This article isn’t meant for those of you who are indisputably close to the grave, more for those whose number can only come unexpectedly. Please do skip this one, if you eat mori for breakfast every day. Much love.
–
I wanna make artistic things happen. It gets difficult sometimes, u kno, all the usual reasons. For some those reasons outweigh the desire, but that is not true of me. I usually have something on my mind, trying to get free. Ambitions, frustrated but not wholly defeated. You can see my attempts from time to time.
I see writers non-writing and think these people don’t have my ambition, and maybe that means they also don’t have my fear. Again, I’ve expressed this before, but death haunts my steps. As much as my naturally upbeat brain juice makes me feel like a future in which I continue to exist will get much better in time, something else cuts through the optimism to say that nobody is guaranteed any amount of time. I could die or lose critical faculties at any given moment for any given reason, lose forever the chance to have accomplished something cool.
On my most recent somewhat related post, I got a lengthy comment that could be construed as hectoring me on my elitism. I’ve gotten comments like that before, whenever I looked down my nose at the mendicants. But let’s just assume for the moment that I am truly better than the lowly masses in this. That I have some sparkling potential that unspent will constitute an egregious loss to the whole of humanity. Don’t I owe it to the people to win? To live long enough to succeed?
Comedy paragraph aside, back to business. The business of lamenting mortality, or lamenting the creative energy wasted in service to Tha Man. We’re all (anybody lowly enough to read this because they are not on secret rich people internet with uncle jeffrey’s ghost) getting drained in this way, it’s true. But if you want it hard enough, you can make some things happen. Like I have, here and there, as able. Just think about what you’d like to have done before you die, because who knows when that’s going to happen?
Get crackin’.
–
i needs a creative project to get back into – one that will hold my interest. j&b were trying my patience, but still… it’s the obvious one to do, and i’d love to have it done. act three is gonna be hella dope if i can grit my teeth thru the rest.
well i dunno, i got thru some of the hardest parts, i think… or have i?
Okay, drunk post time. Although I’m sober enough that I’ll try to abide by Bebe’s preference to avoid ableism, doomerism, and/or using slurs which imply mental disabilities.
Memento mori,… I can’t remember a time when I didn’t know that at some point I will no longer be around, There was a long time when I wasn’t alive, there will be an equally long time (at least from my perspective) when I won’t be alive. This doesn’t bother me. I don’t need to leave my mark on the world because whatever mark I do place on it, it is transitory. Taking the long view, of course.
There is a short-short story in Lord Dunsany’s book, The Food of Death which I might as well put into this extra long comment in it’s entirety.
—
THE WORKMAN
I saw a workman fall with his scaffolding right from the summit of some vast hotel. And as he came down I saw him holding a knife and trying to cut his name on the scaffolding. He had time to try and do this for he must have had nearly three hundred feet to fall. And I could think of nothing but his folly in doing this futile thing, for not only would the man be unrecognizably dead in three seconds, but the very pole on which he tried to scratch whatever of his name he had time for was certain to be burnt in a few weeks for firewood.
Then I went home for I had work to do. And all that evening I thought of the man’s folly, till the thought hindered me from serious work.
And late that night while I was still at work, the ghost of the workman floated through my wall and stood before me laughing.
I heard no sound until after I spoke to it; but I could see the grey diaphanous form standing before me shuddering with laughter.
I spoke at last and asked what it was laughing at, and then the ghost spoke. It said: “I’m a laughin’ at you sittin’ and workin’ there.”
“And why,” I asked, “do you laugh at serious work?”
“Why, yer bloomin’ life ‘ull go by like a wind,” he said, “and yer ‘ole silly civilization ‘ull be tidied up in a few centuries.”
Then he fell to laughing again and this time audibly; and, laughing still, faded back through the wall again and into the eternity from which he had come.
—
For all the work we put into our lives, at best, at the very best, we might be remembered in a couple millenia, as Homer is. Can we change the world, even if we are not remembered for doing it? Sure, and there are plenty of examples of people who are known only to specialists who did change the world, but are largely forgotten. How many people today remember Oliver Heaviside? Several hundred probably, but with every generation fewer and fewer remember. There may be a brief renaissance for someone who was once famous, a popular book written about King Ashoka from India spreads the fame for a few years, maybe a decade, then only a few anthropologists retain their interest. I’m reading a book now, a biography of Harry Bodkin Poland, written in 1924, published in only one edition, by a fellow named Ernest Bowen-Rolands. Ever hear of any of these people? Probably not. But Harry B. Poland served in the English Courts of Justice from 1848 to 1920, seventy-two years. In that time what constituted crime, what witnesses were allowed in courts, what procedures were used changed dramatically. Poland was involved with the Tichborne claim, which may the only case remembered in popular culture. The biography is fascinating, well-written, and a pleasure to read. But the subject is largely, aside from maybe a couple dozen legal scholars and a handful of weirdos like myself who read simply for the pleasure of reading, forgotten.
It must have been in high school when I realized that my life was finite. At the time I was reading philosophy, and I suspect it was something in Spinoza which drove that point home. Not that I can remember it now, forty years later. I do remember one quote, which I have treasured through the years, it’s from Montaigne, “To study philosophy is to learn how to die.” It has meant different things since I first read the quote. In the beginning I thought it meant learning how to perish in a noble cause. As I got older I felt it meant that fear was the mind-killer. Today, as I recognize that more than half my life is in my past me, it tells me that while I may struggle, as Dylan Thomas wrote, against the dying of the light, it is inevitable.
What frustrates me, and I don’t get easily frustrated, is that I have to spend much of my time doing things I really don’t care for in order to continue to live. The reward is supposed to be that if I am a good boy and work hard to make someone else rich then eventually I’ll be able to spend more time pursuing my own interests. There is, right now, a supply shortage of electronic components used in automobiles. This current shortage was ultimately caused by a billionaire who was breaking European laws. When the courts found him guilty, in what seems to be an act of spite, he pulled some strings in the Chinese government to stop shipments from one company. That was last October, and I spent three months trying to clean up the mess he caused. Three weeks ago, a supplier who took a lot of the business which was lost when this billionaire had a tantrum reported that they couldn’t fill all the orders they took. So for the last three weeks I’ve been, once again, finding alternative solutions and trying to explain to our customers that the design changes I am proposing will not impact the performance or reliability of our product. I’ve put in hundreds of hours of unpaid overtime over the last eight months because a billionaire wanted to make even more money. What do I get from that? Stress.
Don’t get me wrong, there are people who are paid less than I do, but have worked even harder. The people on the assembly lines who are trying to make up for lost production by working weekends and holidays. They do get paid for that extra time, unlike I do, but they are paid far less than I am to begin with. I do not begrudge that they get extra pay. I only wish that I had some recompense for the extra time I worked, time I would enjoyed much more in doing what I would like to do.
In many ways I would enjoy the life of Lord Emsworth, one of P.G. Wodehouse’s characters. I’m not going to bother to look it up, but Wodehouse described him as someone who would not be hailed as one of the great men of the British Isles, but, on the other hand, Lord Emsworth had no desire to be seen as one of the great men. Lord Emsworth wanted to putter around growing hollyhocks, pumpkins, and most famously, a pig. There is nothing any of us can do which will outlast time. All I want is to be friends with time, and share it wisely rather than on foolish pursuits, like trying to convince a customer who knows nothing about electronics that the minor change we are making will make no difference to the performance our product.
To be fair, I do understand the arguments from the customers. I am currently working on automotive braking systems, which, if they fail, could result in injuries or death. I do not mind that our customers want to be cautious. What I mind is that I’m talking to people who lack any training or knowledge of electronics. After working on electronic designs for forty years I have at least some knowledge of what I’m talking about, and I think I can share that knowledge with others. But the people I deal with, many of whom are right out of school and their degree is in software programming rather than electronic components, when they pull a set of guidelines out and say, “We need to do this testing”, when the testing they are suggesting will not tell them if the change will work or not, that is frustrating.
Six years. After working at the same company for 34 years, in six more years I will be 65, and assuming that Medicare still exists, I will be able to retire. I really don’t know if I can last that long without blowing up at some manager telling me what needs to be done while ignoring what the data is telling us. There are managers who I’ve worked with who do appear to respect my knowledge, but there are also people I work with, mainly program managers with only a few years of experience, who won’t accept that when I tell them something is not physically possible, that is the physics, the laws of this local area of the universe, is not possible, they don’t accept it and continue to badger me. It shouldn’t be a surprise that I drink. It may be a surprise that I don’t do harder drugs.
But, there are things which keep me going. In a few days we’ll be going to a Jazz Club to hear a tribute to Dave Brubeck (I’ve been lucky enough to have seen Dave perform twice). I’ve been experimenting with recipes for scones, and I am going to try to replicate the Yorkshire Fat Rascal biscuit. I have books coming in the mail. Used books, nothing anyone would recognize, they are all from the last century. I have a wife who loves me, even with all my faults.
This was a long comment. I chose to put it hear because I appreciate the kind words which Bebe has written at times, but also because this post didn’t seem to generate much response. It should. None of us get out of here alive.
I’ll leave with something which brings me pleasure, the taking of something old and familiar and re-arranginging it into something fresh and special. Which, in the end, is what all literature is doing. Bebe has lamented that the writing they have been doing could be seen as derivative or inconsequential. They are wrong. And they are right. All writing is derivative and inconsequential, but if it brings the writer or the reader some joy that writing then becomes meaningful. There are any number of authors who became famous by rewriting some of the classic tales, and that does not diminish their skill, craft, or art. Do not fear being derivative, aspire to create joy.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jHshlkCsAj4
Cheers! And now I need another drink.
i edited your link a few times to see if i could get the vid to display embedded, didn’t work. c’est la video.
are you just a project gutenberg junkie wtf lol
yeah i got the impression in philo 81 that a lot of the field is figuring out how to accept death. or convince yourself immortality is real so you don’t have to.
“I have to spend much of my time doing things I really don’t care for in order to continue to live”
you get me. i swurr. as long as i can, i’m going to have my occasional indulgences. next time pomegranates come available in the store, i’m making that frozen pepsi concoction again.
on billionairedness, hella sorry man. i’ve likewise faced stress from them creeps in the workplace. the consolations… mine are likely less injurious to my health but hey, i’m not one to judge, not as much as i used to.
hey thanks for the nice words yourself. patented flex wallotexts are value added, babe. i was curious to hear if anybody else had thoughts on the end, and what to do with the frustrations of time. hasn’t worked out yet, but i could imagine my cheeky approach left some feeling insulted.
i was getting some species of joy out of writing j&b, just might get back to it. what strange kind of people might enjoy it? i wonder.
kanpai!
–
Am I Project Gutenberg junkie? Well…, yes.
I learned many years ago that if I have a page of text up on my monitor at work no one stops to look closely enough to see that rather than doing work I’m really reading a history of lace-making. But these days the books I am reading are not even in Project Gutenberg. I support the independent used book-seller by purchasing books no one else wants. I may talk about my drinking, but my real addiction is to reading.
Somewhere, and I cannot seem to find it again, George Orwell wrote that one of the things which make people human is that they need their occasional indulgences. Orwell was referring to, and lambasting, the reformers of his time (and earlier times) who looked at the way the lower class lived and noticed that a good bit of the income of the lower (and in their minds lesser) classes was spent on cigarettes and alcohol. A tramp who received a handout would spend it on a fifth of a pint of bathtub gin rather than tea and a slice.
Orwell’s point was that everyone was human. We all crave the occasional luxury, even if that luxury is a twisted dog-end as opposed to a weekend at the Ritz. Further, Orwell’s point was that this is not a bad thing, or an evil thing, or a product of a weakness of will. It was a human thing. So the socialites and reformers who tried to stop humans from enjoying an occasional luxury ended up thinking there was something wrong with the people rather than recognizing that the people were, in fact, people. The reformers looked at the lower class and thought to themselves that if they only stopped being human they would be better off. They didn’t put it in those terms, but that is, in essence, what they were suggesting. They praised those people who stopped smoking, and stopped drinking, and praised them for being so special, when in most cases those people substituted their desire for the occasional luxury today for a fervent religious belief which included unlimited gin, without hangovers, in the afterlife. Not worth the shilling for the candle in my opinion.
Enjoy your occasional luxuries, guilt free, because that is what makes you human.
I was commiserating with a co-worker today about how much I hate the job and how much I’m looking forward to retirement. I try not to do this too often, but he’s pretty much in the same situation as I am. Only he will be able to retire in a year or so. But he said that the reason that in every position I’ve been in, for the past 40 years, I’ve been the one going in front of the customer is because I’m good at it. I am good at it. I may complain about it here, but I’m calm, patient, and project an aura of confidence which calms the customers down. It convinces them that the immediate problem is not the end of the world. I am good at that. But every time I have to do it I feel drained afterwards, and I don’t want to keep doing it. I get more praise than I deserve from my bosses and co-workers, and I know some of my reports look up to me. I am proud that I’ve managed to keep a certain amount of integrity after being in this cut-throat business for 35 years. I’m also proud that I’m good at what I do. But I really don’t want to do it much longer. We’ll see if I can last six more years or if I quit and become a greeter at Home Depot.
I’m not as drunk as I was a few days ago, so I won’t ramble on. If you want my recipe for gnocchi salad, let me know. It was a hit today with my wife.
Tails up!
Doh! I thought I closed that blockquote after the word “indulgences”. Mea culpa.
feexed eet!
talkin bout what makes us human puts me in mind of captain kirk speeches, heh.
my job involves occasionally talking to people for whom something is the end of the world, tho not nearly as bad as a medical field in that respect. i get some mileage out of having a deep-ish voice which people might find soothing, at least if i’m controlling my own feelings well.
recipe post, please!
Recipe post – This is a bit wordier than I would write in my recipe book, but I felt I should explain why I did some of the things and why I think it mattered. I don’t know your skill as a cook, so if you already have a reasonable experience cooking you may find these directions a little too simplified. If so, I apologise. It is my ignorance of your skill which suggested to me that I should be explicit, not a reflection on you or your abilities. Let me put it this way…, my wife doesn’t cook and would need a lot more directions (and reassurance and love) than I wrote below, so I am habitually more explicit than I would be if discussing a recipe with someone whom I know regularly cooks.
Gnocchi salad – as created by me last night.
Ingredients:
5oz package of Mixed greens
500g (17.5oz) Package of dried gnocchi (I used De Cecco, potato Gnocchi no. 401)
450g (1lb) kielbasa sausage (I purchased a pre-sliced package, but I don’t think it would matter)
~2 cups of grape tomatoes. (I purchased a 12oz package but didn’t use them all)
1/2 teaspoon dried Thyme (not ground)
1/2 teaspoon dried ground Rosemary
3 Tablespoons olive oil
3 Tablespoons lemon juice
Preparation
1. Slice the grape tomatoes in half and set aside
2. Add Gnocchi to pot of boiling water, bring back to boil. When Gnocchi floats transfer it to a strainer. Rinse cooked Gnocchi with cold water. Note: I generally do not rinse my pasta, as I feel that a thin film of sticky starch on the outside of the pasta helps hold the sauce. But for a salad that sticky film of starch creates a goo which is not very pleasant in my opinion.
3. Slice the Kielbasa into coins, approximately 5mm (1/4″) wide. Saute on the stove until cooked and many of the coins are browned, they don’t all have to be. But you do want to render some of the fat out of them. I just used the same pot I cooked my gnocchi in, once I emptied the water from it. This is the longest step in the recipe as you probably want to start out reasonably hot to get a sear, then cover and cook on low for about 10 minutes to render out some fat. Remove the Kielbasa from the heat, I’d recommend put into a bowl to cool a little.
4. At this point you can mix the salad greens, tomatoes, gnocchi, and slightly cooled Kielbasa coins together in a large bowl.
5. Dressings are best if mixed right before serving. Some people say dressings should be mixed at the table, not in the kitchen, in order to ensure the emulsion doesn’t separate. (obviously modern dressings from a bottle use additional ingredients to maintain the emulsion for years. They sometimes taste like chalk to me, so I usually mix my own.) So a few minutes before serving, in a bowl which can fit a balloon whisk put the spices (thyme and rosemary) and the warm (even hot if the bowl can handle it) fat from the Kielbasa. Let sit for 2-3 minutes to give the spices a little time to warm in the heat. Add the olive oil and lemon juice, whisk, and mix into the salad.
Serve.
It is not the healthiest of salads, what with the meat, pasta, and fat. But it is pretty tasty.
damn i can’t make that for reasons, but maybe another reader can. thanks, dogg.
I understand. Reasons is good enough. I’ll put here another cooking tip I only recently learned, although I expect every short-order cook ever already knows it. Fish cook best when they are dry. It seems obvious now, but for over 30 years I’ve been frying fish with just a rinse and into the pan. They always came out a little slimy. I was reading recipes in Julia Child’s Mastering the Art of French Cooking and I came across a direction to not only rinse but thoroughly dry and then put a very thin coat of flour on the fish prior to frying it. Woah! Mind blown!
I’ve now cooked fish in a dozen different ways, whether battered, breaded, or just fried, and getting the fish dry before cooking it makes a huge difference. Again, I’m not mentioning because it is new, I’m certain a lot of cooks knew this already. It’s probably not usually mentioned because everyone already knows it. Yet, I only learned this recently, and it makes me happy to learn something new.
hell yes