[This post will be better illustrated as I have the time to scan & edit photos.]
Life is too short to spend working this hard.
Looking through volumes and volumes of old family photos has convinced me of this. Nobody ever took pictures of dad at the office. No. But here is my grandmother as a child, sitting with her mother at the beach, wearing stockings and bonnets and those outrageous full-body bathing-suits, and smiling in their unfakable happiness. Here is my great-grandfather clowning around in a doghouse, and his dog outside, wearing a helmet and riding-goggles. Here is my grandmother on her wedding day, beaming, with the husband who would die ten years later of cancer.
The innocence of old photographs is almost heartbreaking: relatives looking out at you, ignorant of the doom which you know, or (from their age) you can assume.
* * *
We had the Mum over for her birthday last night. Snake made a Beef Wellington (!!!) and a cake straight out of the latest Martha Stewart magazine, some kind of moist white cake with a frosting that had a smooth custard-like texture, and coconut, and which deserved to be a dessert in its own right. We spent the hours between dinner and dessert looking through these photo albums, piecing together what we could of the four generations worth of photographs we've rescued, with the Mum's help.
We made some progress!
A boxy house, the one that's shown burned down in the 1930s photo album, is also over here in the 20s photo album with a "Just Married" banner hanging across the front of it. This must have been my great-grandparent's house (and I wonder why it burned down and what they did after that). My grandmother was likely conceived behind that banner. Moving on to a 1940s album, we find the exact same "Just Married" banner hanging across the house my grandmother was married in. In this picture the banner is stretched straight across the front door, locking the newlyweds inside to do whatever newlyweds did so intensely after their weddings in those (as we would like to imagine) much more innocent times. Very possibly this was the conception of the Mum.
And this creepy Santa suit with the rubber Santa face, well, here's a picture of my great-grandfather wearing it. We learned last night that this suit scared my mother beyond belief; that when she saw her grandfather wearing it, she ran into her room and locked the door and screamed until she was convinced that Santa had left the house. (What were they thinking back then, anyway? That kids would love a Santa made of rubber?)
* * *
So, it hits me that this is all we'll come down to, sometime within the next 60 years: boxes of old photographs, letters, and journals. Maybe some of our treasured entertainments on the media of the day: 78 rpm records or cassettes or DVDs. Maybe some antiques to be re-arranged or sold at auction. If we're lucky, time will boil us down to this at most. And if we're lucky, someone will go through this stuff for an evening or two and find it interesting, and hope that we doomed folks were happy once, before we were doomed.
Which I say, puts us under an obligation to be happy, while we're still bodies with blood in them.
Which I say, means spending more time together with the people we love, and less time working jobs which are, ultimately, forgettable.
I'm not denying that we have to put food on the table and a roof over our heads. But if there's a way to do that without working, we're determined to find it. And failing that, we'll just work as little as we have to. We'll drive rusty old cars and cook our own food. If we buy bigger houses, it'll be to rent them out, not to live in them and fill them with more stuff that we don't need.
Really, how much of the shit that we spend our lives striving for do we really need? How much of it will fit into the boxes that our descendents take home and look through and enjoy, and how much will they have to haul to the dump, load after load, cursing us and our desire to accumulate worldly goods?
And how many hours will we spend working to get that shit, to mortgage a house to put around it, and pay taxes on it?
* * *
The biggest mistake of my life was buying the car I have now. At my current take-home wage, it'll take 820 hours of work to pay off the principal, and 448 hours just for the interest! Granted, it is both sexy and practical and, maybe I didn't mention, turbocharged. But what better use could I make of 1268 hours of life? That's 53 straight days! The books I could read, the hikes I could take, the sex I could have! Instead, I'm here at this job. It's a good enough job, I'll admit. But not as good as reading or hiking or fucking.
Needless to say, we're selling the car. If we can't get enough to pay the outstanding debt, I may just let the repo man have it. I've learned that a good-credit rating isn't all it's cracked up to be. I'd be much better off, it seems, if people had never been allowed to lend me money. (And so would the people who loaned me the money!) Plus, driving a car to the bank and saying, "Sorry, I've decided I can't pay for this after all. Here's the keys," sounds fun enough to do it just for the shits and giggles.
* * *
What I love most about this country, and the capitalist system, is that gives us the choice of working towards stuff or working towards time. And fortunately for those of us who choose time, the vast majority of folks opt for stuff before they even realize that there's a choice. This vast, capitalist stuff-machine: manufacturers producing goods, financiers charging interest to people to buy goods, investment firms helping people speculate on the manufacture of goods and the loaning of money, marketing firms paying huge salaries to folks to hype up the value of goods and the joy of credit. There's so much money flying around all the time that by shifting our perceptions and priorities a bit, we can get what really makes us happy by working a fraction as hard as the Joneses. And this leaves the rest of our life open to do the things we enjoy, even if they may not happen to generate money.
Most Americans are Homer Simpson, lost in the Land of Chocolate. In Homer's daydream, he strides gleefully through a landscape where the streets, the fenceposts, the animals are all made of chocolate, all free for the eating. Mmmm...chocolate. This satisifies him for a while, until he comes to a candy store, advertizing a sale on chocolate. And then he just has to buy some.
I'm not interested in buying, thanks. I'm just happy to live here.
