Has this ever happened to you? You have some habit, some peccadillo, that you think makes you different from other people. And then you are reading this or that and find out that it isn’t just you … it’s everyone. Like me wearing the same shirt three or four days in a row to cut down on laundry. What a nice guy I am! What a good husband!
And then I find out that almost all married guys do that.
Advertisers know this about us. They know that we like to think we are unique. Hell, they know everything about us. That’s why advertising works. They know more about us than we know about ourselves.
So here is what is unique about me: I am self-employed. The people I do work for don’t own me. So I am free.
This happened in 1986, when I was 36. I’m almost 60 now. I didn’t plan it – my boss, Mary Alice Fortin, could not stand me almost as much as I could not stand her. I had five kids to feed, so she did me a favor – she cut me loose, but she gave me a big client to get me over the hump, the Mayo Clinic. They are big and sophisticated, and they surely did not need a land grant BS like me, but they allowed me to oversee the oil and gas properties that she had given them. This allowed me to pay the bills while I developed a practice of my own. I owe my freedom to that lady who disliked me so much, and before she left Montana, I told her so and thanked her. We never spoke again, and continued to dislike each other.
I didn’t know what I had. I didn’t understand anything. My very first day of self-employment, April 1, 1986, I got up, showered, shaved, put on a jacket and tie and went to my little office and just sat there. I had a computer, I had a client, and I had time. I thought that I must still behave as an employed person would, punching a time clock, being diligent … work work work.
It did not go smoothly, I depended far too much on Mayo, but did manage to find other clients, one big, most small. In essence, I was simply lucky. There were many times when I scoured the want ads looking for a suitable job. But the truth was that I had been cut loose. I was no longer part of the employment world. The thought of employment – the security of a paycheck and health insurance, was alluring and depressing all at once.
In short order after April 1, 1986, I lost my political bearings, abandoning the right wing. My wife divorced me, and hard as that was, it had to happen. And I left the Catholic Church, taking my kids with me.
I won’t bore you further. The question is, am I unique? If all of my other experiences in life are any gauge, the answer is no. I am more like everyone than everyone. Anyone in my shoes, give anyone that kind of freedom, would finally develop into a fuller, richer, happier person.
So I write stuff here that is kind of a meandering and long shot across the bow of people who are still mired in employment, and, as with the post below, it can be harsh. I criticize people who behave exactly as I behaved as an employed person. I was harder to get along with than most, but I do not kid myself. I had my mind right. They broke me, as Luke would say. I believed as I must believe to maintain my existence.
So, after the nasty exchange below, I say to Mr. Kemmick, and from long ago, Mr. Crisp, that I don’t envy you your position. I know how hard it is. I know what it is to be bought. That sounds, I know, like a resounding backhanded slap. It is, and it isn’t. It just is. That’s the way most of us live.
Anyway, I’m done for the week, and we have fun stuff to do, and dammit it, if it keeps on being fun, we’ll just keep right on doing it through Monday … Tuesday …. here’s something I didn’t realize when I was employed. We don’t need to work so long and hard as we do. That too is a control mechanism. Too much free time is not a good thing for the servant of wealth …
My final thought on passage into yet more delightful freedom:
By the way, if there is such a thing as karma, now would be the time.
Piece of Mindful 
Mark, is that guy in the cockpit saying “Bombs away!”
I appreciate sharing your cerebral musings. Not unlike my own thoughts. Keep up the commentary.
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Kemmick made the comment below that, in essence, I don’t know shit about journalism, and that he reads critics that are “20,000 feet above” me. That was just my response to him.
The picture was part of a large set of photos about humor in the military. Care to see them?
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Mark: I think I see your problem. You don’t know the plain meaning of words. I said below that it is your view that is from 20,000 feet. Jack Shafer and people like him know what things look like on the ground. This is a very simple formulation, and it is not one I invented.
Also, you should know that David Crisp is self-employed.
And you should know that I have a great job, a really great job, to which I devote 40 hours a week, leaving me with 128 hours a week to live a life that is, if I’m reading your very angst-rridden blog correctly, many times more enjoyable than yours. I could hardly envy your supposed freedom any less than I do.
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I know that Crisp is self-employed. He has developed a detachment that serves him well – he is detached from everything except journalism itself. Since he holds more knowledge of it in his little finger than I will have in my whole life, he thinks of me as a rube when I say that he should merely find out what powerful people are doing and report back to us. Since you guys don’t actually do that, can’t do that, you’ve created this whole complex notion of a highly intricate profession with specialized and roped-off knowledge, and you go about your trades with professionalism.
At least I have the special insight needed to understand that while my trade, accounting, is specialized and jargonized, it is largely not important to outsiders, who only need to know that we report accurately on the inside doings of large corporations. Which, of course, we don’t. (How can we! They sign the paycheck. We are structurally corrupt, as are you.)
People are happy or unhappy. I suspect you’d be happy shoveling shit, as that is your nature. That’s an aside. The important thing is that your are housebroken. You don’t threaten power. But you are a good journalist by journalistic standards. It is only us here on the outside, who want to know what powerful people are doing and planning, who are hurt.
And again, freedom is the warmth that flows from the inside out, knowing that there are no other people who can ruin my day, tell me what to do or how to behave. Only I can ruin my day. And yours.
Sincerely,
MT
PS: I have been reading “bad books” now for 21 years – scores of them. I started out wondering, in 1989, about the herd instinct in journalism, why you all seem to think alike. MC started to help me grasp the larger process, the need to exist alongside real power. You cannot be a news reporter and actually report on power without power hurting you. Crisp said at one time that while everyone complains about bias, no one has ever quantified it. MC did just that, but he will never read it, as you too will never read it, because it will not reinforce what you do and don’t do. It’s a “bad book.”
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That was my point. You shovel shit and are unhappy. I win. Woof!
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There is that Far Side cartoon of the guy pushing the wheel barrow through the hallways of hell merrily whistling to himself, and the Devil saying “We’re just not reaching that guy!”
But I have to say that I have never been happier in my life than I am right now in this time and this place, my belly lit up like a porch light each morning. It’s new for me, it’s been going on for months, and I do not know why.
The stuff I write is what I enjoy writing, probing the depths of the human psyche. It is I who wonders about such things as the meaning of the neck tie. No kidding. And I enjoy it.
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