A freelance pastoral: All things being equinox

We were driving back from a wedding in Springfield when the missus expressed the whole thing very succinctly: “My business model doesn’t work without the bank, and your business model isn’t enough to drive the household.”

So the great experiment in self-sufficiency comes to an end for us, after eight years. She is going back to an office. She is already extremely well thought of there. She is very good at what she does. She will be well compensated. In a stagnant economy, we are grateful.

Yet I also feel a mixed sense of accomplishment and failure on my part. I retain enough of the template of my parents’ generation, of Dad going to the office and Mom staying home, that I am not entirely sure I did all I could to allow her to continue to enjoy the freelance life. Which, rationally, I don’t think is true. We both realized we needed a plan that included boosting the freelance bookings as well as seeking full-time work.

In boosting my own freelance bookings, I was successful. In fact, it got to the point that my schedule was so full I asked myself more than once if going it alone – and paying full freight for health insurance – was really worth the semantic difference in nomenclature. And, ironically, now that she is going back to work full-time, I have had to undo much of the work I did. I will be responsible for the Benbino every afternoon after school now, and have discovered that, in all practicality, I can realistically work a half-time schedule – and just before Alison reached agreement with her workplace, I agreed to a half-time deal with a health technology magazine that was launching a new web site and needed someone with experience to supply content for it on a regular basis. So, I’ve had to tell clients with whom I’ve worked for several years I need to take a break. Yet I still somehow feel as though I did not do enough.

In reality, though, I’ve been in the writing market for 30 years, and I know what a writer of my experience and skill should make – and I make it. I’ve been able to build a national clientele within the narrow publishing niche I found myself in. It’s just not a very well-compensated craft. I know lots of very, very good writers who have moved into better-paying fields. I’ve never been given a serendipitous opportunity to leave journalism and never pursued an exit. I did leave daily newspapers just about in time to escape the industry’s implosion, and have been, for the most part, very well rewarded intellectually since, which is important to me.

But the whole idea that people who communicate, to the best of their ability, the unvarnished facts of daily life are among the worst-paid for those considered erudite and educated is still something I can’t quite figure. Maybe it’s a supply and demand thing. Maybe it’s a perception problem: a couple weeks ago, we went out for ice cream and saw some people we know. We hadn’t seen them in quite a while.

“So, how are you?” our acquaintance asked me. “Still writing?”

Do we ask lawyers if they are still lawyers or physicians if they are still doctors?

She caught herself before I answered.

“Of course you are.”

Of course, but I am placing less importance on it these days. The ski hill will beckon shortly and I bought the Benbino a season pass to accompany mine. I’ve long said the secret to freelance life was not to covet the week in Aspen but to truly enjoy the midweek special at the local lodge. That part of the life I’m not giving up. Or the Indian lunch buffet, and I will be sure the missus can accompany me now and then. I owe her more than that but a nice big plate of tikka masala and some Indian rice pudding makes any day better no matter how one’s salt mine is organized for tax purposes.

Childish things

Until a couple months ago, I hadn’t been to a batting cage since sometime in 1990 or 1991, when the Gannettoid cretins who had taken over the Poughkeepsie Journal newsroom committed another one of their bonehead moves. I was so frustrated I got up from my desk, and said to my editor, “Jesus H. Christ; I gotta hit something. Might as well go to the batting cage and make it useful.”

She just nodded. As I stormed out, the features clerk asked me where I was going.

“To the batting cage.”

“You have the greatest job,” she said. When I moved to Syracuse she got my job, but I don’t know if she ever hit the cage. She didn’t have that tightly-wound makeup of old infielders and goaltenders and I think her career path was smoother than mine has been.

And in the ensuing two decades I rarely thought about hitting a baseball, until I found myself teaching the Benbino the proper method of wielding a bat – stay comfortably crouched, most the weight on your back leg, front foot about halfway back along the plate, and back elbow at a good 45-degree angle. Then, short timing step, bring the knob of the bat down and point it at the ball…keep the wrists cocked and the right elbow in close to your body, then, BLAM! Snap the wrists and follow through.

It seems to have worked OK for him. He really knocked the snot out of the ball a couple times this year – one game he had a sure triple, maybe even a dinger going, but he was so excited he hit it so far that he missed first base by a foot and I yelled at him when he was most the way to second: “Get back here! You missed the base!” So he ended up with the farthest-hit single of the season for any Dodger.

He’s not playing Fall Ball, but says he still loves the game and wants to play next spring. So I signed him up for one week of formal baseball camp this summer and one week of town rec sandlot camp, which is the next best thing to the way we did back in the day, everybody riding their bikes to the junior high diamond and spending the afternoon on the field.

But he also has some weeks where he just hangs with the ‘rents, and we split the work day and the Benbino-watching. I try to get him out to swim or play catch or golf most days, and suggested we do BP at the local school recently. He briefly sagged but rallied, and we hit two buckets of 25 each, alternating pitching duties. We had an hour or so left to kill and I said, “We’re going down to the batting cages in Shelton,” because the only fence at the school is an impenetrable patch of poison ivy about 150 feet out in left field, and I had my juices flowing. I wanted to pound some baseballs, and already had one minor bout with the ivy this year.

“Awwwww.” Damn, that’s a long, whiny sound. Hate it.

He picked that up from PBS’s Arthur, the anthropomorphic aardvark, but off we went, anyway.

I had visited that cage earlier in the spring, in the middle of his season, just to make sure I wasn’t giving him bad advice, like those idiots who scream “Get your elbow up!” And I found I was still OK on the 54-mph pitches but just tipped the 72’s. At the time I couldn’t figure out if I had lost some reflexes or if the machine was hard to hit because there’s no discernible release point – the ball just drops from a hamper and out of sight momentarily, then shoots out of this dark hole.

The same thing happened last week, and even the 9-year-old had trouble.

“This batting cage stinks,” he said. “We’re not coming back.”

I think he has a point. And rationally, I also wonder if a man my age has any business trying to hit fastballs, anyway. But I always think better of such self-limiting balderdash. Are we ever too old to try to be quick, to be sharp, to hit the fastballs and curveballs life throws at us? Is it too much to demand that we be able to see that release point, or is the “foof” of a yellow range ball shooting at me out of the dark at 72 mph a reminder that we better accept the whole inscrutable package with more grace than I can muster most days?

A freelance pastoral, part the next: Waiting for The Man

I haven’t posted for a long time because I thought I’d be posting long before this.

Sounds kinda like a Yogi-ism, I know, but I recently had an encounter with what’s colloquially known as the Hiring Process, in which I spoke with a man on the phone and evidently conducted myself with enough panache that I was invited to come visit him and his colleagues in person up toward Cape Ann. So I bought a new pair of ragg socks that would go well in cold weather with my professorial suede ducks, blew the dust off my favorite Brooks Brothers red rep  tie, and drove off to my first Job Interview in 13 years.

I had been led to believe that I was in a very favorable position to land said Job, but the trip up happened four weeks ago and I have heard nothing since. So I suppose they have decided to go in A Different Direction. I have never been big on post mortems of these types of things, because I have always figured that once one lands in the short pile of people who are granted access to the final stages of the Hiring Process, it all comes down to intangibles, and trying to quantify one’s own intangibles is an exercise in futility, and should be. But I really thought I’d be bidding farewell to the lifestyle and business I have built over the past decade-plus, and sharing my thoughts on that.

I obviously thought that I would have heard one way or the other from these guys before two fortnights was out. I probably sealed my fate from the git-go when I told everybody up there the same thing — that I was looking at the job, which entails covering the interesting world of electronic medical records (and that’s not a sarcastic statement), as just one of several opportunities; that I would write about this stuff as either a freelancer or as a staff guy, and was simply offering my services as any experienced business owner would. I understood, of course, that if offered the gig, 13 years of freedom was to be replaced by being beholden to The Man.

Each has its upsides (staff work, steady salary, health insurance, and paid vacation; freelance work, absolute control over my day, week, month and year) and downside (staff work, your time ain’t your own any more, freelance work, an endless hustle for work and periods of great uncertainty and insecurity). We are about to enter one of those periods of uncertainty and insecurity, and the idea of a guaranteed paycheck has its temptations. But I am also confident that The Missus and I can weather any storm. I wasn’t lying to the people up there. I don’t really need “a job.” I need to increase my income a substantial amount, and going back to wage slavery would be a very expedient way to do it, no more and no less. I’ve seen enough sweat shops that demand unswerving devotion until they need to cut staff.

One of my great-grandmother’s friends used to say “It falls out of heaven for the Joneses.” She didn’t mean that my great-grandma was showered with a king’s ransom from Providence, but rather that, when times were tough and she really needed $100, $100 would show up somehow. So for now I’m banking on that, and continuing my dual marketing strategy, and telling people I encounter in the Hiring Process that. If that signals my unsuitability for their “team,” that is OK with me.

Interestingly enough, I just filed a story on the very far edge of research into using sophisticated natural language processing algorithms to analyze the medical records of a large patient base to discern unlikely co-occurrence of diseases (or its converse). It is very interesting stuff to both techie guys and social policy wonks, and working on the story reinforced the notion that I know this stuff cold. Cold enough to know that, taking all the technical, political, and economic interests colliding with each other into account, the “experts” are talking out their butts just as much as I am. Probably more, because I recognize the situation and can stand at a self-deprecating remove. So whatever and however the guys up north decided what they decided, I’m not worried about my fundamental capabilities to cover the beat.

Kristofferson had it wrong when he wrote freedom is just another word for nothin’ left to lose. It’s the intangible above all others that needs no quantifying. I have a feeling we are about to test the old phrase “poor but happy” here to an extent we haven’t had to in quite some time. I think we’re ready, and my day on the north shore gave me an opportunity to get a great plate of fried clams as well as a reminder of how pungent the aroma of the maverick can be to others, Brooks Brothers cover-over or not. A life lesson with extra tartar sauce on the side is a lesson well worth living.

Buying the 1% A Beer

I grew up in a very homogeneous neighborhood, the IBM ghetto of Poughkeepsie. The majority of the families who lived there were IBMers or owned the businesses that supported their households. Demographically, we were more fortunate than the typical slice of Dutchess County: there were a lot of computer scientists and engineers, IBM lawyers and sales execs, and the school system, which benefited hugely from all that IBM property, produced a lot of kids going to Ivy or shirttail Ivy colleges. But we didn’t know any 1 Percenters.

Nor did I meet any when I was in Greenville at the old teachers’ college. But when I got back to Poughkeepsie, and started hanging out at the Seven Sisters campus, I did meet some. Their social position really never figured with our relationships. In fact, it only came up once, in the truncated way that young mens’ heart-to-hearts often do. One night, while I was having a beer with one of these financially fortunate kids, he said, “Y’know, Gregman, financially, I’m doing OK. I don’t have to worry. But you have a gift.”

I knew what he was talking about, but all I could think of to say was, “Tell you what. You give me half the trust fund and I’ll give you half the gift, and we’ll probably both be happier.”

I still wonder about how true that might have been, but when all is said and done, I’m not about to start obsessing about the market writ large. It took me a long time to realize that if I had really wanted to be filthy rich, I wouldn’t have ended up in journalism. The only journalists I know making even close to 1% money are TV anchors, and if you need huge cameras and satellite trucks and makeup every time you do your job, you ain’t a reporter, you’re in show biz.

The “gift,” as it were, honed itself over the years to the point that what had been a fairly decent sense of proportion matured into a very well-calibrated bullshit detector. And I developed a concomitant sense of limits. I spend enough of my time going over policy minutiae that I don’t get too excited about “bold and sweeping” utterances from any horse’s ass on either side of the legislative aisle or whatever citizen’s crusade some other horse’s ass is part of. I vote for my Congressman and Senators. Sometimes I talk to their press officers. Sometimes I send them an email, as informed as possible. The way the House and Senate have their email set up, you have to supply a Zip code from their district or they won’t get it, so if I really felt the need to send John Boehner an email telling him how full of shit he was, I’d have to do a little research and supply a fake ZIP (not that I’d ever do that – heavens, no, not me).

A rising tide lifts all boats, says the man trying to convince us the bilge of his benefactors is the natural wellspring of prosperity. What’s that smell, sir?

I knew a couple Greek guys who came not from families in the top 1% of America’s wealth, but from the top 1% of the world’s wealth. Nice guys. And I got a salient lesson in economics from one of them when I thought I had hit upon a surefire way to make a million bucks – easy-scrubbing Teflon toilets. The folks at DuPont told me I was a little late and sent me a Teflon cookbook for my trouble. When one of the Greek guys asked me how the business plan was going, and I told him, he shrugged.

“Dude,” he said, “you know the best way to make a million dollars?”

“No, how?”

“Start with two million.”

Of course. Where we end up in the money pile is the product of so many factors – industry and integrity, yes, but also luck, location and timing to vast degrees. I think of my folks, who absorbed all the great post-war lessons in loyalty to your employer and thrift and who were repaid with a comfortable middle-class nest egg because they worked for IBM.

Then I think of how it might have been for them had my Dad come from Detroit, not Poughkeepsie, and if he had been a 30-year engineer at GM with the same qualities of loyalty and thrift – ending up with worthless shares in a bankrupt dinosaur through no fault of his own.

So I go into the next year thinking about how much utter bullshit both the Tea Party and the Occupy movement are going to treat us to, with so much on the line in November. And then I’ll remember my old friends in the 1% and how we all took our rightful turns buying the rounds at McAuley’s because there was an inherent amount of mutual respect there.

I’ve been lucky enough to have grown up in an environment where I could hone the gifts I received from the universe. I do my best not to resent the evidently more abundant and tangible gifts others may have, nor to forget that others have not been blessed with the environment to develop their unique gifts to the extent I have. As a society, we have obviously lost our way in crafting an equitable atmosphere wherein all our disparate gifts can be nurtured. I don’t know how long it will take to ever find that again, because money-based class acrimony is the rule and not the exception here, but I do know who’s zooming us and who isn’t. It doesn’t take a genius to know what’s fair and what’s kind and what’s not.

What the hell. Merry Christmas. Buy a present for a child less fortunate than you, and a beer for somebody more fortunate. It’s the right thing to do.

A freelance pastoral, part II

I had one of those idyllic freelance afternoons the other day. I picked up the Crown Prince at 3, and while the Missus helped him with his homework I started a pot of pea soup (we like the Quebecois-style yellow pea soup – the yellow peas are a little more mellow in taste than the green peas and the soup also doesn’t remind the CP of puke). I also had an extraordinarily interesting interview with a computer scientist.

He’s working on linguistic analysis of scientific papers to see if the language within certain documents that is picked up by subsequent researchers correlates with the number of citations those original documents receive in that subsequent research – which would indicate that there are signals within the text of a paper that can help predict when the language of a given field, and perhaps the basic thrust of its research, changes. His early results show fairly strong correlation, and the real payoff is likely to come several years down the road, as more scientific data is created and stored in the wild – that is, outside of structured experimental or lab environments. And his research is just a piece of a very intricately developing latticework of metadata, semantic notation, and pattern analysis that, ideally, will help researchers find those working on similar problems much more easily than the old “who knows whom” model, and will also allow funding agencies to target the most promising research in new tangents (like in areas where two fields like biology and physics meet) with a more empirical base of justification.

And so I’m reminded of why I love what I do so much. I feel like I’m getting paid to learn (and also getting paid to introduce people whose work I respect to a higher-level perspective…higher level in the sense of “big picture” policy abstraction and not more apt intuition). After such great chats with these bright people, I’m reminded of what the former executive editor of the Poughkeepsie Journal, a good Gannett corporate man who had the unenviable task of replacing a gifted and intuitive young editor who let his big dogs run and who died far too young, said to me after I had been laid off from a paper upstate – “Uh, the only job we have open is the education beat and you’re not an education reporter.” I assured him I was just networking and did not want to work for him again (I didn’t), and thought how full of shit he was. And my subsequent experience hasn’t mitigated my perspective on him one bit. In the ensuing years, I’ve covered the intricacies of federal healthcare financing, telecommunications infrastructure policy, and US-Canadian dairy policy wars. I’ve loved it all.

But this time of year – this is when publications and corporate communications departments set their budget for next year – is also fraught with uncertainty for those of us who work without a net. And, yeah, the economy sucks.  I have faith it will all work out – we’ve been in this business a while and haven’t been profligate. But I have started pulling things in a tad – even bought store-brand white the other day.

But you know what really kills me? The absolute dirt-bottom status of the vast majority of freelancers hasn’t changed since Jimmy Rensenbrink stiffed me out of three or four columns’ worth of pay when he shuttered the Hudson Valley office of the Aquarian Weekly back in 1983. In the past week I’ve been reminded of just how many horse’s asses are still out there masquerading as “publishers.” The content mills are still out there, promising 10 cents a word, “and maybe more!” depending on hit counts. My favorite freelance ad was for some entity that was out front, at least, about its contributors not being paid – but, the site proudly adds, “you’ll be published online.” Wow! Published online! OK! Sign me up!

I’ve always found the best freelance leads aren’t the “freelancers wanted” ads per se, but rather the full-time editorial help wanted ads for publications that cover one of my fields of expertise. More than once, I’ve done just a little bit more digging and discovered that these organizations do indeed use freeelancers and that they pay a competitive freelance rate (which is not a king’s ransom by any means, but in most cases it’s in line with an hourly rate for a full-time staffer at a similar pub).

I’m also amused by the sites that tout themselves as marketing hubs for freelancers. For a “low, low” fee (one of the big freelance boards charges $10 to $20 a month, depending on if you join their site and pay up front or not) you can join thousands of other freelancers who use remarkably similar terms to describe themselves. It’s one thing to be a needle in a haystack, it’s quite another to be one of 10,000 “original,” “creative,” “thoroughly professional” needles. Now there’s a new metaphor for you – needles as haystack within a haystack.

I’ve always thought that if I had to bite the bullet and take out a paid ad for myself, I’d make it short and sweet…you know, something like “I’ll get you what you need. It’ll be on time. It won’t suck.”

That last bit is copyrighted, by the way. By me, not by Indie Albany. So don’t think about stealing it. Especially you, Rensenbrink. You already used your freebie, you putz.

Home, default home

Not long before Eric and Marcia announced they were leaving for Des Moines, I happened to be swooping off of I-84 onto Route 8 in Waterbury and started thinking – had one of those visual cues pop out at me – about why I’m here.

I’ve lived in the greater Waterbury area for 11 years, matching my post-collegiate time in my hometown of Poughkeepsie. Haven’t lived close to that long anywhere else. And unlike Poughkeepsie, there’s no history, no sentiment, no family, keeping me here.

Waterbury isn’t the first seen-better-days Rust Belt town I’ve lived in, but it exhibits a lot of the same symptoms: fond memories of glory days gone by, some atavistic yearning for some symbol of them, and a lot of wheel spinning trying to figure out how to reconstruct them. I get real damn frustrated if I happen to see a bunch of folks without that delicate mix of vision and a sense of reality that seems to accompany a vibrant town, and have tended to write off a burg when that kind of cluelessness is made obvious – in Oneida in the early ’90s, I was struck incredulous by the city fathers’ belief that building a Thruway exit five miles from the existing one would somehow lead the city back to glory, and was struck equally dumb by a recent attempt in Waterbury to reconstruct Austin’s amazingly successful SXSW festival: Austin has one of the best live music scenes in the country, probably the world, and Waterbury can’t even claim to have the best Zeppelin cover bands in Connecticut. But here I am.

We didn’t come to Waterbury as a destination in and of itself. The idea was to land somewhere within a two- to three-hour drive of Poughkeepsie, so we could check in regularly on my folks and get to the ancestral farmstead in Cairo. We actually thought we’d end up in Albany, but the honchos at the TU exhibited not a lot of class in the interview process, and the Missus ended up editing the business section of the Waterbury paper, where she established herself well and won the requisite awards for excellence. But newspapers being what they are, she went freelance herself back in 2004, and we found ourselves in a situation we described as “No The Man in our lives – not much The Money, either, but no The Man.” We were, theoretically, free to go anywhere. But as luck would have it, she ended up doing consulting work for one of the best-run companies in Waterbury, and here we stay in our little suburban lair.

It’s not easy being a policy wonk in a town dominated by provincialism and multi-generational animosities; I long ago decided that there was no way I would ever get involved in politics in Watertown, CT. The Missus volunteers in school and helps run a benefit road race for a former colleague who suffered a calamitous medical condition several years ago. I have joined the Little League board of directors and will coach the Crown Prince as long as he’d like me to. That’s how I’ll give back to the community. And I’ll exercise my vote at budget time and call it a day.

We’re an hour from Bill’s when we want dockside clams, 90 minutes from Mystic and the Rhode Island ocean beaches, and 40 minutes from the ski hill. There aren’t a lot of places so well located in such a way. The bike roads aren’t terribly crowded. There are lots of trees and grass and we found a nice house for not a terrible load of cash.

So as I swooped onto Route 8 the other day, and looked up at the big lit-up letters that spelled out WATERBURY HOSPITAL, I thought about how my son was born in that hospital and my Mom died there, and if those events don’t define what’s home, I can’t think of any much better. I’m still not completely in love with the idea but I’m giving it my best effort.

Das Kapital

On my very first job I said thank you and please,
They made me scrub a parking lot down on my knees.
Then I got fired, for being scared of bees,
And they only give me 50 cents an hour.

John Prine, Fish and Whistle

There is nothing – nothing at all – quite so eloquent as those words from one of our great middle American poet laureates about the often rude introduction the typical kid gets to the wonderful world of work – or more precisely, the wonderful world of moronic bosses.

I was not a stranger to work at a young age. When I was a very young boy, I hectored my Dad about being big enough to mow the lawn. The spring I turned eight, he finally relented and let me mow my grandparents’ rather impressive yard. The first time was one of those hallmark experiences, almost as memorable as that first kiss (Julie Wu, on the bus back from the 8th grade roller skating trip to Avalon Rink in Newburgh – it was knee-buckling). The next week, I mowed that lawn again. It was still pretty satisfying, but the euphoria had been replaced with a belief that I had mastered that particular task and could move on. The third week, after we arrived at my grandparents’, I immediately went out to the garden to dig some worms; the trout awaited.

“What do you think you’re doing?” my Dad asked.

“Going fishing,” deducing that somehow, if he asked me that, I probably wasn’t. At least right away.

“Oh, no,” he said. “You wanted to mow the lawn. That’s your job now.”

Damn. In my zeal to show Dad I was a big boy, I had been a little too successful.

But that wasn’t such a bad thing. I actually picked up a couple lawns to mow between the ages of 9 and 12, and that extra $20 a week in the summer made me feel rich indeed. But at some point in one’s early/mid teens, one wants a “real job” for the summer. One with a paycheck and hours and a boss and a bona fide place of business. A few tentative attempts at breaking into the busboy business at the local deli yielded nothing. I was too young for retail, had no connections at the Grand Union, and was not quite brawny enough to work on my uncle’s mason crews. So, somehow, I ended up at a full service car wash, owned by a young guy from downstate. He’d drive up each day and his crew – there were two workers plus him on every shift – would meet him at the coffee shop next door at 7:30 every morning. At 8 AM sharp, the big overhead doors would open, the big brushes would start whirling away, and the conveyor would chugchugchug along.

On most days, that is. If it was raining, or was substantially threatening, he’d take a sip of coffee and say, “No sense opening today.” Which would leave me free for the day. Only thing was, half the days he would decide not to open, the weather would clear just enough that he would change his mind an hour or two later. As I had the most tenuous of vested interests in the success or failure of the car wash, by the time he would decide to open, I would be long gone, usually out on the golf course. The days he would open, some days the other guy on the crew wouldn’t show up, or would show up late, and looking back, the owner was a pioneer in the use of “do more with less” skeleton crews. We were expected to do a kind of relay from one end of the wash to the other, first vacuuming a car if the customer wanted that, then run along the inside corridor to the other end, where we were supposed to grab a rag and dry the car.  For many reasons, the magic of a real paycheck and a real boss quickly faded, and one day when he did the “now I’m closed, oops, I’m open” routine, and I was once again incommunicado, I guess we had mutually had enough. The next day, he told me if he called one more time and I wasn’t there, I was fired. I beat him to the punch and told him I quit. He told me I was lazy. I didn’t tell him he was cheap and halfassed about running his business.

I finished that summer working through a local program called Tasks for Teens, mostly grunty yard work. I didn’t get rich, but I worked for people in their yards and they seemed appreciative. The next summer I had an awesome gig, umpiring Little League and Babe Ruth baseball. I usually had a game at least four nights a week and some weeks worked every day but Sunday. I made $17.50 a game behind the plate and $12.50 a game for umpiring on the basepaths. That worked out to about twice the minimum wage back then. And I had no boss. I was the boss. Of the whole game. I did well enough that the league honchos recommended that I umpire the preliminary regional tourney games and I even did a couple senior league games, where the guys playing were college-aged and older. If I were conventionally ambitious, I guess I would have said that umpiring helped me develop executive skills. But I was not and am not conventionally ambitious. It was fun getting paid to be on a baseball diamond. And to this day, it’s nice to know the proper way to make a close call at first – look at the bag, not the first baseman’s mitt, and if you hear the “pop!” of the ball in the glove before the runner’s foot hits the bag, he’s out – and when the infield fly rule is invoked .

I don’t know how long the guy from downstate owned that car wash. My Dad and I used to wash our cars in the driveway, so I never had to go there as a customer. But the guy who owns the car wash here has two guys at the front end and two at the back end, no running back and forth – I think that’s the way it’s supposed to work. And I never quite got used to having a boss in the ensuing 37 years. The good ones quickly figured out I knew my job and let me go to it. The last one was just as enjoyable to work for as the car wash guy, so I left the whole boss thing behind, forever, I hope.

A freelance pastoral

Funny, ain’t it, how S. Connick posted on the not-so-great macro changes in the workplace…because I’ve been mulling this pastoral for a couple days now, ever since I was sitting by myself in a chair lift at Mohawk Mountain Monday morning, totally losing myself in the euphoria of a $20 lift ticket and a near-empty mountain. Lou Gehrig’s been dead for 70 years – I’m the luckiest man on the face of the earth.

Mind you, I know there is one big BUT in appreciating my reverie – but for the fact that The Missus is a very well-regarded person in her field, I doubt we’d be able to pull this flexible freelance thing off: journalism just doesn’t pay. Sure, it gives you the chance to stay as independent as one can be in this age of the ubiquitous corporate endorsement, but that independence comes at a price. And the big killer for the self-employed entrepreneur these days is the staggering cost of health insurance. The small number of people who have to pay for all their insurance just can’t get through to those who share the cost with their employer what a racket the insurers have had. And that may mean that one of us has to go get a “real job” before the market-guarantee mechanisms kick in in 2014. But until then…

We’ve been so very fortunate. We never had to put the Crown Prince in day care. We’ve been able to schedule vacations when we’ve wanted to. We’ve been able to chart our own course, more or less. We haven’t had to count every penny, but we haven’t been tempted not to count most of them – and we’re OK with that. As we put it succinctly to a friend when the Missus first went freelance, “There’s no The Man in our lives – there’s not much The Money, but no The Man, either.”

I wish more people could know this life. At one point, of course, we were a nation of small business owners and self-defining artisans. And, given the nature of the communications infrastructure, we could re-emerge in an era of new cottage industries, what I call the “knowledge cottage,” the vanguard of the new American broadband dream. Writers and artists and software programmers, heck, anybody with a saleable idea you can digitize. Every so often, someone will ask me how I’ve been able to make a go of freelancing as long as I have. “Simple,” I say. “Just bust your ass for somebody else for about 20 years.” It will be very hard for me to go back to working for somebody else if it comes to that.

I do worry some about what will happen if and when my skills atrophy and I’m judged too old by the market to follow the things I follow and get paid for. Every once in a while, some guy I meet on the golf course – midweek special, again – will, after about five or six holes of small talk, wonder aloud how I can be so young and be “retired.”

“No, no,” I’ll tell him, “I work for myself.” Really, the whole idea of “retirement” sounds silly. I’m my own boss. The work I do keeps me engaged, there are no time-wasting meetings or “busy work” to soak up productive hours, and I want to do it until they drag me away from the keyboard. When I need to take time off to take the kid to the doctor or help my Dad, I can, whenever I want. And every once in a while, sometimes even more than that, I can go skiing or golfing on a beautiful morning, and feel like I have an entire mountain or links more or less to myself. Thinking all the while up the chair lift or walking toward my perfectly struck drive, of course, about network infrastructure policy or the necessity for semantic awareness in next-gen service robots. Because if one is descended from a long line of dour Puritans, you better put that down time to good use, or karma will put you back on the assembly line at minimum wage.

Happy New Year: It's all academic

Try as I might, I just can’t really get into this whole idea of January 1 as being the start of the new year. I mean, if you want to get into theoretical discussions of the space-time continuum, the very idea of linearly measuring time has probably retarded our understanding of the universe – and, in the case of our unfortunate Amtrak example, hasn’t even led to the trains running on time – but it will have to do as long as there are doctors’ appointments and prime time television.

That said, for 16 years of my youth and young adulthood, the “new year” always started around Labor Day, with the new school year. When I got back to Poughkeepsie after the Gallipoli Campaign that was my college experience, I figured that way of looking at things was over.

But I was wrong. About the only university-recognized activity I enjoyed during Gallipoli was playing lacrosse; this was back when lax was, to quote Hunter Thompson’s remarks about the pre-Super Bowl NFL, “a very hip and private vice to be into.” So when I got back home, I hunted up the local post-collegiate lacrosse club, and got back into the cage. Since there were very few teams around, we would practice a lot with the Vassar College team, which in those days had club status. Officially that meant that the players didn’t get any scholarship money and the team ran itself; there was no NCAA involvement or college athletic department oversight. Unofficially, because the lax community was so small, it meant something very different. When one of the Vassar guys said, “Hey, you should play for us,” and I expressed regrets at not being a student there, he said, “Dude, all you need is a red T-shirt.”

So I started playing lax for Vassar, in an old red Montreal Canadiens jersey I had cut the sleeves off of, and son of a gun, if I didn’t start meeting a whole lot of people I likely never would have, young, smart people whose “new years” still started around Labor Day. The local watering hole, the beloved McAuley’s Tavern, would be very quiet all summer, only to spring back to life with tanned scholars on September 1, and we’d trade stories and sink eight balls until last call, the locals usually drinking beer and a lot of the Vassar kids drinking Cape Codders or Sea Breezes, night after night. And, through that accidental convergence of lacrosse players, I spent some five years debunking the notion that town is town and gown is gown and never the twain shall meet, making friendships I cherish to this day. In fact, I ended up marrying a Vassar grad the first time around, and when she went to grad school, the year started at the same time. After we split up, I moved and got a new job that started the week after Labor Day. I moved to LA to be with the ultimate love of my life two years later, yup – just before Labor Day. And now, when the Crown Prince starts each grade, I also sit down with full school days to work: I feel like I’m getting a fresh start myself.

If my folks had stayed on the farm, maybe I’d look at plowing and planting time in the spring as the “real” start to the new year, but it didn’t work that way, and I have also come to realize that, in a microcosmic way, each day is the start of something new and the end of something, if only of itself. I don’t waste too many, and don’t expect to, which is resolution enough, considering.

So, whenever you start your new year, I wish you a great one. And try to avoid Amtrak if you have to be somewhere on time.