When I made a veritable day job of walking dogs, I did so having realized that in most meaningful ways, it was preferable to every other work environment I'd taken up, prior. Within eight months, I'd left town to study for two months in Vermont. Just three months after returning, I'd found a subletter for my room at Casa del Ajo and skipped town to play shows across South America, the US and Europe. Thereafter, my work was punctuated (albeit, less and less) by this or that tour, more study jaunts in Vermont, a trip to Palestine, weekend conferences, etc. In short, my job was more or less a mechanism by which I sustained routine (if not entirely constant) motion. Generally, that was in place of any authentic stability, but the jury was still out on such things being altogether desirable at that point, anyway. So, in the end, work rarely felt like work. It was merely what I did from 12-3pm, when I wasn't doing whatever it was that made that particular day interesting.
Upon launching Brighter Days, I found myself wet-headed in the kitchen, filling the coffee grinder earlier and earlier. And the previously optional administrative elements of my work (not to mention my resistance to them) began swallowing up more and more of my day. Mind you, this is down to a relatively conscious decision to fuse my livelihood with the fairly radical reconstructive vision of society that animates most other aspects of my life; a decision I have zero cause to mourn. Nonetheless, what was once a line of work I relished for its simplicity and comparatively undemanding character is increasingly something on which I could spend (quite seriously) every waking minute.
Granted, there's delegation; we're a collective after all. I'm shitty with numbers, and have a proven record off piss poor attention to financial matters. So, I play as little role in such things as I reasonably can. Nonetheless, there's a seemingly bottomless creative potential in what we've set out to do, which leaves me with any number of other tasks. Where a business website might traditionally hem rather closely to the promotional/service template, ours can also serve an informative and radicalizing function beyond what is strictly lucrative or instrumental to our individual material interests. It constitutes both a step past capitalist logic (i.e. the radical possibilities of merely supplanting Use Value for Exchange Value) and an attempt to forge new connections; to render tangible what we see to be the nakedly apparent bridges between the world of a handful of bike-happy anarchists (and the constellation of radical social projects in which it resides) and the worlds of people who stumble on to our website. It's an opportunity to challenge assumptions, pose questions, and foment a sort of cognitive dissonance that lingers long after the banalities of the company-client relation have been resigned to background noise, or abandoned altogether.
Search all you like. There's no such volume in the "... for Dummies" section of Barnes & Noble (or Busboys, for that matter). The same goes for merely experimenting with infrastructure and organization in a self-managed workplace. The actual labor that constitutes the face of what we do is now little more than a footnote, really. And what resides beneath it is by all indications relatively infinite.
Needless to say, Lindsey's arrival on the scene threw a whole other set of variables into the fray. It's not even an equation I've entirely worked out, at this point. Being emotionally available and present, while dragging around this whole other bag of (rather compelling an exciting) unknowns is not the sort of thing for which there exists some sort of kill switch. Life just doesn't work that way, and there's something altogether more demanding than that in the challenge. If there weren't, it'd be a pretty cheap and uninteresting narrative, I gather.
Which brings me back (nearly full circle) to the theme I explored in the first entry of this blog: Becoming; the recognition that one cannot be what one was, that one must forge new resonances, new positions, new ways of orienting oneself to the world with which one is greeted each morning. It's relevant because a few days ago I woke up to a world in which I was someone who needed a vacation. I'm not even kidding. The endlessly multiplying lines of flight (all more or less equally compelling) arising in the creative -- and by that, I mean predominant -- sphere of my life had proliferated to the point of being a single, dulling frequency, utterly indistinguishable from one other. And my orientation to it all had become a sort of averse and passive lockgroove of convincing myself that "It can wait", which in turn became its own static feedback loop.
Besides, I needed a new belt. Which obviously meant going to NYC. More on that later.
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