Collective Gelt

Here is a concept that has altered very little over the years. The basic premise is that within societies, there is this thing called gelt, gold coins, and everyone bears a shared responsibility for collecting, shining, and earning them.

The issue is how do you spread around something that isn’t digital? Do you mail it? And if so, how much? Does it make sense to pay for insurance? What about people able to make it, ya know, counterfeiters? 

What are we supposed to do with that fact? Don’t spend it all in one place. How there are people who don’t want someone else’s gelt, preferring to procure their own. 

Do we all invest together, sitting down with a financial planner on a society-wide basis? It sounds complicated, but if that’s what needs to happen, then fine, sure, let's do it. We could get a safety deposit box and exchange passwords to ensure everyone goes along with the plan. There’s not much you can do if someone refuses to participate though. You can’t just give someone gelt, leaving it on their doorstep. They might hand it to the mailman or a neighborhood voyeur. 

Some people think that gelt should only be personal, hidden in a stash or piggy bank. This individual basis makes it so some hoard gelt, believing the stuff possesses some sort of special quality.

The main problem I see with collective gelt is that far too often it’s covered in tin foil and made entirely of chocolate. Not bad, but what happens when it’s left in the sun? Honestly, how far would edible currency get you at Davos before the economists laughed you off the slopes? 

Happy Hannukah. 

Nom Nom Nom

 

For those seeking a cross between anonymity and immortality, noms provide a warm security blanket of notoriety. Notice how I didn’t say, “names.” This is, like a baguette or some au jus, something the French have accepted as their nominal, national legacy. 

Aside from the famous noms of du plume and de guerre – there happen to be others, for which, only the most confused and confusing individual could wish to adopt on a semi-daily basis. 

Nom du jour is a lot like soup du jour, except one does not assess a name solely on drinkability. People wishing to shed a name and try on a new one with each passing sun, a nom du jour is what they’re looking for. They don’t need a reason to pick a new identity, aside from boredom, something which creeps into their psyche around 3 or 4 pm every day. It can be a lot of pressure to come up with a new name, but the good news is that when selecting a below average moniker, one only has to maintain it for 24 hours (less when you factor in sleep).   

Nom de la mer is an idea I stumbled on body surfing at Rockaway Beach, not wanting to reveal my true name to alleged authority figures. When asked by a nosy park ranger for some identification, I said it was Don Sepio. Luckily, neither Greek mythology or deciphering anagrams are part of standard curriculum at park ranger school. 

Nom de la classe gives students the power to change into someone else for a chance. You might still fail the course, but by becoming a new person, it helps separate your own sense of self with the poor grades marking up your transcript.

 

Some people like to become different people in the bedroom (nom de la chambre) or the bar (nom de taverne) or on a transatlantic flight (nom de voler). While others prefer adopting their pet’s name (nom de chien) or see a clear dividing line between themselves with stimulants and without (nom avant la café). There are those who believe they are different on stage (nom en dansant) than when they are eating (nom au dîner). 

Still, most of the aforementioned noms are general, not specific. The purpose of most is to achieve a sort of common universality. Take the mangnificnet nom en mangeant une déliceuse prune. This is not about someone who adopts a different name while eating just any old stone fruit, but only a delicious plum. Many a rascal has opted for the nom en étant un idiot. There are many, many more. For the blizzard lovers among our ranks, a nom de la neige de plus six pouces wouldn’t bat an eye lash at any accumulation under half a foot. Religious minded folks with a devious sensibility are often found to have a pew preferred nom pour Dieu, in case their birth name has too many sins on the ledger. 

But that’s just to nom a few.

It Could Be Better

There’s a tendency by perpetual optimists to couch everything in terms of hope and positivity. Good things and happy thoughts. The sweet stuff. This gives most events a nice veneer of respectability and acceptance, making it seem unseemly to complain about anything in polite company. I consider this method dishonest since it uses trickery to repress a natural human emotion. We have entire industries based around complaints, dubbing them departments, yet after a couple glasses of wine people shouldn’t whine. How is that fair? 

Complaining is what most people do best, especially around the holidays. To some, the holidays are about togetherness and thankfulness, but I don’t see that possible when so many could have so much more. The way it’s often positioned is that if you look at the whole of human history and pluck out our pleasant temporal nugget, this is inarguably the best time to be alive. You don’t have to worry about being eaten by roaming beasts or beaten by Roman legions. You have a decent Internet connection, a microwave, and a fridge full of solid food (alongside a couple liquids too). Your closet isn’t empty and neither is your bank account. But you can’t help but think things could be just a little bit better.

You’re not a billionaire. You’re not a young, capricious king, looking to expand territory. You haven’t paraglided today. And your newest child’s stroller doesn’t hover a few millimeters off the ground. 

Therein lies the first of many reasons to complain about your situation. You want to be thankful for what you have, or, as the song goes, what you got, but how can you be?  

So this Thanksgiving, don’t be thankful, be determined to get more out of life. This new direction starts with your dinner plate. If you dominate the side dishes and win the Risk like struggle for dining supremacy, 2022 might just be a great one. Right now you ought to be strategizing how to best secure the most helpings. This isn’t dinner at a Chinese restaurant where sharing is the norm. The point is to pile each dish high and by the time your relatives approach the buffet, the pickings are slim and cold. You’ll have them thinking how to optimize their food selections during future holidays. 

Happy heaping. 

No Principals

I don’t have any principals and it’s really starting to show. My whole life is governed by nothing and no one remotely resembling a high school principal. An individual redolent of an educational epoch when double-breasted blazers were all the rage and one’s pocket square was the sole place for genuine self-expression. With shoulder patches, the options were far more limited. Tartan plaid was about it, the repurposed kilt from a Scotsman sick of feeling sudden drafts.

But not having any principals is simply the beginning of my bizarre journey down the unsupervised corridors of civilization. Not only do I not have principals, but I don’t have vice principals either. Nor do I have people in my life called “deans.” What if you’re a dean who’s also named Dean? Double Dean? What then? 

Nevertheless, allow me to digress. So, as you can see, I have no principals, no headmaster, no teachers and surely no hall monitors in my relative peer group wearing a reflective sash and carrying a clipboard cataloging the movement of every student in the proverbial locker lounge. 

It’s not only the people who are different in my world without principals. There are other things that have changed, too. This means I have no homework, no detentions, no suspensions and definitely no expulsions. There aren’t grades, classes or extracurricular activities to speak of. There’s no band practice with a failed tubadour living out his Sousian dreams of gridiron glory through halftime heroics – melodies at midfield. There are no books with a thick spine and fine print taxing my vertebra. There aren’t janitors sweeping up after me either. No nurse whose solution to every ailment is a sugary cough drop and to “walk it off.”

There’s no school spirit, no pompoms or locker combination to remember. I have no need for buses, lunch trays or school plays. That’s the thing about not having principals. It never stops there.   

Types of People

There are only two types of people in the world. People who believe there are two types of people in the world and people who don’t. But what about Mars, or is that now considered part of the world in the same way East Rutherford, New Jersey gets lumped in with the long, greedy arm of the Empire State? Are there two people up there, red-blooded renegades revved up for reality on the Red Planet? I guess there are two more types of people in the world. Those who want to go to Mars and those who want an almondless Mars bar, not realizing that it’s just the Euro-version of a regular ol’ Milky Way.

Like everything from telegraphs to fax machines, this is a rather recent development. There used to be three types of people in the world. People who believed in God, people who didn’t believe in God and people who believed they were God. Sadly, the prophet-sharing model has made its way only partially to the solar-paneled landscapes of Silicon Valley. You might say that certain famous billionaires believe themselves to be Gods. But I doubt it. If these gents really thought that were the case, they wouldn’t be wearing helmets or perfecting safety devices on their vehicles. Deities don’t require spacesuits – space is their home. It’s like asking someone to wear a helmet around the house. What’s heaven if not the Heavens? The self-proclaimed Gods I notice are those sleeping in trash-filled vestibules on public transportation. To be a true believer, you need to be a little crazy. 

Before that, there were four types of people in the world. Those who thought the world was flat, those who thought the world was round, those who didn’t think much about it and then those who didn’t really understand geometry. 

But I guess before there were two types of people in the world there were simply two people in the world. I wonder what they did to pass the time. It usually starts by sharing a Twix.

Health Code Violations

Over the last several months, several anonymous people have complained to me about the direction this delicatessen is headed. So before getting started, Dave and Steve, thank you for your courage. You’re going to need it now that everything is out in the open. I wouldn’t be up here lecturing my employees if it wasn’t for your efforts. I have noticed some disturbing trends that are affecting this business. And it has little to do with the rodent family in the cupboard or the soapless bathroom going on 7 months now. It's about how we speak to each other.

There was a time when we all spouted off willy-nilly about silly things. Not anymore. I realized how giving customers familiar labels creates certain issues that leaves other customers feeling left out. No one at this establishment is hungry but rather, they are people experiencing hunger. No one is starving, but rather they are people experiencing starvation. No customer of ours should ever be responded to with the casual, “thanks, boss, how ya doin’ boss” as it implies the very social hierarchy we’re trying to dismantle. “Thanks, equal,” works much better. 

When I told Steve, “you have a genius level IQ” he called me out for improper pronoun use. “We have a genius level IQ,” he said, having recently uncovered my long-lost Stanford-Binet under the wheel of cheddar in the broom closet. He was right, naturally, and I was left to apologize and hope for his hasty forgiveness. Our pork products are differently cured, speaking to the equanimity I’m attempting to engender. Before you’d have pancetta partisans arguing with the bacon brigade as the ham heroes sat and watched. Remember, there are many types of tomatoes, not just beefsteak Jersey juicers. Avoid the use of adjectives like “delicious” or “spicy,” as it can be dehumanizing to those with blander palates. Avoid terms like “slice,” “cut,” “chop,” or other terms with violent imagery. A phrase like “thinly-sliced prosciutto” might have the opposite effect and force our thicker customers into a sudden onslaught of tears. Avoid exclamatory statements of joy like “Oh baby” as not everyone in the store maybe be able to procreate. 

So last night I put together a comprehensive handbook of these sorts of things, with an index, glossary, photos, and a lengthy acknowledgement section. However, just as I was preparing each crease for this meeting, a member of my staff informed me that "handbook" is problematic. There are people without hands out there, who dream of shakes and fist pumps, never to feel like the firm grip of a colleague's palm after a job well done. 

At first, I thought, you really have to hand it to these people, they sure think of everything. But then I realized, even that I couldn’t do. A footbook has same drawbacks, with the footless ruing the footloose for constantly putting their best foot forward. I opted for a compromise that didn’t reference either, calling it a plain old book. Then someone told me that it might make the illiterate in the group feel singled-out. I wondered how they would even know, not being able to read and all. I shrugged and said, if not a book, what then? A boo perhaps? No, that involves paranormal problems, making ghosts feel even more unseen than normal. A bo? Those lacking a basic pituitary function might feel anxious, though they would have an odd way of showing it, not being able to sweat and all. A b? What would the other 25 letters think watching as the second letter of the alphabet is placed into a position of arbitrary importance? I scratched my chin for a few good minutes before saying, maybe it could be called nothing. Not the word nothing, but nothing nothing. Like Oxygen. I really thought that could work. Since these rules for communicating are as essential as the very air we breathe. I impressed myself at such an unexpected epiphany. How naïve I must have been to think such a thing. What about Carbon Monoxide? It’s as colorless and odorless as I'm thoughtless. Just because something is categorized as a silent killer doesn’t mean it doesn't have feelings, too. 

That’s when I gave up.

Lines in the Sand

 

I’m one of those people who visits the beach out of season, when the surfers, swimmers, and drone-operators are gone. But to me, it's as ripe as a mirabelle plum during high season. On days when the weather is subpar to some, but superb all the same.

Writing, though a compulsion of mine, has grown exhausting given the narrowing of available platforms. I can only write by hand or on a word processor. I’ve never been a graffiti guy (perhaps it was the fumes that got to me). Our canvases are quite limited, despite what online prognosticators claim. Sidewalks are only suitable when wet. Windows and mirrors only viable when fogged up. Snow only comprehensible, well, let’s just say when particularly colorful. 

As a writer in need of a medium, I avoided making an appointment with a psychic (foretelling myself ignoring their predictions, thus skipping the process altogether) and headed to the beach. 

The beach is a great place to write. Drawing lines in the sand gets a bad wrap, but if you ask anyone who has a handle on cuneiform, they will surely sing its praises. Then again, talking to ancient sarcophaguys, doubly mummified under the weight of museum-grade plexiglass, gets old after a while – as do you. But they know a thing or two about sand and making the most of it. 

Lines in the sand aren’t ultimatums. How could they be? It’s not like they last, given the tide. It’s an empty gesture, a way to blow off a little ocean steam. The beach is beyond censorship, unless you consider Poseidon’s twice daily tidal onslaught something akin to a marine ministry of truth. Is it possible that right after writing something wildly offensive a rip current arrives, sweeping you out to sea for a date with Davy Jones? Of course. I wouldn’t call that censorship though. It’s more like accountability. We need people who take a look at our writing and provide feedback. People who, while they can't necessarily write themselves, have an eye for what words sound best and in what order. Folks who understand that writing needs rhythm, timing and a sense of both song and dance. Writers can't be their own masters, unless you believe blogging should inherit the earth. We all need people who have a keen sense of verbiage. We all need editors. Right?