For those who’ve been searching for the “Commencement 2009″ piece, below is a link to the four parts of it, in one continuous PDF file. People seem to really like this thing, so we threw all of the installments into one document, for easier printing and reading.
I’m told this piece circulates a lot. If you know someone who’d like it but can’t access this site at work, print him or her a copy. Or just pass it around the office. Maybe leave it on the water cooler. Management loves people reading this kind of stuff.
I usually don’t update on a Friday night, rarely being in any condition to do so. But this is a unique occasion. Barring some unforeseen delay, this is the last thing I’ll be writing on the Rudius platform, most of which is closing on November 1. When you click on Philalawyer.net next week, you’ll be taken to a new site. Same material, same writing. Different organization.
My time at Rudius has been a pleasure. I’ve enjoyed working with many talented, devoted people, without whom I would never had the opportunities I’ve been given. The list of names is long, so I’ll just put this way – to everyone at the company who helped me, present and past employees, Thank You.
There isn’t any neat way to close this, so I’ll leave you with two final pieces of Happy Hour is For Amateurscovering my early days at Rudius.
Turn this song to 11, open the stuff linked below in a new window and read it.
To anyone wondering where I’ve been for the past three weeks, I have a few announcements. I’m still writing, and I intend to regularly update this site, but over the summer, things are going to be a little different.
I am focusing on my next book right now, and I can’t write that while publishing lengthy pieces here. Only so much time in the day, and I also have business interests to attend to. So for the balance of the season, I’m going to write shorter, more frequent pieces. The longer, dialogue-based material will return later. My idea for now is to offer rants and commentary on current events, along with the occasional “top five” list here and there – sometimes philosophical, sometimes juvenile, usually both.
But more than that, the aim will be to provide and create a discussion of some ideas, issues and observations neglected in the public discourse over the direction of the country. This is a unique time in history, a once in a century reckoning. And right now, it doesn’t appear we’re answering its challenge. What I’m seeing emerge is the usual Pendulum Effect. We swung too far in the direction of unfettered markets, greed and materialism and now we’re going to swing too far in the direction of regulation, confiscation and soft collectivism.
But this isn’t just about a failure in the way we manage the government, economy or financial markets. I’m talking about a broader intellectual laziness in the way this country approaches just about every controversy or crisis it faces. Historically, we don’t seem to be able to adjust to anything in a sensible fashion. It’s just one extreme to the next. Part of that’s a failure of our political system, a structure creating professional politicians interested in nothing but re-election. Part of it stems from the nature our spoiled, soft culture – a mindset thrilled to celebrate free markets in upticks, indulging in what it couldn’t hope to afford, then immediately crying for a generous safety net when the inevitable correction comes.* Part of it’s the media, which makes its money carving us into warring factions at the poles of debates, pretending fringe players like Limbaugh or Olbermann represent the views of a significant constituency of voters.
And part of it – the biggest part – is the reasonable middle of this country never opening its mouth. For years we’ve been running on treadmills, harried, on the edge of burnout – slaves to Blackberries in a vicious “efficiency cycle” where the corporations we served beat more and more labor out of fewer and fewer bodies, all while the cost of living exploded around us. We shifted to a culture of unthinking execution, of being too stressed and overworked to consider what we were doing… to wonder if maybe there was a better way.
Well, our economy’s in the shitter and unemployment’s headed for 12% before this thing is over.** We’ve got more than enough time to think now, and we’d better. Every element of our culture, from business to law to government – it’s all being restructured. And if the moderate middle of this country doesn’t open its mouth, the usual useless mouthpieces will again control the debates. The cures for the current problems will be crafted by politicians responding to the media’s Right or Left spin on public sentiment, with dissent given over to the blogosphere’s Molotov cocktail throwers and conspiracy theorists. And that’d be a goddamn shame, because good ideas – solutions beyond what’s “politically possible” or attractive enough to gain thirty seconds of interest among a pack of narcissistic Twitterheads – can be intensely powerful. They can catch fire and, given the current technologies, circle the globe, creating an army of supporters in less time than it takes to fry an egg.
I think most of the audience here shares my affinity for ideas outside those offered by the usual participants in the important debates. There seem to be four viewpoints in America today – the Left, the Right, the Crazy and the Reasonable, the last being nearly unheard. I think maybe, if among the filthy jokes, book out-takes and bizarre noodlings I post on the site this summer, I raise a few questions on some important issues, and you, the readers – many of whom have as much, if not more, insight than I do – respond or raise your own, perhaps a good solution or two will gain some traction online. At a minimum, it’ll get people thinking.
And really, what else are we going to do right now? Bust our asses for bonuses at work? Trust me folks – this is a Jelly of the Month Club kind of year. The first new post will be up Wednesday.
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* This applies to both the “Capitalists” on Wall Street and the credit the junkies they enabled, and everybody else in this country who lacks the will to entertain the discussion we need to be having: Is our aggregate standard of living in this country unrealistic? Are we just deferring a brutal, inevitable collapse, in so doing making the pain worse for the poor generation that faces it?
** Many respected sources claim the real rate is already over 15%. Look up “real unemployment rate” on Google.
Just in time for the holidays, Dr. Rob and I round out our series on the “Trifecta of American Hangups,” sex, drugs and death. Part III: Death PL: Most people think we’re obsessed with death as entertainment based on the violence and gore we feast on in our movies and television programs, and our apparent appetite for global Manifest Destiny. I don’t think so. I think the American hang-up with death is our refusal to acknowledge it. We race like rats and consume as though toil and collection of material are the only markers in life. To say one’s more interested in experiences and maximizing the number of interesting stories he can amass than buying the biggest home, car and stuffing his 401k to make sure he can live well in the decade before he dies is perceived as strange. I think there’s a willful ignorance at work here. I don’t know exactly the forces at work causing it, but we’re conditioning ourselves with excess to avoid consideration of our finite circumstances. We don’t want to think about death because death forces us to ask whether we’re maximizing the moment, and the answer to that question for almost all of us is “no.” But I don’t think this is sheer delusion. I think on some level we realize that, in order to keep the stores open and the streets clean and lights on, we have to push the reality of our fleeting situations from our minds. Our abstraction of death is the biggest of those white lies that keep the world spinning, keep the systems we accept rolling along.
For your Monday reading pleasure, Dr. Rob and I continue our discussion of sex, drugs and death, the “Trifecta of American Hangups.” Today’s Part II – Sex: PL: I think the reason we’re hung up on sex in this country is because we’re a pack of control freaks and sex is the one drive we can’t ever conquer. It’s our White Whale. We can stave off depression, hold cancer at bay, stop heart disease, steer the economies (well, until this year) and in all those things we can feel like we have the wheel, even if it’s just an illusion. But then, passing a high school and seeing a 17 year old Catholic school girl in one of those maddening plaid skirts, we’re suddenly forced to recognize just how little control we really have. Sure, we’re not rabid sex-crazed animals. We won’t act on our filthiest desires. But we’re forced to deal with the concept that even within ourselves, we can never extinguish certain base urges. No matter how much we try, we’re going to think about what’s under that skirt. We’ve harnessed so much in this country, and we seem to think that if we just put the right amount of effort and ingenuity into the endeavor, we can control every force in our society. Master every aspect of our existence, bring it all to our bidding. Make it safe and give us comfort everything’s always going to be alright. I don’t think we can’t deal with the fact that no matter how hard we try, our native sex drives defy our commands. So we do the next best thing – use sex as a device to control others through advertising, entertainment, or chastity as a form of moral currency in religion. Problem is, however much we use sex to control others, it still controls us, every one of us. Can you think of any greater force in the universe than sexual frustration? It’s the root evil under every wrongheaded and infantile ideology in our country, on the planet. I think until people learn to deal with sex as a force beyond our complete control – something utterly incompatible with absolute edicts – it’s going to remain the source of half of our national neuroses. Dr. Rob: Like pinot noir, football and the Wii, sex is what makes America great. So it can be frustrating to listen to uber-conservatives prattle on about its immorality. And I agree that sex is used as a controlling device in both popular and religious culture. That being said, I caution every young client I see about the inherent vulnerability that comes with sexuality. There’s something in our hard-wiring that makes sex more than just orgasms. Our bodies were created to do it as much as possible, yet the psychological ramifications of it can be huge. When people are forced into it they often never recover, no matter how much therapy or medicine you give them. Men are taught that there’s a direct link between their self-esteem and how much tail they get. Women are labeled as sluts for having sexual expression. And while our bodies are prepped for sex at a young age, our psychological development lags far behind. So if sex is a superior force as you describe, our sexual education needs to focus not just on proper condom use and where to buy a dental dam, but also on how to work with this force so that the sexual experience is more fulfilling from a psychological standpoint. That might help our culture lose some of the neurosis you describe.
Like any other writer, I read reviews and feedback on my work. And among critics, I’ve noticed a trend. A lot of them fixate on three subject areas – sex, substance use and mortality (on that last one, more specifically, the suggestion many of us aren’t maximizing the limited time we have). For some, these subjects seem terribly complicated – infused with a good deal of neurotic angst. Addressing these subjects frankly, or lightly, in a comic, unapologetic fashion, seems to tweak a fair number of people.
I know, I know… You’re surprised by that?
Yes. Yes I am. Not in the sense that it’s unexpected, but in the sense that now, here – today – civilized man has been dealing with these things for what? Ten, twelve, fourteen-thousand years? You’d assume the species long ago reached a happy détente with the concepts of fucking, getting high and getting our ya yas out before we kick the bucket.
Apparently not. And this got me thinking, Why? Why do we carry so many neuroses about a biological function like sex? Why are drugs and alcohol postured as a moral issue by so many of us? And in a world where we obsess over avoiding our demise – in retaining or at least giving off the appearance of youth and vigor at all costs – why do we willingly engage in so many endeavors that waste the time we have and require, at least superficially, observation of the fiction we’re immortal?
Again, I know… These are impossible questions.
But that doesn’t mean they aren’t worth asking. And luckily, I had just the person to bounce them off – the author of Shrinktalk and Rudius’ own in-house psychologist, Dr. Rob Dobrenski. Dr. Rob and I had a conversation about the “Trifecta of American Hangups,” sex, drugs and death, and all the myths, phobias and paranoia attached to them. We can’t promise concrete answers, but we touched on a few issues worth considering. Here’s the first part of it.
Holy shit. He said it all. Everything. Everything I’ve ever thought… Everything I’d ever say if ran into that kind of cash…
Somebody just sent me the screed copied below, and the damn thing shocked me. Almost knocked the Tanqueray and tonic out of my hand. That someone would say it so plain, so obvious… Be so utterly unapologetic. Say what we’re all thinking, or more accurately, what we’d all like to be thinking if we had a bag of “Fuck You” money in the bank.
For a long time I’ve bought into the belief that myopic assholes tend to make the biggest money in their fields. That you had to live your job, make it an obsession – buy into the belief a gig in something like accounting, finance, law, brokering or any of the other “welfare jobs” for overeducated upper middle class kids matters on some intrinsic level (or be a hopeless workaholic toiling to avoid a hole somewhere else in his life) – to hit a mother lode of cash.
I’ve always bought into the notion that the people least able to enjoy the money are the ones who amass the largest piles of it. That here, in our paranoid, envy-addled, “gimme gimme gimme” culture, self-awareness works like a pair of concrete shoes. To build an obscene net worth you had to give your entire life to a job. Be a Zero, with nothing in his head but execution… A hyper-highly functioning variant of those “wind-up dolls” we’ve all been forced to suffer at social gatherings – the sort who speak in industry lingo and talk of nothing but what’s connected the The Work. That a cruel Murphy’s Law keeps those of us who’d spend wealth best watching from the cheap seats while a pack of miserable and clueless greedheads who know nothing but addiction to The Game pile up mountains of cash they’ll never enjoy.
Over on Shrinktalk, Dr. Rob and I conclude our three part conversation on the Intersection Between Work and Life with a bit on something every American worker understands, Exhaustion.
But there’s a little more to it than that. Dr. Rob asked me a curious question at the end. What I’d think of my career, law and writing at the end of my life. That’s a hell of a thing to pop on somebody, and I tried to answer it. You can read that over on Dr. Rob’s site. But if I had an image – a way I’d like to look back on it all when I pulled my eyes up from the newspaper and realized I was standing in front of an oncoming train with nowhere to run – I hope it’d be something like this:
The second part of my ongoing conversation with Dr. Rob regarding the intersection of work and life is up on Shrinktalk. The subject for this Monday morning is, fittingly, Pointlessness. Specifically, the pointlessness of most white collar office work.
Most of you probably already know about Cracked.com. If you don’t, you should. Simply, directly, it’s one of the funniest sites on the internet – probably the best all around blend of pop culture, quirky and “high brow scatological” comedy going right now. All of it really well written.
In light of the synergies, and a shared sense of responsibility to our readers, the writers at Cracked have graciously allowed me to do a guest piece on an important social issue we both feel strongly about – Bad Sex. Yes, it happens. Anyway, here’s the link. Seven Supposedly Fun (And Actually Awful) Sex Ideas.