Friday, September 2, 2011

work is more fun than fun





okay, so i'm crazy. please give me a little credit for knowing it. as i watch certain friends retire, fall apart and die or get bitter, projecting their own decay onto the world, i'm glad i'm still able to labor, though i need to define what i mean, or you'll  onto have me thrown in the nuthouse.


look at it this way, a hundred years ago retirement didn't exist, nor health insurance, people survived i don't know how. (no penicillin, yet they did put cocaine in coke!) we've risen to the top like scum on a fermenting wine-barrel. true, benefits being slashed and if you truly want security, work for the government, they print the money. 


this brings up the main reason people hate work: supervision and bureaucracy. what do teachers bitch about? not their time in the class room. or friends in the forest service? have you ever had to sit in useless meetings all day? if you're a professor, you can clap your hands and say 'i have, almost every day of my working life.' 


and actually, i just finished reading a book every one should: 100 Things Every Designer Needs to Know About People you will learn an amazing amount of stuff about human nature. and low and behold, group decision-making most often faulty! i'll let you find the chapter. and did you know research proves our minds wander 30% of the time. what fun. i'm not the only bozo day-dreamer.


i have to admit something damning: i'm a workaholic. oh, my friends don't think so. lazy bum, works seasonally, looks out the window and makes money. unfortunately perhaps for me, i've never been able to stop doing. traveling, for example, you know it's reward only comes after you forget the beggars and sand-fleas. everything looks beautiful in colored photographs. writing, damn, hundreds of manuscripts. photography, a million pictures a year for eight years. now the drawings pile up. i think this section almost to five hundred: www.pbase.com/wwp/android


yesterday i did do eight hours of honest labor - and at the end i couldn't see straight. fifty years ago i stole a bag of family photographs from my grandparents. why, i don't know. i'm not a family history bug. i don't think we can take credit for what other people have done.  these photos buried themselves in my belongings, and honest to god, i never looked at them, not til yesterday. 


my niece dawn fascinated  by our family through time. i decided, okay, i'll help her out and i scanned over two hundred pictures. not that it wasn't fascinating, especially since my sister's house burned down years ago, charring every evidence of familial memory. this is it, none of it can replaced. i drove myself, and later in the night the electricity died and i stiffened in my bed from the cold. so much for history keeping us warm.


you can scan the pics yourself: www.pbase.com/wwp/family