Delayed Gratification and Wasted Money

I hate gambling. I think it preys upon the poor and the impulsive. It reveals a deeper problem.

When I saw a young man in the convenience store putting dollar after dollar into the "skills game" machine, I tried not to wince. No, it's a gambling machine, not a skills machine. That would be the arcade games I played, for a few bucks in quarters, 40  years ago. 

This was not just a few minutes of harmless fun. He was playing to win, round after game. 

The House always wins, kid. You can read about the state legislature's latest bill on this subject, if you wish. 

I try to avoid the political here, but it saddens me to see what I regard as a urban problem flower out here, where lots of folks still work with their hands or work the land. 

The fellow punching buttons on the "skill game" was strong-looking, the sort I'd pay 20 bucks an hour in cash for manual labor, plus feed him lunch and give him gas money. My late father-in-law would have said "I'll find him work to do." I have 300' feet of fence to put in and last weekend, I was lucky to get a former neighbor to help me pound in 30 T-posts. Yet I cannot find folks I trust to pay to do that. One lad who came out--in shorts and tennis shoes--lasted one whole day and never returned. I'm three times his age and wore him out.

We are picky about who we invite onto our land. We don't trust day-laborers unless we know them already. It's a sad reality of a time when too many people lead precarious lives, make bad choices, and have substance-abuse issues. Trust must be earned, not assumed.

In any case, at the store I wanted to tell the young man "put 50 bucks down at Charles Schwab and get a share of Tractor Supply. In six or seven years it will be worth 100 dollars."

He'd think I came from Mars. His addiction to that one-armed bandit shows that he's not one to wait for returns. I may be too cruel. Perhaps he's living like so many Americans, from paycheck to paycheck.

That said, American life exists now in the age of instant gratification. It's changed the labor market since COVID.

My friends who run a local Chinese place are closing shop after this week; they can no longer find any help to provide table service and they are worn out. The husband runs the kitchen alone; the wife runs the bar and their daughter handles the take-out orders. Their son runs errands. I hear from lots of restaurant owners the same complaint: no one wants to work their hours at any hourly rate and it's hard to pay a living wage on restaurant margins.  I don't mind the mandatory service fees I'm seeing on checks now, either.

Of course more folks may soon be on the job market. Our server at a pub in Williamsburg, VA had a career as a graphic designer until AI replaced her; she's the second designer I've met who had to leave the field.

In such an economy, setting money aside to get us through old age is a tall order, especially in a culture that discouraged thrift. I sound like an old fart, but I feel that there's something to the idea that social media and what Sherry Turkle calls "always-on, always-on-you" technology have made us a nation of emulators, who want to party like influencers and live like high-rollers. We were already consumers. Now, in short, we want all that stuff and that lifestyle without waiting to earn it.

I prefer what we Lebanese-Americans refer to as our "side hustles." We make a bit of money here, a bit more there, and sock it away. If there's hope, and I think there is, it comes those like a recent student who, at 21 years old, puts $25 dollars away monthly in a mutual fund. She knows what it will be worth in 40 years. The son of the Chinese restaurant owners wants to become a mechanic. He knows it will pay well and provide a lifelong career, and he loves cars as much as I do.

I wish there were more like them. I would wager--yes, wager--that they'd let me hire them to hang fence on T-posts any day of the week, even if they lacked the stamina to pound those posts into the ground.

 That's reason to hope. As Spring unfolds here, and chores get done, I'll keep hoping for other changes on the wind.

Creative commons image courtesy of Pennlive. 

Fiddly Hobbies in Crazy Times

I have this rage for order. It is an impossible ask of the universe, even on a farm. Especially on a farm where in a month, the weeds will erupt and I cannot find any young folks with lives uncomplicated enough to come help with projects that need doing first. I cannot get help, even when I offer to pay them far more than minimum wage.

Now we have 300’ of wire fencing to install, all by our arthritic selves. Yet I feel a strange sense of optimism.

How did that happen? I am a pessimist to the core. A change of outlook started with a big problem that I solved by fixing something little. After a frustrating year off the road, my wife’s 1968 pickup will roll again. I had sheared a bolt’s head off when putting on a valve-cover and new gasket. For a few months, I pretty much threw in the towel. The truck also needed a heater core, a surprisingly difficult task on those vehicles, as compared to many newer pickups. 

More towels almost got tossed.

So I went in the house and built airplane models. I fixed a few things in the shop. I organized spare parts and tossed a lot of junk out.

Fiddly, yes, but confidence-building exercises. Then I read about how to drill out a broken-off bolt and how to rethread a hole to set a new bolt. Then I read about how to remove a Chevy heater core without removing the truck’s fender or hood (a job requiring two strong sets of arms). Then I invented a technique not found on YouTube but based on a tip there.

Soon enough, all by myself and with only a few curses and skinned knuckles, I had a heater core and valve cover that did not leak. When the other cover seeped oil, I fixed it in minutes and did not shear off another bolt. Then I fixed up a drag-harrow whose many parts have stymied me for a while. It worked beautifully to prepare a field for seeding.

“Not through our walking, but through our stumbling is the world saved,” a Yoga teacher once said, at the end of a challenging class. Add “fiddling” to her maxim.

Start fiddling. The world is in a bad place, and we will need to do some fixing as soon as the know-nothing who is breaking things goes away.

Thinking Little With Wendell Berry

Last year, I picked up my first volume of Wendell Berry's essays. I'd read some of his poetry, but until recently, not the prose.

I found a kindred tractorpunk, even if Berry and his son work their land with animals. I'll point you to one essay in particular, "Think Little," that can be found free of charge at the Web site for the Wendell Berry Center. In particular I want to note a couple of his premises, ones that could be adapted to a Distributist lifestyle even in a big city:

• "The Confucian Great Digest says that the 'chief way for the production of wealth' (and he is talking about real goods, not money) is 'that the producers be many and that the mere consumers be few…. ' ”  To me this means that in a Distributist economy, rather than a Corporatist or Socialist one, we all are makers. We trade, barter, and yes, pay in currency when we must. Above all, we avoid credit.
• "Our model citizen is a sophisticate who before puberty understands how to produce a baby, but who at the age of thirty will not know how to produce a potato." Stunningly true, even if I struggle to grow white potatoes still. Barbara Dalmrosch said something similar in her wonderful book The Garden Primer: we can make change happen by growing just one thing we like to eat. That could be the potted basil on your apartment balcony. Start little, think little, but imagine big as you influence others.
• "[T]he remedies are not always obvious, though they certainly will always be difficult. They require a new kind of life-harder, more laborious, poorer in luxuries and gadgets, but also, I am certain, richer in meaning and more abundant in real pleasure. To have a healthy environment we will all have to give up things we like; we may even have to give up things we have come to think of as necessities." It's a small task to learn to repair or hold on to common items; I just refurbished my old phone rather than give into Verizon's seductive texts (now blocked) to upgrade it (at more than $250 per month).  A $20 case, some hours removing photos and apps so I could update the OS, and now I have a phone that will last me a few more years without incurring more e-waste or personal bills.
• "Odd as I am sure it will appear to some, I can think of no better form of personal involvement in the cure of the environment than that of gardening. A person who is growing a garden, if he is growing it organically, is improving a piece of the world." Not odd at all, and certainly less odd than when Berry wrote the essay. Most folks I know keep some kind of garden now, often with local varieties of plants and some food crops. 

I've gotten too critical of urban and suburban life at times. I still could never imagine living in suburbia, though I know some suburbanites who are minimalists and avoid the rat-races of conspicuous consumption and look-just-like-the-Joneses conformity. Moreover, the 'burbs of the 2020s are not those of the 1950s or 70s. You'll find local markets and businesses aplenty, from a halal grocer I frequent next to my locally-owned Yoga studio, to a locally-run bakery or three. I have found cobblers who still fix shoes, tailors who mend clothing, a great local bar, and places that repair small electronics or engines. 

 I'll end with Berry's prescription for change:

"We are going to have to gather up the fragments of knowledge and responsibility that we have parceled out to the bureaus and the corporations and the specialists, and we are going to have to put those fragments back together again in our own minds and in our families and households and neighborhoods. We need better government, no doubt about it. But we also need better minds, better friendships, better marriages, better communities. We need persons and households that do not have to wait upon organizations, but can make necessary changes in themselves, on their own."

Can we do this? We have to. The philosophy should appeal to Libertarians of the earth-loving rather than broligarch sort, too. 

You may, like me, have already started. I'll be at a Board of Supervisors meeting next week to mention the economic madness of building soon-to-fail giant data centers in our county. We are involved in a law suit against this plan, a concept voted down by supervisors in the counties north and east of us. If we don't try, we lose by default. Yet if we lose, we keep trying. Onward.

 

The Last X You Will Ever Buy

Sobering, isn't it? At age 65, I confront a strangely comforting dilemma: Many of the thing I buy or do will outlive me. That Deodar Cedar in between us and the road? It will be big when I'm in my 80s, but if climate-change and future residents allow, it will still be growing bigger in the 22nd Century.

If my tree-planting is for the next generation, as well as an "up yours" to the greedy idiocy of denying human-driven climate change, then buying things that last a long time constitutes a statement about economics and frugality. 

Every time we acquire a vehicle, and I'm addicted to clean used vehicles, I say "this one will be here when I ain't." And now when a tool wears out, I start shopping for something that will be in my estate sale. I've written here about the wisdom of getting only vehicles that are friendly for DIY work. That philosophy applies to many things, big and small.

Last week, the first circular saw I'd every owned, a basic Skil purchased in the early 1990s for under $50, gave up the ghost. I could have ordered a new trigger (the motor works still) but stands far from my late father-in-law's Porter-Cable belt sander, a Gibraltar-like device that commands reverence and weighs about 40 pounds. I got a new trigger for that one. It should last another 40 years. The Skil is a cheap tool that lasted a long time because I am careful with my tools, cleaning them and never, ever loaning a tool or vehicle to anyone unless I use it for the borrower.

The saw's replacement is a DeWalt saw. Instead of an $80 Skil, I spent another $100 and got a saw that rips paneling like a hot knife though butter. The handle fits my big hands well, and the trigger design is sure and solid. These features matter after you work with a saw for a few hours.

I really like the DeWalt's corded tools, but I've sworn off the cordless ones because the company changes battery designs regularly and I had to find third-party batteries from China (when I can in these crazy times) to keep a set of 2008 tools running. 

Planned obsolescence violates every fiber of my being.There was a time when a good tool meant a lifetime investment; that's the case for the sander I noted, as well as some of the shop tools we own. My Bosch Miter-box and Delta table saws should survive me (I bought the latter from an estate, in fact). I attended a farm show where a craftsman used a spoke-shave from the middle of the 18th Century; George III was boss here when that tool was made. He told me it would go to a child with an interest in woodworking, as it has been passed down for over 250 years.

I just wonder: if we thought of purchasing as much as possible items that would outlast us, how much healing would that do for the environment? Moreover, how much would it rebuke the purveyors of cheaply made, disposable goods? We would have to save up for a quality item. Wendell Berry made that this sort of durability and longevity tests for a sustainable economy.

When the current stupid era ends with an inevitable economic crash, I wonder if we might return to the Distributist principles of localism, frugality, and durability.

I'll be cutting boards and waiting to see.