Working in a crowded classroom today, with eight or ten kids who have just spent a long Monday in school, the kids are distracted, cannot focus, some do their homework.   Two brothers, both very talented, sit outside the room, one doing his homework, the other staring at the screen of his phone.  The animation workshop is set up, the materials arrayed, endless possibilities all around them, but the after-school program is ineptly run at this place, and the kids come into the room mostly unhappy.   It takes a good 40 minutes for the beehive to start humming and the two paid adults in the room to get busy.  Sadly, that leaves 20 minutes or so of animation. My assistant, who sets up and breaks down the animation workshop, is well-paid and I pay the guy who runs the workshop the same thing I was paid for a session twice as long, and myself, as so often, I pay nothing, even though I am actually still running the workshop.

“You’re an idiot,” says an observer.

An idiot with a fond dream.  Like Woody Allen’s father in Love and Death who loved his little piece of land.   The camera pans back to show the demented old man fondly petting a square of sod he is holding close to his beaming face.  “My father was an idiot,” says Allen’s character, the cowardly braggart based lovingly on Bob Hope.

You know what I’d love?   Not so much the widespread success of my “business”, which would be very gratifying.  Not so much giving the children of the poor, the crazy, unteachable kids that society gives up on, the chance to shine, to show the billionaire funders of school innovation what poor children are actually capable of, sing their songs, improvise in a climate of tolerant appreciation for wild creativity.  Not so much an award and handshake (instead of a kiss!) from the lying sociopath who is our president at any given time.

What I would love, and it does not seem ridiculous to me, even as it may be galling to read the words here, is a MacArthur Grant.   Not so much the grant to hire the staff I need, or to rent a storefront where the workshop could have a home base, not a grant to pay some internet designer a fraction of what one was paid to design the wonderful Obamacare site– a grant for me, personally, in recognition of my evolving life’s work, to allow me to continue that work without the frequent knot in my stomach because I am failing to find a way to pay myself, even as I pay two or three young people very well for their hourly services.

I am not a selfish man, nor greedy.  I’m not acquisitive.  The MacArthur grant would enable me to work to build a more just, verdant and peaceful world, to carry out the mission of the MacArthur Foundation for more than a decade to come, should I live that long.  I would be freed from the wheel I am bound to now.   I would be able to walk into a room and smile, because the best smile to smile is the smile of a person who needs nothing but friendship from those people he likes.

I know the world I am living in, and so continue on up the long, greasy slope, muttering as I go, employing my current version of a smile whenever I can.  But, if it was up to me, I am exactly the kind of person this grant was designed for, if you know what I’m saying.

(I told her not to put the copyright notices on these stickers….)