Beauty

We can still look out at the show of the turning sun
Firing up clouds, powering the day and exclaim at the beauty
What a tragedy when we took beauty and stuffed it
Into the safety of things
Working so hard to keep it in an object
Either owned, or unownable
But it fights back
Slips through the cracks
Gets caught on canvas
In the strings & horns of desire
How hard we men have tried to
Keep it manifest in women’s curves
Only to find we’re left jealous when it
Taunts us with being so close
And their seeming ease with it
That women can even call each other beautiful
While we strive for stoic and strength
Or work at some vulnerability
What danger to release that frightening equality
To be able to look even upon each other
As beautiful

How did we get to this place where we are all so far from everything? “Father, paint me the earth on my body”, a Sioux chant from North Dakota, is how Galeano opens up Mirrors. Not that the indigenous people here were somehow supernatural, but that they were still closer to that time before we forgot we are a part of all of this that we live in.



My loves

She ate my stories as if they were payment for access to her body
Took those intimate moments, took my secrets and fears
And only gave her body back, as if that was enough
As if that was the goal. The exchange was always unequal
Perhaps she couldn’t believe that her body
Was the least that she had to give
She kept her stories, her fears, her intimate thoughts
those were too frightening to let loose, only allowing hints
Never willing to give back what she took

My soul is worn
threads stretching bare and torn
No blanket for the winter
Nor to shade come summer
No sail to blow me from the shore
or tether me to this ground.

As I move farther from life…

I find that I am moving farther away from life. I find it harder to see what makes connections between people, and I’m not sure that I ever really did. That may be an artifact of how today colors the past. I am an observer into someone’s life, watching how they move through a community, but I don’t know what or how any of the interactions are supposed to be like. Some of this comes from how I grew up. Some of it is from the daily reminders of the confusion sown by certain events.

A friend told me I was abused. Another gave me a label. Our laughably inept medical community has given me other labels, and then flaunted them. Abused doesn’t define me, it’s just something that defiles me, exists as a dirty little background to life. What comes with it is always a feeling of being broken, and I’ve been defined, described, labeled as broken for so long that I can’t remember when that wasn’t something that echoed behind every thought.

My dad, he’s a master at it. How many times he’s ended, or attempted to end, some discussion with the refrain that I’m just broken, not whole. Grim. As if that’s how I came out of the womb. And I’m sure that’s his belief- I’m just how I was made.

I have a question of precedence.

This is memory I’m talking about, which is the aggregate of how life molds a person. Time is linear only in experience, but each experience moves through the time you have lived. What happens now isn’t localized to this moment, no. It moves, weights those moments from yore. What was experienced changes with each new experience, and as such, the idea that time is always linear cannot be defended. What happens today affects what happened to me then.

What led to those afternoons by the creek. Alders near the creeks drop softer leaves, make a dry cover over and with the needles from the pines. The first time it was a game, a time for convincing. This will be fun- see, you’ll like it. Nothing like someone older to show you the ways of the world, yeah?

Six was a tough age in a lot of ways. The parents had split, Dad making his preferences clear when he took my twin brother and left. Left me with Maeve, so was that so bad? Sure, except that there’s a difference between the act of being left and being taken. When you’re taken, even if it’s not good, at least there’s an element of knowing you were wanted. Being left, yeah. Even if you’re left with someone who cares for you, you still know you were discarded. But that’s interpretation from now. At that point there was certainly some sort of effect. I don’t know if being a twin is different from being any other sort of sibling, but I’ve been told I didn’t sleep well. That was something that changed all of us. I can’t even tell any more what my feelings then really were because today is so much closer, and what’s happened in between colors it all.

Abandonment is something of a theme in my family. I suppose that’s why the parents had such an easy time of it. I’ve learned to be, well, callous about leaving. Or perhaps, I’ve just learned to pretend it doesn’t exist. What’s certainly come about in its place is a desire to be touched. But maybe that’s from the creek, some weird example of an option to replace… Whatever was lost. Johan, child of alcoholics, who’s father was abandoned by his parents by their death, and then abandoned to live in a cabin with his bad legs after that. Maeve, a child of rape, was abandoned by her mother, who had been abandoned by her mother. They both abandoned their parents to a greater or lesser extent, and both learned to leave their children.

Sometime about then, we’d moved to the Church of the Creative, a commune outside Creswell, Oregon. Dad had returned and found his new partner. We lived in a tent while building a house.

Where was Maeve? Ah, who knows. I think she was in San Francisco with Ron, the man she had hooked up with when Dad took off. Or maybe she was fishing. Trading one missing parent for another. Not like Dad was all that present at the moment anyhow, his new partner pregnant, a house being cobbled together, baking at the Excelsior Hotel in Eugene. Saturday market.

Smoking weed and fighting with the other people at the commune. We were trying to build a fort for a little while, and my Dad and another kid’s dad were always fighting about how it should be built. We’d get something done, then they’d argue and tear it apart. Maybe that was after? Doesn’t matter. At this point it’s just texture to the story. We’d go visit Bonnie & Barry sometimes.

Carl was older, the kid who would babysit us, as it were. Lived on a piece of land with forests and creeks. They had horses and we would ride up to the power lines. Or shoot bows and arrows. Play with knives, and shoot at cans out back. So much older, he was always the one with the cool things and toys, and music eventually.

I remember that’s when Johan started forgetting how to talk with children. Or at least with me. Maybe I was arguing. Boundaries were not his strong suit; it’s sometime around then, at 6 or 7 when I first heard his line “See, you don’t even have the words to say what you want to say.” It was his ultimate dismissal- if you don’t have the words for something, you can’t understand it. He’s a debate guy. If you can’t win the argument on the technical, then you’re entirely wrong. You lose. If he could push you to stutter, or to use the wrong word, then you lost and could be dismissed.

Maeve came back during one stormy night and packed us up. Water and damp, get ready, we’re going to go to San Francisco. Somewhere in the Tenderloin, we would walk to a bakery and buy bread from an old Chinese man who told us we were good kids, here, take a candy. We had a friend I remember vaguely. His name over time has faded, but we would watch Speed Racer at his house, and his dad took us all to see the Nutcracker Ballet at the SF Ballet. The tree rising is still a bit of magic.

You learn not to think of anywhere as home. Everywhere is just a place, a place you’re at for a while.

We would swim naked in the creek sometimes. That’s when Carl would come and grab a hug. The one time when he said “try this” and took my penis in his mouth. I didn’t know what to think of it, but it was nice to be touched. “Now you do that for me.” It was weird how his got large. I didn’t think to be suspicious, and it felt good to have my hair stroked. My Dad didn’t touch my hair much anymore and I missed being able to cuddle up with dad. Missed being held by mom.

When we came back to Oregon Maeve moved into the A-frame up on top of the hill at the Church. Ron was there- I don’t remember him in San Francisco. But he was there, at the Church, with Maeve. He was always fun when he was drunk; if he couldn’t walk up the hill he would pretend to be a dragon chasing us, and we could get away really easily. Lots of laughter in the late summer light as he roared up the hill. Watch out for the poison oak.

Carl kept that up for a couple months. If we visited, he’d come up with some way to get away to the creek. Off to the woods somewhere. Not that I’d have thought it strange to be away from the adults- we always had adventures. Then came a time he wasn’t very interested in playing. Didn’t want to go do anything with me. I do remember the shame, though, trying to get my friend back. Asked if he wanted me to do the mouth thing, if that would make everything okay, and he sneered “why, do you like it?” Lessons in how touch changes. It’s always needed, but then its no longer a thing of comfort, but a thing of confusion, risk, becomes a weapon. Now I can’t imagine why anyone would do that to a six year old. Maybe if I could it wouldn’t sit there like this, a sore that interferes with all my relationships. Maybe because it’s entangled with all the other losses.

It was good to go to Alaska after that. The A-frame burning down is, to me now, a neutral thing. Exciting, in that it was fun to watch. It was nice to have people acting like they cared. I can’t say I feel bad it happened. What did we lose except some baby pictures and clothes. Maybe some jewelry. But we got to move in to the house in Eugene and live with some other kids, go to a different school.

Magnet arts was an alternative school. I got to learn a little Japanese. I tried stealing things and then finding them for some reason. Some things are ridiculous in hindsight, although not growing up with a television turned out to be a real social problem. I got pummeled on the playground once because I didn’t know who the Fonz was.

So, yeah. Living on an island with just the four of us on it was nice. There were no people to have to figure out. No one to try to be friends with, or to not be friends with.

Those years loom large, they are a cloud I can’t figure out how to escape, and don’t know I want to. So many interesting things happened- we were there for the early years of the Oregon Country Fair. Living off the land (sort of). Living in all those different places meant exploring and a sort of freedom. They, too, are colored by what happened later, or in other places of this same time. What I experienced makes intimacy a conflicting desire. What if uncertainty becomes a refrain? Is it wrong to want? Is it a perversion to wish to be touched? What’s wrong with me that I want to be intimate when it doesn’t really mean anything, except for in the pull of the heart and the body?

Transience as a child has other dilemmas. Moving, changing homes and places, that places contacts in every area, but you don’t get to choose who these people are. When I was fourteen my dad asked me to come down to Eugene for Thanksgiving from Seattle. We had fought the summer before, so I wasn’t sure about going, but did. Sense of obligation, not enough of an understanding of choice. When we finished dinner and were having desert Johan asks me out onto the porch where he asks me where I am staying tonight. “I thought I was staying here.” He gives his smile, the one that says that you don’t have the capacity to understand, and shakes his head “No, you’re still not welcome to stay here yet.” That summer someone broke into the house and stole a few things, including their checkbook. He’d decided I had done it, and that night sat me on a stool for a family meeting and proceeded to yell at me. When I scowled he hit me and told me to stop frowning. So I smiled, and he told me to stop smirking. So I smiled wider, and he hit me again. And again. And again. My brother sat there, head down. My sister cried, but didn’t say anything. His wife, she sat there and looked angry, angry with me, then gathered the other kids and took them away.

Where do you go in a city you’re not living in? Not going to school there, so not sure where any other kids are living. We’d been taken to visit Carl that summer though, he was in an apartment near the University of Oregon where he was a student. So, I walked over there. Carl was drinking eggnog with a friend, watching movies. Come on in. Eggnog with Bacardi 151. I got drunk enough that I spent the rest of the night puking. They thought it was pretty funny. I still can’t stand the smell or taste of eggnog.

All those colors, the tints and hues of now that obscures, changes, modifies the past. Was it really such a bad thing to have a summer being sexualized as at six? Maybe I’m making a tempest out of a teapot of, as my mom said when I asked her about it “boys being boys”. Which was worse? The past becomes a little less immediate. Then again, getting slapped around a bit at 13 is a pretty pale problem, and kicked out for a night at 14 is barely a blip. I managed to get back to Seattle, nothing obviously wrong, didn’t lose an eye. Could have been worse.

Yet, there is something worse. It’s that at the end of the day, when I look at this, I do feel broken. That there are these things wrong with me. That at the end of the day, the fact that I’m broken does mean that I am not worth enough to really care about. I will be too difficult. I won’t be valuable enough to give that second chance. I know this, I can even prove it, because I’m more expensive to insure, I am seen as less reliable. Not because I’ve proven to be less of any of that, but because I have admitted to damage, and this is a place where to lie is held in higher esteem than honesty. If you’re hurt enough that you have to admit it, you will always be less. Less worthy, less valuable, less of a person. I know I just don’t matter that much.

Power changes

Power changes. That is, who has the power to be heard is an evolution.

I know that I feel like some of the groups that have appeared in the last few years have come out of nowhere. Black Lives Matter. Me too. These are the big ones, the two that have been changing the landscape of this country, and elsewhere.
It doesn’t take much reflection to realize that the problems behind these groups are not new. Women have been subjugated to second class citizens for all written history. Black has been a measure of one’s lack of worth, a weird arithmetic where the value of black skin is an inverse relationship in time to their perceived worth as humans as it stopped being the mark of a commodity and slowly becomes just another facet of humanity.
These aren’t new problems, then. So why are they now so public, so newsworthy?

I think it’s because we (all of us) are seeing groups who are finally achieving enough social standing for their concerns to be taken seriously. After all this time, a black man can finally say that the life they have to live is unfair, and we, the public, that is everyone who isn’t black, those who are black, and largely those of us who have been living the privilege of being white, we realize that they are telling the truth. That we owe it to them to listen to them.
This is the same thing that has finally allowed “Me Too” to become real. How sad a story is that? After how many minutes we’ve existed together, women finally have enough social cachet in the Western World to say that they are tired of being paid less and being subjected to rape and molestation. There really isn’t any one thing that led to that realization. It isn’t as if Weinstein is the first famous, powerful man to treat women as toys. He’s just the piece of dust that started the snowstorm.

Talking with a friend we mused about why “Me Too” would be having an easier time, spreading farther and being taken more seriously in the press, the media, and in the actions of companies than “Black Lives Matter”.
On one hand, it’s difficult to play the game of which wrong is worse. On the other hand, there seem to be some obvious reasons. Everyone knows a hundred women. Mothers, sisters, aunts, spouses, partners. Roughly half the people we all know are women, and while the women might be surprised at being finally heard, the men are equally surprised at hearing these stories. Not that they haven’t heard them before, but that it’s not just from the one or two women, but from their mothers and sisters and daughters.
That’s a revelation.
“Black Lives Matter” has a bigger hurdle. We still separate out after school. How many white people are still friends with their high school and grade school friends who had different skin tones? Does that friendship last until college? Graduation? The first job? When do those people fade away?

One thing I’ve heard is that people go to their culture, go to where is comfortable, so we just drift apart.
The more I think about that, the more it seems facile. It’s not necessarily intentional, it’s just what happens, right? Sure- but it’s what happens because we are all affected by the cultural prejudices.

Take me: I didn’t go to “my culture”, I went to where is easy. I want to say that I’m a special case. I didn’t grow up in the same America as most. I know what it’s like to be profiled because of my name, to be profiled because of my clothes. I know what it’s like to have someone say that they didn’t expect me to be… American, White, etc. But that’s not really different- it just means that they didn’t expect to respect me.
I went where it was easy. I could go to Alaska and work on fishing boats. I could sleep on the streets in NYC. I could stay at Sarah Lawrence College and walk around campus without attracting attention. So, no- I didn’t have it really different; I experienced privileges that I didn’t earn.

That’s the same sort of benefit I got in construction. I could open a business because it was easy. No one asked if I knew what I was doing, they didn’t test me beyond practical jokes or crass attitudes. I didn’t have to worry about what I was wearing beyond whether my tools were too new or my boots were too clean. My skin was not seen. At least, not after the first glance.

Being taken seriously is a matter of many little things, little actions.
I didn’t go to any school long enough to have friends for more than a couple of years. There were problems with that- I learned just how little people care about those who aren’t seen as part of their community. I learned how different the curriculum is from one district to another. I learned that education is a small and secondary element of the education system here.
Most of the kids I met were long term residents of wherever. They lived in a couple houses, went to a couple schools. They could name their 3rd grade teacher in 10th grade. They had friends who were multi-year friends. Kids they met in grade school and still knew in high school.
None of those kids said they didn’t want a friend to go to the same college as them. It’s just that they didn’t get to.
They didn’t ask why their friend didn’t get into the same AP class they did, or why they weren’t ushered in to meet the college counsellor in the same year. I remember hearing that kids had counsellors at school, advisors who helped them with applications and talked to them about college and what they would do after school. I never had one of those, never met with one, and was never offered one. I know there were others like me- not seen as part of the community, not valuable enough to spend effort on.
This is part of the little differences, the little things that aren’t done for many here.
It’s not that people go to their culture, they just aren’t invited on to the next part of the game. In the same way that women are subtly directed to social careers, not invited to the more “serious” industries, black students aren’t invited to college, except as some stereotype. Their parents may push the idea, but the schools don’t go out of their way to get them there.

No one person says “you aren’t going to do this”, it’s just not put on the menu.
Then we end up here, where one of the questions should be if the friends you have now look like the friends you had when you were young. If they aren’t, why not? Is it really just the natural progression, or is it what happens when the place we live isn’t questioned. When we do what’s easy, with an eye to what works best for us. We aren’t taught to look around to see if the other people we cared about are staying with us, or why they aren’t still there.

Fortunately, things get better.
Today the women in America are heard more than ever before. Black people in America are taken more seriously than ever before. Both of those overlapping, intertwined groups are today doing better than ever before. And it’s pretty sad to realize that doing better is what exists now. When we hear “Black Lives Matter” or “Me Too” in public, it’s not that they just arrived, but that this culture has evolved enough for all these people to have this much of a say. The culture doesn’t mean everyone, and there’s always some backlash to change. This isn’t the end of change, just another step in the evolution of society as it heads toward the (hopeful) goal of recognizing everyone here as having value. Hell, maybe that’s part of the problem, that there can even be a question of whether “value” has a place in that statement.

Anxiety

Anxiety.
I wish it was a stranger.
No, this is so familiar.
It is my companion. My closest companion.
Never far, there’s nothing to note when it leaves.
But, oh, the return. That’s something to know about.
When with one breath I can feel it coming.
In the second breath it is here.
By the third, it is settling into my chest.
Fourth finds it in my bones.
Restless stomach, I cannot move.
Each breath brings more in.
Each breath is dread, poison.
How much more can I take?
Will I survive this course?
Oh, it is here, and it has everything.
The world is contained in this.
Every piece of sand, every flower.
Every billowing cloud, every smile.
Your laugh, and the hopeful eye,
You all are in this, and you have nothing.
Two dimensional caricatures
Worthless loves and lives
In here, you are just moments
Meaningless, but not weightless
All of you pile into me
Fall onto me
Smother me with your demands
With your chatter
With your cares
Anxiety eats you
Makes you dust
That coats my lungs
Suffocates me

What does it mean to grow up a man in America…

I don’t really know what it means to be a man.

I know what it was like to grow up transient in America.
I am white. I am male. By all accounts, I am in a privileged class, and that has some truth to it.
At the same time, there’s a dialogue happening that seems myopic. It holds generalizations about the benefits of being male and assuming it applies to all as a fairy tale of wonderful benefits and intentional actions.

Hugs were a part of my life when I was young, very young. By the time 1st grade came around, hugging was beginning to be restricted to family and close friends. By 4th grade such a thing was limited to parents and some sort of crisis.

At 18, it became more acceptable to hug a few close friends. Things have loosened up a bit in the past decade, and more people seem to hug upon meeting, but it’s still a segregated action. It is risky.

One did not hold hands after age 7. Holding hands could be done with parents or with younger siblings who needed to be guided somewhere.

Physical touch was reserved for those you loved within your family, and those who you were in a relationship with.
Oh, there was the touching of sports- roughhousing, wrestling, fighting. That’s all okay. But to be touched in an intimate manner, a touch that could be caring, soothing, comforting? No. Those could only be from lovers.

Women touched, hugged, held hands. Men in foreign countries could do those things, but not us.

With puberty came real danger. Here you could become a target of anything.
To look too much like one thing meant exclusion from other things. You don’t really choose, you get assigned.
This is when you learn that you can have some physical contact with others that isn’t violent or abusive. You can hold hands again, you can be held again. The catch is, you have to want to kiss them, too.
To touch is to be overshadowed by sex. You can touch, but only in the context of sex.

These conventions are not optional.
These are the rules, and they are set in granite, enforced equally by the other boys and by the girls.

This is the foundation of so many of the complaints about men. The grabbing, the ogling, the crude language.
How many generations of us are here, for whom human contact outside of family is violence or it is sex.
Fear colors it all. Fear of weakness, fear of humiliation, fear of being misunderstood.
And loneliness.

This is why men buy companionship.
This is what sits behind the crude comments, the grabbing hands.
How many crappy one night stands come from this?
How many assaults come from this loneliness?
A loneliness that can’t be admitted. Might not even be conscious.
This is so much of the pain behind a break-up, a divorce. It’s not the loss of a connubial bed, but that the loss of that partnership means the loss of human touch. Knowing that one will be in solitude until someone else could be found.

This twisted need, cut from us too young, festers into a wound.
We can’t ask our friends for solace, for an intimate touch. We can’t curl up into a friend’s arms, or have a hand held as we grieve. The closest we can have is an awkward pat on the back, the frail hands of parents, if they’re still around. Maybe a hug from a child who we don’t want to burden with this.

This is something that has to be dealt with for the balance to change.
If men are expected to be more gentle, more respectful, they have to be given something in return.
We all need to be allowed intimacy that isn’t tied to sexuality.
If one wants to know why so many men kill themselves, even with all the supposed benefits of being male, this is a large part of the puzzle. We all know it. We know that loneliness, and we all deal with it differently. Some turn to sports. Some turn to violence. Some turn to drink. Some to abuse. Most to abuse of themselves.

This is part of what it is to be a man.
You have to stand alone, and to look with scorn on those who need a hand.
To mock the ones who voice any need for care, for tenderness.
One must feel shame when asking for help, or for concern.
So be strong, feed your shame, and act like a man, whatever that means.

philosophistry economistry

I see that there are a number of ways to perceive most things. I have always liked the idea behind philosophy- the idea of attempting to make sense of the world. This is the basis of what we call science, now. Making sense of intangibles is something that starts internally and then branches off to any number of paths.

When I look out there at how people choose their world, it seems to be ordered by which path they chose to take. Each one gives a vista that is unique to its own meanderings. Once on a path there are many branches, and it is always possible to turn around and walk back, to take an earlier branch that can lead to a different perspective.

What I see in people is that there is a feeling that there is a race going on; whoever gets to the end of the path first wins, or you’re running out of time and there just isn’t time to ponder what-if’s as you go. Keep to the trail and don’t get sidetracked by those little paths that don’t go somewhere obvious.

Economics is something enormously important to the society I live in. In a way it is written into the landscape here. The founding of the country was, in a way, an economic choice; the argument that resounded with many was that of freedom of trade, freedom to build businesses. It was also a revolt against taxation, against a government that seemed too far away and that used the taxes to benefit those far away, with too little benefit here. And it was also a bunch of smugglers who were about to see their income reduced by a new scheme of that government that would benefit the general population, but at the expense of ruining their illicit trade- these are the people who funded the revolution.

It was also a rejection of monarchy. Freedom from the social mores, the layers of rank and privilege. This, too, was seen as a chaotic venture- if you don’t know your place, won’t you waste a huge amount of time trying to figure out where you stand in comparison to your fellow man? This was an argument against the idea of equality. While it seems that we made that choice, there appears to be a wish to see some as innately better than others, and the country has spent the past two hundred odd years codifying how to make sure that the better classes have legislative and legal rights to promote their interests above others. We have never gotten rid of that adoration of the royalty, and transfer it to whomever we can see as royal, special, better.

This seeps into our economic system in a number of ways. We have a study of economics that is famously difficult, famously deep and mysterious. We have “Game Theory” to justify actions and rules, sets of arbitrary scenarios to which rules of logic are tested and results tabulated to come up with what must be the most rational response, and at the same time, we are surprised when people on average don’t act rationally.

There is a tension between simplicity and complexity. For science to work, it is easiest to start of reductively; find the basic foundation that the rest is built on, and work from there. In some places this works wonderfully- in mathematics we have arithmetic, which can be applied to represent just about anything, so long as the right form of question is found. It can represent the entire world, at least so far as we can tell.

In some way, arithmetic is a tool that justifies mathematics as something that is infallible. And it is, to some extent. It works, and it works the same every time. I say it is a lot like opening your eyes; if you have sight, every time you open your eyes, you see. It works every time. But, mathematics is a lot more like comprehension than it is arithmetic- while you see something, and you can look at a rock and it will look the same every time, the closer you look, the more you realize that what you see is an ever changing understanding.

The basic concept of philosophy that became the scientific method is that you work on previous knowledge and test it. You look at the rock and say “it’s a rock”. Then you try to figure out what “rock” means, and start looking at what its properties are- hardness, density, structure. The closer and more intimate you get to “rock”, the more “rock” becomes a complex arrangement of different parts- first different types of rock, then the molecules, then atoms, and smaller and smaller. Coming to understand those leads to figuring out how the rock was formed- was it pressure? Was it lava? Was it lava and pressure? Chemical reactions between different things at different temperatures? It turns out that “rock” is structure, history, chemistry, any number of things, and it never really returns to simply “rock” after that.

This is a path. Once you have wandered down it, the vistas that you see have changed you and changed how you see the world. The way that you have been informed becomes structural to how you view the world around you.

In economics there is a similar path, but it is mixed up with the social mores. On the one hand are the rational rules, applied to moderate transactions. On the other is the legal and philosophical underpinnings of how the economics are recorded, metered, the prism through which the data is viewed.

From my perspective, much of our economics is based primarily on the relationship between only two parties- the seller and the buyer. This applies to work (wages, compensation), to banking, to fines. Caveat Emptor appears to rule the day, not just in warnings, but in the philosophy behind how our judicial system deals with money and banking; if you can be convinced to sign something, the economic advantage or disadvantage is held within that agreement, and it’s your fault or your gain.

As one person put it during a conversation, “usefulness has a very simple definition, one that provides a pillar of free-market societies: desirable for exchange.” I love this definition, as it is apparently simple, looks logical, and is about as close to a perfect fiction as is possible. The statement holds within it a range of privilege that is, from my perspective, stunning. This is permission for anything possible- and at it’s most simple definition, one that exists outside of societies, in a neutral space with no outside forces, it is true. Desirable for exchange means that one party has some use for the thing to be exchanged.

This is similar to the way that economic rules are phrased. “Right to Work” rules are a similar simple set of rules based on the idea that anyone is free to work for whoever they want, and any employer is free to hire or fire as they please. The concept is perfectly true for a society where everyone is perfectly equal and no one needs to work. I don’t know where that is, really. If you were born into a wealthy family, then those are rules that are perfectly justifiable for you; because you don’t need income, the employer has no power to influence you into a less than desirable position. On the other hand, most of the people in the world don’t have that benefit, and the less family wealth a person has, the less choice they really have in matters of work. At a certain real point, an individual’s choice is often either to live through crime or accept whatever terms are available to get a job because the barriers to starting a legal business are too high.

In the “useful is anything desirable for exchange” paradigm, this is a rational extension. The person needs a job to survive, and therefore any job offered is useful. Between the two parties it may even look beneficial all around- the employer gets a worker at a rate that allows for profit, and the person being hired gets income in exchange for work. Fine, it’s perfect- that’s Capitalism at it’s basic.

But, to paraphrase another person in that same conversation once said, Capitalism is a nearly perfect engine, if it is allowed to operate without influence. That point being that Capitalism works in a perfect world, but in a world where people stop looking at efficiency in what they are doing, and attempt to exploit other factors, the Capitalist engine winds up requiring controls to prevent too much exploitation on the basis of power, rather than efficiency.

Here in the US we have a stratified social order. It hasn’t been stratified primarily by inheritance for much of the history of the country, but it has always struggled with the urge toward royalty; the idea that families have better genes, and proof is in their economic standing. Families rise, and families fall, and every few generations there are dynasties that control the country to some extent. Our judicial system and our banking system are in a constant state of tension between the words of the Constitution and it’s warring principles that everyone is created equal, but money makes some more equal than others. Our economics looks at short term issues while ignoring long-term.

Access to capital is a great example- the more money you have, the less you pay for access to other people’s money. The less money you have, the more you pay for it. This makes some sense in that economic theory states that there is more risk in loaning to a person with less money as they don’t have the means to finish paying. This theory is proven by the data in that poorer people end up making payments late more often. In short term thinking, then, this is true- poor people are more risky for bankruptcy. But, because of the higher interest rate, the banks have recovered far more of their loans at any given time from a high interest (generally low-income) borrower than they have from the low interest (generally higher-income) borrowers. So the real losses are less, but the way they can are reported make them “higher” losses. This is a perceptual bias, and creates a self-reinforcing problem in that the person with lower income will suffer more and have a harder time paying the higher interest rate- we don’t really have any proof that this is structural to income, or if it is a problem created by the method of calculating “risk”.

It’s a problem of what path you are on. If you have mostly experienced beneficial returns from the economic system, then it looks like it is a pretty fair system that works well. If you’ve have mostly dealt with the opposite, then this looks like a broken system that punishes people for their lack of net worth. All too often, for those at the bottom of the economic scale the institutions that do make money or goods available on a loan basis do so at rates that no wealthy person can conceive of- rates that dwarf the person’s income, with penalties that are severe, and mostly legal now. These predatory companies are all owned and supported by people who live outside of the poor community, and they earn a very good rate of return, and get to pay fairly low taxes because they often get to claim full losses on loans that have been paid back many times over.

I think it’s a combination of the problems of people who are on paths and don’t want to look beyond what they see as benefits. In Seattle most prostitution is purchased online at about 4PM from an office computer, according to some recent studies. This is probably common. Those are all “useful” exchanges if one is deep down one path where the problems with that are on the other side of a hill that they rarely visit. Then it’s just something that two consenting adults do, and the buyer gets to remain blissfully unaware of what sort of exploitation the other is under- is it just easy money? Seems unlikely considering the stigmatism against sex work in this country. Is it voluntary? Perhaps, but only if voluntary allows for it to be the only thing that person can see to do. Is it abusive? Only if you look at the statistics and history of sex work; it isn’t that common for someone to go onto the streets alone to earn money through sex, most are brought to the trade by someone who has some level of power or coercion over that person.

Low income, low skilled work isn’t really all that different from sex work in that the person rarely sees another choice. The outside forces are certainly less- it’s unlikely that there is a Pimp there coaxing you to do something, and the work you do likely won’t be as socially unacceptable or with as much risk of violence. But it’s too simple to say that there’s another job that you could work. If all the jobs are similar, then there isn’t any real choice. If there are no lending institutions to help start a business and you don’t have family money, then it’s unlikely that is a viable option. If that is where you live, you are probably having to work to support yourself and/or your family, making school something other than an option.

This is simply not visible as anything but a concept to many people in this country.

The opposite is also true- when you grow up in poverty it is very hard to see the benefit to work that isn’t labor. You simply don’t have a conceptual ability to understand that someone can get paid for thinking, as opposed to laboring. They know that the people earning the highest incomes in this country don’t pick up shovels or hammers, they use a mop only if they have a whimsical notion that cleaning is a way to meditate. Useful is something that manages to pay the rent or unclog a toilet, not an idea or a concept.

I guess I am far more on that utilitarian side. What is useful has to have greater breadth than the exchange between buyer and seller. To my perception, that is a view of a person in a perfect little glade, or an idyllic island where the plant that generates their electricity and the farm that grows their food and the people that build their houses and vehicles and computers are all far on the other side of mountains. I am living closer to that glen than to the dark side of the mountain, but I didn’t grow up here. I grew up working, moving, struggling. I don’t have that belief that an idea should pay more than the shovel, and that puts me at a disadvantage in this type of economy, this sort of society, with the mores of this country.

For me to learn to live in that privileged glen, I have to give up the paths that I have walked down, leave the people that I have learned to care about, give up the morality of poverty, and I don’t really know how to do that. I don’t know how to un-see what I have seen, what I have learned, and to accept this life of caveat emptor. It seems there has to be another way. I can see the problems with embracing any one of these views- that it puts you on a path you don’t want to leave. But this path looks like it ends only in misery.

How did I get here?

I think it’s fascinating the reasons people have for starting a business, or for not starting one. I wish I understood the difference better between people who work for themselves and those who prefer to have a job.

To start with, I have noticed that many of the people I know who prefer to have a job don’t think of themselves as working for some one person in particular. The people I know at Amazon know that Bezos is up there, but I don’t get the sense that many of them think of him as their boss- he’s more like a figurehead or a mascot. Kinda like Bill Gates was at Microsoft. Not many worked for Bill, they worked for Microsoft.

My ex’s dad was an employee. Or, as he would say, he had a career. He didn’t like me because I was self employed and, in his eyes, that meant that I was someone who wasn’t reliable enough to create a career. I wasn’t made of the right fabric to be significant in a real place.

That, I believe, is one of the things that keeps some people in the role of employees- they have a path, they have a goal, and they know that these places will pay them to be on that path and will reward them at the end by supplying the necessary benefits to achieve that goal.

Some of us don’t have a path that they can see, much less a goal. That takes time, sometimes.

I started off my working life in the fishing industry in Southeast Alaska. It wasn’t a very normal beginning in any sense of the word; we were living on a small island and we were the only residents. It was about fifteen miles by boat to the nearest town, Elfin Cove. It is sixty miles by air (or around a hundred by boat) to Juneau, the nearest city, and the only real hospital near. My mother fell ill and we hitched a ride on a passing tugboat that was heading to Juneau. I still remember paddling out there in the blue plastic skiff we had, the salt spray and the rope ladder dragging in the water. When we got to Juneau Mom was admitted to the hospital and we (I have a twin brother) somehow wound up staying on the tugboat for a few days. We walked the docks and offered to clean people’s boats to get some spending money, and a couple people bit. We were cleaning a skiff when another fisherman, Harlan, came along and recognized us as the kids from the island.

He asked what we were doing, where our folks were. After hearing that our mother was in the hospital he left to see how she was doing. We went back to cleaning, finished up the job and were sitting on the tug when Harlan returned with a proposition. “I talked to your mom, and she said you can come fishing with me. You guys will be my deckhands. You can keep all the humpies (Pink Salmon), and I keep the rest.” That’s all we needed to hear, and off we went. By the end of the second day Harlan let us know that we were going to have to change the deal a bit as the only thing we were catching were humpies. I think we were a little disappointed, because we’d been keeping track.

Work has always been a place of skills acquisition for me. That first job was fascinating- we learned about charts and perused them when Harlan would let us in, looking at his hand-scribbled notes about catches, weather, and true depths. We learned to change out the bait at different times of day, about keeping track of what was catching, how to spot when we had something on the hook and how big it might be. We learned about cleaning the fish; this was an ice boat, and these would be prized fish sold whole at the markets, so we had to gut them perfectly. Harlan had shown us to keep the roe in a bucket, he kept the hearts and would fry them up with eggs for breakfast. The bloodlines were cleaned with a spoon, only the rounded side so you don’t rough up the lining.

When we returned to the mainland work had become expected. I washed dishes at my father’s bakery, worked at my mom’s short lived landscaping business, prepped and cleaned at my stepfather’s painting and drywall business. When we lived in farm country there was always work at the dairies and bucking hay, or picking filberts. Everything we did had some story, some skill to be learned. It doesn’t take long to figure out that the more you know the fewer ditches you’re being asked to dig.

In Seattle there were computers. My friend Noah had a bulletin board. This was in 1981 and the computers were cobbled together out of what parts we could scavenge or buy. Floppy discs and modems and purloined phone cards to cover the cost of roaming the world. I realized that I didn’t have much interest in computers then, but figuring out how to use them was fairly easy. If I’d been more interested I probably would have been able to make one of those “careers.

Instead I left school and fell back to fishing. Work the summer, travel the winter. I knew enough to know that even though the money was good in winter, the work was tough, cold, and filled with people who didn’t have anything else to do. Or they were making a career. Perhaps if I’d had some better captains I would have made a career out of fishing, but I wound up working for a couple bad apples and didn’t see a path to getting my own boat or even a job on a boat where it would be worth staying.

I am not afraid to try new jobs, new industries. I worked in restaurants- there, too, I didn’t make my choices on finances, but on what was available to learn. Instead of working the front of the house waiting tables or tending bar, I chose the kitchen where I traded learning how to use knives and how to cook during long hours for a fraction of the pay the waitstaff made in their 5 hour shifts.

Poor perception of the markets has been one of my achilles heels. In Portland I helped a friend set up his iMac. This was the first generation, and those introduced millions of people over the age of 50 to the magic of email. If only they could figure out how to set up the machine. From my perspective it was about as easy as computers get- it was all pre-loaded on the machine. All you had to do was follow the prompts. That was too much for people who pretty much wanted to play solitaire and send emails to their kids. Setting up one led to setting up another, and then people were offering me money to do it. Way too much money, in my opinion at the time. $60 to spend 1/2 hour working, and another hour explaining email while being fed coffee and cookies? Kinda like stealing money from babies.

That did lead to a job at Oregon Health Sciences University. One of the iMacs was owned by a secretary to one of the lead cancer research doctors and they were working on their Federal Cancer Research grant, one that they do every 10 years and designates them a Cancer Research Center. They needed someone to install, troubleshoot, and get a program going that would automate the footnotes and links. They had the program. I set it up in a morning, and then sat around making sure it worked for 2 weeks for them. Two weeks only because they wanted to be sure it worked. I got paid too much and was allowed to browse all the research papers and had full, free access to all the medical journals. That was payment enough. Again, a position was offered, but I couldn’t see the value in setting up programs anyone should be able to do- all they have to do is follow the directions and keep track of what it’s doing. It’s not rocket science. Except it turns out that it is rocket science, and has a lot of value for some reason.

All this is to say that I don’t make a great employee. What I see when I have a job is an endless procession of days doing things that are not very difficult but are complicated by politics. I started taking classes to get a Project Management Certification. That was fascinating. The points about project management were good, but basic; managing projects is all about front-loading everything you can, and if you can organize it and have all questions answered before you need them, then it’s a really easy position. In my opinion, the only reason a project manager is needed is if there is a lack of skills and ability in the people under the PM. What really turned me off about the class was that more time was spent teaching people how to discover who the important people were and methods of getting the attention of people otherwise too important to pay attention to you. I’ve got too much ego to have to worry that someone might be too important to talk to me.

Fishing was always a percentage job. You are an “independent contractor” and earn a share of the catch, less expenses (boat, fuel, food). Your value is in production and ability. A restaurant kitchen is much the same- your value is in how much you can do well. You don’t get paid for that skill, so you do it for your own satisfaction, especially as you know that there won’t ever be a bonus or respect given. That’s what I liked about kitchens, and why I didn’t stay in them- at some point you have to create your own kitchen or you become one of the production drones that the people with passion can’t stand; it’s the fear that you’re going to wind up being that one day. The IT jobs were dull, overly profitable for what was being done.

That line; “overly profitable” is my worst dilemma. I haven’t ever worked just for profit, and the idea of being over-paid has always been uncomfortable, as though I am doing something wrong. I know a lot of people who suffer from some variation on this theme- some of it’s not being sure that they are worth anything more than what they get, some of it’s just not being from a place where anyone earns enough to live on. My family was always on the edge, always moving, so some of it is the wages of poverty; not believing that you should have enough to be comfortable.

Which gets us awkwardly back to the question of why would someone start a business?

My first construction business was started because I wanted to become a better carpenter and there was no opportunity for me to learn from any company around me. I should say that I couldn’t see any company doing the work I wanted to do that would allow me to do it. I wanted to build better than the people I had worked for, I wanted to do custom woodworking. I wanted to follow a path that interested me, not the path someone else told me to take.

This was an offshoot of a fortuitous experience a few years earlier. I had been working as a bike messenger in Seattle and was tired of the grind. I needed to get out of Seattle, and decided I would take a bike trip. I went to San Francisco with my friends Al & Jen, with their newborn baby Elliot, and set out after a few days. I winded my way through Santa Rosa, Yosemite, Death Valley, Las Vegas, Phoenix, Albuquerque, Santa Fe (where I wound up getting a job that took me back to the Grand Canyon to cook for a crew filming a Charmin commercial), and got snowed in in Taos.

In Taos I had the good fortune to meet Jonathan Taintor, a sculptor who had started out his career as a carpenter. John traded room and board for my labor helping him finish his house. He had a fantastic carpenter running the show for him who had retired a few years before and moved to Taos from Southern California. He had entered the trades working for German Cabinetmakers, then went on to be part of the post WWII building boom. He was highly skilled; he had run the renovation of one of the Hearst Mansions. He also gave me a book, “A Sense of Place, A Sense of Time” by John Brinkerhoff Jackson, a book that really opened my eyes almost as much as that job in Taos.

I wanted those experiences. I wanted to see what I could do. In Portland I had been working for a mediocre company that did everything, all of it under the table. That allowed me to learn how to do plumbing and electrical work. I shouldn’t have been doing it, but I learned how- I read books, learned how to calculate loads and load drop. That learning curve was enough to keep me there for a couple years, along with buying a house and getting married. As I learned more, though, I learned how much we weren’t doing to be better- we hit code, and did an average job, and that’s really all that the owner cared about. That and him not paying taxes, which meant I paid all my own taxes. I was also getting better at what I did, and as I was left on jobs to do them start to finish, the customers started requesting me. I became a reason why people came to the company, I was creating work. Eventually I had customers who wanted to fire the company, but wanted me to come back to do the work. They preferred my honesty.

I finally realized that the way to do what I wanted to do was to start my own company. I would do it legally, and do all my work legitimately. I could do work that was better than okay, learn how to do more things, and get paid for learning!

That business was really an education. Profit wasn’t my main motivation, education was. I wanted to build skills, and I learned how to find people who know how to do what I didn’t know. I found resources online. I built a stable of other small companies who were also interested in doing better work, and we would team up on projects. We all undercharged. I would make money on one job, lose it on the next. I learned how to do books better, and learned how to estimate.

I built my ideas about what a company should be through all of those experiences. I also learned that there is value in having respect for yourself. For me, starting businesses and working in new jobs has been about growing as a person. Some of it has been about trying to define where I am in this culture, in this society. That seems like a good enough reason to start a company.

Time, Cost, Quality

In a recent discussion the old saw “Time, Cost, Quality- pick any two” came up. This is a common triangle of choices that describes the main points in any sale of services and is based on the tension between the three elements; you can only emphasize two of these at any given time. In other words, if you want it cheap and fast you give up control of quality. If you want high quality and fast speed, you give up control of price. If you are concerned with price and quality, then you have to give up control of time.

Something has always bothered me about this triangle. Two of the choices are simple; time and cost are definable qualities. Everyone knows what a dollar is and everyone knows what an hour is. Time is an easily definable facet; it will be done in 6 hours or it will be done in 6 months. It will cost $100 per hour, or it will cost $50,000; these are fixed concepts that don’t rely on an individual to supply anything more than quantity. Quality is a whole different matter.

Quality is, in my experience, where the ability of the parties to agree parts ways most often.

What is quality? How do I know it is quality? What part does quality refer to? These are tricky questions all by themselves, and made more difficult by being points that have to be both defined and agreed upon. The service provider is hampered by knowledge and the particular blindness that can come with expertise- how do you find out what the customer knows and separate that from what the customer thinks they know?

To make this even more difficult, quality is a fluid concept that changes with education and proximity.

Coming to terms on quality is probably the most difficult part of creating a construction project. There is no strict definition of quality. There are a few organizations that have attempted to qualitatively define “quality”, such as AWI. This often means that there is a set of rules about how a project can be inspected, such as “flooring will be inspected from a standing position or at a distance of 6′.” Diamonds are graded on qualities of color and clarity, both being aspects that take experience and training to know how to do; the average person isn’t likely to be able to see the difference.

In services this becomes important because it means the client’s expectations change through the process. This may seem fickle, but it is really an aspect of knowledge. The client is often the one with the least knowledge, and as that grows, things that they didn’t think were important become important.

As a service provider this can be frustrating. On the one hand you may want to educate the client from the outset- to inform them of all the details and the decisions they will need to make. That takes a lot of time, energy, and unless the client is intensely interested in the product the subject likely isn’t compelling enough for the client to understand, no matter how many words you use. On the other hand you may want to be brief at the beginning and create a good change order process so the job can be modified as the client reaches plateaus of understanding and can answer questions. This often leads to piles of change orders and a final cost that is far above the original estimate.

I don’t know if there is any one answer is to this dilemma. It is lessened by familiarity- any return customer is already trained to some extent and will have an idea of what is to come. I think one of the best methods may just be to explain this to the client. Let them know that there will be changes, that those changes will become more significant as the project progresses, and give them an idea of how much you think the project will change. That’s where your experience comes in, and the honesty may help cushion the pain of additional costs.