I woke up in a room piled high with clothes on one side, random unused items carpeting the floor, a cracked wall and peeling ceiling, a Sony Trinitron and VCR un-used for perhaps a decade.  The clothes I’d put in a black contractor bag after the fire in the apartment downstairs were still there, in front of the blankets piled haphazardly on the trunk of drawing books.  My beloved Oinsketta had been alive during the fire, I rushed her and her tiny lungs out into the street.  It was probably a year before September 11th became a day of infamy.

“That bag of toxic, smoky clothes has been there for more than ten years,” a voice said indignantly.  And it’s true.

I woke up realizing it’s probably me, not the other maniacs I know, who is closest to being a kind of crazy.  Everyone I know carries their collected wounds, scars and disabilities, but not everyone does it so stylishly.

I should be clearing off my desk, or at least picking some things off the floor here, but it’s my time to do a bit of musing and tapping and that’s important to me too.  I was propelled out of bed last night by a swarm of mostly faceless anxieties and wrote about the unluckiness of this propensity of mine to sometimes brood, to helplessly watch my mood flip from strong to weak.  It is the other side of my luck in knowing what drives me, the same forces have made me particularly vulnerable to certain fears, even as I’m less susceptible to other fears that seem to drive many people.

It reminds me of a friend, raised by a mother who was generous with slaps in the face but not with love and support, who had a moment of terror at work when something he was responsible for began to go wrong.  His colleague, who had not been slapped but told “don’t worry, you didn’t make the world. You’re a smart boy, let’s figure out how you get out of this” didn’t worry, realized he didn’t make the traffic jam that was delaying things, knew he was smart and confident.  He calmly picked up the phone and suggested a simple fix that saved the day.  My friend’s intestines took a while to unknot, but the lesson was palpable, unforgettable.  I’ve told the story many times over the years.  It’s the perfect illustration of how the way we are raised either gives us a foundation for problem-solving or leaves us at the mercy of a sometimes merciless world.  

So, the way my father never saw love in the home he grew up in, confessed at the end his complete inability to express affection, since he’d had no model for it, I never saw mature problem solving or calm, methodical analysis of how to fix anything demonstrated in the home I grew up in.  I saw frustration, helplessness, rage and fear disguised in various crude get-ups.   It’s a deficit I must deal with, invent ways to solve problems, overcome moods, the way my father had to invent ways to show affection, no matter how stunted they may have seemed.

Back to the ambitious business person and my disdain for the type.   I think the biggest piece that irks me is the prioritizing of monetary success over everything else, the mercantilizing of human relationships– who doth it profit me to cultivate and who doth it not?   And this dehumanizing calculation, reducing each human to a net profit or net loss, is performed with the abacus in one hand and keen business acumen in the other.  Is this person good for my business’s bottom line or a drag on it?  Such is the thought process of the truly ambitious businessman.  There are not enough hours in the day to be successful and to daydream or shilly shally.  

Time is money.  It is the mantra of a materialistic society, it is a drumbeat that never sleeps.  There are slaves to pound the drums constantly and the successful love the sound of this beat.  It reminds them that in the competition that is life they are winners, while the guys banging the drums, well, they are not quite such big winners, though at least they’re not outright losers.  OK, maybe they are.

I think of the richest of the rich, people who have reaped enormous wealth from their corporations, wealth they couldn’t spend in a dozen luxurious lifetimes, and how hard they fight to hold on to several more tens of thousands, or hundreds of thousands, in tax reductions every year.  It’s envy, punishment of success and class warfare to suggest that investment income be taxed like the wages of the slaves who bang the drums for free enterprise.  Never mind that we are fighting fantastically expensive decades-long wars and dealing with desperate poverty here.  Can you say Ayn Rand?

Our nation is founded on the idea that unlimited wealth is the right of every person who can fight for and obtain it.  That few ever will attain the American Dream, well, that’s another discussion.  Yes, slavery was wrong, but at the time it was necessary.   OK, corporations aren’t really people, but we treat them as people so we can make certain laws and have the kind of government we need to help the richest among us while not letting the poor starve to death.  Or, if they do starve to death, to absolve us of moral responsibility for people who do not strive and instead choose to feel sorry for themselves because they are losers instead of winners.

I realize I am conflating some things here, oversimplifying things too.  But this is at the root of my disdain for people who put their own monetary profit above all else. They have no time to discuss anything else, it’s a waste of time, which is also a waste of money.  End of conversation.  You only want to talk about it because you are a loser, they will say, if they feel like being polite about it.  If you were successful and had the right values, they could add, you wouldn’t be attacking my right to have a hundred times more than I need while children a mile away are eating paint chips and shooing away rats.

But my heart has always bled this way.  You know, it just seems to me — and to song writers and the creators of that “priceless” ad campaign — that the most important things in life can’t be bought.  They may even agree that 45,000 people dying preventable deaths every year in the richest country in the world, for lack of affordable health insurance, is obscene, and a price too high for unregulated free enterprise.  Or that having to file personal bankruptcy because a family member has had cancer or some other catastrophic illness is the creation of a perversely immoral culture.

If you have gold plated health insurance you might say: why don’t these “poor” people just reach into their trust funds and buy decent health insurance, Biffy?

I’m sure there are driven business people who are very concerned with the poor.  I know of more than one billionaire whose foundation helps millions of poor people the world over.  But, if you will excuse me, I have a business plan to write, and spreadsheets to spread out (once I clear off this desk), and I can’t waste any more time/money pontificating here.  Is that clear?

I have not learned certain things that most people learn.  I’m not making excuses, or blaming anyone, but I have somehow avoided learning a few key lessons, and these occasionally come back to bite me, like now, late at night when they propel me from my bed in horror that robs me of my rest.

My housekeeping, for example, is pretty bad.  I don’t know where this comes from, but it’s not good.  Chaos creeps across the desk, every table, up along the walls, on the floor, and among the chaos, a lot of dust.  It occasionally overwhelms me.   A normal person, coming into my apartment, must immediately feel something is very wrong, even though the place doesn’t stink or have vermin, since I keep the kitchen and bathroom relatively sanitary.  

I tell myself that I’m a creative person, that the disorder in here is no worse than in many a working artist’s studio, that it reflects a bohemian unconcern for conventionality, but I know as I tell myself this that I am full of it.  For some reason I never learned good housekeeping.

My disdain for business, and the kind of people who do business, who possess the competitive entrepreneurial drive that keeps them at work late into the night, wakes them early in the morning to get back to their consuming ambitions.  These kind of people give me the creeps.  I don’t know exactly why that is.  I think this disdain is a bad thing, just because somebody seems to think of little but money, fame and power, chases it all day and in their dreams, does not mean they are a bad person.  I have not learned to get over this feeling, which I realize is at least partially irrational and certainly is the kind of prejudice I try to avoid.

I am unlucky in this too: I find my spirit flipped in a moment sometimes, from a rational optimism and faith that things will work out to a deep and implacable pessimism that assures me everything will go badly.  I’m not sure what it was today, though it seems to have been when I sat down and recorded a one take acoustic version of  “Brokedown Palace” that I liked very much.  I sang it while playing the guitar, overdubbed another voice and another guitar and then put a simple bass line to it, panned left.  It had the kind of space and spontaneity I am always going for, and it was take one.  I was about to mix it down and go prepare dinner for Sekhnet.

Garageband crashed, “quit unexpectedly” is how the machine put it, and when it came up again there was nothing there.  Wiped away like it never existed.  Suddenly the metaphor for death was unmistakable, the futility and vanity of human endeavor stopped me in a way it never stops the driven businessman.  A pall was cast over the day and the miraculous fact that technology let me  be a one man band and record a nice song in five minutes was lost on me completely.  And even though my subsequent recreations of the track came pretty close to the original, the idea that I’d had that inspired track stolen by a stinking machine burned me, continues to burn me.  It reminded me of the delicate pencil drawings, unlike my usual work, that a friend borrowed years ago, promising to take good care of them and get them back to me.  He lost them, has no idea what happened to them.  It burns me like that, though there is no reason for either thing to burn me.

So I am unlucky in this even as I am lucky in other things.