I wanted a job where I built things. Here and there I’ve had it, and enjoyed the pride of construction. But lately it’s been more “entrepreneurship,” which turns out to mean: bookkeeping and snake oil.
A hunt is on for investors, so that my partner and I can get paid real salaries for, say, a year, and farm out some annoying business to hired hands. The idea of hiring hands: it is hilarious. Can I stand to sit in the office with you? Will you not follow me around asking every fifteen minutes what you should be doing? Will you not rifle my desk when I’m out of the room? That's all. But for this to happen, I have to generate a lot of verbiage. That's parallel to “roughage.” Shovel the alfalfa. Feed the cow.
It turned out a lucky break that my English department decided to make a major play for private funding during my last years there. It gave me some experience in spoon-feeding folderol to the rich. Reagan’s endgame: the starker the economic inequality, the more every relation becomes a form of patronage.
I wanted to scrape up a hillock against the floodwaters, and don’t yet have it. Earth is in short supply. I am very alert, and feeling more mercenary all the time. I swear to you, I love the created world.
