Drifting

"Dubois thinks, A man reaches thirty, and he works at a trade for eight years for the same company, even goes to oil burner school nights for a year, and he stays honest, he doesn't sneak copper tubing or tools into his car at night, he doesn't put in for time he didn't work, he doesn't drink on the job-a man does his work, does it for eight long years, and for that he gets to take home to his wife and two kids a weekly paycheck for one hundred thirty-seven dollars and forty-four cents. Dirt money. Chump change. Money gone before it's got. No money at all. Bob does not think it, but he knows that soon the man stops smiling so easily, and when he does smile, it's close to a sneer. And what he once was grateful for, a job, a wife, kids, a house, he comes to regard as a burden, a weight that pulls his chin slowly to his chest, and because he was grateful once, he feels foolish now, cheated somehow by himself."

— Russell Banks, "Continental Drift"

*******

Dear Kate,

A few things transpired this past weekend and I thought about the book that saved me.

A man announced to me, actually two weeks ago, how capitalism works, as if it was his to discover the day before, and regretted how he discovered it so late.  You'd want to want more, he said;  You'd need to want more, he meant.

This past weekend in our church's Men's Group we talked about capitalism, as if it was a centerpiece on the table, a dining table we dined around just then and were richly blessed for it, now moving on to scrutinize the falsehood we had just swallowed.  Capitalism is bad for us, we said; what is good then, good enough for us, we didn't know enough of.  In fact for months we've been asking ourselves How do we even connect as men, Christians, human beings? and we still don't have a clue.

Then someone else told me something else...what was it...?  Right, this friend told me some friends of his, a lovely couple with teens, have decided to eventually quit their jobs, both highly skilled professionals, been doing good things with their gifted hands, would now devote the rest of their life to mine cryptocurrency.  Wealth that isn't there transpiring into what they want more, need to want more of, a better future whichever way the betterment comes good enough if quick enough and easy enough.  We don't work for pay cheques, they said, bright young things in their budding spring, virginal awakening to the possibilities of fast, dirty sex, ascending in the metaverse of prosperity while stepping down from past duties they'd never wanted, life complexities they couldn't be faster doing without.  The dollar sign shall become the only tangible thing, everything else tentative.

The book that saved me, yes, that's what I meant to talk about, Russell Banks' "Continental Drift," pulled me back from the gates of hell.  Time, though, is money, and I am running out of it.  This New York Times review does a good job to set forth an invocation, the same way how the story begins, and maybe I will just leave you with it and everything at that this rainy morning.

Yours, Alex

PS. Oh, one more thing happened this past weekend that I can't speak about.  This is more like a footnote for me to remember the unspeakable.