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Booyah! In your face! Cha-ching!
(20 Dec) That and other boorish swaggerings come to mind. But I alone have the right to blurt them out because I have done something seriously fucking amazing: I'm barely thirty and I just paid off my thirty year mortgage in five years.
Yes yes, y'all! HOO-ah!
Five years of steady guerrilla tactics against banks, work and the government. Lurking, tracking, hiding, sniping, enduring every institution that wanted a piece of me. Five years of balancing staying still and blending or bolting to be a moving target. How did I defeat these empty entities, you ask as you contemplate your own campaign.
Very well, I reply, I became just as empty.
Five years playing dead as decadence throbbed from beyond the walls of my middle class battlefield. Five years since I embalmed myself, carefully labelling the canisters "soul", "hopes", "dreams", in preparation for a time when I could begin an equally painful reconstruction. As a hollow shell you shed no tears as life passes you by nor are you wont to rail suicidally against the doublespeak at work. If I recall correctly, tear ducts and outrage were on the second shelf from the left, in the red and blue jars.
Out of skin then I fashioned myself into a conduit for money. It's harder than it looks you know, getting the tension just right so that it doesn't burst or implode under the pressure. Then coring out the excess to smooth the flow of mad bank from payroll straight to the mortgage. It's invisible but you can trail it by its electronic residue and its impeccably ordered paper statements. Marvel at its complexity, its elegance, its boldness. Breathe on it and watch your breath condense then freeze. Don't come any closer or it may puncture, showering all with sweet money. Once I taste luxury the bleeding may never be staunched, leaving me with the added death of surrendering to a 'conventional' mortgage. No one wants that.
I'm money baby, and you're all fucked up!
The sacrifice of human life can be measured in seconds. These five years are no less poignant than a few shell-shocked seconds on Omaha Beach or the slow burn of a night in an apartheid-era prison. I had to do it or the losses would have been far greater.
At the end I claim victory over one of the strongest forces known to man: compound interest, an unholy attack dog bred through the union of time and money. Having subdued it alone should I now share my win with others? As the ink dries on its unconditional capitulation, surely it's time for me to populate my land. But I ask, where were they? Where were the 'wife' and 'child' I was supposed to a-squire while I drilled with musket and fife? Was she too repulsed by my spartan ways to afford me even the delusion of warmth? Didn't like the thought of being Mrs Freedom-fighter, huh? And so you're back, from outer space. Well, my home is no home to someone who didn't man the Gatling or feed the ammo. Get your own honey smacks.
Go you good thing!
To my allies and detractors I bear no diplomatic tensions, just a hope that I have repaid all my debts. Other nations may have deficits but that's not for this little sovereignty of one. Debt is slavery and I've seen what the world does to fledgling countries who raise their flags in nationalistic fervor before taking their current accounts out of deficit.
I don't need a flag anyway when I have paper. Pride may cometh before a fall but I will not feign humility after making history. After merely five years, my land is my own. My whim is law. My title is my constitution, my bill of rights, my chronicles. It is testament to a purgatory of staying bound in a free-flowing market, watching others frolic through cold tired eyes, of cutting off consumption in a world where your sole definition comes from what you consume, of trading thirty years of tithes for five years of revolution.
Such are the trenches we crawl through to wrest freedom and dignity. You included.
Read it and weep.
(20 Oct) I don't procrastinate with jobs I hate: changing tires, doing my tax, or computer troubleshooting. But when it comes to something I enjoy deeply - writing - I leave it until I have absolutely nothing else to do. Strange, no? It's not because I'm short of ideas. It's not because I'm not confident of my skills. And it's certainly not because I am too busy at work. It's only occurred to me in the last few months to investigate this and I think I've struck the root of the problem:
I don't believe writing is real work.
Oh don't get me wrong, I believe good writing enlightens and entertains. I recognise the value of the written word. It's just that someone else should write it while I work in a real job.
In my family premium was placed on 'getting things done'. You got praised for being a 'doer' rather than a 'talker'. 'Doers', I was always told, are the ones that get paid and the ones that get laid. 'Talkers' surround themselves with puffy words and expressions which, in addition to getting them nowhere, often prevent our 'doers' from 'doing'.
(Sometimes I wonder if I'm related to Ayn Rand.)
From that I got the idea that writing served no tangible purpose, that all writing was wank. Not a very useful attitude for someone who wants to be a writer.
Better to make myself useful, my family said, and the best gauge of utility was money. The more 'useful' a profession the greater the chance of finding work with a good salary. My choice of work, business computing, resulted from that calculus of financial utility; risk-reward, return-on-investment. Computers are the paragon of my inherited world view, eternally 'doing': crunching numbers, calculating, rendering, communicating. They are the future my son, if you could be more like them you'd be rich. In contrast the stereotype of poor writers poor reinforced my notion that activity of writing was redundant in society.
Surreptitiously following my dream last month I attended a workshop where I met people who actually made their living out of amateur writing - a minor shock in itself to learn that they exist. There I was horrified to learn how inefficient writing is. Let me give you some of the statistics: Only 10% of characters ever get used. 90% of stories are discarded by their author and from the 10% that get chosen for polishing even fewer are published or turned into films. My dominant business analyst persona was outraged. "What a terrible waste of time!" I spluttered at the speaker but the quiet little writer in me recognised that such attrition was part of the chiefly subconscious artistic process.
But the same inefficiencies lie in other occupations. How much wood does a carpenter waste? How much metal will a boilermaker scrap? Looking closer to home, the amount of computer code that I discard far outstrips what makes the final compile.
Writing and optimising a syntactically correct, functionally elegant subprogram takes the same effort as writing and refining a moving, appropriate paragraph. Furthermore, if we judge an activity's usefulness by its impact on people then a good piece of writing will trump a nifty program any day because writing speaks to us directly using human language function calls evolved over millennia whereas code must affect people indirectly through a computer. Why judge writing by a harsher standard than programming?
Easy: the money. Programmers are rich. Writers are poor. Programmers are 'doers'. Writers are 'talkers'. Moral of the story: you can write as a hobby if you absolutely must but make sure you spend more time programming.
So if I spent 0 time at work programming (because I detest it so) then it follows by my personal ethic that I spend 0 time writing. I avoid programming because I hate it and I avoid writing because I believe I must program in order to earn the 'right' to write. It all makes sense in convoluted emotional logic.
Caught in this vocational riddle my displacement behaviour is to surf the web and anxiously gnaw on my headphone cord.
But is it true that programmers are heroes and writers are zeroes? It certainly used to be that programmers were considered l33t haxors, cyberspatial ronin who could put an 'e' in front of your business and turn clicks and mortar into warm fuzzy dot-com cash. Once hailed as missionaries who would save us from the Y2K apocalypse, now I.T. workers are chopped liver. We're split off from the 'core' and shipped off to India. Computers were the future, now they're just another cost-centre. Long ago this fluke of the market priced writing bad programs above writing good stories. No one has checked to see if that fluke still runs.
Okay, maybe it does. But does that matter to me anymore? I've followed money in computing to the extent of forsaking the bits which I love for the bits that I hate. Now my house is almost paid and money is all but out of the equation. And when money is out of the equation the worth of all activities become maddeningly equal. I should keep forsaking?
I wish I could just snap my fingers and believe in the process of writing as well as its product. Unless I change my attitude I will always find something else to do other than write. Unfortunately my disdain for artistic activity that helped me narrow in on profitable work still remains firmly lodged in my psyche with the strength of racial memory. Realising that there is no basis for such a stigma is truly the biggest writer's block I face.