Over the years, I’ve had the great privilege of dabbling in a number of serious and unserious professions. By never holding a job for more than a couple days, I’ve allowed fresh ideas to take a hold of me whenever they materialize. When things really get going, succumbing to every sudden career impulse is remarkably liberating. I cobbled shoes, I wrote hit pop songs, I laid grout. It’s an interesting life, especially come tax season. But where has it all led me? Back where I started, I suppose. Each new job gets harder and harder to obtain, as my references dry up, tired of being called upon week after week.
What I’ve come to accept is that following each stint as an extreme caddy or a luxury plumber, I find it impossible to relate to the average person. Someone who’s only held a few jobs in their day can’t understand the nature of a man who’s interviewing for something new on his first day. During orientation, I've already moved on. I’m ready, I think, to settled down career-wise, sensing my professional restlessness abating. Exciting, don’t you think?
Independence is paramount, obviously. So whatever I do, I must do alone. Except for the dozens of contractors on the payroll and unannounced visitors stopping by assessing my progress. I just have the overwhelming urge to build something. But what? I tried academia, believing there existed a place where I could become comfortably walled off from criticism, totally separated from inconvenient facts, protected by tenure and microfiche. Secluded from my peers, cloistered from my enemies, and buttressed by my own false notions. Yet even there, it proved next to impossible. The students never let me have my way. They picketed, they complained, they wasted juicy Jersey tomatoes - hurling them at the board during a controversial lecture.
That’s why I’m building an actual Ivory Tower in my backyard. Sure, I'll have to cut down some trees and displace a few bird families. But it's about time they understood the concept of eminent domain.
I’ve always been attracted to big ideas - literally. But clunky, tortured metaphors are one thing. They exist only on the page, giving people the freedom to turn away and ignore. You can’t do that in this case – not when I’m finished. Choosing to live inside a metaphor takes a special amount of gumption, resilience, and insanity. Think of all the fools – some very rich indeed – building a mancave as a terribly misguided subterranean response to married life. Why go down when you can rise above it?
I no longer wish to explain how my interests are unique and different. I want people to look at the glistening structure in my garden and get it immediately. The trouble with ivory is that it’s hard to come by. There’s only so much vintage scrimshaw to be found along the dusty windowsills of rural antique malls. Trace amounts of the substance are found in obscenely-shaped cloves of elephantine garlic. But I can’t rely solely on those for my tower. It’ll permanently alter my breath, rendering even the most powerful mouthwash painfully inadequate. No, I’ll have to get whaling again, picking up the harpoons of my strange New England forbears. Unlike them though, I’m not in it for the spermaceti.
When it’s all done, you’ll see. It shall be my proudest accomplishment. That’s until I discover I’ve violated a number of local and state building ordinances. They’ll force me to raze the whole thing, piece-by-piece, selling the ivory for scrap in conjunction with a Lion’s Club bake sale. The tower will then exist in myth, memory, and drone footage taken by a precocious teenager on my block with aspirations to help grow the current surveillance state. If you miss it, there’s always the Freedom of Information Act. Kids today don't want to be the next Snowden, they want to rat out the next Snowden. And that makes all the difference.
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