daily post

Daily Prompt: Work, Work, Work

Posted on by Mark Aldrich

The WordPress Daily Prompt for September 1 asks, “In honor of Labor Day in North America, tell us what’s the one job you could never imagine yourself doing.” (Canada celebrates Labour Day on this first Monday in September as well, but with a U fancifying the name.)
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“It was Ellis Island that ruined my shoulder.” A friend told me that today. I pressed him to explain. For many years he held a job etching signs for the sides of buildings, huge signs hand-made on enormous lathes, and the combination of a great deal of repetitive motion with delicate manipulation of heavy slabs of metal took its toll on his body. He blames the enormity of the Ellis Island job on his injury. He now works on a smaller scale and forges swords for a living.

My sister is a bank teller and on one of her first days on the job, the bank was held up at gunpoint. More precisely, she had a gun pointed at her. (It turned out that the gun was a dummy, but my sister is no dummy herself and she did everything as trained, as if the robber could have shot her.)

I have been friends with house cleaners, and every one of them has reported that they have had “that one house” every week whose owners either live disgustingly or insist on creating the image of living disgustingly, perhaps to test whether the cleaner can keep a closed mouth. I will spare you details.

I have police officer and firefighter friends, and their stories of everyday life on the job combine the terror of micromanaging superiors with the perpetual possibility of random gore.

Please travel back with me to August 21, when I wrote in “Punch the Clock,” “Off the top of my head, from age 15 till 40 I held 14 different clock-punching jobs from almost as many employers, with a couple employers that hired me more than once.” Each job is one that someone has described to me as something they could not or would not now or never do. Car mechanic friends have told me they can not imagine standing in front of a class and talking, which I have done; but I hate grease and do not comprehend mechanical engineering. Theirs is a job I misunderstand (car engines operate on magic, to the best I can tell) at best.

It is said that if you choose a job you love to do, it can not be called “work.” Everyone I cited above loves his or her work. I love whatever it is that I do, too. Work performed with a sense of love and duty is work worth celebrating.

Today, September 1, 2014, marks the 120th national Labor Day, a federal holiday, in the United States. For a decade before 1894, several states around the country started to mark Labor Day with parades and celebrations of work and workers. Labor Day is the American equivalent of International Labor Day, which is celebrated in many countries around the world on May 1 and is often referred to as “May Day.” In the United States, this correlation is ignored, as “May Day” here is associated with the practices and traditions of communist countries; thus, it is not a good thing. We celebrate our Labor Day in September not because we hate communism and its holidays but because a workers’ protest in Chicago for an eight-hour workday in May 1886 ended in a massacre, the “Haymarket Massacre,” and Labor Day-type celebrations in May tended to be about that violent day. The developing labor unions suggested September, and the government acquiesced. (This does not describe the relationship between labor unions, workers, and the United States government in the United States of 2014.)

Through the 1880s, workers fought and sometimes died for the right to work in reasonable circumstances and for reasonable hours. Capitalism with profit as the only goal and with production achieved through the cheapest means is unfettered capitalism, and companies will take advantage of every opportunity to cut costs, such as wages or safety; in this country, unfettered capitalism hit its lowest depth in the practice of slavery, which is free labor.

Thus, it is a true North American holiday. It is as American as the fight between slavery and employment, between being voiceless and fighting for the right to vote. America’s greatest moments have come when we have fought together to achieve greater fairness; our lowest, when interested powers have deemed “fairness for all” to be insufficiently fair for themselves and have fought fairness with bullets and jail.

Labor Day was established to celebrate work, but in our 2014 world we celebrate work with retail sales offered in stores that do not pay their workers double-time or time-and-a-half for the privilege of working on what is supposed to be a vacation day. Capitalism 1, Fetters 0.

Daily Prompt: ‘What Am I, A Farmer?’

Posted on by Mark Aldrich

The WordPress Daily Prompt for August 29 asks, “How often do you get to (or have to) be awake for sunrise? Tell us about what happened the last time you were up so early (or late …).”
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Some 16,700 sunrises have been available for me to view since I came on the scene—all of them free of charge. I have treated each one as mere scenery, equally majestic and thus, equally drab. Earlier this summer, I estimated that I have missed at least 16,000 of these sunrises. Every single sunrise was screensaver-glorious somewhere, and each one also heralded the start of “just another day” for someone, somewhere else.

(“I Like The Sunrise” from Francis A. and Edward K., Frank Sinatra, Duke Ellington Orchestra)

But, ah, the winking parenthetical ellipsis at the end of the Daily Prompt’s question; that ellipsis is Dr. Evil’s pinkie aside his mouth—”the last time you were up so early (or late …).” In my head, I hear “late” pronounced in three syllables. (And, seriously, the question is quite imprecise in its meaning, as one Daily Prompter points out in “Preposition Precision.”)

In upstate New York, a tree-filled, short skyline part of the world, sunrise is a rumor for most of us on the ground or second floor. When I am awake at a little before 6:30 a.m., which is the official time of sunrise around here in late August, I do not see sunlight until around seven. By then, it is DAY. Unless you are a shepherd hanging out in the mountains—the Berkshires, Catskills, Adirondacks, Poconos—or on one of the few available upper floors, the angle of light keeps it dark a bit longer. I grab that extra 30 minutes/several hours of sleep, because my dad made a good enough living for his children to not be farmers.

(My father grew up on a small farm in Vermont and he never made the life of predawn chores sound idyllic. I am proud that I come from farmers and rural … life … everywhere. Just … everywhere. Not a city slicker among them. On both sides of my family, small-town and farm life extends into the [sunset] distance. The rurality of my heritage is a point of pride, even if I am not myself even a gardener.)

Because much of upstate New York is tree-filled, I hear rather than see the sunrise most mornings. The creatures of the night shut down their nightly production at around 11:00 p.m., and sometimes precisely at 11:00 p.m., which is creepy beyond measure, and then the morning birds start singing each other awake at around 5:00 a.m. I miss the birds chirping each other sunny in winter.

So I rarely start my day with the sun, as I am neither a pet owner nor employed. For most of my life, this has not been a point of pride, as some inner, rural, farmer version of myself considers me a lazy bum shirking on his many chores … again. Day after day after day. Being one’s own harshest critic means that one is neither critical of the things worth being harsh about nor correct very often. This is one of my many conflicts with myself, chronicled here regularly.

But the few dozen sunrises I have made it my point to see, when I have had occasion to stay up late, those have been spectacles, indeed. An early morning flight into Chicago, watching as dawn broke on the upper floors of the skyscrapers and then extended downward into the night-filled streets below. One New Year’s morning as daylight filled the streets of Manhattan, after a New Year’s Eve in midtown Manhattan, and all that that phrase carries with it.

For a year I worked for a rural newspaper in Sullivan County, New York, and sometimes would stay with friends not in rural Sullivan County, New York. I would drive west in the morning with the sunrise at my back; often mine was the only vehicle commuting into rurality and not away from it.

The sunrises that were not spectacles were not spectacles because of me and my need for the day to unfold as “just another” one.

Daily Prompt: ‘The … Details … Incident’

Posted on by Mark Aldrich

The WordPress Daily Prompt for August 28 asks, “We often hear strange snippets of conversation as we walk through public spaces. When was the last time you overheard something so interesting, ridiculous, or disturbing you really wanted to know what it was all about?”
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I am a very private person, so I probably waste more psychic energy and time trying to give other people their privacy than I do anything to maintain my own. Especially in those moments when it seems that people around me are oblivious to their horrible and immediate need to simply keep things to themselves. Or to warn me of their imminent over-sharing.

Blame cell phones, blame Facebook and Instagram, think some thoughts about the effect of self-help groups and therapy on the culture at large, but after thinking all those deep thoughts, I do not care about your details, unless you are my dearest, most intimate friend(s). No. Not even then. Even then, there are things I do not really need to know. The details.

Last winter, I was living with a housemate who taught me something about this. (And a few other things.) She was in a phone conversation with an old boyfriend—just to be clear, my housemate at the time was and is a woman and I am a guy; she and I were completely platonic friends, and I have a girlfriend whom I adore, and, further, my housemate was starting to date—now, back to the anecdote: One night, my housemate was engaged in a phone conversation with an ex from her teen years, so decades of their lives apart were falling away with each minute and they began to affectionately reminisce about … details.

(See those three periods there? That group of dots is called an “ellipsis”; it represents the idea that I am leaving things out. The details. They are not your business, but they weren’t my business, either, which is why I am writing this. Out of concern for her privacy, I am not going to give her details here. They are hers and if she wants to blog about them, she can.)

My housemate and I lived in a small apartment, however, and she gave me no heads-up, no message quickly scrawled, no hand gesture that … details … about her life were going to be spoken out loud for a half an hour, nor did she make any attempt to transform the conversation into a more private one by doing something like take herself and her phone into her room. If it was not my apartment also, I would have left the premises in order to give her her privacy, a gift she would have returned unopened, apparently.

Afterwards, when I shared with her that this had been a conversation with … details … that I did not think were my business to know, she said she did not know why I was uncomfortable, if she was not. That is most of what I find fascinating and a little disturbing about the incident. We’ll call it “The … Details … Incident.” If a person is not uncomfortable with me overhearing certain things, why should I be uncomfortable with hearing them? This is almost a question for philosophers. If … details … are (over)heard by a person whom you do not mind whether or not they hear them, but they do not want to hear them, are they heard?

Yes. Yes, they are.

I may be the only person on the planet who suffers from this affliction, the need to not know. Because we live in an era in which we syndromize much of life, I’ll call it “Leave Me Alone Stress Disorder” or “Don’t Want to Know-itis,” because I feel a rash coming on when exposed to over-sharing.

(But if I had started typing a live play-by-play of what I was hearing from my housemate to a third party, my housemate would have been profoundly offended. As a matter of fact, when I suggested that the situation made for a funny anecdote and thus a possible blog post, she was offended and insisted that I write a disclaimer about her as a housemate. That sentence serves as the disclaimer.)

One day at the electronics retailer at which I once worked, a woman entered, talking at us sales associates before the door had even shut. “My cell phone froze! I can’t make a call or anything!” She held the phone out in front of her like a child who had finished her Popsicle and had no idea what to do with the stick. I happened to be the associate nearest the door, so I spoke first and asked if the phone could be turned on. (My next book, “Brilliant Deductions Made E-Z,” is due out next never.) I took it from her and powered it on and waited through the start-up jingle. When it was powered on finally, I saw her personalized screen: a photo of a man’s … details.

I looked at her, said, “It powers on okay,” and saw her face turn red as she either realized or remembered what was on her home screen. She said a quick thank you, grabbed the phone from me, and started to speed walk out of the store. A man entered the store at that moment, and she greeted him on her way out with a nervous laugh and “We’re leaving,” and the two left together, both giggling.

I never learned either person’s name, but I learned something about the health of their relationship that I did not need to know. And I seemed to be more embarrassed for them than they were for themselves. What is with that?

I do not force my friends and acquaintances to engage in only PG-13 conversations with me, nor do I police the over-sharing phenomenon in restaurants or other public places when I hear … details … from other tables. Sometimes I joke about being a prude, but it is just a joke. In my over-sensitivity to a personal desire that I always keep myself to myself, I do not make a show of insisting that others be more circumspect just for my sake. In some circles, this is called “people pleasing,” but because it misfires so often, it pleases no one.

One-on-one, I can be told anything in confidence and not blush or be surprised, as I am a 45-year-old man who has lived on this planet for a great many of those years. I think what I suffer from, and suffer is too strong a word, is a term a friend recently coined: “co-ingratiationing.” When a person carries themselves with the confidence to not care whether or not I am in the close circle of friends with whom they share intimacies, I am going to feel the “or not” in “whether or not.” Being oblivious of me, in front of me, is akin to rejecting me. When your right to privacy invades my need to not know, no one wins.

And the result of all this is I am a very good friend when you need me to keep a secret; I just do not want to know them, particularly.