Gumption (5 page)

The year was 1776, and the aforementioned king of England, a somewhat addled chap by the name of George, had refused to answer yet another petition from the colonies to redress his aggressive taxation. The publicly chosen leaders of the colonies likely could have argued amongst themselves for decades about the issues at hand, but they did not. They recognized that despite many differences of opinion, whether they preferred the thin New York–style pizza crust or the clearly superior Chicago-style deep-dish version, they must leave those common sources of rancor at the door and behave as one united front. To my way of thinking, this is, and always will be, our task as the human race on this planet.

We’ll never settle this pizza debate, for after all, when weighing the advantages of either crust style or pan depth, they’re both fucking pizza, for crying out loud. The answer to the question of which style is better is simply, “Yes,” but as James Madison adroitly pointed out, human beings can never rest in such agreement, at least not for very long. There are many sections of the world’s population that might admonish us, saying, “Why are you arguing about this minor detail? There is pizza that we can eat. We’re hungry, you assholes!” This sensibility brings me to a follow-up quote by Franklin, from Paris after signing the peace treaty in 1784, again searingly on point: “Thus the great and hazardous enterprise we have been engaged in is, God be praised, happily completed. . . . A few years of peace, well improved, will restore and increase our strength; but our future safety will depend on our union and our virtue. . . . Let us, therefore, beware of being lulled into a dangerous security; and of being both enervated and impoverished by luxury; of being weakened by internal contentions and divisions.”

Right? Is it just me, or is this statement alarmingly prescient? I suppose it was not at all ambiguous to a thinker with such a clarion comprehension of human nature that given an inch of slack, we Americans would then take mile after mile. We engaged in the bloodiest of battles to gain the individual freedoms of our citizens (that is, our white citizens who owned property), and once that was achieved we effectively put our feet up and began to obstinately enjoy our
Real Housewives
television programming and our Twinkies. I feel this profoundly, for I love a Twinkie.

We have been occasionally made, with reluctance, to pause the programming of luxury long enough to look out the window and witness some persevering injustice or other, which is a total pain, right? We’ve been made to acquiesce the right to vote in our elections to people like ladies and also dark-skinned people. Ugh, fine. Can we please get back to
The Dukes of Hazzard
now? This episode is amazing—they jump the General Lee over three creeks
and
Sheriff Rosco P. Coltrane’s police cruiser! Plus, that lady has an amazing butt, so successfully exploited that tiny denim shorts came to be known as Daisy Dukes! This diversion is top-drawer!

I think we can hold as self-evident the truth that Ben Franklin, having been shown to possess a love of humor as well as a fascination with farts, would have been a great fan of my television program
Parks and Recreation.
I believe, furthermore, that he would have enthusiastically approved of modern viewing systems, by which we can watch the programming of our choosing at whatever time we prefer. This luxury allows me to budget my time accurately, allowing for one or two hours in an evening devoted to
Downton Abbey
or
Jimmy DiResta videos on YouTube. Unlike the TV viewing of my youth, I am no longer required to watch anything I don’t fully choose. If I wanted to watch
Happy Days
at eight and
Three’s Company
at nine, I had to sit through some bullshit called
Laverne & Shirley
at eight thirty. That’s not the best example, since
Laverne & Shirley
was fantastic, but you get the idea.

I believe that Mr. Franklin would have enjoyed the small percentage of television programming that is not garbage, much as I do. Particularly if he had taken some beer onboard, transporting himself “halfway to Concord,” for he takes a very inspiring position on the topic of leisure versus laziness. Bear witness: “Employ thy time well, if thou meanest to gain leisure. . . . Leisure is time for doing something useful; this leisure the diligent man will obtain, but the lazy man never.”

I believe the difference in the two conditions described above, leisure and laziness, is one of intent. Franklin is instructing us to live diligently, working at our vocations to raise an income in such a way as to leave a remnant of time for more leisurely pursuits. In my own life, these pursuits can include hiking, woodworking, television, reading for pleasure, walking by the ocean with my wife, playing with our dogs, listening to records, playing my guitar, etcetera. These are all activities for which I earmark periods of time, as opposed to just randomly thinking, “Hmm, I have three hours to kill; what should I do now?”

Conversely, I feel like laziness requires a strong inclination to passivity. I know that among my human attributes I definitely have the potential for laziness. That’s when we think, “Ugh, this bed feels so nice. I don’t want to do
anything.
” The trouble with this human
inclination is that, as Poor Richard says, “The sleeping fox catches no poultry.” A refrain I have heard from young people my whole life, usually delivered in a plaintive whine, has been, “I’m bored! There’s nothing to do!”

Franklin’s guidance is precisely apposite to this particular complaint, as he is counseling us to fill our time with “something useful,” which to me means that, if I know I’m going to ride a train for four hours, I bring a book. If I finish a project at the woodshop a few hours ahead of schedule, I try something new on the lathe or ride my bike to Griffith Park, whose mountainous roads are a useful workout indeed. I have learned to use foresight whenever possible to preemptively fill my time so that none shall be wasted. Sometimes I stumble in this effort, but sometimes I am successful, and I know well by now that I will go to bed much better satisfied if I have filled the day’s time with productivity instead of the diversions of a lazy person.

Positively occupying one’s time is also a matter of health, both physical and mental. We must avoid sloth, Franklin adds, for “Sloth, like rust, consumes faster than labor wears; while the used key is always bright, as Poor Richard says.” When I have sometimes indulged in sloth, I can in hindsight identify how quickly I became depressed, which I “solved” by overindulging in intoxicants, namely, weed and bourbon. I have learned that by budgeting my “tavern time” just as punctiliously as I do my work and leisure times, then the libation of my choice (single-malt Scotch these days) becomes a temperate dose of medicine against the stress of the week rather than a constant dulling agent.

There’s a great anecdote in Franklin’s autobiography about one of
his first jobs working at a London printing press as a young man. The work was incredibly physical, as I would imagine, hauling heavy trays of type to and fro, upstairs and downstairs. Franklin explains that he drank only water, as he was quite aware of the strenuousness of the exercise involved, while the other workers, the Brits, guzzled beer all day. He was able to carry one tray per hand, while the Englishmen would bear only one tray in two hands, causing them to marvel and dub him the “Water-American”! They wondered how he could appear stronger than they, drinking only water, while they consumed strong beer. Our young American explained to them that there was far more sustenance in a penny’s worth of bread than in all that beer, but they would not be convinced.

To give you an idea of the quantity and consistency of this consumption, Franklin wrote, “My companion at the press drank every day a pint before breakfast, a pint at breakfast with his bread and cheese, a pint between breakfast and dinner [lunch], a pint at dinner, a pint in the afternoon about six o’clock, and another when he had done his day’s work.”

Using my ineluctable powers of arithmetic, I have tabulated that bar tab at six pints a day. Now, I don’t know about you, but when I’m working hard at physical labor, I can handle a refreshing pint with my lunch, so long as I’m not required to perform any activities requiring precision or finesse. That’s one pint. The second pint certainly feels good going down, but then the pleasing effect of the elixir’s alcohol turns the idea of going back to work to one of misery. That’s two pints. Six sounds like a possible problem was at hand.

The periods in my life when beer at lunch was de rigueur included
my work on a blacktop crew, framing houses, and building scenery for larger Chicago theaters. All jobs as a member of a labor crew, some requiring more skill than others but as much muscle as anything else. Frequently, some of my fellow laborers would consume beer (or weed or vodka or all three) with a thirst to match Franklin’s printing-house compatriots, which I found a bit alarming. Some of them were clearly alcoholics to the point where we’d stop at the bar on the way to work at six
A.M.
so they could slam a double vodka and fill a cooler with Miller Lite.

I tried to join in on this apparent good time, and on much more than one occasion. We managed to get through those years without anybody losing a finger or an arm or a life, but that’s just luck and dumb animal fortitude. It turned out that I could haul plywood and framing timber and drive nails in a perfectly acceptable fashion after a couple of one-hitters or a few beers. It was also clear that I needed to lie down in my truck and sleep for three hours immediately after getting off work. I’d find a shady spot behind a barn, open the doors for the breeze, and pass out from exhaustion.

This seemed fun maybe the first or even the second time it happened, before I slowly discovered that my days were, on the whole, exceedingly more enjoyable if I
wasn’t
shitfaced while performing extreme feats of physical strength in the hot sun for eight to ten hours. I suppose this was my first lesson in moderation, when I began to work sober and then enjoy the drinking only after work so much more. Youth was an important ingredient for me in this high level of consumption, and so as my years have progressed, so has my tolerance decreased, a statistic which I find to be comforting.

One reason I was able to identify the folly, eventually, in such a lifestyle was that it occurred to me that my coworkers had given up. They had resigned themselves to the fact that they would be merely brute laborers for the remainder of their able-bodied lives. Now, this isn’t to say that one can’t have a rewarding and admirable life pouring concrete or shingling roofs; in fact, I know a great many such tradespeople to whom I look up for doing just that. I often envy these men and women their lives of staunchly task-oriented schedules requiring only a pickup truck, a set of dependable tools, and some quality materials. I find an undeniable nobility in the men and women who build our houses and buildings and roads and bridges.

These particular fellows, however, had thrown in the towel, reducing their aspirations in life to simple dreams of a nicer, slightly less used Camaro or maybe an extra week at the Wisconsin Dells. I suppose what I’m driving at is this: If you’re having drinks on your lunch break from work, you might be in the wrong job. Or you might be in the best job you can lay your hands on, in which case you might be neglecting the time and love you could be spending on your spouse/kids/pets. Working as an artist onstage or on-camera or making objects of wood in my shop, I flatly need every bit of sharpness and focus that I can muster. When I am lucky enough to be engaging in the work I love, the last thing I want to do is put on a buzz, which would serve only to cloud my abilities and desecrate my experience.

Ben Franklin wrote that “when men are employ’d, they are best content’d; for on the days they worked they were good natur’d and cheerful . . . but on our idle days they were mutinous and quarrelsome, . . . which put me in mind of a sea-captain, whose rule it was to
keep his men constantly at work; and when his mate once told him that they had done everything, and there was nothing further to employ them about, ‘Oh,’ says he, ‘make them scour the anchor.’” To clarify, scouring the anchor of a ship is a perfectly unnecessary activity, but given the choice between that and having a workforce stand about idling, a good administrator will always set the crew to a task. You’ll see this refrain again before my book is done: Find good work to do, and get to it.

I mentioned earlier, you may recall, having two favorite statements from Benjamin Franklin. The second of the two is not funny at all, but it is the lesson of his that moves me the most to emulation. As a young man returning from England, he wrote out a moral code for himself, which included this: “I resolve to speak ill of no man whatever.”

Among all of Franklin’s advice, I found this instruction to be the most profound, perhaps because it is the simplest. Of course, my mother had said to me as a lad, “If you can’t say something nice about a person, don’t say anything at all,” and of course that stuck with me, as did a great deal of my mother’s beautiful teaching. However, since I can be described as the duplicitous mess known as a “human mammal,” my nature will, on occasion, steer me in directions that blatantly disagree with my parents’ gentle wisdom. Often, I am able to pull out the map that my mom drew and find my way through the underbrush of my ego back to the path of decency, but having that tutelage reinforced from out of the blue, by an American Founding Father no less, about whom I was reading simply because I knew there would be some talk of farting and electricity, has been stirring.

Like anybody, I am susceptible to insecurity or paranoia upon any
given day. When I examine my professional choices, for example, good or bad, or even just a quote in a magazine or a review, I can, if I’m not careful, dive down a rabbit hole of self-doubt. What did that reporter mean by “bravely quirky”? Was I wrong to have passed on that crime teen drama? Is
ursine
a compliment?

But in the end, we’re all Americans, and it’s been said that we had better hang together or we shall most assuredly hang separately, or something like that. Beyond that, even, we’re all earthlings. I’m afraid that eventually we’re going to have to admit that we’re all in
that
together as well and that Franklin’s words hold true on a worldwide level. He knew this when he penned a letter home from Paris in 1777: “It is common observation here [Paris] that our cause is the cause of all mankind, and that we are fighting for their liberty in defending our own.”