Curating The Box

It started like these things always do, with me minding my own business. We were in the middle of our annual New Year’s purge of all the things in our lives that we hadn’t touched, used, or needed in the previous year, 2012 edition. If it sat around for that long and didn’t contribute, it’s gotta go. I was at the epicenter of the disaster area the house becomes during this ruthless expunging of all things redundant, the office. Lindsay always conducts herself with the utmost professionalism during this procedure, allowing no sentimental attachments or wistful trips down amnesia lane to mitigate the lead pipe cruelty with which she discharges her duties. The Germans would be proud. 

Me, I always get sidetracked tinkering with things; reading random articles in back issues of Rolling Stone or some stray comic book I find; perhaps wishing I’d taken advantage of an expired coupon found in the dusty arcology of crap under the desk. I like trying to turn on all the old cell phones that mark the various periods in my life and career with their obsolescence. Blackberry, Motorola Razr, LG Flip Phones, EN-V 1 and EN-V 2; they’re like runes and arcane totems of bygone epochs, archeological curiosities of a fallen civilization. So far the Razr is the winner, still turns on after 4 years of not being charged or connected to service. I’ve read you can still call 911 from any cell phone that turns on, no matter how antiquated. So it survives the purge for another year. You never know.

Probably the worst thing that can happen to me during this process, at least for the sake of efficiency, is finding The Box. I’d guess we all have a version of The Box somewhere in the dusty corners of the messes we curate and call our lives. Mine is a Nike shoebox with black walls and a red top that has survived 20 years and 11 moves across 4 states. As far as I can tell, it still looks exactly the same as the day the shoes came out of it. It appears to be impervious to both the abuses of life and the weight of years. It’s fared better than me, anyway. Inside it is an archive of letters, pictures, journals and memories that constitute the major chapters of my life. They’ve sifted themselves into strata that roughly approximate the chronological march of the different eras they represent. The footprints left of a life gone by.

The pictures are the easiest. You’ve seen a lot of them, of course. I’ve scanned them into binary representations, essentially a picture of a picture, yet another step removed from the reality they once represented. I’ve put them in albums here, messaged some of them to you as calling cards to see if you still remembered, still wanted to know me. That friend request button became a referendum on me as a person, which is more than a little disconcerting. How have we arrived in a world where the pressing of one button can represent the entirety of your being, encapsulated for the review and approval/disapproval of another person? But I’m getting ahead of myself.

If the pictures are the easiest, the journals are the most unbearable. I stopped journaling forever ago, after I compared the angst and existential soul searching from Jr. High to those I was writing in college and my early 20’s. Only the names had been changed. It was disturbing to discover that all the problems were exactly the same, and the only difference was really in the degree of complexity grafted onto the same old BS. So I have to be pretty far down the well to crack those open, and with Lindsay buzzing around the house filling boxes and plastic bags for the numerous trips to Goodwill and the homeless shelter, there’s no time for that sort of navel pondering nonsense. But there’s always time for the pictures. And this time for the letters.

So it was that in January 2012, I found myself at the center of this perfect storm of life circumstances and melancholy mementos. It was the first New Year’s since I’d turned 40, which is kind of a double whammy as many of you can attest to from experience, or empathize with out of your own dread at it’s coming. The natural bent we all have at the New Year to take stock is only magnified by the whole midlife crisis thing, rarely to positive effect. So when I opened The Box and the pictures from my 40^th Shindig were sitting right there on top, it kind of caught me flat footed. Blindsided me with an uppercut before I could get my guard up. There I was, staring back at myself, except 6 months older already. By January, I was headed into my third month of unemployment, and was about twenty cents shy of a quarter. We were behind on a house payment and I had no prospects for work in sight. There were no unemployment benefits by then because I’d been self-employed for a year, so I was picking up the odd weekend graveyard shift running a cash register at a local Subway for minimum wage, servicing drunk college students at 2:00 AM. With a shaved head and 40 pounds of extra weight, my self-worth was on the mat and the ref was already at an 8 count before I even had time to wonder what the hell had happened.

So on that Sunday morning, January 1, I was in a mood to go waaaaay down in The Box. Past the pictures of me jamming guitars with Christian, singing with Dave, hiking with Lang and Kristin, bowling with Sean.  Past the pictures of me with the girl I lost my virginity to the summer I turned 17, Chrystina, or the first girl to break my heart. Down into the letters. The letters are a halfway point between the pictures and the journals, both in the topography of The Box and my own psychological landscape as well. There are relatively few of them, and I’ve always wished that I’d kept more of those over the years. Although to be honest, they’re mostly from people that I wound up letting down or those who did the same to me, so maybe it’s best that there are as few of them as there are.

Owing to an ennui onset by the circumstances in which I found myself, and to the general laziness that is part and parcel of my character, I took the time to really look at that stack of letters for the first time in over a decade, instead of sifting through the avalanche of paperwork in the office like I should have. The contents of The Box, although rarely viewed, are as familiar to me as the contours of the teeth in my mouth. You kind of take those unseen things for granted sitting in their darkened niche, only becoming aware when something foreign intrudes. In this case, it was a thrice folded sheath of light brown recycled paper. Not recognizing the letter from the outside, I had no idea what awaited me.

Seeing the characteristic loops and whorls of a woman’s elegant handwriting on college ruled paper gave me no clue as to who the author was, which really surprised me since I thought I was intimately acquainted with every corner of The Box. Clearly, not so. I actually had to flip it over to see who it was from. As an English Major, she had been so good as to sign and date it in civilized fashion, giving me a touchstone that oriented me in time and space. Glad I was sitting down. This missive had time traveled to meet me from 15 years in the past. I had virtually no memory of every having received it. Not entirely surprising considering that when I originally received it, I was approaching the tail end of an uninterrupted 2,195.5 day bender of 24 hour a day, wall to wall stonerdom. It would be 278 more days until sobriety found me. But that’s another story. 

So I set into that letter with real curiosity. It was from a dear friend who had been one of the right people, in the right place at the right time to help catalyze a fundamental change in my life and personality that has literally defined every minute since; possibly the single biggest turning point in my life. It was like finding the winning lottery ticket to hear from her again. But all was not well in those nostalgic halls of memory. As I said, the letters are almost exclusively from those disenchanted with me, and this was no exception. She was sending me this letter to call me on my shit and tell me what a bad friend I was being. It was excellent. She wasn't shrill, or strident. It was completely open, honest and gutsy. I loved it. She was putting it out there how hurt she was, totally honest and unvarnished, but with this incisive openness that only comes from having balls of solid rock. I was totally blown away; I'm tearing up now just thinking of it. And the worst part was, when she sent it to me back in ‘97, I NEVER RESPONDED. What an ass! Total autopilot zombie moron. Because back then I was so spoiled; my life was filled with all these thoughtful, amazing people. I thought they grew on trees, and of course they don't. They get jobs, get married, have kids, and move away. Idiot!

So there I was, January 1, 2012, minding my own business… Only to realize I hadn’t been minding the business that needed minding at all. In one hand, the photos of my big birthday party, the State of the Union at 40, if you will. These were the people I know now, salt of the earth, every one of them. In the other hand, the words of someone I used to know, and wished like hell that I could know again. Because no one in 40-land would ever have talked to me the way the English Major did. Everyone in 40-land is civilized and diplomatic, politically correct and non-judgmental. The edges are all smoothly polished.  But somebody needs to talk to you like that sometimes. Otherwise you wake up at 40 under the weight of this crazy stone, having lost all care for the things you own; where everything is a copy of a copy of things that used to matter. And when you’re washing dishes at Subway at 2:37 AM on Sunday morning, you got nothing but all the time in the world to think about that.

So that’s why I did it. I made a list of people that I very much wanted to know again, the people who were challenging, funny, sardonic, inspiring, kind, wise, generous, talented, wisecracking, irascible, intelligent, creative and beautifully flawed, and decided to build a family of my own choosing. To add another chapter, another strata, to The Box. That list had 4 names on it. So I pulled out my trusty laptop and typed in the word Facebook for the first time.

I had no idea what I was doing, of course. All I knew about FB was that everyone I knew locally that was on it had either petered out after finding out what their best friend from high school and/or first love was up to these days, or they posted every banal detail of their day on it and used it as another layer of distraction in their lives, just like TV. None of that was of any interest to me. So there I was with my list just blindly groping, trusting in technology to manhandle me through to the place I wanted to be, with no idea how to get there or if there would even be anyone home when I arrived. There almost wasn’t.

Of those 4 names, only 1 came up in any of my diligent searches. If none of them had, I probably would have just dropped the whole thing right then. And nothing would be the same today. But there she was… Lang Sheorn. To the rescue again, just like in ’95. And with her came the whole kit and caboodle.  She was actually the last of the 4 to respond, and that was months later, but because of finding her and her friend list, I found the English Major and she was the first to respond. Kind of fitting that together they would open a new chapter for me… Wheels within wheels.

The rest has come slowly, organically over the last year. Some were added because it was obvious, we’re already friends in regular contact. Some were added because it was expected, work or family. Others are here because they pine for my wife and the occasional tidbits that come here. One of her friends gave me a key piece of advice early on in limiting the number of friend requests I responded to, which I’ve come to see the wisdom in. Some of you saw my name amongst the contacts of our mutual friends and reached out, much to my continual delight. Some arrived because of sleepless nights while I went out of town looking for work, and you responded at 3:00 AM like it weren’t no thang.  And like all of life it has been messy, disappointing, and randomly amazing in unforeseeable ways. Some of the ones I hoped for the most from turned out to be duds who just phoned it in and got deleted. Sadly, even one of the 4. Others who seemed like blast from the past nostalgia contacts have turned out to be the most gracious, hilarious, uplifting friends that I have.

And what a motley group you are.

There are 84 of you now. I know that seems small to many of you (though not all), whose friends number in the hundreds, even one or two whose count is in the thousands. But I followed that one person’s advice (Thanks Suzie) to focus on the quality rather than the count of spectators who just wanted to satisfy their curiosity about how things had “turned out” for me. As though we were all done, and this was the outcome. So instead I’ve ignored two thirds of all requests, and even had a mid-year purge of twenty-some-odd that just weren’t contributing or desirous of my input. In fact, I’m about to dump 5 or 6 more here in a few minutes. Haven’t seen or heard from them in a year? They gotta go. I don’t need tourists to LOL their way through my life.  I’ve had about enough autopilot BS for a lifetime. Haven’t you?

So instead there’s this crazy-quilt ensemble of carpenters, musicians, computer gurus, ship captains, teachers, architects, cops, tattoo artists, accountants, engineers, prison guards, attorneys, weavers, former clients, real estate agents, students, office managers, Marines and even… a parrot. And let’s not forget those English Majors, God love ‘em. From elementary school to college, from church to the psychedelic frontier, ranging from Florida to Alaska, Hawaii to Maine, the Virgin Islands to Chicago, Germany to Canada you hail from every corner of my life’s story. Some are boys, some girls, some gay, some straight, some with serious edumucations, others with blue collar hands of steel. We got us some unemployed ones, some stoner ski bums, married or multiple divorces, home-schoolers, small business owners, a kid that I babysat in High School during the summer for gas money, who’s  now a grown-ass man big enough to easily snap my neck for all the merciless pillow fight beatdowns in the 80’s. Hell, there’s even a millionaire thrown in for laughs.

Some know me as Lawrence, others as Brien, and a couple—the few, the proud—even from the O’B days. From Christians to Jews to Agnostics and Atheists, it’s a big ol’ tent we’re under here. My Marine buddies roll with some serious fire power, while some would like to see those same guns confiscated. We’re Liberal, we’re Conservative, gee-whiz optimists and industrial-grade cynics ranging from 26 to 68 in age. And while I’m perfectly comfortable discussing the Bible, Carlos Castaneda, and the Laws of Thermodynamics, and find myself at ease with the attorneys and the blue collar bruisers I hang with (hell, I’m still friends with both sides of the same divorce), it can be lonely here in the middle. 

Because whether you’re a Democrat or Republican, religious or agnostic, millions agree with you either way. When you find yourself in empathetic agreement with elements of every side, when you see clearly the glaring holes in your own logic and belief system and can never quite buy all the way in to anything, it can feel like you’re a constituency of one. Like the edge of a coin, neither heads nor tails. And as much as I’d love to round you all up and have a huge reunion, I think it’d be a bit of a powder keg up in here.  But here in this single portal I can be with each of you in our respective ways without fear of the matter/anti-matter reaction that would surely ensue at the big roundtable that I actually wish was at the center of our lives together. Oh, well.

Over this past year we’ve had our share of debates, where most of you have been so gracious as to give me the last word, since I’m prone to taking it anyway. Because of you I’ve seen unbelievable displays of art; sublime paintings, breathtaking photography, amazing music, kinetic sculptures and some quantum poetry. We’ve had a ton of laughs, shared embarrassing photos and reminisced about forgotten misadventures and our wasted youths. I sent out a couple dozen mixtape CD’s to friends old and new, like that annoying guy in Jr. High you only wanted to be friends with. I’ve even shared a beer with one of you who was three time zones and two beers ahead of me on a Friday afternoon (Cheers, David D!)

We survived a particularly shrill election cycle, about which the less said, the better. We’ve rooted for each other; weathered national disasters, white-knuckling it through a hurricane lashed night, whether in the teeth of it or powerless to help and just sweating for friends in harm’s way. We cried, grappled and raged at our still raw, shared national tragedy.  Our exchanges were challenging, and comforting; passionate and compassionate as we sought to find meaning in senselessness, and solutions to sickness and evil in our midst.

There have been two phone calls, one with Lang and her sweet Southern lilt (No one says my name like her: “Lorrance”), and one with Elise who has the softest voice ever, in stark contrast with the hardcase she is on FB. There’s been one reunion in real life, with a decades overdue apology tendered, hatchets buried, bridges built. I know I still have a couple more to go, but if Facebook can shine a light of redemption on the worst things I’ve ever done, maybe there’s hope for me yet.  

We’ve added babies to our respective clans, we’ve lost loved ones. There have been divorces, but an engagement as well, and new businesses ventured.  Your kids have become beloved to me as extensions of you in this world as I’ve watched them thrive in dance lessons, or breaking your heart on their first day of school as they’re already growing up too fast. Just knowing that some of my high school friends have kids of their own that are now married…  People 2 years behind me in school, by the way. Yikes!

From that first glimpse into the lives of the original 4, to the fuller experience of this expanding density of souls, one thing has remained consistent. My perception of you and the lives you’ve cobbled together has both challenged and inspired me in my own daily walk. Seeing your beautiful families, your careers, hobbies and passions really drew a line in the sand for me. I looked at you, then looked at me and did not like what I saw at all. Granted, FB is a commercial for the best version of ourselves and our lives that we can present to the world, but even so -if you’re only half as awesome as you seem- I was still deep in the red, and that is a bad feeling, really hard to live with at first. I mean, seriously, have you looked at you lately? You’re pretty sexy.

I can’t tell you how much time I spent hovering over my page in the first few weeks, still unemployed and scratching for every dime I could get my hands on, and looking for those blessed little red squares to help make the day just a little more bearable.  To kill time between logins I started walking, just to get my fat ass off the couch and in some kind of motion. And week after week, I’d strap that iPod and raincoat on and go for long aimless walks that spanned a hundred square blocks, and hundreds more miles of train tracks. And when I got home there was always something new waiting for me.

The days became weeks, which became months, as they are wont to do, and the work began to trickle in again, thanks in large part to somebody’s crossed fingers and in small measure to well-timed networking and fortuitous meetings. The 40 pounds slowly melted off as the miles fell under my ancient Doc Martins. My hair grew back in with more than a few grays. Who knew they could do that while in exile? They hadn’t seen the light of day in 6 or 7 years, so WTF, man? The business continued to grow in fits and starts, I added a couple of partners and employees. I learned the true meaning of stress as I began to swing hammers in the day and sweat the books at night. Confidence, patience and resolve began to take the place of frustration and poverty.

In the interim, we shared. The first chats with long-lost friends were always a mix of breathless exhilaration and typing over each other, essentially generating two parallel conversations at once. Playing catch-up, me trying to be funny and charming, someone worth knowing. Thankfully a chat allows pauses for me to Google things to sound smart. And yet, this is still the best I can do. Sadly, there are limitations to the illusions that technology can generate.

The first post I wrote that wasn’t a laugh or some esoteric rant was just a random observation about the spring cherry blossoms falling from the trees that line one of the corridors I walk down. Your amazing, positive responses were a catalyst that got some wheels turning. Feeling emboldened, I began to write. Some things were published on my page, others were messaged privately, representing huge leaps into the unknown for me. I’m no stranger to writing, I’ve actually been writing a book since sometime in the late 90’s (It should be obvious even to me that I will never finish it, but I keep plugging away) that I’ve never shared with anyone, so sending those couple of essays (Especially to an English Major!) was scarier to me than walking any 3^rd story framing plates could ever be.  That alone has been rewarding beyond anything I could have hoped for, bringing an entirely new dimension to my life. It’s given me boldness to work with a radio producer, and to begin doing some writing and voice work for commercials. Who knows where new paths might lead?

Two things really surprised me this year about you and the FB experience. The first came when I announced that the business had landed our biggest contract ever, which was several times bigger than our previous best. The congratulations were overwhelming. When you post as often as I do (which is more than average, but still a lot less than several of you), you get used to playing for an audience of a dozen or less. I still remember the first thing I posted that got no response at all. It was surprisingly hurtful, which seems ridiculous now. Today I think nothing of it, but that first time… So when responses are low, one gets the impression that the number of people seeing the entries is also low. But when I made that first announcement, which was a huge watershed moment in whether or not we were even going to make it at all as a company, you all came pouring out of the woodwork. People I’d forgotten I had even friended showed up. It was a nice reminder that even in silence we still orbit one another, which is oddly comforting as the days pass. There you are.

The second was a badly worded joke that I made about being depressed and calling an Al-Qaeda fronted suicide hotline. The punchline goes something like -Suicide Hotline Operator: “That is wonderful news! Can you fly a plane?” I received one phone call and a number of concerned messages about my depression. The funniest one was from a client whose bathroom I was remodeling. He wanted to make sure that his project would be finished before I offed myself (You got a heart as big as all indoors, Ray). By far the sweetest thing was that the English Major messaged me at almost 1:00 AM her time, to be sure I was OK. It was all surprisingly affecting, as I suddenly became aware of a safety net I hadn’t known existed.

 And In the end, that’s really why I came.

Not to find out how you “turned out." I hate to ruin the suspense, but at the end of the story, we die. That’s how it “turns out."  And those Entertainment Tonight weekend edition segments on “Where Are They Now?” are just the worst. I have no interest in Before and After versions of you. We’re not some nostalgia band playing our greatest hits here as our best days recede behind.  It only matters who we are now, and who we’re becoming. So although I’ve come a little late to the party, say 10-15 years late in many cases, I don’t want to miss another minute. I don’t care if you’re political, religious, artistic, nerdy or just ornery. I like the articles, the pictures, the memes, the rants, the videos, the songs, the jokes, and the beer recommendations.  Keep the Star Wars, Kitteh, Birthday, Metalfest, Tumblr, YouTube, and  JibJab stuff all a-comin’! I wanted to find myself connected to a real community of engaging people. To find myself in the midst of those who would communicate, criticize, rage, encourage and participate in each other’s lives, rather than phone in some “Workin’ hard, or hardly workin’?” nonsense. The world at large is built by and for those automatons. But this one is built by us. Anything authentic is welcome; good or bad, happy or sad, whimsical or deathly serious. And nothing besides.

It’s been a helluva year. I believe that I failed to mention that the business has tripled in size, and even better, its gross receipts have increased by an order of magnitude. In one year. For a guy who began the year fat, bald and unemployed, it’s been quite a ride indeed. All of these changes are linked in so many ways to finding myself re-inspired, reconnected to something purposeful, rather than just going where the whims of fortune take us. I looked around one year ago and realized that the life I had was the kind you wind up with when the music stops and you just sit in whatever chair remains, with whoever’s left. I guess that’s what happens when you spend too long minding the wrong business.

This year as we begin the ruthless purge yet again, I find that I have way less to be rid of, and more of what’s worth keeping. Another strata, but this time added to an entirely different kind of Box, one that I visit way more often. In this Box the letters are filled with laughter and commiseration, and rather than letting friends down, I try to uplift with every lame joke, bad pun, philosophical pondering and emoticon in my arsenal. ;-) I don’t have everything I want, but I definitely want what I’ve got. And I can’t imagine how I would have gotten here without you.

Yup. A helluva year. No idea how we’re gonna top this one, my friends. But how ‘bout we give it a whirl anyway? You never know.

Play It By The Numbers

For the most part, when you wake up each day the world is largely the same as when you went to bed. Some days are really dramatic, either personally or historically. Births, deaths, first dates, weddings, new jobs. 9/11. But most days are pretty much variations on fixed themes of work, food, and entertainment. In the interlude between the end of one day and the beginning of the next, somewhere between 6 and 8 hours have passed, you’ve shed about 152 Million cells, give or take 100,000 here or there, and .001% of your life is over. And while you were sleeping and essentially not moving a muscle, you hurtled through 5,390 miles of space rotationally, and 469,000 more miles in orbit around the sun. Whew, you really get around! 

But the sun is the same in a relative way… 

You awake to a world that has, as a net increase, 228,960 more people in it, which seems like a lot but is actually fairly infinitesimal compared to the base population of 7 Billion. As varied as our lives may seem from one another, a ton of things are virtually identical from person to person.  Each day we all take an average of 23,000 breaths; you only get 654,810,000 of those, so careful how you spend them. Your heart beats 105,000 times in a day and you spend .004% of your given lifespan over 24 hours. Over 99% of your DNA is exactly the same as every other person on earth. Which means I’m pretty much 99% Michael Jordan, William Shatner and Janis Joplin. Which is awesome. I’m  guessing my jumpshot is contained in the other fraction of a percent.  Just my luck. In fact, pretty much everything that matters is in that 1%. Height, weight, eye, hair and skin color. Gender. What a difference one measly percent makes. The difference between me filling stadiums like Janice, versus torturing the drunks down at the Karaoke bar on Thursday nights. Oh, well. I can still out-act Shatner. Which isn’t saying much. Kaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaahn!!!!   See? Who needs that 1%?

Waking up in America is pretty much the best thing that has ever happened to anyone, anywhere. Ever. For all our belly-aching, even the poorest people in America are richer than 80% of the world. 5.6 billion people on the planet live on $10 a day or less. And that’s a true purchasing power, inflation adjusted number. Rupees, Pesos, Rubles. Whatever. The guy with the cardboard sign at the freeway entrance by my house makes more than that in an hour. In a lot of ways, it’s actually better to wake up in a refrigerator crate in some alley in America, than almost anywhere in Sub-Saharan Africa. Your survival rate there is measured in single-digit years, and 40,000 people per day die of starvation. 

In my town it’s hard to even find a malnourished looking homeless person, which seems odd. But maybe it isn’t, since more than 2/3 of kids and adults are overweight to obese. Strange since the poverty and hunger statistics seem to indicate that people should be a lot thinner. I suppose that depends on how you define “hungry." In America it has a very specific definition. If a person only has 2 meals per day, instead of 3, they are on the hunger roles. It doesn’t matter if they have 5,000 calories in those 2 meals and are overweight. They are still considered “hungry”. Try explaining that to Starvin’ Marvin. And while you’re at it, try explaining how the appetizer is the food we eat before the food we eat, and dessert is the food we eat after the food we eat. 

In olden days only rich people could get fat, and it was considered a status symbol. That’s why Botticelli’s all tended toward the portly. The poor had to hustle to feed themselves and their families and rarely had enough to eat, let alone get fat. Today that is reversed; only rich people can afford to eat the locally sourced, sustainable, fair trade, organic, free range Manna that their chefs and nutritionists prepare for them. Who else could afford the second mortgage it takes to show up at Gold’s Gym every day and have their Nike-Under-Armor-clad asses toned by Fabrizio, lipo-ed by Dr. Schwarzman, and then reinjected into their lips by a duly licensed aesthetician from the former People’s Republic of Wherever, where she used to be their Surgeon General but in America is only qualified to administer shots to your face and wax your bikini zone. The rest of us fatties have to subsist on Twinkies, french fries, and whatever genetically modified, congealed petroleum product Monsanto has dreamed up for us. And just when we were getting around to legalizing weed, somebody took the Twinkies away. It’s a world gone mad.

It’s actually cheaper to microwave a burrito and pop open a can of malted battery acid (read: Coca-Cola) than to prepare a salad. At least up front. Let’s not talk about the 190 billion dollars a year we spend on obesity related healthcare. It takes about 7 bucks a day to feed an adult mouth around here. That’s not taking into account the cost of utilities and appliances to refrigerate, boil, fry, bake, blend, puree or frappé your Pop-Tarts and tacos. So if you never, ever go out to eat, you can satiate your cake hole for one year at the bargain basement price of $2,555. Just shy of $200,000 over a lifetime. Maybe less, if you’ll buy Costco-sized pallets of freeze-dried, dehydrated, vacuum-packed for freshness, preservative-delivery foodstuffs with ingredients like sugar-enriched flour, partially hydrogenated vegetable oil, polysorbate 60, and yellow dye number 5. Just everything a growing tumor needs. Don’t forget to add in the cost of your own forklift. Although I’m told they include one for free when you meet the metric tonnage requirements on your Sam’s Club punch-card.

The chances are you’ll drive around 33 miles today as you make the rounds of work, food, errands and entertainment. All the hunter-gathery stuff you have to engage in to sustain this constant need you have for caloric intake and BTU’s.  All that consumption gets expensive pretty quickly. Thank goodness for that job of yours. On average, you’re probably making around 17 bucks an hour, and you’ll work about 2,000 hours this year. That’s just shy of 25% of the year. Take into account the other 30% of the year you spend sleeping (you lazy git!), and you wind up with 45% of your life left to brush your teeth, wash your car, clean out the gutters, and buy shit on Amazon. To say nothing of those episodes of Mad Men you have filling up your DVR. Don’t forget to schedule that 4 hour window for TV watching each day. That way you hit your quota of 2 solid months a year, two weeks of which is commercials. Now what to do about those 10 other pesky months?  Facebook, anyone?

Considering that you’ll hunt and gather about 38-40 tons of food over your lifetime, enough to fill a 53 foot semi wall to wall and floor to ceiling, and then magically turn it all into a river of sewage that has to be pumped out of your life and into a treatment plant before going into the local river, you might need a nest to feather and tuck all 53,655,000 calories away into. I mean, that’s a lot of energy! What in the world are you going to do with it? Well for starters, you completely replace all 50 Trillion cells in your body every 7 years. That means you’re literally a new person every seven years. Maybe that’s why marriages only tend to last about that long. The person you married no longer exists by the end of that time, and you have a completely new model of them on your hands. The old switcheroo has been pulled. Over the course of your lifetime, there will be around 11 versions of you. Hopefully one of them is someone you can live with. 

So while you’re busy building all those clones of yourself and passing them off as the “real” you, you’ll  probably need a house to do it in. That’s the American Dream, after all. It’ll set you back about $180,800 right now, on average. That’s if you pay cash, of course. If you have $18,000 laying around for a down payment, you could take out a 30 year fixed rate loan and make 360 payments of $869.00 (not including taxes, insurance, or utilities, and assuming you never, ever remodel or make repairs) and wind up paying about $313,050 for your  $180,800, 1,200 square foot filing cabinet.

Make sure it has more than 1 bathroom because you’ll spend a year and a half of your life in there. Brushing, tweezing, waxing, washing, shaving and just generally beating back the unending tide of dead skin cells, hair, fluids, oils, secretions and bacteria that you produce on a continual basis. All of which must be scoured off of you every 24 hours to prevent a toxic buildup of halitosis, or whatever other thing the advertisers can dream up to make you hate yourself. It’s revolting really, but the only cure requires you to permanently assume room temperature. Even then your hair and nails continue to grow for some time. You’re unstoppable. 

Then, once you’ve got that all squared away, you’ll have to decide what kind of cutlery defines you as a person, and try to pick out a couch you can live with for a few decades. What a hassle. Maybe you should just get a weekly rate over at Motel 6 and spend about $1,860 a month for a kitchenette and never worry about running up your light bill or taking 2 hour showers. Then it’s all sporks, red Solo-cups, Hot Pockets, free basic cable and Wi-Fi. Plus a mint on your pillow every single day. They’ll leave the light on for you. 

That all sounds very daunting, demoralizing even. I guess it kind of is. But take heart, you’ll earn about $2 Million over a lifetime of work in this country, on average. That’s an all-in number. Salary, overtime, benefits, vacation, sick pay, maternity leave, disability, Medicare, Medicaid, Social Security, life insurance, inheritance and tax returns.  If you get a Master’s Degree, it’ll be noticeably more.  Unless it’s in Art History. If you drop out of High School, it’s substantially less. Unless you can sing, dance, or play the guitar, and know the right somebody.  

So make sure you think of that before you decide to rob a bank to finance all the crap you don’t need, but still want to have so you can impress all the people you don’t care about. The Big Payday better be worth more than $2 Million. And make sure to get it in non-sequential bills. Otherwise you can’t spend it anywhere, since a sequentially marked bill takes less than 72 hours to show up on the Treasury radar. And lift with your legs, not your back. Money is heavy. $2 Million in $100 bills weighs 46 pounds. Don’t ask me why I know that, plausible deniability is your best defense. 46 pounds is a bitch to run with. Try filling a Home Depot 5 gallon bucket with water, and then carry it around your house for a minute. A duffel bag full of cash weighs more than that.

Probably better to just do your workaday routine, than to wind up with a 10 year hole in your employment history wherein you are not earning that portion of your lifetime $2 Million in cash and prizes. After that, you have to check that box on the job application that says “Yes” to whether or not you’ve ever been convicted of a felony, and join the ranks of the 3% of Americans adults who are “under correctional supervision”.  That’s 6 Million people, about the same as in Stalin’s Gulag, costing about $30,000 a mouth to provide with food, healthcare, and cable. 2.4 Million of them are in for simple drug possession. Hmmm. I don’t have cable… Maybe that robbery thing is starting to look a little better after all. I’ve never even seen an episode of the Sopranos. I’m sure a little embezzlement could earn me 3 hots and a cot for 18 months at Danbury Minimum Security.  Just keep your head down and it’ll all be over in no time.

Of course, money isn’t everything. In fact, after about $80,000 a year it stops being reported as a source of satisfaction or happiness. Seems like the sweet spot is between $30,000 and $80,000, or to break it down, $15-$40 an hour. After that? Well there’s only so many boats you can water ski behind. And money can’t really buy you happier relationships with your family if you didn’t have them already. It doesn’t retroactively erase abuse, neglect, mistreatment or name calling. It doesn’t give you or anyone else a better personality. It can take you on vacation and buy you nice stuff, but not make your kids behave better or love you more. Once it reaches the end of its usefulness, you have a museum of knick-knacks and grown up toys to curate, and… what else? Still, I’d rather cry in a mansion than a hot-sheet motel, so obviously it has its uses. I mean, those kids of yours will cost you about $235,000 a piece to feed, clothe, house, and educate. And that’s just till they’re 18. If you’re paying for that college degree… well, I just hope they pick a decent rest home for you. Be nice! 

If you don’t feel like taking my word on the whole money thing, you could always try winning the lottery. Sure the odds are crazy against it. You’re more likely to be killed by a falling airplane part. More likely to be struck by lightning, multiple times. More likely to win an Academy Award. More likely to become President of the United States. More likely to be killed in an extinction level event involving an asteroid. Good news though, winning the lottery is still more likely than being killed by a shark. So you’ve got that going for you, which is nice. And if you actually win, you’ve got about a 50/50 chance of holding on to the money for more than 5 years. A little worse than your odds of making a successful go of a marriage for the same time period. Easy come, easy go I suppose.

If you really want to get into a pool where you have a much better chance of winning, consider joining this one. There is an elite group of lottery winners that enjoys a rate of 1 in 45,613, as opposed to the usual Megamillions rate of 1 in 130 Million or more. This group is made up of a fairly average cross section of Americans. They hail from all 50 states and the District of Columbia. There is surprisingly little discrimination, although there is some, to be sure. The winners do tend to be men over women, and non-Hispanic Blacks, at that. Don’t hate the player, baby, hate the game. But in a surprise twist, the game does tend to favor older folks over the younger players. The great thing about this lottery is that if you don’t win today, you have another chance tomorrow. And the next day… This group of 6,884 people woke up this morning and went about their business just like you and me because most of them had no idea that they were going to die today.

They eat, sleep, work, shit, shop, have sex and watch TV like everyone else. But unlike the rest of us, today doesn’t represent .004% of their lifespan. Today is the margin call; the loan has amortized and the vig is due in full. To some it comes as no surprise; it’s a relief even. In my years as an orderly in a retirement home I watched dozens of people die, often very suddenly, and became convinced that the majority of them chose the date of their deaths with some deliberation. On Birthdays, Anniversaries and Holidays most often. Anecdotal evidence at best, but quite convincing when you watch it happen yourself. 

But for many others the imminence of their demise comes as an unexpected shock. They go to church or out grocery shopping or to the movies in blithe ignorance of the fact that some worthless drunk with 4 DUI’s is finally going to match speed and timing perfectly to intersect with the life of the first person they’ve ever killed. We’ll all react with appropriate shock and outrage. Then we’ll sentence them to 10-15 years of free food, healthcare and cable that costs us more than $300,000. 

Somebody else has no idea that the bullet with their name on it has been loaded into a gun. As crazy as it sounds, the person that ends them is most likely an acquaintance, family member or friend. And you’re actually much more likely to die by gunfire if you’re a criminal. Apparently, they all target each other, and any kind of felony conviction ups the odds of your death by lead poisoning 7 times more than John Q.

But waaaay more of the winners have simply made the last installment on their layaway suicide plan. Fired down the last cheeseburger, Twinkie or cigarette. Heart Disease, Cancer, and Stroke. The Big 3. No single smoke, midnight snack, or run to Mickey D’s could ever really be held to blame, I suppose. Just like no single snow flake is really to blame for an avalanche. Of course, every avalanche is made exclusively of snowflakes. It seems everything counts in large amounts.

Of our 6,884 winners, the majority of them will pass from old age. 1,585 of them are over the age of 80, which is pretty much the outside edge of national life expectancy. Of course, no one dies simply from being old, there is always a cause, like injury or disease. But once you reach a certain age, every kind of death is considered a natural cause. 

Heart attacks edge out cancer by a nose. The big C takes 1,574 souls a day into the great unknown, but those heart attacks are 1,588. Strokes come in at around 355 a day. Various and combined diseases like Diabetes, MS, AIDS, Lupus, TB, the Flu, Meningitis, E Coli claim around 1,402. Even some old chestnuts like Bubonic Plague and Rabies will crop up to take out a few from time to time.

Suicides and car accidents are about neck and neck with 101 and 90 per day, respectively. Accidental poisonings and falls come in at 87 and 73. Then murder. About 45 per day. That seems pretty low in a certain light. Chicago is the place you’re most likely to be done in by foul play, although violent crime is way down this year across the board in every state. It’s oddly comforting to think that you’re more likely to take a spill off a ladder or slip in the tub than to be shot or dismembered by a serial killer. Cars, cigarettes, and donuts actually turn out to be more dangerous in the long run than assault rifles and nuclear weapons.

Together boats, trains and planes take out a combined 4 people per day. You would need to fly once a day, every day, for about 123,000 years to actually die in a plane crash. In fact, of the people involved in crashes, which are damned few to begin with, almost 96% survive. Only about 7 people a day die in fires. And remember the SARS “epidemic”? It had a survival rate of over 98%. You’d think it was the Zombie Apocalypse the way people freaked out about it. You know what has a worse survival rate? Almost everything. The flu. Taking a shower. Driving to work. It seems we’ve spent a lot of time being afraid of the wrong things. 

When I was 9 my parents had a renter in a glorified shed that stood on the back edge of our property. His name was Duffy, he was an aircraft mechanic for McDonald-Douglas. He was a Viet Nam Vet and just about the coolest cat a 9 year old kid could ever hope to meet. He had an epic mustache, and facial scars that he got from a piece of shrapnel that took out 4 of his molars as it passed through both cheeks. They looked like dimples. He listened to a lot of Skynrd and Three Dog Night, and he dated a hot, blonde hippy-chick name of Daisy. Think Meg Ryan with a little more Va-va-voom. She was the first person I ever met who wore leather pants. Absolutely scandalous to my 9 year old brain. It’s hard to overstate the kind of cachet they had with a good little Star Wars nerd like me. They would take me out with them for ice cream from time to time, riding around in an open-top Jeep blaring “Never Been to Spain” and “One Day at a Time”. It was awesome. Right up to the time that I noticed Daisy never, ever wore her seatbelt.

I was raised by a 24 year Naval Veteran who, in his youth, had exited a moving convertible the hard way. Straight through the windshield. Over 75% of people ejected from vehicles die. And of the few survivors, most are horribly disfigured or paralyzed for life. He threaded the needle and came out in one piece, probably not any uglier than he already would’ve been, judging by his brothers. Consequently, the discipline of wearing a seatbelt was ingrained into me before I could walk, and defiance of that rule was the surest route to a swat on the bottom. So Daisy refusing to wear hers, not out of laziness but pure, incorrigible willfulness, was practically sacrilegious. Even more scandalous than her leather pants, if that were possible. When I questioned her on it, with the kind of concern and earnestness that only a child can generate, she told me that she had survived a car accident because of not wearing hers. She too had been ejected from a vehicle that had then rolled down an embankment and killed two of her friends. She had lived once because of doing the wrong thing. The stupid thing. The kind of thing that would have earned me a red bottom. The idea that my Dad’s advice and training could be so wrong, as evidenced by the practice and philosophy of the infallible hotness of the leather clad Daisy, was existentially horrifying to me. Perhaps my very first crisis of faith.

When I confronted my Dad with the evidence, all atwitter with my new knowledge, he did what he always did. He took a fear-filled kid being driven by emotion and, with infinite patience, shone the light of reason on the situation. He disarmed my fears with rational facts, like an Aikido Sensei easily redirecting an opponent’s energy back on itself. Daisy had somehow found one of the two times a day that a stopped clock told the right time, and then she'd set her watch by it. Sure, some people survive accidents because of not wearing a seatbelt. But the odds are 5 to 1 against. And you play the odds. The race may not always be to the swift, nor the battle to the strong… But that’s the way to bet. 

Every day we wake up in America, the lottery fires up again and selects its 6,884 winners. The gross odds are 1 in 45,613 that today will be your day. Of course that’s not really meaningful in a scientifically accurate statistical study. It goes down if you don’t smoke, goes up if you’re a non-Hispanic Black man of a certain age, etc. The only thing that’s certain is that sooner or later everybody’s a winner. We all know this, it’s not news. But we go right on with whatever our thing is. Skydiving, maybe. But more than likely it’s sitting in front of a screen of some sort, and combining our two favorite activities: eating and not moving. Worrying about—(Insert boogeyman here)—when we’re already doing the thing that is ending our lives one breath at a time. 

Somehow we convince ourselves that we are special. Beautiful and unique little snowflakes for whom the normal rules do not apply. But the quickest way to become a statistic is to imagine that you are not one. Numbers define our lives. For an actuarial analyst, everyone fits into a category, even those who think they’re rebels. That’s their category. Imagining that you’re not in a category, is a category. Actuarial tables exist for every kind of scenario and a surprising number of variables. One legged albinos and tap-dancing pimps have predictable life-spans that pan out if the statistical sample is big enough. Everything counts in large amounts. On a long enough timeline, the survival rate for everything drops to zero. But you play it by the numbers. Because, really, what else is there?

Whatever it is that we are all so busy doing, one thing is certain: The one who dies with the most toys… still dies. The hunting and gathering, the careers, are all fine and dandy, and necessary to sustain life. But to what end? What are you staying alive for?  Because whatever your particular thoughts of the afterlife, or lack thereof, the last number I’ll throw at you is 1. That’s how many times you go around, how many shots you get at it. The percent that is singularly you. 1.

But that does make you unique. Just like everybody else.