Lather Gets a Job

What’s that expression about “best laid plans?” Today was supposed to be the first day of “two-a-days” with the workouts but my brother needed me to keep their dog for a week so I drove down and met him halfway to collect my neice-dog. She’s a lab too so she fits in well with my lab-oratory here. She’s full of puppy energy but the rest of my boys are adjusting. (Dennis isn’t thrilled but it was rough going with him and Willie and Sydney at first and now they’re all buddies. Dennis, for the few of you who don’t know by now, is the cat.) Because I had to make that drive, I didn’t make it back for the 13:00 Crossfit but after I had my afternoon powerlifting workout with Miles, I’m not really sure I could have done both. We kicked our own asses in there today. By the time I got home and jumped in the pool to cool off, I could barely swim.

With regard to the underearning recovery, here’s where I’m at with that: I’ve been approaching recovering form that “hopeless state of mind and body” by incorporating many of the tools that I used to stop drinking all those years ago. Presumably the “bottom line behavior” for people seeking to recover from compulsive underearning (giving away time and talent et al) is– well, underearning and so that would seem to indicate that to stay “sober” from underearning, one would need to not do that on a daily basis which would mean if one is not underearning (on a daily basis), one is earning. And in the recovery communities around this issue, abstaining form underearning isn’t simply earning money– in fact one can be seen as still underearning if they are earning less than what the market will bear or earning doing something that is not where God has blessed them with skills, talents, and passion. I know damn well I could go up there to WalMart or Home Depot or more likely both and get jobs and work hard and bring home a paycheck and voilà, no more underearning, right? Not hardly. It’s not that easy and not only is that not recovery from underearning, it’s in support of a very sick capitalist system that just looooooooves exploiting willing underearners. Now does that mean that I consider myself too good to do anything as a job that’s not inside the definition of my prosperous vision for myself? I think my work resume can prove that’s not the case. I’ve had a lot of those jobs. Gratefully, right now, I don’t have to do that in that I have a job helping vets and a job that offers a tool of support to the recovery community and that provides me with a good income as I move forward to open myself to greater and greater levels of abundance doing what I love. It’s all a process and sometimes slow-going but I’m seeing a lot of change since last September 1.

The biggest area where I’d like to see more rapid improvement in the area of recovery from underearning is with clarity around the way I use my time. The key is to keep good records and be more mindful about working off of a schedule. I’m kind of what might be called a “time drunk.” I will chase a butterfly for half the day and spend the other half coloring a picture of it or writing a poem about it without ever giving any thought to how I’m generating income that day. Not that that’s too awful a way to be. I always have loved that Jefferson Airplane song, Lather. Don’t you just love Jefferson Airplane? If you don’t love Jefferson Airplane, you should ask yourself what you’re doing being friends with someone like Jeff Key. In the 80s I was listening to 20 year old music like Jefferson Airplane, Janis Joplin, The Doors, The Beatles, Led Zepplin, The Grateful Dead and others while also savoring some of the greater talents of the day like Culture Club, Queen, Blondie, Abba, Depeche Mode, and a bunch of others. I am getting so off track here. I was talking about relating to the title character song “Lather” by Jefferson Airplane (it was written for drummer Spencer Dryden). I still relate profoundly to Lather– but I have to make sure the bills are paid and I want to interrupt that toxic ideology that artists and activists should be poor. Poverty for artists has been fetishized for far too long and I want to help put a stop to that. If those bastards on Wall Street can get rich off destroying the world, maybe we artists can get rich off saving it.

See y’all tomorrow.