Inger is home. She returned home last year. Since then, she’s answered phones and greeted visitors at Halberd & Wren. She still barbacks at the Paradise Valley Resort and Casino on some weekends. The mess from Jace’s murder is a memory. East 16th Street in front of her house is quiet and clean. Mrs. Callow’s neighborhood watch posts on porch.local aren’t viral-worthy anymore.
Repeating myself. The mundane is the heartbeat beneath life’s melodies. Next, Inger achieved the artful life I aspire to. Her day-to-day is mundane. Her way of life has a serene rhythm I wish I had. I’m writing this at a Starbucks in Carytown instead of home. Because each first week of the month I have to make decisions about which bills get paid and which won’t. I’m on a payment plan with Dominion Energy. The bargain is that I pay the amount billed each month and my lights stay on. I’ve been a month behind for a while. Long enough that Dominion Energy cut off my power. I have to pay the past-due balance to get it turned on.
WTF?! Well… my impossible choice was to pay traffic fines due this month or pay the full amount needed to keep the power on. I paid my traffic fines and half the past-due amount. Half wasn’t enough. So my house is dark. This is the water many of us breathe. We struggle with impossible choices where there is no good solution. It’s which bad choice we’ll make. I’m living this truth: choices have consequences.
Sunrise
Am I done? Is the future more misery? Near term? Kind of. Further out? No. The progress I’ve made, the progress Inger has made, isn’t going to go viral. It’s been a year since I started living on SSA and building a stable future. Inger is ahead of me. Her rock bottom wasn’t as deep as mine. So she has less distance to climb than I do. I’m a few years into building a life of slow money habits. SSA helps, but it also makes progress slow enough to be nearly invisible. I’m not done.
Seven stages of a life. I’m in stage five or so. I have what many aspire to: nothing on my calendar. I can, and have, cocooned in my house for weeks on end because I can. That’s the promise: we work hard, raise kids, and one day, can retire from the working world. Utopia unlocked, am I right?
Wrong. Life without some struggle isn’t healthy. We need purpose, a reason to answer the alarm clock at 6 am. My gifts, my talents, are words and art. They are hosted in this space. I can’t explain why, but those of us who choose the arts over stability have a little (?a lot?) of chaos in us. We make absurd choices in service to our craft. Living on SSA enables that. Healthy? Maybe. Inger and women like her would say it isn’t healthy. My house is dark, and Inger’s isn’t.
Seasons
My life hasn’t been serene. I’ve been a suit-and-tie Y2K expert for Montgomery Asset Management, an Oakland, CA cab driver, and a dishman. I’ve rented two-bedroom condos and called my car home. My son will be 31 next month. I’m divorced. The story of why is published in this space. “Give grace first” came from my marriage to my son’s mom and then our separation. It’s a mixed bag of extremes. From good times to rough times. I don’t regret it, though.
I come from kind of a bipolar past. Some of my kin wrestled our heritage to a draw and achieved what Inger achieved. My dad won the battles he fought. Others, like me and my paternal paw-paw, made the family worry about whether we would make it. By the by, we do. This season, phase five, offers hope for me that I might vanquish the consequences of decades-long fast-money ways. I’m still the son of a bipolar past. But my history doesn’t have to be my destiny.
This season is an opportunity. The primary work of fatherhood is behind me. Divorced. Retired, so nobody is punching me in for a job. The finish line on fast-money habits is visible. 461 essays in this space as of this post, something like 700,000 words—not too shabby. All I need to do is keep going.
And Then Things Work Out
This is the rhythm — things get bad, sometimes really bad, and after a while, something breaks my way, and things work out. What’s different this time is that no rescue is coming. I can pay the past-due balance and get my lights turned back on. October will be ugly, but I can make it. I’ll take another baby step toward slow-money living.
I’ve had enough case managers that I know the drill. What’s the plan? What are the tangible steps to take to ensure that my lights stay on? Have I written a balanced budget? Does it include charitable giving and savings? Am I paying anything on debt? Fun fact: I’m a great planner. Planning isn’t my weakness. It’s follow-through where I fall short.
That’s the perpetual challenge — execute the plan. Even if the execution isn’t perfect. What Inger learned while training with Saito-san, and what I learned at Sennin Kai, is to keep training. Success has come slowly with consistent practice.
OMG! What Now
Myers-Briggs, the four humors of the Greeks, other ways to categorize temperament. People like me tend to be more NP than SJ. We need everybody, though. Us who will spend the rent money on a hotel and airfare to audition for something, and Inger and my Dad, who built a portfolio that will outlive them.
My granddad boasted he could make heavy water in his kitchen. It was more than a boast. “Wells A. Webb, Berkeley, California, U.S. Patent 2,137,430, Process for the concentration of isotopes, filed 15 May 1934, issued 22 November 1938.” So the family legend goes, he wrote to Gilbert Lewis and said he could make deuterium at the sink. Lewis said make me a gallon. Grandpa did. Thus launched a nice little business that kept the bills paid. I cannot prove the letter. It is how we tell it.
“Let us become mountain mystics and live our lives as art.” Too much chaos, and that adventure flying to an audition will result in relocation to a shopping cart. Too little chaos and we’ll never take the shot. The artists I admire figure out early that success is built on net worth and passive income. That’s the bass clef that will support the melody of a creative career. I can’t cite sources, but I believe it is a lesson in living that my grandpa learned eventually.
Envisioned
We are like that. When things are bad, when the power is off, the landlord has sued for eviction, the city taped a cutoff notice to the door for water and trash, we still believe in the vision. I’m still publishing, still writing with the power off in my house. 461 essays is about ten anthologies’ worth. I think I’ve earned the title of writer.
It’s what sets us apart from Inger and my Dad. We keep going even while faced with daunting challenges that reasonably would have us give up this folly. I’m seated in my living room on my love seat writing this with my laptop in my lap. It’s a beautiful 62°F fall day outside. My overgrown yard beckons. Here I am, though, writing this.
I’m not going to tell you what to do. Do you. I will say that at 67 years old, with plenty of legacy behind me, the thing I didn’t do is build net worth early so my adventures had a foundation. We who live by “FIRE! Doh. Sorry, I didn’t make ready or aim” won’t all change our ways. Some of us will, and I hope to be one of them. But not all of us.
Truly Crazy
And maybe frustrating for people like Inger or my Dad, providence intervenes at times. That stupid move to spend rent money on travel to an audition pays off enough of the time that some people take the shot. This space is found by an editor who works for a publisher and will pay me to turn these words into a published book. It’s a crazy wish, yes. But crazier wishes have come true.
At this point in my life and because of Uncle Sam’s benevolence, it’s a somewhat low-risk choice to call myself a writer and publish to this space once a week. “You should write a novel” because novels are legible to the normies. Essays are a dark art like poetry, maybe darker. So embedded in this space, among the over 400 posts, is Inger’s Finger. You need a subscription to read more than one episode of the novel per day for free. I just need an email address to attach to the account
Better late than never, I guess. I get it now: just living in the melody clef isn’t sustainable. But unwinding sixty years of fast money habits doesn’t happen easily. I’m making progress, even if it’s not obvious from the outside. Have a little faith in me. Things do work out.