I have a way with words. And I have a way with money. Actually, that’s not entirely true: Money has always had its way with me. I realize this is not a singular predicament; it’s a universal one, especially in these unprecedented and uncertain days we find ourselves.
I’m certainly not a writer like Joyce, or even the “poor Joist,” but I do suffer from his free-spirited way with money that only the inveterately insolvent know anything about.
I’ve always scraped by, squeezed through the monetary aperture like light that’s about to blink out. I’ve stepped out of the shuttle only to realize, and always too late, that I forgot to attach the safety cord: “Ground control to Major Tom, your bank account’s in the negative….”
Nobody ever tells us how to be masters of money, unless you’re an accountant, and I’d rather be screwed financially than order money about like a little dictator. I’m not very practical. This could be a reason for my financial fragility. But wisdom always comes in the end — or not at all.
Like everyone else, I’m a very evolved specimen for coming up with excuses.
And it’s not as though I’ve never worked. I’ve always worked. And as much as I enjoy re-reading Bertrand Russell’s essay “In Praise of Idleness,” I’ve worked since I was 16. My first job was delivering newspapers, a job I hated.
A blighty, a reeky, a lighty, scrappy, a babbly, a ninny.
I hated the early mornings and the disgruntled newspaper readers who always seemed to go into a fit of despair or anger if their paper didn’t show up at exactly the right time. This was my first exposure to what a totalitarian regime might look like. I’d actually love that job now, just me and a satchel full of papers, ambling down deserted streets, slipping the news of the day into hungry mailboxes. In fact, I wish I could get paid for delivering poetry. Auden famously said that poetry makes nothing happen, but I disagree. I think of poems the same way Lucretius thought of atoms randomly moving in an infinite universe. Poems are difficult to silence!
I wasn’t doing well financially before this pandemic, even with a full-time job and part-time one as a college adjunct teaching English. I still floundered in the big economic tub where there’s a bit of loofah to keep you afloat or else a heel of soap to scrub you clean and hope for something better to come along. Now, though, that coin of soap is a godsend currency that keeps me safe.
Debt is like a contrail. You sense it everyday, spreading out before you and after you, but everyone else just sees the plane and wonders where it’s going.
Grief sea with a purse of pearls and debt.
And this coronavirus pandemic has made my financial situation even more fragile. It’s gone from biscuit to wafer. The anxiety has risen like bread and I’m stuffing myself like a skinny chicken hoping to provide for my children, hoping I’ll still have my job, but hope is a fragile thing with wings. And, yes, I know that I’m fortunate to even have a job, but knowing doesn’t alleviate anxiety, it just keeps it at arm’s length or else subsumes it into the land of the subconscious and every night you are reminded of your situation now in the symbolic language of dreams, which only makes things worse.
I chose to be a writer, which is a financially perilous profession, it’s not something lucrative unless it becomes so. And I’ve sort of inoculated myself against the worries of not having enough money. But as a person, and as a civilization, we can’t sterilize ourselves to life.
How we spend our days is, of course, how we spend our lives.
Notice how even this quote floats about in the language of “spending.” I’ve always valued so much more how I “spend” my time than how I earn my living or how I even “spend” my money.
And I’ve always tried to make myself feel alive, writing, eating, drinking, making love, listening to music, walking, thinking, dreaming. But having no money, or even the thoughts of having none, makes me feel embarrassed, ashamed, angry, lost, frustrated, childish, pathetic.
And I write this not to simply row my dour green boat into your harbor and hoist its despairing sail, but because I sense we are all now in similar dour green boats, rocking on this precarious tide of a pandemic and wondering what will be the economic outcome. Will there be a place at the financial table for us?
I want to continue to have my moveable feasts without the lack of money. I don’t want to find myself at the beggar’s banquet clacking my bowl endlessly for some morsel. I don't just want to survive, but live.
We all need a dose of luck. All of us, because without luck, you’re fucked!
It’s now more than ever that I feel a solidarity and spirit of revolution to see if it’s possible for a universal basic income for all. It’s either that or like Lawrence of Arabia, I come to realize the following:
The trick, William Potter, is not minding that is hurts.