Boston, many of whom would be keenly interested in our wrestler, no doubt; and if not many muses, plenty of mousse. Thin lipped college girls with their stringy shoeblack dyed hair, skinny glasses, grim expressions, and Doc Martens and backpacks stand in for the muses today. They rarely dress in bedsheets like the picture, as they obscure their tattoos and ruin the general effect they’re driving at.
See, I don’t know much about that painting. Sargent just put it on the wall and said: Take that! He didn’t explain himself or nothing. What a dope.
Someone told me an artist isn’t an artist if he has to explain himself.
To a college student, everything that sucks is marvelous. It’s wry to like that which is dreadful, and odd, and bad.
That used to be a straightforward thing. You’d search around for something nobody wanted, and for good reason, and want it in spades. If you were a tastemaker, pretty soon everybody would want one too, and then you’d move on to browner pastures.
That well has been poisoned, of course, because instead of trying really hard to make something good, and failing miserably in just the right manner, manipulative viral tastemakers are now trying to make something deliberately crummy that seems accidentally crappy. I can’t like that stuff, because it is like going hunting in those game preserves you read about where they drug some wild beast and keep it drooling and tottering around in a corral and the idle rich show up and cap them like a mob hit. I like my kitsch free range, thank you.
This is bad. Compellingly bad. Interplanetary, extraordinary bad. Hey look, homely women in ill-fitting reform school prom dresses are banging away at a song like it’s a railroad spike –a song that could be entered as exonerating evidence in a rage murder trial –while a little greasy troll with some sort of nervous affliction beats an upright doghouse like it was a puppy next to a stained carpet.
(It’s important for me to offer the disclaimer first, and forcefully:I’m not complaining. In the real scheme of things, I don’t have a care in the world.)
I don’t know how many days in a row I’ve worked. I can’t remember. I was making clocks last night a 10:30. I’m not sure what that means, except that five people want clocks and I didn’t have any and I ran out of week and kept going.
I’ve supervised the activities of construction workers, from one person to hundreds, with varying degrees of success, since I was young and Carter was president. I learned something funny about overtime, and construction workers. I’m not a construction worker any more, really, but there’s a great deal of overlap.
I learned that in general, it was impossible to give a construction worker a meaningful raise, or to have them work overtime. This requires explaining.
The amount of money a construction worker would make would make prodigious jumps. It almost always involved going to a different employer. I tripled my income in one evening by simply sitting still and listening to an offer in a barroom once, for instance.
But once any construction worker in any informal non-corporate setting was ensconced in my care, I was never able to give them a raise in any meaningful way. I was constantly giving them more money, but it was never a raise.
I know that seems odd, but here’s how it works: The construction worker finds a situation that is tolerable to them. They need to be able to listen to precisely the type of death metal or talk radio they prefer, at flight deck volume, and be dressed in rags if they so choose. They generally never want to talk to the end user. Drug testing is right out. There’s a certain aversion to alarm clocks. There is never any aversion to having your affairs sorted out in a court.
They have a certain amount of fiscal requirements that they can recount instantly. And once their needs are met, they don’t care a fig about your money. If you give them more money, they work less, because they don’t think they need it. They need free time above all, and take it. If their circumstances change drastically, they have a tendency to make drastic changes in their work situation to make the fiscal adjustment, and start all over again. And construction workers will work incredible amounts of overtime when they need money, but they will never work more than 2000 hours a year. They’ll work 2000 hours in a row, and then disappear.
When a customer hires a construction worker directly, they are often mystified that he often doesn’t show up, and doesn’t answer the phone. They shouldn’t be mystified. It’s very simple. They have not run out of money yet today. If they had, they’d be trying to climb in your windows at 5:00 am to get an early start, and a down payment.
When the informal worker gets tired of all the amusements of the idle poor, like deer hunting and darts and drinking and Keno and so forth, they generally go into another line of work, or they go to a big official construction company, or a union setting. A marriage and a certain amount of maturity is often the petri dish where this newfangled reliability is incubated. And in that new and official situation, they switch over to making sure they never work past 4:01, or on Saturday, and that’s that.
It’s the boss that’s working all the time. His phone is always ringing, and he’s never off duty really. It’s what you get paid for, so you shouldn’t complain. And the guy in the tavern or the La-Z-Boy shouldn’t complain that his boss is making all that dough. He’s still at work, and sober, so that you don’t have to be.
But when there is no boss but the king of all bosses –the customer– and no employees but yourself and the yellow pages, all that goes by the wayside. You work because it is necessary. You work because you know there is no slack, and no one to take it up for you even if there was.
You work because it is what you are, not what you do. And you forget how many days in a row you worked.
Month: December 2006
sippicancottage
A Man Who Has Nothing In Particular To Recommend Him Discusses All Sorts of Subjects at Random as Though He Knew Everything.
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