Fountain of Sorrow

“You ain’t no kind of man if you ain’t got work.”

-        Borrowed (and slightly adjusted) from “O Brother Where Art Thou”

I’m sitting here, as I usually do, at my home office as we’re told to hold our breath until June over a pandemic. While sitting at a home office would normally imply there’s work to be done, it’s really more about just having the desk and the space in the house. 

The fact is, I have no work, which produces the common side-effect of having no income.  The money part isn’t as big of an issue as I would have assumed before all this came about. Yet. It’s really more about the way the brain works and how it needs to be engaged and central to a common cause. But that’s not happening now unless trying to get the right amount of alcohol content into homemade hand sanitizer is a covered problem-solving exercise.

Not all of what I just wrote is actually true. In part, we’re all locked in our homes due to the Wu-Tang Clan Virus, so millions of people have gone from enjoying a few days away from the job to climbing the walls. It’s also true that there are things I could be doing that masquerade as work. For example, I could always work on my novel; a project that has now fallen into the fiction category of it being a total fiction that I will ever finish it in my lifetime. Also, and maybe crucially, N has desperately tried to get my help in forwarding the goals of her foundation, but I’ve been stuck in the mud due to brain atrophy from too many months of little-to-no work. In fact, this post I’m writing is actually a diversion to see if I can string together a few coherent lines that can slop over into the work that has been left in partial sentences and even less partial imagination.

How I got here is less a mystery to me than any of my former readers. It first came to me in slow motion and then, one day, it occurred to me I was fired by the owner of my own company, which happened to be me. It was a clever move to rid the company of the approximate reason for its demise, and I’m pretty sure I’m angry at my boss and he at me that it all came to this unfortunate parting of ways. The fact that we are one in the same person is merely shrewd obfuscation meant to throw the reader off track. What we know now is, the company stank and I’m its stinkee. 

But then the problem of firing oneself is that there is so much less to do; so many hours that used to be devoted to simple joys such as success and signing paychecks – most notedly mine! I don’t miss the business, but I miss being busy.  I also miss the social interaction that comes from running a company. There’s no question you need a shared brain and a hive mentality to make a business buzz.  You pick up the smallest and the largest ideas from everyone involved and it goes into a collective alter ego that is a company and everything just runs better. All that brain matter mixing together to oil the engines of a smooth-running business is what drove nearly 40 years of unparalleled success. 

Some of the core producers of those ideas took their thinking elsewhere (and good on them that they learned the basics with me and were welcomed elsewhere), some of the key people jumped off my company’s stepping stone into careers and opportunities that better suit their intellects, very important others, sadly, passed away with no ability to ever be replaced, and a few sat with me in the captain’s quarters singing Nearer My God To Thee and faithfully went down with the ship. To the last group, I feel the most derelict in my duty as owner and fiduciary. They trusted me; trusted I would avoid the iceberg yet again. I couldn’t do that forever and, for once, there were too many of those frosty islands to chart a path around and it happened so fast I can’t even remember if the band played on.

Jackson always sang “while the future's there for anyone to change,” he also added “still you know, it seems, it would be easier sometimes to change the past.” I want so much to change the past. Maybe I would have appreciated what I had a bit more if I can ever prove up the most elusive proof of knowing then what I know now. I like to think I’m smart enough to have done things differently. Why is it, then, that I don’t have the same faith in my own ability to create the next chapter of life with the wisdom learned from the earlier chapters? 

Learning something new. That should be the goal. As well, we should remember our past as more zeitgeist than something we take into the next phase. No era is the same and we have to adjust to what’s happening around us. What we’ve learned, we’ve already learned, and nothing can change that. Thinking forward leaves so much left to take in and maybe this time, we learn what we’re meant to learn and, significantly, why.

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