I've had a very full 2011 so far for me. 

I was telling a friend of mine the other day I've rediscovered my inner workaholic.  He seemed surprised that I had one.  And it's true, in the six or seven years I've known him, I have been a hapless layabout and rather proud of it.  I have often quoted other layabouts like the great big Gertrude Stein saying things like "It takes a lot of time to be a genius, you have to sit around so much doing nothing, really doing nothing."

And she didn't even have tumblr.

It's a well-known fact that the worst part of being a genius (aside from becoming Gertrude Stein) is the boredom.  The boredom is their downfall every time.  Against boredom, said Nietzsche, even the gods contend in vain.  But when the gods of antiquity got bored they made mischief.  Usually with humans.  Which is about all we were good for back then, apparently.

It was the Hebrew God who invented work.  Yahweh toiled to set a good example for humanity.  He woke up on a Monday morning, switched on the lights, set straight to work, and the rest is history.


It's true: God — a, ahem, career bachelor with control issues who invented the "kept man" — had nothing but work.  And he was not a great delegator back in the day.  Technically Eden was the first welfare state.  But eventually God instituted a welfare-to-work program and gave Adam a job any bureaucrat would die for: naming the animals! 

Are you kidding me?  Can you imagine the queue?

"You with the spots!  Take a number!  You with the stripes!  Come back when you've got your form 440-B filled ALL THE WAY out in TRIPLICATE!  Jesus!" 

It's a bureaucrat's wet dream.

Can't deny it: God started it.

And there's no point to it, really.  I mean, what's in a name? 

But if you're like me, you can only sit around being brilliant so long. That gets — you guessed it — boring.  That's when work comes in handy.  God, in his infinite wisdom, right?

And yeah, if it's a certain kind of work it brings out my inner workaholic.  Not a good idea to get the two confused, but work is like sex in at least this: it can be either the most exhilarating of activities, full of concentrated energy, high-fives and cheers from the stands, or it can be absolute unmitigated soul-shriveling tedium. 

And yes, I sometimes hear from people who tell me they've never had tedious sex, which makes me wonder if that's actually all they've ever had. But then, yeah, tedium is relative. 

There was a time in my life when I was fascinated by it.  I think it's an angry young man thing.  Boredom remains an interesting topic for me, but the tedium of labor was something I got out of my system pretty quick-like.  I didn't go off to do factory work myself, although on the migrant worker circuit you always heard about how scads of money could be made at canneries in Alaska. 

No, I went up to Moosehill Orchards in Londonderry, New Hampshire and worked a year in the orchards. (It was lucrative enough for the Thoreauvian lifestyle I aspired — if that's the right word — to lead back in the day that I actually went back for a few months out of the year for several years after.)

I can say with some confidence that that was work.  At least, when there was work, it was work work.  By which I mean most people didn't want to do it.  And it was hard starting out.  Luckily there was also a lot of bullshit macho competition — there were a lot of chess-playing Southern boys on the crew — and I was not one in those days to pass up the chance to out-macho another macho. 

The trick was not only to pick a lot of apples — we were working piece-rate — but to be able to pick a lot of only grade A extra fancies — to develop the eye for ripeness along with a quick hand— and to get them off the tree, into the bucket, down the ladder and into the bin without bruising them.  So it was kind of hippie macho.  It wasn't just brute force — there was a little finesse there, too.

The best I ever saw in all my years at the orchard was a mild-mannered middle-aged fellow by the name of Jon Blood.  Nicest guy you'll ever meet. Unassuming.  Didn't talk much.  Was kind of like a Clint Eastwood character who showed up in the orchard, picked ten of the most gorgeous bins you'd ever see, and went off into the sunset.

One day I was picking a set next to his, and he was blowing through his trees, loading up his bin.  I stopped what I was doing — something I rarely did — and peered through the trees at him.  It was like watching a man in a trance — a sleepwalker with a cigarette dangling from his lower lip — perfectly calm, perfectly at peace.  Moving with such economy it seemed he was hardly moving at all — the very embodiment of simplicity and grace. 

That's when it struck me:  Jon Blood was meditating. On the job.

It was not what I'd been led to believe work was. At all.

I never really thought about it all that much as a kid, of course.  I remember the first time I did.  People who don't work find work amusing, somehow.  Quaint.  Old-fashioned.  Remember how you felt on those grammar school field trips to the Wonder Bread Factory or the pioneer village nearest you? Connor Prairie Farm was ours. The little woman at the big loom?  How odd work was.  Like nothing else people did.  It didn't seem hard.  Just... naff.

My mother, when I first came into the picture, was the pretty girl behind the fine jewelry counter at J.C. Penney.  I never thought what my mother did was work.  Hanging out at the mall all day playing with costume jewelry?  Are you kidding?  It was like getting paid to be a teenager! 

But my father.  He worked.  And he let you know it, too.

Dad worked in a factory I was sure was nothing at all like the Wonder Bread Factory.  Inside, as I imagined it, it was as dark and dank as a medieval dungeon.  My father spent his days chained to a giant treadmill, making money.  I wasn't sure exactly how the money was made, I only knew, because he had told me many times, that it didn't grow on trees.  Which made sense — no tree could grow inside a factory (not even one as wonderful as the Wonder Bread Factory).

Work, like my father's work, was like a fairy tale curse — had he offended the Troll King on an innocent trip through a dark wood as a child?  Was he paying off some ancient debt?  Would I be trundled away to the factory to make money, too, some day, to pay off some ancient debt I knew nothing of, a legacy shrouded in misery and shame? 

As it turns out, my father managed to pay his debt to the Troll King, and I wasn't shipped off to the Money Factory to take his place at the giant treadmill in the end.  In fact, my work now, such as it is, involves ensuring, as much as is possible, that the young people I meet don't have to toil in the Money Factory to pay off ancient debts themselves. 

I guess you could call it work with a happy ending.