On Not Being Able to Get a Job

Mark and I used to read the jobs section of High Country News to see if there were any that had an element of environmental justice in the description. We would then narrow the list based on location: Helena, Montana sounded pretty good, despite the cold weather, or any place in northern California, but the Dakotas, Idaho (neo-Nazi country), and Arizona (too hot and too racist) were off-limits, which in itself limited the selection of possible jobs to almost none. But it didn’t matter, as it was all fantasy, an exercise in futility: Mark and I, and especially I, were essentially unemployable.

Lack of credentials certainly contributed to our dilemma. While Mark had at least earned a BA in English, it was a useless degree, of course, in the traditional job market. But he managed to parlay it into a job at the Living Batch Bookstore in Albuquerque, maybe because the infamous owner, Gus Blaisdell, was impressed by his erudition and liked having people around with whom he could have a conversation, but probably because Mark was competent and willing to work for shit wages. His other job was working on other people’s houses in Placitas, where we were living at the time, to acquire the skills needed to build our own house, which we worked on for ten years during the 1980s.

I never even got a BA (when my younger son Max first realized that I didn’t have a college degree he said “Mom, what in the world were you thinking?”). My first real job was with the Forest Service as a fire lookout, no experience necessary. On my first day on the job on top of La Mosca Peak, after a few hours’ instructions on how to use the fire finder to locate a smoke and the radio to call it in, I reported the Grants dump. Working for the Forest Service was also my last real job (and not because I was a lousy fire lookout). But I managed to parlay my experience as a hiking patrol in the Sandia Mountain Wilderness into self-employment: I started a publishing company and wrote a guidebook to the Sandias, which was quite a success, and then went on to write guides to cross-country skiing in northern New Mexico, hikes in other wilderness areas, and hikes around Santa Fe and Taos. I also parlayed our “back to the land” life in Placitas—building a house, bartering for services rendered, participating in acequia culture—into a freelance writing career.

So you might say, not so bad, we both managed to find self-employment rather than wage labor jobs, but several things have to be factored into that evaluation. The first being that we made lousy money, had no health insurance, and no retirement. While we didn’t have a mortgage, we did have to pay for the birth of two babies born by caesarian section rather than at midwifery centers, as planned (we managed a trade with one of the obstetricians), for Mark’s hospital stay when he fell off the house while putting up the roof beams, and for a well that went dry before we’d even moved into our new house.

The other factor that contributed to our dependency on marginal self-employment was what I have to call our incorrigibility. It started in Placitas, when the developers came in with their subdivisions and their covenants (no chickens, no junked cars), and the Forest Service decided to pave roads and develop new ski areas, and we became, well, incorrigible. We demonstrated, connived, monkey-wrenched, wrote editorials and mockeries, and sued all of them. This continued, after giving up on Placitas and moving to El Valle, where threats to the community included not only the Forest Service and developers but lo and behold, environmentalists. This time we parlayed our activist experience, coupled with Mark’s degree in English and my book writing skills, into “that radical rag” La Jicarita News.

La Jicarita was the beginning of the end of any chance of regular employment. Over the course of 16 years we managed to piss off everyone: certainly the Forest Service; all kinds of other government officials from the county to federal levels; mainstream environmentalists who don’t know anything about community-based environmentalism; land grant activists who think only heirs should have a say in the management of land-based communities; many of our Anglo neighbors who worked at Sipapu Ski Area and supported its expansion; some of our Hispano neighbors who regard their water rights as private property and probably think we’re Communists; foundations that funded groups at cross purposes; and any number of other people, organizations, and bureaucracies that would never in a million years want either one of us to work for them.

So there you have it. In a couple of weeks I’ll be old enough to draw social security and I can jettison forever the fantasy of finding a job. I’m still self-employed as co-editor of La Jicarita with David Correia as it transitions to its new life in the American Studies Department at UNM, but as I threatened to do in my Productivity blog post, I’m going to start reading novels during the day to celebrate my new status: it’s not quite retirement, and it doesn’t mean better behavior, but it’s definitely a change, and at this point in my life, change is good.

On Not Watching Basketball

It looked like nobody was going to be watching basketball this year until the players and management struck a 50-50 deal (meaning the players and owners will share the billions), and we had a five game bonanza on Christmas Day.

I didn’t do any basketball watching last year, either, except for a week: the NBA finals. I’m not a fan of either team (Dallas and Miami), but I’m especially not a fan of Miami. The hype generated by its acquisition of LeBron James as a member of the Three Musketeers (Dwayne Wade and Chris Bosh being the other two), was enough to make even the most diehard fan jaded. Yes, even Mark, who loved basketball, had already admitted that the spectacle had defeated the substance. But I watched in his memory.

I gave up being a fan, meaning wanting a particular team to win, after the Pistons’ and Lakers’ great years in the late 1980s: I’ll never forget the on-court kiss of Magic Johnson and Isaiah Thomas. We loved Kareem Abdul-Jabbar, Magic, James Worthy, Kurt Rambis, Maurice Lucas, and Michael Cooper (he came from New Mexico), Isaiah, the crazy Dennis Rodman, John Salley, and Bill Laimbeer. Mark stayed a fan through the Laker transition to Shaquille O’Neal and Kobe Bryant. The kids and I gave up after Bryant was accused of rape.

You could make a case for not being a fan of any sports team if you wanted to make criminal activity the criteria: the transition from the ghetto to the “show” (as they call it in that great baseball flick Bull Durham) has littered the playing field with adulterers, wife beaters, rapists, animal abusers, and even a few murderers. To be fair, a lot of them are guilty only of wearing silk suits and driving Mercedes Benz’s and Jaguars. I always marveled at Mark’s ability to disassociate sports, particularly basketball, from the criteria used to judge just about everything else in life: class structure, economic inequality, corporate greed, media misinformation, etc. While he knew the world of sports was complicit in all these machinations, he didn’t care, because he just got too much enjoyment out of watching the ballet of basketball, the gut wrenching physicality of football, and the beauty of the home run. Watching games he became just another fan, yelling in excitement over a great play, groaning with disappointment at a missed opportunity.

Mark and I bonded watching Monday night baseball years ago. These were the last of the Oakland A’s days, also the last time I got excited about a baseball team: Catfish Hunter, Rollie Fingers, Vida Blue. Then when the baby came along, one of us would cook dinner while the other one swung Jakob in his Tarahumara swing that a friend had given us. We hung it from a viga and tied a rope to its side so we could sit on the couch and swing it to and fro without it getting in the way of the TV. I sometimes still watch the playoffs and the world series, but once you lose track of who the players are you kind of lose track of the game.

The only football I watch is Friday Night Lights. A friend just told me that the only actor who actually played football is Landry, the Johnny come lately to the team and the ensemble oddball. Mark was a diehard Buffalo fan (his hometown), which was a kind of torture, even when they were winning (remember, Jim Kelly took them to the Superbowl, what, four times, and lost every time). I never really understood this about his sports nature, either. He knew perfectly well that the Buffalo Bills had nothing to do with Buffalo other than arbitrarily playing there, but he hung with them, and suffered with them, to the bitter end.

But back to basketball. I do appreciate the athleticism, the ballet jumps, and whirlwind speed the players display in every game, but without Mark to remind me, I just don’t watch and only tangentially know which team in each division is winning and how it looks for the finals. I’ll watch the finals again, just as I did last year, and hope that it’s not Miami or Dallas (or the Lakers). I can’t really say which teams should be there instead, but hopefully I’ll enjoy the spectacle: Marvin Gaye singing the Star Spangled Banner could redeem the show, but alas, that is not to be.

Letter to Elizabeth, Number Two

I haven’t had time to blog much lately, but when I read your piece “On Breaking Two Taboos, Sharing, Playing Games, and Not” (elizabethtannen.com/blog), about a month ago I started composing this letter to you in my head. Now it’s in writing.

When I was in my carefree twenties (that’s a laugh, carefree maybe but, as I talked about in Letter Number One, full of existential angst), I remember having a conversation with someone about the “worst part of being alone” and all he could come up with was he didn’t like eating by himself. I went into a long discourse about how being alone denied one intimacy, being able to share your most heartfelt feelings with someone who actually cares to listen and respond to those feelings.

I ended up being intimate with Mark for 34 years, and yes, there was a lot of sharing and caring and listening, along with all the silence (comfortable and uncomfortable) that accompany a long relationship. Now, however, I am at the other end of the book shelf, alone again, without the intimacy I complained about not having in my twenties, but aware now of how complicated intimacy can be. I lost the only person in the world who paid constant attention to me, even if it was often critical attention. There will never again be anyone who knew me as Mark did, and in many ways I won’t know me as well either because I don’t have him around to fill in the gaps: “Who is that person?” or “Did we see that movie?” or “Which kid was it who called big trucks ‘hot zooms’?” Neither is he there for me to share the information only he and I were privy to, which makes it hard to validate a feeling or remembrance.

You don’t particularly appreciate this when you’re living it. Mark and I, as well as many other couples I know, were constantly jockeying for time alone, to have the house to ourselves so we didn’t have to answer to anybody or do anything we didn’t want to do, like cook dinner when you wanted to read your book. We’re not really wishing for singlehood, as we see our single friends wondering how it happened that they live alone, without the intimacy we’re complaining about. We want to have it all, actually: someone around with whom we feel completely comfortable and intimate when we want them around, and when we don’t want them around we want them to go away for awhile but know that they’ll be back.

When we lived in extended families or tribal groups or all those crazy communes in the sixties we had more than one person paying particular attention to us, which created its own problems, of course: lack of privacy, peer pressure, group think. It’s complicated, no matter how you look at it: living alone, living in a nuclear family, living in a group. We fumble along, complaining and compensating, rationalizing and resigning ourselves to circumstances that are both amenable to change and outside our control. I imagine you’ll experience it all over the next 30 years, like I have. All I can say is, buena suerte.


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Stuff

For the past three weeks I’ve been dealing with my mother-in-law’s lifetime possessions, the story of her deliberate accumulation of things that become, to the successors, “stuff.” It was all acquired during the course of forty years in the same house in Buffalo, then ten in Santa Fe. I’ve tried to be respectful of what to her were treasures, not stuff, sending the china (I knew her for 34 years and I don’t remember ever eating off it), crystal, antique chairs and dresser off to the consignment store, gifts of art or pottery or jewelry back to those who gave them, especially cherished things to friends, books to the library, and much, much more to St. Vincent de Paul.

My mother-in-law, an immigrant from Poland whose family came to New York when she was six, grew up desperately poor in Williamsburg, Brooklyn. She told us stories of getting thrown out of her family’s apartment for unpaid rent, carrying their belongings down the street in a wheelbarrow. One of her siblings was killed in World War II; an older half brother became a successful businessman; her younger brother a professor at New York University; and she, after twenty years of secretarial work, went to college and earned a master’s degree in social work. She and my father-in-law, also a social worker who headed a United Fund agency in Buffalo, became solidly middle class and enjoyed a fully pensioned retirement—fueled by a booming stock market—of world travel and portfolio security.

They were also of the generation that bought Dalton china settings for twelve on a trip to England, Waterford crystal at the factory in Ireland, Tibetan thangkas in India, gold jewelry from around the world, pueblo pottery and turquoise jewelry in New Mexico, and art from a sophisticated group of Buffalo painters with whom they socialized.

But what really got me, going through the stuff, was the thought of my own children someday going through mine. What do I have that makes me so anxious? A set of red dishes my mother-in-law bought me for my fiftieth birthday? My clothes, mostly acquired at thrift stores? The art gives me pause, but they can give Terri’s paintings back to her, if she outlives me (or keep them, of course), and they took some of Mark’s work after he died. The John Wengers will probably find their way to those who knew him.

What seems to be upsetting me are the floor to ceiling shelves with books, that, just like the china, nobody wants. James Woods, in a recent New Yorker article, wrote about inventorying his father-in-law’s library in upstate New York and finding out that “nobody really wants hundreds or thousands of old books.” I may not have 400 books on the Byzantine Empire, but I have, due to Mark’s love of him, every book ever written by or about Jack Kerouac; every beat poet ever published; every 18th and 19th century English novel ever written (I know that’s an exaggeration: let’s arrogantly say every “important” English novel ever written); political philosophy from the Greeks through the Enlightenment to Karl Marx and the poststructuralists; and 20th century paperback novels that everyone else has, too. Mark already sold the first editions and collectors’ items to folks like Nicholas Potter (secondhand bookstore owner in Santa Fe) of whom there are fewer and fewer in business. My kids will want only a select few, just as I wanted only a select few of my mother-in-law’s. Even if the iPad and the Kindle don’t destroy the book business altogether, nobody is going to want my “old books.”

When I don’t have anything of interest borrowed from a friend or checked out from the library, I go to my shelves and find stuff, like this incredible passage from George Elliot’s Mill on the Floss, which I’ve owned for 20 years but never before read:
“I will not believe unproved evil of you: my lips shall not utter it; my ears shall be closed against it. I, too, am an erring mortal, liable to stumble, apt to come short of my most earnest efforts. Your lot has been harder than mine, your temptation greater. Let us help each other to stand and walk without more falling—to have done this would have demanded courage, deep pity, self-knowledge, generous trust—would have demanded a mind that tasted no piquancy in evil-speaking that felt no self-exaltation in condemning, that cheated itself with no large words into the belief that life can have any moral end, any high religion, which excludes the striving after perfect truth, justice, and love towards the individual men and women who come across our own path.”

How can you not stop and marvel at a passage like that. It speaks directly to my post-Marxist humanist pragmatic self (see eponymous blog post), which is tied directly to all these books on my shelf that no one but me wants. While I’m not quite ready to let them go, not ready to consign them to “stuff,” I think it’s time to start culling: slowly, carefully, selectively (based on some criteria I’ve yet to determine). That, instead of an estate, will be my gift to my children: one small shelf of books when it’s my time to go.

Diary of a Bad Year: The End

This will be my last installment under the heading Diary of a Bad Year (two bad years, actually). It is signified by the death of Mark’s mother, from whom he was estranged when he died last year, on November 27. During this last year of her life we never discussed this estrangement, nor did we discuss anything that would force us into a place I did not want to go.

That being said, as she began to decline I did whatever I could to help, eventually moving her out of her house into a fairly nice residential facility, an “independent living” apartment. But once she made the physical move she essentially gave up: her increased dependency and loss of “control”, something she had hoarded all her life to compensate for a bad beginning, shut her down psychologically, emotionally, and physically. Her decline was dramatic: within three weeks of the move she required 24-hour care, and a week later she died.

Dealing first with Mark’s death, and now hers, has forced me to face my own mortality, which I’ve written about previously in other Diary of a Bad Year blog posts. But it has also forced me to think about not just the fact that I will die but how I will die. Not surprisingly, this is a topic that doesn’t generate much discussion in our youth obsessed society, but as we continue to live longer, buoyed by miracle drugs and interventions that may extend our life span but render us mentality and physically bereft, we better start doing some serious talking.

The so-called Death Panels that were a part of Obama’s health care reform package were quickly scuttled after that nomenclature stuck. In some more enlightened European countries there can at least be a discussion between the patient, family, and physician about “end of life” wishes, which is much more substantive than the health care directives we sign in this country saying we don’t want to be resuscitated if we’re already dying of cancer or heart disease. They don’t say anything about what our choices might be if we’re dying of old age and are so infirm that staying alive is cruel and unusual punishment. And the medical interventions that have gotten us to that state are also forms of cruel and unusual punishment. Two years ago I watched my beloved amigo y buen vecino slowly die of complications from diabetes, a stroke, and finally colon cancer. The last six months of his ordeal were in the hospital, where he was kept alive by extraordinary means, until finally he came home and said, “Ya basta, I’m tired and I’m not going back.”

While he had the wherewithal and presence of mind to refuse more hospitalization, that doesn’t really speak to the problem of those who are old and infirm and are ready to die before their bodies actually give out. There was a story in the newspaper the other day about a couple, in their nineties, who decided to stop eating and drinking because, like my neighbor, they’d simply had enough. They were kicked out of their retirement facility for taking this action. Let’s penalize those who actually make a decision to exercise choice, as opposed to default, which drains their—and everyone who loves them—physical, emotional, and yes, financial well being (the focus of Medicare on medical intervention rather than long term care is another story).

What about those who suffer from incipient Alzheimer’s, who are able to see what the future holds and don’t want to go there? What choices do these folks have who want to be the person they are instead of a person who will be unrecognizable to family and friends? Some would argue that as Alzheimer’s progresses you are unaware of the loss of identity, that it is those around you who do the losing, so that makes it OK. I don’t want my children to lose me. I’m their mother, the person with whom they share their most intimate thoughts, worries, and aspirations (caveat: I know there are tons of things they don’t tell me because it’s none of my business), but I am also a person they see in a larger context defined by my work, the way I choose to live, and how I treat them. When Mark’s mother was dying, what she talked about was not the present, her loss of control, what she suffered, or even those of us who were with her. She talked about her life when she was young, her parents, her brother who died in World War II, her youngest brother who she essentially raised, and her life with her husband, who died five years before her.

The image of the native Inuit putting the old person who can no longer contribute to society out on the ice floe remains very vivid to my generation. That is obviously not an option for today’s society (as well as the fact that there may not be many ice floes to put them on). So what are we supposed to do? I don’t have the answer, but if we can’t even have a conversation about it without a Death Panel label we are, as individuals, and as a society, complicit in what often amounts to torture.

When You Got Nothing You Got Nothing To Lose

Bob Dylan’s iconic words carry several meanings. To those of us who decided (with the luxury of a middle class background) to live as leanly as possible, the meaning is literal: if you’re not part of the system, with a mortgage and credit card debt, when the system collapses you haven’t lost much. The other meaning, that when you’re poor and struggling and the system offers you nothing in the way of rising out of that poverty, you’re already lost.

Some of the folks who started Occupy Wall Street offer a third meaning. Many of them appear to be from recently achieved middle class homes—upward mobility from working class or minority assimilation—and aspire to professional work and home ownership—a piece of the American pie—albeit with a more sophisticated understanding of how that lifestyle is supported both economically and politically. Then they find out there aren’t any jobs doing what they’ve been trained to do, they can’t afford mortgage loans (and no one is building anything affordable anyway) because they’re deeply in debt from college loans. So what better way to spend the day than in the street with their cohort.

They are joined by an interesting array of other protestors, from all walks of life, including the working poor, college professors, union organizers, activists, and retirees. But the core group of folks, even with their different spin on “you got nothing to lose”, are the direct descendents of the protestors who were in the streets during the Vietnam war: people young enough and unencumbered enough to stay out there in the park day and night while a movement is created. Those of us who were in Washington D.C., Kent State, and every other city across the U.S. in the late sixties and early seventies keep saying to ourselves, “I wish I could be in Liberty Park, too.” But there’s the mother who requires 24-hour care, the house that needs to be ready for winter, the woodpile that needs to be split, and the animals that need to be fed and cared for.

The anti-war movement addressed all things that sustain a war of occupation: the imperialism of the war mongers, the military industrial complex, and the race and class distinctions that sent a disproportionate number of young men and women of color and low economic status to be killed. These power structures are still with us, and I suspect there’s plenty of conversation about them among the Occupy Wall Street protestors. But the overriding focus on the growing economic inequality illuminates Wall Street’s free market fetishism, which eludes the control of even the weakest regulatory oversight and defines an even more insidious hegemony than the war mongering political and corporate establishment we’ve been fighting forever.

I mentioned in a previous blog posting the conversation I had with a young friend who didn’t want to hear about what went on in the sixties, that the social network has supplanted the need for organizing in the streets. I’m sure all this twittering and tweeting is a lot less cumbersome than printing fliers on ditto machines, but there’s nothing like meeting your compadres face to face in a public space with a common sense of purpose. Maybe this time around, with their general assemblies, their consensus building skills, and the message on the wall “It’s the system, stupid,” they’ll avoid some of the internecine struggles that tore the New Left apart. Maybe not. But I’ve heard so many of the people interviewed in various Occupies around the country say, “I’ve been waiting for years for this to happen.” It’s impossible to keep cynicism at bay, without being part of an uprising of consciousness and spirit and action. (Pessimism of the intellect, optimism of the will—Antonio Gramsci.) I may not be there physically, but I’m there, one way or another.

Diary of a Bad Year: Mark and Steve

As the entire blogosphere knows, Steve Jobs died of complications from pancreatic cancer this past week. Although he lived for almost six years with a rare, “treatable” form of the cancer, it got him in the end. While the doc in the emergency room who treated Mark used Jobs as an example of everything that’s wrong with a medical system that provides every option for the rich and bankruptcy for the poor, not even a liver transplant and the best care money can buy could save him (see Diary of a Bad Year, February 13, 2011).

His death has elicited obituaries that run the gamut from the visionary genius “who knew what we wanted before we wanted it” to the capitalist exploiter who produced his slick products on the backs of foreign sweatshop workers. For me, however, his death elicited a resurgence of memories of Mark. It made me think about the disease itself and the differences in their treatment and their prognoses, but in a much more visceral way it made me remember Mark in his corporeality. Steve Jobs and Mark Schiller looked very much alike: tall, thin, close-cropped balding heads, graying beards, and dark brown eyes behind round wire rimmed glasses. When I saw pictures of Jobs in 2009, when the illness had made a thin man gaunt, I was seeing Mark.

I know nothing about the private Steve Jobs. He was seven years younger than Mark, but close enough in age to have experienced many of the same things. I don’t know if he loved Mavis Staples and Al Green, or Chet Baker and Thelonious Monk. I don’t know what his politics were: many capitalist entrepreneurs consider themselves liberals, especially those who came of age during the sixties and seventies. Mark’s politics guided his life from the time he helped organize his high school SDS chapter to his choice of where to live to co-founding La Jicarita News. To stir up the mix he’d declare he was the only Stalinist left standing, when in reality what we learned together about race, class, and absolutist positions in northern New Mexican made him a complex, thoughtful activist whose compañeros included loggers, Forest Service rangers, acequia mayordomos, and gasp, even a few environmentalists. His encyclopedic knowledge ranged through poetry, abstract expressionism, jazz, 19th century English literature, rock n’ roll (he always knew the names of the most obscure groups played on the oldies station, see Guilty Pleasures blog), the Energy Employees Occupational Illness Compensation Program Act, and Spanish and Mexican land grants. He wrote many, many articles about the history and politics of land grants for La Jicarita News, as well as scholarly papers for the New Mexico Historical Advisory Board and the Natural Resources Journal. He was working on a book about the tenure of New Mexico Surveyor General George W. Julian, who was responsible for the loss of millions of acres of land to their rightful owners, which he was unable to finish before he died. I’ve collected the chapters he completed as scholarly papers or articles, and with the help of University of New Mexico professor David Correia, plan to finish that book.

Steve Jobs legacy is unparalleled. I have two Mac laptops and an iPod. My kids have iPhones and iPads. I also have many questions about the value of all that technology and disgust, but not surprise, about its production (see the NYT article about Mike Daisey’s one man show “The Agony and the Ecstasy of Steve Jobs” in the Sunday, October 2 issue), but that’s not what this blog is about. The Steve Jobs and Mark Schillers of the world who lived creative and intense lives and died before their time is sad, but what they did is what we have, tangibly and in our memories.

My son Jakob called to tell me that he’s planning on publishing a photo story about Mark, also triggered by Jobs’ death. He took many pictures of his dad over the years, and with Mark’s permission, some while he was sick. I started this blog the day before he called. Steve Jobs’ death, within a year of Mark’s and of the same disease, reminds us of our loss, and being the writers and photographer that we are, the need to express it.