Today’s throughput. There are two more piles just like this one, partially finished. I’m a road warrior today. Gasoline costs $3.45? The filling station shuts you off like a drunk at a bar at $75. Who knew? I haven’t been outdoors in a year, it seems to me.
I guess I shouldn’t have worn long underwear. It’s eighty.
Today is a big anniversary for anyone born in the fifties. An event of profound importance is commemorated on this date every year now — first popularized, of course, in the seventies.
What? What the hell are you talking about? Yeah, yeah, littering is bad. But what the hell are you people picking through your trash like raccoons for, and calling it Christmas? Never mind all that. It’s Peter Frampton’s birthday!
Excuse me, I have to go cut down a tree and make it into something useful.
What shall we talk about today?
By the time you are reading this, I’ll be pushing wood through a saw. I have help occasionally, but for the most part it is a solitary thing.
Many people used to work in solitary endeavors, or in small groups. Those types of situations are becoming much more common again, and many more people are joining the ranks of the fractured work force, as I have. I think it’s better in many ways.
There is an image I have in my head of the average denizen of the office building. It is not an imaginary image, as I have worked there myself. It occurs to me that it it is the office building filled with information workers that is old-fashioned, not me and my version of the work picture.
The office building is the text version of belching smokestack-noon whistle-timecard punching-id badge-break room-factory of my youth. The cubicles and the old CRTs and the in and outboxes are the assembly line of text now. That’s the modern version of the old sepia colored photo of a humming factory. You nice folks with the boxy shoes and skinny glasses and the Blackberrys and ACT folders open are the buggy whip people now. You are the people who used to wear coveralls and carry a sandwich in a pail and grind it out until you get a watch and bed with a lid. Not me.
The idea that you’d all congregate in one place made sense when there was a smelter in the back. The smelter is a server now, and you probably don’t even know where it is. There is little reason to congregate in one place between low-pile carpeting and drop ceilings just to think. It is unlikely people will continue to do so much longer.
I have a network of persons to help me when I need it. That pool is too small, but not inconsiderable. We congregate when it is necessary. We generally each have the tools we need available to us wherever we are, or go. We buy components and materials and machinery from people we will never meet, and sell the fruits of these constantly shifting associations to other persons we may never meet. In the past, I’ve even occasionally worked in occupied homes and never met the occupants. It’s not always necessary.
The little shelf outside the HR office with the brightly colored forms. The vending machine. The bagels laid out before all but the most hardy clerk arrives by a contractor no one has ever met. It’s all going the way of the dodo. You cutting edge old-fashioned people are going to have to learn to live in the world outside the office tower. The world is booming, and it’s kinda scary if your sun is of the fluorescent variety. Be brave, and do not allow yourself to be taken advantage of by those that say they can put the workplace genie back in the bottle.
I bet you’ll like it out here.
I’ve been married for almost two decades. I don’t know anything about my wife.
I imagine I know her better than anyone else at this point. Maybe her parents knew the little girl they raised better than I, but she is gone into a person now.
My wife is quiet and mysterious. I talk all the time and am mysterious. It’s not a bad combination. We have made children together, and raised them a little. Everything good about them reminds me of her. There’s more good than bad.
Marriage is a decision. It used to be a profound decision, and so most people took it seriously. It’s more or less morphed into a cultural ornament, one considered a little threadbare by the hipsters. My fellow countrymen mostly bounce like a tennis ball between marrying every person they meet, serially, or ignoring the whole ritual and coupling without any title.
If you decide to marry, really decide, it helps you to stay that way. Because if it’s no big deal, you feel no compunction to gauge your behavior for the long haul. You’re figuring you can act like a jerk to a series of people.
If I was cruel to my wife, I would have to look at her for the rest of my life in regret. I am far from perfect and so I do have my regrets. My wife is one of those people who will be buried someday and no one will remember a single bad thing about her. You will not be able to find any sane person to make an unkind remark about her. You’ll be able to form a Roman Legion of my detractors.
So, as I said, I do have my regrets. But I have never once regretted asking my wife to marry me. And I certainly don’t regret that she is too inscrutable for me to figure out if she’s regretted marrying me for every waking moment of half her life.
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