Monday 9/2/02 7:30 AM Labor Day

Double Bubble Toil and Stubble.

It is hard as wood, petrified in a dry climate, to get a point into my head sometimes. Worse when I thought of it myself. I have set this laborious glorious weekend aside to contemplate the nature of work. It seems somehow appropriate. As well as embarrassingly unimaginative and facile. A depth of subject that I sound on a daily and most familiar basis. Full fathom one, my analysis spun, completely exposed in the sun.

It came to me on this leisurely celebration of labor that I have thought of work as the enemy for all these years. A living, that is to say, accompanied by great psychic pain, to earn. Now armed with new and slightly dangerous knowledge, I explore my wicked older ways and try ,somewhat desperately, to come up with a scheme that will integrate my writing life with my comedy life with my commercial working life with my leisure life (and to be complete, lest some narcoleptic god intervenes, my dream life).

Let there be no mistake about it, I consider this integration my highest level of achievement and have little tolerance for segregation in any sense. I have always believed that unity can lead to a master of all trades allowing only little jacking around left to be done.

I have been working in the world of commerce for almost all my life. Since the summer of 1958 I have been paid for that work. That, I think, is the definition of a pro. My father, likely enough, was my first teacher. In his own perverted Italian contractor way he was the Mr. Miyagi of the construction trade. His wick was short and the explosion often violent and couched in foul language and a healthy fist connecting with the newly muscled flesh of my upper arm. He definitely lacked the infinite patience of the wise and old Zen teacher. Although I have problems with method, it definitely got my attention and kept me interested.

I learned, as I perspired mightily over a saw cut on a two by four piece of lumber that would somehow leave the pencil marked line made by a square behind and follow a jagged canted line of its own design, that I must always keep all things plumb, square and level. I further learned that it was important, sweat burning my eyes, to let the saw do the work. Pow! Biff! ~Bam! One of these days right to the moon, Joey. Where I most fervently wished to be. I had stars in my eyes and could think of no more wonderful place to inhabit than outer space. I just wanted my conveyance to be of a more refined and controlled explosive construction. Now make that cut again. Make is Square! To Make the wall Plumb! So that all will be Level! Cross cutting I would go. Eventually I got the point. Of course, the saw was designed to do the work!

My father taught me the true inner glowing of mathematics. He was straddled one day on the railing over a second story stairway. He reached into his apron and realized that he was out of 16 penny (16d for the initiates) common spikes. "Joey," he yelled as I bit my tongue and tried for the hundred thousandth time to force the saw to cut straight, "hand me a couple nails." I was on a roll. Not only had I cajoled and worried the cut to almost straight perfection (it was unfortunately also almost fifteen degrees out of square), I also knew the size and shape of the nails he was using. I hopped over to the nail kegs and grabbed two beautiful new sharply pointed dull steel spikes and ran across the room to his perch and handed them to him. I waited for an acknowledgment of thanks.

"What the farbidyqurab is this?" he said. "I asked for a couple nails!" Which I had given him. With some accuracy and precision. He then launched into an explanation that confuses me to this day. "When I ask for a couple of nails," he said with some force and passion, " I want at least a thabamitywhack handful of nails. If I ask for a few nails bring the whole kilbbityflammed box. If I ask for a handful bring me the godlyfarbiquradifared keg!" Clearly this was a logic that was new to me, but as my father would point as old as the earth is tired. I have encountered it however when trying to understand a soliloquy from Shakespeare. It is a poetic vision of the logical universe that entirely escaped me until just recently.

This weekend.

I, not work, am the enemy! The harder I battle to force my mind to do the work, the more fatigued, unsatisfied and unfulfilled I become. I just gotta let things go a little.

Hi Yo! Hi Ho!