Old Sayings of Quality and

quantity. How much have you lived? That’s a loaded question. It can be answered in so many ways. I guess the traditional way would probably to measure in years. This is a very business-like way to look at our existences, however, and it just does not seem to sit quite right in my heart. The things I feel about existence are not measurable in numbers. That’s why I am not a good American.

Something I have discovered in the last year is that the true driver of America is business. I don’t mean in the traditional capitalistic experience, although it now makes sense why there are so many people in the world that have a righteous indignation about the way one particular country deals with the world. We look at things in terms of business. It is not just that we are trying to make a buck and stay afloat, we actually think about things in terms of business: the numbers reveal the success.

The problem is, of course, that they are right. Numerically deciding worth is almost completely valid. If you were to set a goal for somebody, and they reached that goal, would you be proud of them? Absolutely. The problem with business is that somebody else is always making the goals. Presidents, CEOs, and Board Members do not even set goals. It’s the culture that sets the goals, because even presidents, CEOs, and Board Members all what to be as good as that guy across the street who started his congruous company a year after I did. That now becomes the goal. I want what he’s got. It’s really got nothing to do with him particularly; however, if we think about capitalism as competition drives capital, that other guys only has to exist. That’s his only job.

But we have all seen it, when two rival businesses get out of hand and start battling each other outside the lines of business. This is the really unsettling part because it is the business mentality that has gotten into their understanding of existence. They truly feel that what they need is more than what they’ve got, but their investment to get it involves so many other things that there is no way to keep track of them and it winds up being a very inhuman standard of human interaction. No matter how compassionate or people-oriented the culture of your business may or may not be, it is eventually about putting money in the register, the year-end reports, the weekly sales goals, the sales volume by department, the conversion rate, the average customer investment and (the big daddy of them all) profit.

I want to be very clear, here, and say that this is painting of big business overall, and this is not to say that within many of these companies there are not managers and directors and supervisors that feel it is a part of their investment to truly attempt to foster working relationships with the part-time staff and truly invest in them. Truly. But these guys don’t usually last all that long because it is an understood part of business that the part-time staff has the highest turnover, and that’s just the way it is. The longer you can keep them, the better, obviously, but the fact remains that you can train almost anybody to do that job or the equivalent of that job in what amounts to a grand total of a couple of days.

It gets a little bit hairier in the next steps.

This is largely because the complexity of the responsibility increases and becomes less about the tasks and more about the maintenance of the business. The tasks on any given salesfloor are not complicated. As nuanced as you want your tasks, you could probably teach a monkey to do most of these things. That’s a little bit harsh, but I’m afraid it’s true. Even when you have to deal with the human element, you can give your part-time monkey staff the skills to handle what most of the humans will throw at you.

Training people to take over a higher-complexity, less-task-oriented, business-watching position is more complicated. But even here you can train people to understand it. I’m so convinced of the ape’s ability to handle complex tasks, that were apes able to speak and read, they could do these tasks as well.

The goal of business is to make money. Anything else that happens outside of that is meant to help the business make money. Contributions to charities – good publicity. Social development – happier employees equals elevated efficiency. Careers and benefits – employees locked in for the long haul and it is easier to not have to train a new monkey.

I am not trying to pass judgment on business because there is a place for it in society. People have been in business for a long time. It is a necessary thing for the successful functioning of any society. What I worry about is the effect that the mindset of business has on the culture of an entire country when it becomes the only mindset. You can only get your music heard if it appeals to a mass of people and somebody can make money off of your efforts. You can only get a book published if it is accessible to the general reading public, especially if you have not ever had anything published previously. Somebody has to profit off of this goddamn it (tometimes I wonder why MS Word allows the word goddamn to go un-underlined whereas helluva will consistently get the underline until you tell the dictionary differently), and that had better be profit of the cold-hard electronic kind.

Digital money kills me, and has been killing me more and more lately. The fact that my enormous amounts of debt exist only in the fact that I can look at my accounts online and see what I owe is a difficult thing to juxtapose with the idea that it does not exist physically. Then again, it exists in the computer I am typing on. It exists in the diamonds I have bought. It exists in the groceries purchased and consumed long ago. But long after the physical things have gone, it exists in our hearts and our minds. Money has become so powerful that it does not even need to exist physically, the overwhelming reality of it exists so powerfully inside us—as a result of our cultural conditioning—that the ironic gap can never be bridged (i.e. because one side of the land does not have to exist). Sometimes it does exist, but it doesn’t have to.

Money has become too powerful to fight against.

Goddamnit I’m afraid I’ve lost the thread here, but then again, I think what I’m getting at is that quantifiable quantity does not equal quality. Two years of bartending experience does not mean that you are a good bartender. It means you have two years of experience. Having more money than somebody else does not make you better. Unquantifiable quantity does equal quality. Having money in your hand that you earned through a day of work that was involved in your desire to make yourself a better human being means something, no matter what quantity of money it is. Time spent in research and development of bartending skills will make you a better bartender. Qualified time, as it were, can be a successful measure, but time as a number cannot.

How much have you lived? Have you ever run around a hotel doing cartwheels down the hall and breaking onto the roof? No, there is a good chance you haven’t, because that is not qualified time to you. Have you ever wandered aimlessly because that is what you WANTED to do. That is a good investment of your time, and the quality of that time is unquantifiable in terms of the quality of interaction it will have on your existence.

Desire is natural. Desire for accumulation of things is not natural. I’ve got everything I want and still I want more.

I am in a struggle with the business-trained part of my head. It wants me to believe in that piece of the truth that the numbers reveal something. They do. But it’s what they reveal that is oftentimes skewed.

I guess I’m lost and don’t really know how to end this piece. Let’s call this a continuing struggle in my brain space, and there will be more business-minded cogitations into the meaning of existence to come.

But goddamn it I hope there’s not a helluva lot more.

My Whole World is

change. And changed, and changing. I have oftentimes wondered, previously in my life, how things seem to change so rapidly. My mind naturally turns toward history, and I can’t help but reflect on the last two years of my life, and good god one helluva lot has happened. For example, I have decided that helluva is a word, and screw Microsoft Word. Perhaps it’s because I am trying desperately to be very conscious of my decisions, but the problem I have encountered is that when you are aware of your decisions—even the smallest ones like deciding to say “screw Microsoft Word”—you became very aware of the fallout.

I think differently now. My mind has constructed whole new channels of flow. In a lot of ways I can only be grateful for the way I can somehow see the neurons firing along new paths, because it means that I am still developing new areas of my brain. This means a lot to me. I have tended to downplay the fact that within the last two years I have begun and completed a Master’s degree. Only in my recent reflections have I come to realize just how important this time was to my life/existence development. There was, essentially, either a consistent disinterest in what it was I was studying on the part of people around me, or a consistent desire to keep it hidden on the part of me. My very first semester of class sent my brain spiraling down paths it had not encountered before, and I am still struggling with some of the basic concepts I learned in that first four months. One of my classes consisted of something like sixteen women and me. I think I could have gone two ways with this. First, I could have tried to “represent the male perspective” consistently in class, to the point where I would have probably just caused contention and ill will—which would have stunted my growth, I think. Instead, I decided to learn from all of their perspectives, and get to know a new way to see the world.

I’m unfortunately too attached to this idea of seeing things through others’ eyes. I write. I have decided that recently. I am a writer, and writing is what I do. It has to be my focus. It’s part of the reason that I find myself so consistently attempting to see things through other people’s eyes: it’s all character development to me. I wrote my thesis on Dr. Hunter S. Thompson, whose main thrust was in the experiencing—at any level—the act, the event, the subject he was writing about. In a way, while Thompson’s writing often employs grotesque imagery and exaggeration—with a backdrop of paranoia—it rings with truth like no other writer of the time. We all know Tom Wolfe pulled some information from Thompson in the writing of the Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test from Hell’s Angels. Thompson once told somebody that it didn’t really matter to him because the difference between Tom and him was that he was there.

I am writing a book. It is complicated. It is based on Ulysses by Joyce. It employs techniques similar to Thompson’s. It is largely incomprehensible to anybody but it’s author. In what we could equate to the Wandering Rocks episode, one chapter is snippets of people’s lives from around New York City. I like most of them, but there is one that rings false. It has rung thusly ever since I wrote the damn thing. In a lot of ways it is because I have absolutely no experience with the particular subject of that snippet—nothing beyond what I’ve seen in the movies, and I guess I never trust what I see in movies. But I think in the last two (and a half) years I have decided to experience things in a way I had never thought of experiencing things before.

It has created an objective/subjective split in my self that is both a blessing and a curse. On the one hand, I feel like I learn more from each day when I can be inside a scene but acting for something outside of it: a sort of full-time Thompsonesque investigation of everything in the world. I am there, but at the same time I am not there. My desire for objectivity leaves me outside while maintaining corporal proximity ensures that I am intimately involved. While it provides outstanding fodder for the book and for the unquenchable thirst for analysis and examination that is my head, I find that the turn of the screw is my almost complete lack of subjectivity. I have become a character in my own story.

I feel a brain split that I can’t quite get a handle on. It’s like one part is sinking into the other, or one part is eating the other…I can’t quite tell which it is. I’d like to think that it is a healthy part consuming an ailing part and putting it out of it’s memory, but there is a part of me that is a little bit worried that one part is just sick, but it’s also contagious and has infect the healthy part of me.

Worrisome it is. I derive meaning from too much. Some things are meant to be experienced. They are build to be a subjective experience. You need to be so involved in them that there is no way to tell the story straight. That is where Thompson succeeds and I fail. Sometimes I move too far away, mentally, from where I am supposed to be involved. I have been feeling like I keep people more at arm’s length lately when it comes to my head. I usually divide humans up into their body, spirit, and mind. There is a way in which all three are connected. My body and my spirit are fair game, but there is a high security situation with my head. I have put the walls up that even a grenade launcher could not penetrate. You can’t come in. You’re not allowed. When you even get close I will launch an all-out attack on getting you away. I feel safe inside my head, the fortress of my mind. But I only feel safe when I’m alone inside there. I have used the word sociopathos to describe the kind of the thing I think I’m feeling. It may amount to a purely egotistical unwillingness to let myself go, my real self, the self inside my mind. But it could be that I’m protecting something. But what? The fabric of my mind, perhaps. The unfortunately fragile nature of my mind? Inside thick walls, is there simply a glass house? Have I realized this and raised defense levels?

Self-investigation can go too far. I write fiction. I write non-fiction. I write poetry. I write songs. They all fall under a certain sense of self-investigation as far as I’m concerned. Writing, thinking about change, thinking about history, thinking about action, thinking about non-action, thinking about music, thinking about love, thinking about existence, thinking about Aristotle, thinking about ethics, thinking about style, thinking about subjectivity, thinking about existentialism, thinking about the sun, thinking about the moon, thinking about rotation and revolution, thinking about drinking, thinking about smoking, thinking about cereal, thinking about milk, thinking about pasteurized processed cheese food products, thinking about the body, thinking about the spirit, and thinking about the mind can sometimes bee too much. I didn’t used to do this, you know.