It’s hard enough to sum up the emotional import of any one show without trying to string together four, especially when each had their own distinct feel, ranging from the foreboding drunkenness over-present at the second (Left and Leaving) show to the unbelievable happenstance of running into four former APDA friends at the third (Reconstruction Site) show, four of the maybe 25 people I know in the eight-million-strong metropolis of New York City. The fourth (Reunion Tour) may have been my favorite, if only for the somber reverence of the crowd and the true appreciation of realizing that one is watching a band for the fourth straight night and desperately craves a fifth.

John K. Samson spent a small part of each show referencing Occupy Wall Street and encouraging people to participate, even evoking some excitement for the somewhat faded jaded revolutionary spirit from some earlier Weakerthans tunes and no doubt his prior stint with the band Propagandhi. Playing “Confessions of a Futon Revolutionist” each of the first three nights, including one impromptu in the encore seemed a clear reference to the growing fervor of a generation disappointed to miss out on the sixties but still desperate to change an order that has only consolidated its grip on power in the ensuing four decades. The Weakerthans used their platform at the Bowery Ballroom the way they have used their entire fifteen years in the limelight of the Canadian independent music scene – to live their values as they envision them, shunning overt fame, the chance to make it big, overcharging for tickets, etc., in favor of selling political books alongside their CD’s and T-shirts while selling out small clubs that fervently sing along.

I used the weekend to discover a couple other things too, like how surprisingly drivable lower Manhattan is from my current residence, taking just forty minutes to get to the venue from New Brunswick after I gave up on the subway after a miserably cold rainy night running under awnings to get from Penn Station to the BD line in its circuitous far-from-everything-but-still-getting-vaguely-where-you-want routing. (See also Tournaments, Fordham.) And it also occurred to me just how expensive New York really is relative to the rest of the world. People may complain a bit about the cost of living in the Bay Area, but the bridge across there cost, what, $4 and had a carpool opt-out for free? And BART would usually run you about $3-5 a pop to get pretty close to where you wanted to go? All the entrances to NYC now cost $12 by bridge or tunnel and the roundtrip train is $26 from New Brunswick, subway fare not included. I know that New Brunswick is significantly further out than Berkeley, but it’s not much further out than, say, Dublin or Pleasanton, and that gets you up to maybe $8 on BART. New York City is just a giant financial funnel and while I see its worth in occasional cultural access points, regular entry starts to feel like a life tax.

You may have to put a small X where I lost my way on this post. It wasn’t really supposed to be small-minded whinging about the cost of living, although one could argue that’s the only source of the angst and discontent abroad in the land, that that’s what it takes to knock Americans out of their complacency and into action is having to pay more than they can for things. Certainly the crass commercialism of traditional wealthy USA seems alive and thriving in NYC as compared to other parts of the world, though the Best Buy in New Jersey seemed full and bustling, even if the actual lines for items were pretty short. It is the great paradox of whatever this economic situation is that most people appear to be hurting and yet most everyone seems to have essentially the same quality of life as before, give or take some stress. There are exceptions and people who’ve been knocked from their pedestal, but for the most part the magic wheel of debt has kept spinning its web of lies to obfuscate the true nature of what’s broken about our system.

So you can forgive John K. and I and the other upbeat believers for getting excited about the present circumstances and the awakening possibility that we won’t have this same tired unjust system to kick around for the entire remainder of our lifetimes. And yet, it’s the personal poignance, as it seems to be with most every important band (Ani DiFranco certainly comes to mind) that overrides the political upheaval and potential tumult at the end of the day. We can raise our fists to “Futon Revolutionist”, but people probably relate more closely to the bipolar maturation of “Aside”. We can hum along to “Pamphleteer”, but there’s a reason “Left and Leaving” gets played every night and that one only once. The compelling nature of internal emotional struggle has got to be at the heart of why the two songs ghostwritten by Virtute the Cat get the loudest cheers, why “None of the Above” resonates so deeply, why we all feel heartened by “Reconstruction Site”.

This review is probably meaningless to anyone who doesn’t know the Weakerthans, but that’s probably true of every concert review and doubly important because you should get to know the Weakerthans. John K. batted away catcalled questions about the next album date and even concert date and his upcoming solo release next month portends the possible demise of an indy set that’s only released four albums in a decade and a half and sort of missed their every-three-years pacing deadline in the year before the one about to die shortly. John K. looks forever young, like the man who introduced him to me, but his supporting cast wears their facial hair a little hangdog and seems like the comforts of Canadian homefires might start to outweigh New York nights, no matter how much the bassist sweats while he rocks out.

John K. admonished us to go to bookstores. It’s the only place we’d be able to find him if he hadn’t somehow tried to teach himself to sing. I’m not sure my catchphrase “All the Poets Became Rock Stars” applies better to anyone else.

7 December – Fallow Show
Illustrated Bible Stories for Children
Diagnosis
Confessions of a Futon Revolutionist
None of the Above
Letter of Resignation
Leash
Wellington’s Wednesdays
The Last Last One
Greatest Hits Collection
Sounds Familiar
Anchorless
Fallow
Tournament of Hearts
Sun in an Empty Room
[Anne of Green Gables song]
Reconstruction Site
Plea from a Cat Named Virtute
Aside
Left and Leaving
—
One Great City!
Bigfoot!
The Reasons
Watermark

8 December – Left and Leaving Show
Everything Must Go!
Aside
Watermark
Pamphleteer
This is a Fire Door Never Leave Open
Without Mythologies
Left and Leaving
Elegy for Elsabet
History to the Defeated
Exiles Among You
My Favourite Chords
Slips and Tangles
One Great City!
Our Retired Explorer
Civil Twilight
Letter of Resignation
None of the Above
—
Confessions of a Futon Revolutionist
Plea from a Cat Named Virtute

9 December – Reconstruction Site Show
Manifest
The Reasons
Reconstruction Site
Psalm for the Elks Lodge Last Call
Plea from a Cat Named Virtute
Our Retired Explorer
Time’s Arrow
Hospital Vespers
Uncorrected Proofs
A New Name for Everything
One Great City!
Benediction
The Prescience of Dawn
Past Due
Everything Must Go!
Aside
[Anne of Green Gables song]
Greatest Hits Collection
Tournament of Hearts
Virtute the Cat Explains Her Departure
—
Left and Leaving
Confessions of a Futon Revolutionist
Night Windows

10 December – Reunion Tour Show
Civil Twilight
Hymn of the Medical Oddity
Relative Surplus Value
Tournament of Hearts
Virtute the Cat Explains Her Departure
Elegy for Gump Worsley
Sun in an Empty Room
Night Windows
Bigfoot!
Reunion Tour
Utilities
One Great City!
Watermark
Reconstruction Site
Our Retired Explorer
Wellington’s Wednesdays
Left and Leaving
Without Mythologies
—
Aside
None of the Above
Plea from a Cat Named Virtute
Manifest

There were also behaviors which would warrant an immediate “level drop”. Contrary to my ex-brother-in-law’s assessment, this did not indicate that we would dump a kid off the stairs, but merely that they’d go from yellow to red or gold to purple if they swore or made a threat or tried to make a peer act out. And then violence meant “R&R”, a term I guess we were trying to reclaim for the bad, which would be resolution and restitution in this instance and prompt spending the rest of the day on red, usually after long periods of sitting time to calm down.

A lot of our job, other than navigating and assessing people through the process of earning their levels (surprisingly like APDA judging – the level sheets even looked like debate ballots), was about keeping people motivated to meet their goals and make their level. After all, most of the kids had grown up in households where, de facto if not overtly, bad behavior was rewarded and good behavior was punished. If you were quiet and humble and polite and got your homework done, you’d get neglected. If you set the house on fire and kicked the family dog and yelled and screamed at the table, then you’d get some attention. And in the world of six-year-olds whose parents are addicts, any attention is good attention, because it means you get fed or talked to or even physically contacted, even if it’s to be hit.

The hardest part of this engagement and motivation was finding ways to get people on red to believe that tomorrow would be a new day and they’d have some way of climbing out of their bad level. Often they’d be on red after spending significant portions of the day in R&R, which meant no points were being earned toward the next day’s level while they were in the quiet room (an Orwellian term if there ever was one) or restraint or sitting staring at a corner thinking about what they’d done. Usually this meant they’d spent the day not only being unstable and unhappy, but they knew that the next day was doomed to be another day on red – that it’d be 36 hours before they could watch TV or even think about going on the computer. And 36 hours is long enough for a well-adjusted adult human – for an anti-social adolescent, it’s an eternity.

One of the things my boss – an ex-drill-sergeant (literally) and college football player the size of a small house with the voice of an irate seal – was very good at was advising us what to do with these kids in these situations. He told us that the key to their motivation and improved behavior was engagement. Keeping them interested, distracted, putting their minds to something. In a word, keeping them occupied. The man was often a blunt instrument, but he had incredible insight into the mindsets of these kids, having worked in mental health facilities like ours and/or juvenile hall for the better part of two decades. And he implored us to, when times were stable, engage and stimulate the kids who were on red with the few activities always allotted to them – playing outside, playing board games, reading, talking with peers or staff. And there, over time, I learned a fundamental truth: that people act out when they’re bored. It’s something to do.

The human mind despises boredom. Probably more than pain, certainly more than sadness. The brain is too complex, too creative, too active, to tolerate monotony and absence of objects. It will create things to think about where none exist, it will foment processes and possibilities in a vaccuum. The only antidote to this is another element of our strategy in engaging red-level kids: exhaustion. Playing outside was not only good because it kept someone occupied, focused, and not-bored, but it also meant they came in too tired to create a ruckus. Adolescents have restless unspent energy in the best of times – abuse/neglect victims triply so. A kid who comes in tired from his day will be disinclined to take offense at a peer’s comment or a staff direction to a time-out. One who has nothing but seething surging energy beneath the surface will be ready to rumble.

This difference of exhaustion is why so many people can put up with assembly-line jobs or grocery-checking or long commutes, but buckle under the universally feared torture of solitary confinement. The capitalist structure of our country went through a really glorious period of getting humans to willingly accept and even embrace monotonous boredom because the tedium of their jobs created the byproduct of wearing them down. So even if they were getting repetitive stress injuries from twisting the same widget the same way and almost falling asleep from the 3,275th time making the same commute, they would arrive at home too beat to complain about it, having only just enough energy to awaken the next day and do it again. Meanwhile, those confined to small dark boxes alone with little or no exercise were slowly driven insane in their prisons.

Something’s been happening in this country the last three years. People have lost their occupations. No matter how small and crappy and minimally engaging their jobs were, they were still jobs that carried the heavily taxing byproduct of exhaustion. They were still something that took enough mental and physical energy to negate the urge to rebel, to foment discontent, to hold out for something better. But one by one and in droves, they were turned out of the opportunity to spend their energy flailing in the capitalist mill and instead consider the walls and corners and televisions and want-ads of a solitary existence.

Yes, some have turned to creativity. Some have expanded their minds to accept the lack of occupation as a gift and driven themselves to occupy themselves instead. But most, realistically, have not. Most people turned out of work by downsizing or offshoring or consolidation or automation have turned forlornly and blankly into an abyss of disinterested blandness. They wake each day not even sure what to do without someone telling them. They wander aimlessly through a directionless day, storebought distractions no longer working for them in light of the fact that they are only sufficiently entertaining or engaging for an exhausted person, but not someone with all their faculties at disposal. No longer exhausted, they become restless, agitated, rumbling with a soul-deep longing for something to do, be, create.

This, my friends, is the fundamental root of the Occupy Wall Street movement. It is the quest for occupation. And despite my framing the question in the context of a job where I tried to modify violent kids’ behavior toward the more productive, I am very much in agreement with the principles and methodology of this budding revolution. The powers that seek to maintain order, stability, and the status quo in America have overlooked some fundamental tenets of how to stave off rebellion by controlling the masses. They have forgotten that bread must join circuses in sufficiently distracting the people, insisting instead on a system which puts bread at a premium as a mechanical rabbit to hold in front of the racers. They have allowed the attitude of those at the top to become perniciously elitist, rubbing superiority and greed in the face of all society. But most fundamentally, they have forgotten that people must have something to do or they will find something to do themselves. That people accept the terms of their social contract when they are too occupied or too tired to read the fine print. When people have nothing else to do but read the fine print because they are so bored, they will realize what they are forfeiting and rail against it.

What is most exciting and inspiring about the Occupy Wall Street movement (and its hundreds of offspring across cities across America) is that it does not overtly seek political solutions. Naysayers and corporate threshers want the occupiers to write their Congresspeople and go to the polls, knowing that anyone accessed in such a way has been bought and paid for to the point of complete imperviousness. Even those not explicitly on the payroll of corporate America are believers in the fundamental tenets of a system that rewards greed and punishes altruism, a way of aligning society to maximize the consolidation and stratification of wealth and power. It is blindingly obvious why this is so, as any student of history (from age eight on) could tell you: those in power like being there and will rig the game so they can stay there. And capitalism is one very effectively rigged game.

I myself have struggled mightily with the advent of the Occupy Wall Street movement, feeling pulled almost inexorably to the front lines of its tent encampments and yet not even setting foot as yet in the wake of my overwhelmed exhaustion at my full-time job. For me, unlike most, it is not the gun-to-my-head need for the pay of a job or even the expected pressure of finding fulfillment in one’s occupation, but rather the true motivation of actually loving my work and wanting to devote sufficient time to it that it brings me to the brink of capitulation and illness. I hung out with Ariel and discovered yesterday that I may be her only friend whose problems wouldn’t be largely or entirely solved by money. Which itself is no small factor in the Occupy movement, that reality. For me, I work because I want to and I love to, but it has thus far kept me off the sidewalks and streets of a rising tide that could sweep the whole world.

It is hard to feel twin obligations that are mutually exclusive and equally compelling. Even at Glide, I think I might have begged out of work to go join the protests, though there I may have felt the pull of alleviating the suffering that was driving so many to this brink. But I also must self-examine and recognize that each marginal person could be part of a tipping point in creating more change in this country than anyone born prior to this year could have imagined was possible. When I first saw the most recent Zeitgeist movie, I chuckled at the slightly naive vision of hordes of people gathering around Wall Street to give their money back in rejection of the system that printed it. Now it’s underway. And it feels wrong to not only not be a part of it, but to not be a spearhead.

And yet it feels like a hedge is in order too. It is unclear the direction or power the movement will have, whether it can be co-opted by money and politics and all the American powers that have resisted internal change before. And throwing away the best job I’ll ever have, one I created from scratch, and all my obligations to people I feel a deep personal bond with, for what could be a week and a jail term depending on how things bounce, seems crazy.

But it only seems crazy because I am occupied. Were I not, it would be the most obvious thing in the world.

I will continue to wrestle and struggle with the question, continue to dance on the razor’s edge of conundrum. I can’t really see myself abandoning everything to go live in the encampments, at least not yet, so the Rutgers debaters reading this should let out their breath. But there’s a big part of me that feels I should anyway. And I know it’s not zero-sum – I know I can go try to participate without sacrificing it all. And I will. More than anything, though, we need to develop a way that people who are occupied can still Occupy. We need a day where everyone who still wants or has to go to work can show their solidarity and support. Sometimes revolutions can’t all involve defection from the military, because they need people in the military to be quietly sympathetic so they can make sure that institution changes with the rest of society. This revolution needs occupied people too in order to make all the changes necessary.

If those on top of this precipitous pyramid know what’s good for them, they will create new incentives and occupations. They will come up with some way to motivate the masses and make use of their time and brains. But it can’t be through capitalism, at least the way it’s been manifest in society so far. The market is editing out jobs, ensuring they never return. We need a new system to occupy our minds. Until then, we must occupy the streets.

In any event, I was really sick of 9/11 yesterday. All I wanted was some NPR or talk radio that wasn’t about ten years ago, and that just wasn’t happening. I get it, I guess, but I was simply completely overwrought with the references and remembrances, especially given their personal context which I’ll outline a bit herein. Basically, 9/11 has become rebranded with a trauma for me that it never had to begin with, which is kind of weird and melodramatic, but nonetheless true for my emotions. I’m not exactly sure why I feel compelled to chronicle all this when I was so OD’ed on it yesterday, but my perspective is a fickle beast these days, to say the least.

As far as my actual perspective on the 9/11 event itself and most of its remembrance, I think Ariel summed up my feelings beautifully in her post yesterday. I include the link not only to highlight her spare but poignant description of said feelings, but also to highlight that she’s back to blogging, something that few people are doing with any regularity these days (self somewhat included), so you should check it out. And it was this same shared perception, the idea that 9/11 itself was, while tragic, vastly overblown in significance by a country and city steeped in complacency, that was so much of the baseline of Emily’s and my connection that led so quickly to our near-decade union in life.

Emily and I shared spots on APDA’s governing body, the APDA Board, with roughly similar levels of ambivalence at the outset of the 2001-2002 debate season. And three days prior to the opening tournament, the Columbia Novice contest in New York City, the events whose description need no reviewing unfolded on a Tuesday morning. The APDA Board, like so many other leadership councils, scrambled that night to determine the fate of the weekend and APDA’s President (from the host school of Columbia Novice) insisted that not only would the show go on, but so would the celebratory party on Friday night. The Board somehow concluded that it would be appropriate to cancel elimination rounds, but not the late-night festivities.

It is easy to forget in the light of a decade without terrorism in the United States how much paranoia was abroad in the land in the days and weeks following September 11th, 2001. I had friends, several of them, who unequivocally told me I was committing likely suicide by driving to New York City on September 14th and a possible atrocity by bringing college freshmen with me. I felt serious responsibilities to APDA and especially those new recruits on the team who wanted to attend that I had to lead them in whatever decision they preferred and enable a real choice on the matter. And I felt driven, as did Emily, to make sure there was a viable alternative to going to a bar on Friday night for those attending the tournament. And thus she and I planned the vigil that would ultimately yield our all-night diner talk that would single-handedly put us on a course for marriage.

It was a permanent fixture in our relationship and marriage that 9/11 directly caused our union, a serendipitous quirk that gave the historical event a greater legacy for our lives than either of us had personally found it to have for the world. And in my first e-mail to friends in the wake of her attempted over-the-phone-from-Liberia divorce salvo, I cited how this silver lining had gone gray overnight, how what once felt like a sign that all could bounce back in the universe now felt like a monument to the meaningless trudge of life’s ongoing hardship. A more draconian interpretation might instill a lesson that tragedy is tragedy and one ought never take solace in it, no matter how redemptive it seems. But most of my mind went back not to the event itself, but my tenterhooks feelings on that unfolding evening itself.

I had developed a crush on Emily for years prior to 9/11, but sometime just before 2001 had resolved to actively try to eradicate it from my mind. Her judgment and perception of people seemed fatally flawed in the context of certain overtly disastrous public incidents with her then-boyfriend and I concluded that no matter how intelligent, attractive, and vibrant she seemed, she simply lacked the judgment required for a trustworthy foundation. It was this internal argument that I mulled for hours in Tom’s Restaurant as night became day and I was forced to conclude in her flirtation and the ambiguous silence on the topic that she must finally have shed the relationship and demonstrated that I had judged her judgment a bit too hastily.

This was incorrect, though. She was still with that boyfriend at the time. And it was a much eerier and less comfortable joke sidelining our marriage that my not knowing that on that night was as responsible as 9/11 itself for our forging a life together. It was only the increasing though ultimately disproven conviction that she’d made a good decision that convinced me to quiet my own pre-committed voices against pursuing her any further.

By the time I found out her true status at the time (not that she lied about it or that we did anything that violated the relationship), I was already mentally invested in us having a future. And the rest, as they say, is history. Creepily foreshadowing history, as it turned out.

Emily asked me late in our Stateside disassembly of our mutuality whether my story on our time together would be all about the betrayal. I blinked at her and asked how it could be anything else. And she returned to platitudes about the time that we spent together for its own sake, the love that we shared, and especially her cloying refrain that I would be the better for our parting. And despite its seriously grandiose overtones, I can’t help but find a parallel to the question in the event of 9/11 itself. After all, the power and prestige of Osama bin Laden was purchased by the United States of America. His military interest, knowhow, and capability was all facilitated by the country he ultimately attacked. It is hard to imagine US officials close to bin Laden feeling like the partnership paid off overall, like it was somehow worth it in view of its fiery catastrophic conclusion.

Of course, there is an underlying asterisk to that whole angle on the story, namely that the US itself, or more broadly certain interest groups and factions within same, did probably end up better off for the experience of 9/11, despite its horrible upfront costs. It is this reality that prompts such widespread belief in the Inside Job theories that I myself share a sufficient sympathy with to make almost everyone I talk to about this wildly incredulous and uncomfortable. Almost as incredulous and uncomfortable as I feel every year that the dire predictions of in-country terrorism subsequent to 9/11 go unsubstantiated. The evidence of negligence in the face of threats is irrefutable, and the evidence of Pearl Harbor-style ignorance in the face of an impending reality is nearly so. The next step to active crafting is more ambiguous and will always remain so until someone can at least build a lifesize replica of the twin towers and send a remote-controlled jetliner into it to see if the theories invented to cover apparent empirics have any validity. You have to remember that the reason so many police and firefighters (and, frankly, regular people) died that day is because literally no physicist or architect believed it was possible for the buildings to fall. Had structural collapse even been the remotest inkling of a possibility in the minds of anyone witnessing the events as they unfolded, the death count for the day would stand around 400. And that has to give you pause, regardless of how crazy you think questioning the official story is.

Suspending that thorny, divisive, and potentially alienating question, though, part of the 9/11 story (as with any tragedy) is trying to find redemptive outcomes and hopeful plotlines that mitigate the sheer horror of the unprecedented and unpredicted death of innocent humans. Indeed, my marriage itself was key among these. Which brings us to an unsettling conundrum that has underlied a great deal of my life in the last year. Anything good that happens in my life – from the success of the Rutgers debaters to any future relationship I might have to simply having a day where I don’t cry and contemplate giving up – can be used as a justification for Emily’s destruction of my previous life. If I wind up happy in a year or five or twenty, Emily gets to come back and say “I told you so,” to justify her callous and cavalier betrayal as a necessary step in both of our lives. I would no more hope to thus be unhappy than I would myself fly a plane into a building with people in it, but the insidious extent of her poisoning of my life puts a tarnish on any future joy or success I have. Anything I hope to find or build or do is asterisked as an argument that I had to lose what I most cared about, that I had to be betrayed.

I was going to say that the difference between that seemingly irrefutable reality and people making the same claim about 9/11 is the obvious irrecoverable destruction of 3,000 lives and a certain sense of American security (and ultimately, rights). In other words, no one would ever claim that this could be somehow “worth it,” no matter what benefits were reaped, while I’ve had to endure countless close friends already lobbing the “you’re better off without her” tripe because that’s permissible in the wake of divorce in our society, but not death. But I don’t think divorce/death is actually the key distinction here. I think it’s that even Osama bin Laden didn’t have the temerity to claim that his attacks (if they were his attacks, which he [uncharacteristically of all terrorists] denied for years) would ultimately be for the good of America and its people. Yet that’s exactly the kind of claim Emily’s tried relentlessly to make.

I know how this looks. The point of this post isn’t to say I was married to the moral or functional equivalent of Osama bin Laden, or even a more audacious version thereof. Indeed, the character flaws that led to her unraveling actions had nothing in common with terrorism so much as the weakness and distractability and poor self-awareness already identified before we even kissed. In other words, I knew exactly what I was signing up for, or should’ve. The fault, as I’ve shouted over countless eye-rolling friends, is mine. Not that this itself justifies her not checking her own immature proclivities, but neither does it render them entirely responsible for surprising me. So forgive me this melodramatic comparison. It is, as discussed with Ariel yesterday, merely my inclination to intertwine themes that have an echoey resonance, to contextualize the significance of an event that, in spite of itself, carries enormous world-changing weight even in my life.

But this counterpoint helps serve another function, namely to illustrate and reemphasize the depth of pain that actually brought me to, for the first time in three decades, cut off communication with another human being. It is only by being this visceral and thorough that I can truly show how hurtful the claim that her betrayal was for my sake is. How hurtful and endlessly compounding, a domino chain of exponential increase, cascading with doubt and haunting as I am left in the wake of wondering if all my suffering is for my own good. It is also to articulate across the void, I suppose, to a person who may or may not be reading this, that that one thought, baseline of her own self-righteous defense of her actions, was the tipping point in my being able to keep her in my life or not.

It may be fundamental to Emily’s future happiness and even functionality that she believe this malicious notion. But it is anathema to my own. And as long as we both maintain this, unsoftening, we will stand as hard and opposed as the World Trade Center towers themselves. Twinned, unyielding, so similar and yet never touching. And ultimately doomed to fall.

But just like the day that I got waitlisted at Swarthmore (what had, in spite of myself, become my first-choice college for undergrad applications back in ‘98) and the Brandeis scholarship package was the other envelope available to open in the same delivery, so too was there another envelope waiting for me this day. And instead of coming from Trudi Manfredo and friends, it was from my new academic department at Rutgers, informing me of a little stipend I’d be getting on top of my regular salary for serving as adjunct professor of the one-credit debate class. And suffice it to say that the stipend easily more than covered the uptick in rent. And so I had this weird moment of wanting to be grumpy about the increase, but being wholly unable to because I had basically found unknown money under the proverbial couch cushions of the mail.

To be fair, though, I shouldn’t have been surprised. This has basically been my entire life experience with the green paper figments we call currency in this country. Despite an upbringing where my parents and especially grandparents taught me to take money very seriously and be quite sparing in its expenditure, the actual flow of finances in my life has been something like the pacing of a poorly-shot action film. And it’s all served to remind me of what I’ve now long known – that money is totally and utterly random and that any correlation between its availability and anything resembling work or effort or especially dessert is entirely coincidental.

It is this increasing conviction, borne of scrimping money early in our life in California only to have a hit-and-run driver force $1,500 of repairs on a car we ended up ditching shortly thereafter or me follow advice to an Emergency Room bill of similar heft that was entirely unnecessary for our uninsured selves, that has probably solidified my conceptual comfort with gambling. Many people are surprised to learn that I not only gamble, but enjoy it, perhaps assuming it fails to dovetail with a life devoted to avoiding all drugs, alcohol, tobacco, and meat (probably quadruply redundant, that list, or at least triply so) as well as one spent railing against capitalism. And there are times that my anti-capitalist convictions make me squeamish about the financial fracas that is wagering, though I also have this Pi-like (the movie) fascination with numeric patterns and beating the system, something only reinforced by having a series of close friends who also invest a lot of mental energy in same. Nevertheless, I’m squarely in the camp that gambling helps unearth a fundamental truth about money and capitalism writ large, or a series of them – namely that your income always comes at the expense of someone else’s cost, and that money is oh so random.

Which is not to say, mind you, that gambling ought be random. I am a lifetime vocal opponent of the lottery for precisely that reason – there’s nothing remotely involving skill one could attribute to this institution, unless you want to sort of count this innovative couple who bought enough tickets to beat the house. Besides the fact that the lottery positions itself to violate the other fundamental rule of gambling, namely that one should only risk what one can afford to lose. A rule that I probably violated when managing some retirement funds before the dissolution of my marriage, in a sense, though once one has access to a certain amount of cash, it gets harder to see the real value of any given dollar or even thousand. And this gets even more difficult when the person betraying one steals far more than that in the effort to extort a friendship one will soon lose interest in maintaining. Good God, this stuff is so random.

But back to gambling, quickly. The point is that gambling is an arena whose entrance should be blocked by a certain playfulness with the money, and whose contents should require skill instead of luck. Which has of course driven a lifelong fascination with poker, which can combine with an addictive personality (there’s a reason I don’t get involved with mind-altering substances, or about twenty-six of them – reasons, not substances) to really ramp up the stakes. I’ve probably been a break-even player for most of my life, in aggregate, treading water at the limit game at Oaks Card Club in Emeryville, California for a few years, occasionally dropping money in Vegas or somewhere else and paying for it with pretty decent money taken off my friends $10-$100 at a time in weekly home games or in the Castle Commons back in college.

I can’t really explain why gambling is fun, but I think it’s only fun if it’s affordable and requires some sort of skill. I had twice as much fun bowling when we bet on it as when we didn’t, and the same was probably just about true for chess. Maybe it’s the risk-reward structure or the adrenaline of competition or the personality of a generation raised to be incentivized to the hilt with a thousand tiny carrots ranging from literal grade-school warm-fuzzies to free candy bars for high grades to book-club books for lots of reading. I don’t think it’s an oversimplification to say that the children of the 1980’s were a straight-up bribed generation, without even getting into the countless kids of broken homes whose parents would outright bid for their affection with toys, trips, and allowances. No wonder we’re drowning in debt and associate every activity with some sort of dollar cost or potential reward. And even I, ever the skeptic of the whole exchange of goods and services thing, get pulled under if there’s enough strategy or drama.

Something changed on this roadtrip, though, the mosaic of the nature of poker altered and shifted like a desert djinn and started to reveal itself in a new more visible light. I actually lost overall in three trips to casinos in three different states, but felt I was absorbing almost alien-inspired knowledge about the way the game should be played. Something that’s always intrigued me about poker also accelerated, namely the social aspect of the game. Even in the frigid east coast, with its brusque disregard for human communication, poker tables knit strangers together in a friendly camaraderie rarely rivaled outside of ideal workplaces and debate or sports teams. It was largely loneliness that drove me to Oaks on many of those Oakland and Berkeley nights, the challenge of living on four hours a night of sleep with a wife who preferred ten. And though I walked out of the St. Louis cardroom agreeing not to make poker a continuing thing in my Jersey life, at least until the summer, I still had this nagging feeling that I’d made a breakthrough even in light losses.

Fast-forward to a couple weeks back, when I was feeling energized and excited after a great week looking forward to the debate season, all friends in any sort of range busy, but wanting to go talk, be, and see. I posted on Facebook that I was considering going to AC for the weekend, but probably knew better. To my near-shock, at least five friends almost immediately posted with exhortations for me to go gamble. Maybe they knew me better than I know myself, saw the glint of caring and distraction entailed in cards that makes the mopey self-recrimination cycle of much of the last year more difficult. At least if one doesn’t lose too much, that is. And one of them informed me there’s a card room a half hour east of Philly, twice as close as AC, which made the difference between needing a hotel and not. I was sold.

Seven trips later, I’m making $27 an hour playing poker. That only counts table time, so tacking on the drive time puts it closer to $20, and then there’s a little gas as well. But twenty bucks an hour is surprisingly job-like compensation for something that’s incredibly fun and social. I also feel like I’m getting better, and even though there was one losing session overall against the six winners, I’m up over $1100 in two weeks of play.

Granted, seven trips in two weeks is utterly unsustainable during the debate season proper and winter will also likely dampen my enthusiasm for that much Route One driving. Though I do thank the roadtrip for reminding me that I actually enjoy driving a fair bit and otherwise tend to lack time to belt out singing to favored songs or absorb some NPR. Or even, as I’ve discovered I actually like lately, put on a dance radio station and bob along in the sheer momentum of an underlit night. It even occurred to me, in light of a surprisingly lackluster feeling about not only the online dating site I joined a month or so back but the idea of online dating writ large, that maybe poker can be my girlfriend for a while. I can well see the withering look I’d give myself had I heard myself say such a thing, but I’m starting to think my heart may just be closed for business for a good long while. And it might even prompt me to take another look at monasteries if I weren’t suddenly fascinated with the idea of making something like an income playing cards for chips.

The nicest thing about this whole process and experience is that the flash-temptation I have to quit my job and play poker full-time is resoundingly defeated by how much I love my job. For perhaps the first time in my life, I know I wouldn’t give notice if I won the lottery (which I would never play, but you get the metaphor) tomorrow. Even hitting the big-time with a bestseller and having the opportunity to write full-time would probably not prompt an overnight shift to a new career. I don’t know quite what to do with this information other than to be grateful for that aspect of my existence. I really love the debate team, the people thereon, and the endless opportunities emerging from the school’s support of both. And maybe it’s that confidence in how I’m making a day job that makes the night job both relaxing and viable.

Or maybe I’m just lucky.

I’ve talked about this phenomenon to a few people, but it seems like the kind of thing that’s worth documenting at this juncture as I cancel Netflix today, because I think it has some implications for broader incentives and how money messes with people’s better motivations. I’m also considering creating a “War on Capitalism” category for posts here because the broader “Politics…” one is starting to feel like it’s getting thrown at too many disparate ideas. We’ll see.

Anyway, I like movies. Quite a bit, I feel, perhaps more than most people. Although I traditionally don’t like watching movies at home. I’ve spent a lot of time discerning why I love movies in theaters and am kind of annoyed, generally, by the process of watching movies at home. Most of it, I’ve found, is about immersion. I’m able to really lose myself in a film and the world it’s creating when it’s on the big screen in a huge dark room and I don’t control the timing of the event. It is just that: an event. I cannot pause the movie, I cannot rewind it, I cannot determine the parameters of the environment. I am part of something larger and bearing witness and thus I have no choice but to let go and be captive to the universe around me. Whereas that element of control that a remote offers, combined with the reduced sound and size and co-viewers, saps the surreality from the perspective and reminds me, repeatedly, that this is just a movie I’m choosing to watch and I can break the spell of illusion any time I want.

And that immersion gap is the hinge point for a lot of my enjoyment of experiencing a film. If I’m constantly hyper-aware of the fact that I’m in a fictional space with fictional characters, I’m far less likely to learn anything from what they’re trying to illustrate. The reason I like fiction is that there’s more truth in it than the often blatantly biased “non-fiction” presentation of an argument or perspective. If I’m continually being reminded that it’s just a bunch of actors, then that goes out the window. Which it can, because I’m in a room with windows, as opposed to the theater.

But I’ve been able to put up with shifting gears to a lot of home-watching, first because Em and I were trying to save money after moving to Jersey (and she had spent years lobbying me to watch more at home because she liked couching it, which makes her citation of that as a flaw in our relationship thereafter so unfair and ridiculous) and then later after she’d robbed me. It’s not as much fun, but I did it enough that I got used to it and didn’t mind so much. And then, in the last six months or so, I started noticing a creeping phenomenon from Netflix subscription that was having a detrimental impact on my life.

Netflix is a subscription service, and an unlimited one at that, with the only restriction on one’s capacity for utilizing it being how many movies one wants to pay for at a time and how quickly one can turn those movies over. There is also streaming, sure, but I forgot to buy a laptop with an HDMI port and thus my connecting it to the TV screen is extremely complicated and requires unhooking my desktop speakers and a bunch of other garbage, making it unpalatable. And I really don’t like watching movies on the laptop itself, since that’s a whole extra stairstep down in the immersion factors discussed above. Once in a while I’d watch something in bed with a headache, but the reduced immersion made it almost a non-starter.

So for the most part it’s about turning DVD’s over. And one has this pressure in the back of one’s mind that makes it clear that the value of the subscription is maximized by turning over the most number of DVD’s possible. Ideally, from an economic perspective, one would watch ever DVD the day it arrived and ship it back that night. This would make the price per movie the lowest possible and thus maximize the value of the service.

As a result, even though I am often able to resist economic motives and urges, I would feel this light but needling pressure to watch movies whenever they were available so I could ship them back and get more movies. The irony being, of course, that the reward for satiating this feeling of pressure was the opportunity to feel it again, sooner and more frequently. Which I feel is actually true of a lot of capitalist motivations, when it comes down to it.

This becomes especially problematic when what I most want to do at home most of the time is either read or work on a creative project. Given that I’ve mostly been reading library books lately, or books purchase for me or a while ago, there’s no economic pressure there. And creative projects, except for the occasional “next big thing” to win the Internet, are also the opposite of a financial incentive. Both of those pursuits tend to be ends in themselves, where the process of doing them is their own reward. Whereas watching movies, something that should probably also be an end in itself, had been corrupted by Netflix implying how I could best value its service.

The problem, of course, is that I actually prefer doing things that are an end in themselves, but frequently would choose to watch a movie because of this slight monetary motive. There were several nights in sequence when I was really into my book and would prefer to read it, but somewhat begrudgingly forced myself to watch a movie first so I could turn it over. This, my friends, is insane behavior. It’s totally irrational and it’s exhibit 342001389B in why capitalism is crap.

So I’m unhooking myself from the machine. In retrospect, maybe it’s entirely about the price. Obviously if Netflix were a free service, I’d feel none of the economic compulsion and thus be content to keep it for the occasional filmy distraction. But it’s just that, a distraction, stealing time from the pursuits I actually prefer. And I hear they have DVD’s at libraries from time to time, so I’m not completely stranded on that front if I want to have a movie night. Libraries, one of the few bastions of salvation from this collective insanity we’ve all decided to embrace in society so it can motivate us to ruin our lives.

What they often overlook, as is becoming somewhat trendy to observe, is that there’s actually a lot of effort and even intellectual curiosity going into these alternate pursuits. There’s creative problem solving and collaboration and sometimes almost obsessive dedication. It just happens to be to the “wrong” things. Or as I’ll explain in a minute, I don’t think it “happens” to be to that at all. I think it’s obvious and measurable exactly why some things get attention from the younger generations of our era and others get ignored to the aghast gasping of old-school academics and their ilk that everything is about to collapse.

Video games and other time-consuming pursuits of the genre are structured around motivating a certain series of behaviors. And many of them, especially the best ones (e.g. the much-maligned Massively Multiplayer Online Role-Playing Games, or MMORPGs [e.g. World of Warcraft or WoW, which you've almost certainly heard of]) do an almost insidious job at motivating their player to achieve the goals desired at the expense and detriment of everything else in their life. The rewards are frequent and satisfying and there are always more goals and rewards to unlock, all amidst a fun and interactive environment to partake in. Contrast this with traditional classroom learning or the traditional workplace, where the main goal to achieve is simply putting in hours, regardless of accomplishment or function. There are goals and rewards to unlock, potentially, but the main goal and reward is being at an appointed place for an appointed time when expected and surrounded by others doing the same thing.

Indeed, this motivation, something my Dad and I have called “time in the seat” since my first serious rebellions against education in the late 1980’s, is the fundamental core of the modern Western life. People are not recognized or acknowledged so much for what they do or even how they do it, but when they do it. And not even when they do it so much as for how long. The person who works 60 hours a week is automatically respected more than the person who works 40 (let alone 20 or 30), no matter what they’re actually doing with that time. They could be surreptitiously playing eight hours of Minesweeper while no one is looking over their shoulder at their computer screen, but people will nod sagely and say that this is a better worker than someone putting in 20 hours of brilliantly focused work and otherwise out living their life.

Thus we see that Minesweeper itself, unlike our school and work places, actually motivates people to minimize how long it takes to complete a given task. And one ends up spending a long time, or long enough, mastering and perfecting that task in order to complete it more minimally the next time around. While school and work actually motivate and incentivize people to maximize the amount of time it takes to do a given thing, because that will prolong the time in the seat and fill the hours or enable one to work longer and thus get more respect and/or money.

It’s no coincidence that pay is traditionally doled out by the hour in our society and those like it, or that schools are paid for the number of full days of attendance logged by their students. And even for the increasing army of “exempt” non-hourly-paid employees, their respect and prestige tends to correspond to how long they can be seen “slaving” away at the office, yet only an excellent supervisor or trained eye will be able to see the person actually working smarter and harder, not just longer and longer. These incentives and motivations are precisely backwards, and among the best and brightest actually create a very common and extremely pernicious impact.

This impact is to actually sandbag productivity in the effort to make something challenging or interesting or actually push oneself to develop. Almost everyone I know will recognize this from their own college days, but I’m sure many have also done this during high school and work. The phenomenon is centered around procrastination of a given task or duty, not because one is lazy or disinterested, but because the procrastination itself builds a sort of excitement or pressure around then having to complete the work in a short period of time. And that pressure supplants the lack of excitement or push to learn or grow or exert effort normally found in a school/work environment, building a learning curve and a thrill of challenge that the work would otherwise go without. And almost universally, inevitably, the work completed under such circumstances is better than that completed over a slow plod or mincing hours of working laboriously. It’s fresher, it breathes with the passion of a looming deadline, and it reflects the rise to the occasion so often seen as a result of a human pushed to their capacity.

So what’s the solution? Is Storey just railing again with another problem and no fixes? Or is he going to suggest something absurd like having us all play MMORPGs instead of working? Fear not, friends, for I have the most obvious solution in the world.

School is the easy one – work’s a tiny bit trickier. But we need to unleash school students of all ages from their annual fixed rate of progress. Graduation from high school – not a GED or quick-fix substitute, but actual full graduation – should have no implied age. One should be able to complete the full work of high school assignments at any pace they so desire. Maybe people have to get kicked out of high school by 22 or 25 or something to keep things moving along, but there are otherwise no restrictions on pace of work. Assignments are available to be taken on at any point – the only catch is that when an assignment is given, it comes with a fixed deadline X number of days thereafter. But if you want to do three grades’ worth of work at a time and graduate at 11, you’re welcome to try.

Suddenly under such a system, which would take roughly the same resources as status quo, just more open-minded teachers and a more flexible attitude overall, everyone in school would be motivated. Don’t like high school? Get out quick! Bored with a subject? Finish it in days! Your motivation would be not just to play a game for grades or to goof off in the back of class for a diversion, but to actually absorb material, demonstrate mastery, and get moving with your actual life. Even if this system took more resources to try to deal with all the people flying around at an individual pace, the job satisfaction and ease of work increase from dealing with people who want to be learning would be exponential. You’d basically turn school into a video game with checkpoints that can be completed faster and better with more obsessive play.

Work can be trickier because there’s sometimes the need for people to have meetings and, worse, committees. But I think the same basic rules apply. Release all hourly requirements and restrictions. Have each job assigned a pile of tasks. These tasks must be completed by X time and short of that, however much or little you have to work to do that well is done. This even works for construction and ditch-digging and some of the worst jobs imaginable, because you’d suddenly be incentivized to complete projects faster rather than take your time and milk them for hours. Lawyers would no longer be limited to billable hours, but freed up to try to streamline the efficiency with which tasks were completed. About the only thing I can’t figure are certain service jobs where a place is open for X amount of time and people have to be there to anticipate that. Then again, outside of maybe restaurants, most of these jobs are being replaced by online retailing. And I think that’s great, because most of those jobs being replaced are no fun at all.

The human mind was not meant to pursue things for fixed amount of hours every day. It craves creativity, spontaneity, new thinking, innovation. It is not greed that motivates us to such things, but flexibility and our own internal motivations of wanting to get things done. If the motivation were to speed up this process, then synergies and opportunities would continue to rise exponentially. Instead, our society languishes in the doldrums of clock-watching. No wonder we’re disproportionately overweight, saddled with back problems and stress and all the other collateral damage of life glued to chairs for fixed amounts of time. We need to get up, get out, get going, and get faster. And we can’t do that with the number 2080 (or a larger one) around our necks like a stone collar.

Free your time and the mind will follow.

A funny thing happened on the way to exchanging meaningless electronic representations of meaningless green pieces of paper for fabric-covered stuffing, though. I was having a nice conversation with a pretty competent salesman who seemed genuinely interested in debate (either he was really good or really interested) and then, right after he’d quizzed me about all the ways he could improve his own public speaking (and thus, presumably, sales), he offered to make a side-bet with me. He offered to bet me money about the longevity of the furniture he was selling me.

To be fair, he offered to bet the furniture store’s money with me about this. On behalf of the store. Yes, folks, he offered me an insurance plan. An extended warranty. A fee for replacing the furniture, whatever happens to it. And I had been enjoying the interaction, so I did my best not to get angry.

Insurance has become a common, accepted, and even well-liked thing in our society. There’s a lot of rhetoric, some of it well-lampooned in this recent mac-n-cheese commercial campaign (I think it was in front of a movie or a YouTube clip at some point, because I don’t know how I otherwise would’ve seen it) about “security”, “peace of mind”, and “safety” associated with insurance. And since our government has decided to guarantee us almost none of these things in the US, it’s not terribly surprising that we go looking for it from corporations. The problem is that corporations are sleek, well-evolved, profit-making machines that have no regard for anything else. Kind of like sharks without the remorse.

So insurance is nothing of the kind. It’s a wager that I’m invited to make against myself. It’s saying that I bet I will cost myself more than the bet on the table through my own stupidity or contact with danger or, in this case, likelihood of ruining furniture. It’s saying that I want something bad to happen to me so I don’t look like a dummy for making this bet in the first place. Or at least lowering the possibility of my best-case outcome to losing that bet. And increasingly, corporations are offering them at every turn. Warranties and insurance on almost every item (maybe not quite macaroni – yet), deals and offers that sound so good. For just a little extra, you can make sure that you don’t have to be careful in that rental car or with that chair or on that hotel visit. Almost nothing that costs more than $100 these days is sold without the offer of a tack-on fee for replacing it.

The problem, of course, besides the philosophical issues with betting against oneself, is that these profit-seeking missiles know the bet is rigged in their favor. They have armies of staff evaluating and bean-counting and figuring out how to maximize profit and have it outstrip any potential liability from people signing up for insurance. The odds have been critically determined, proven, and reproven, to be against you any time you take that bet. Because otherwise, they would have no incentive whatsoever to offer you the bet in the first place. And trust me, the furniture store knows more about furniture costs and longevity than you do. The car company knows more about cars, the macaroni company… you get it. So they know that they’re going to make money on that bet, regardless of what happens. Maybe you’ll take it and get lucky and need a replacement, upgrading your stolen insurance money to a lottery ticket. But since when were lottery tickets sold at furniture outlets?

So when my otherwise friendly salesman looks me in the eye and offers me a $129 bet that I’m going to want to take the scissors into my chair at some point in the next 5 years and get a brand-new one for free, I say no thanks. Granted, there’s also a small moral compunction here that makes me recognize that, were I ruthless capitalist, I would throw the furniture off the roof about 4.5 years into my 5-year term and then say “oops, look what I did – I guess I need new stuff now” and that there would be this Friedmanesque voice in the back of my head telling me I was a fool if I didn’t do that if I made the $129 bet. Of course, there’s also the other issue that the new stuff would presumably come with a new bet, maybe $159 now since I’d proven I was risky, for that furniture. And if I was the kind of guy who took the bet in the first place, I should surely take it again. And that’s how these things guarantee that they make money no matter what, because the odds of you calling in that bet sequentially are pretty low, and by that time you’ve basically paid for the full price of the replacement furniture.

There’s a reason that gift cards are everywhere now, vast quantities of them hanging tantalizingly on racks at every grocery store and convenience shop. There’s a reason everyone wants to tack on a warranty and tries harder to sell you that than the initial item itself. There’s a reason three cents of soda sells for a couple bucks at most places and five or seven at movies and plane stations. And you really have the audacity to tell me that this is efficiency? Really?

This was the case Dave & Kyle were going to run in Nats Finals had they gotten there. Instead, Dave & I had fun with the sisters Sanders in this round that is not precisely an exemplar of full decorum. Enjoy:

APDA Summer 2011: Round 1 from Storey Clayton on Vimeo.

Debate: “Would You Get Rid of Religion?” from David on Vimeo.

APDA Summer 2011: Round 2 from Storey Clayton on Vimeo.