Pit and Polack?

Not going Poe on you. Instead, a reminder to self of why I’m in a house alongside a worked-out mine pit.

Has to do with hands. The dirty hands that made it happen.

Every year on the North Shore got more depressing as work was displaced to make way for more secondhand affluence. Commercial fishermen, loggers, truckers and miners, as it turns out, aren’t big on coffee houses and boutiques. If livelihood requires a two-hour haul one-way you don’t have a lot of spare time for idle midday chatter.

(I haven’t extensively studied it, but regular coffee housing is a somewhat leisure time activity often occurring following the well-fed, post-lunch pet waddle favored by the work-unencumbered wide loads. How’s that for biting nasty?)

Willingly living adjacent to a spent pit and saying so isn’t simply evidence of investing in a poor real estate neighborhood. To me, the dirty hands history that went into making all this is worth remembering. The direct past is a better teacher and companion than any narrative.

Out my kitchen window is visible evidence of multi generations of dusty-dirty labor in July and grim tough sledding in February. None of those folk had much spare left over for a boutique, either.

So is the Polack (adopted maybe working like a double-strength inoculation) by the pit doing a simple grouse?

I suppose, but also, No. Lamenting isn’t particularly constructive nor, tell true, as active as I’d like. In any case, it is not complaint to state obvious.

Not all work is equal in labor. Collecting and delivering a load of logs from a side road is not work equivalent to applying foamy décor to a latte. Be a rare day you’d swap those workers with success.

Fundamental changes happen as dirty-hand labor is displaced. Want to call it primary labor compared to secondary? That gives a sense of it, but the implication is more than that, I think.

Can you fault the driver waking in February’s pre-dawn freeze for thinking starting five hours later to make sandwiches in a warm room is labor deserving of equal pay?

Figuring out what’s fair isn’t easy as wand waving. How do you negotiate sale of an item you think is worth $10,000 when there are no takers? What’s it worth if no one buys it? Nice round number isn’t it? You hear in Seattle they’ll pay $7,000 for one of these. Great. Go to Seattle. But maybe not so great if it costs $9,000 to make the trip and return home.

On one level it feels totally wrong to bargain over a market value, in other words, what the market will pay. A thing is worth what someone will give you for it. But unless selling a traded, marketable commodity the price is what you can get. Turn down an offer of $5,000 for your precious and what do you have? The roundest number again, or less, into the negatives, if you have to maintain and insure your precious.

It might come down to the simplest of things. Do you stand firm on $10,000 that you can’t-won’t get because no one will pay or take the disappointing offer and move on?

Tough choice, but your choice, one made no easier if an outside authority sets “uniform” prices. Then think how much the starving would pay for bread. But the starving often lack a means to pay.

How much “gold” should the starving get to buy their food? A whole new trade reality kicks in. And, as a kicker, if you say the starving are entitled (along with everyone else) to food for subsistence aren’t we also accepting the notion of being entitled to the work-produce of others?

We have terms for those who are entitled to (own) the labor or property of others. Trying to figure out and then address all the ways life can be or is unfair will keep us busy a long, long, long time. Forever, maybe.

Being a dumb Polack (heard that often enough without it injuring me) sitting alongside a spent mine pit is a limited perspective of universal use.

What? I know. That sounds worse than trying to fix all the wrongs. I don’t stand a chance at that, so why bother?

There is, for me at least, value in staying grounded. The pit reminds me of laborers long gone, companies alive due to the effort of ordinary, dirty-hand workers.

Dumb Polack by an empty hole has it easy. Knows the daily news is salesmanship, distraction, an embarrassment. What? Aren’t we knowledgeable and smart? Smart as ancient superstition. Didn’t we see-live that with COVID? Do the sacred mask-dance and holy distance ritual to save us.

Vulnerable to fears, we’re (I was swept along as any) easily swayed by lip work of actor, news-reader, prostitutes, politicos and influencer forms of deceitful humans pedaling their glory at your expense.

The pit is empty, and I’m still dumb enough to know news and info are current forms of profitable deception. Some of the noteworthy examples flap lips so rapidly it’s a wonder they don’t helicopter up.

A friendly smile and leeching on your trust is the con-person’s bread, butter and life. Living for that, they might very well believe they’re being honest and helpful, to themselves at any rate.

My guides, which might not work for you, are dirty-hand basics and decentralization. Universal cure and good? No. a guide only. Less fluff, stuff and nonsense in the air makes life less overwhelming, almost manageable, I hope.

But wanting no kings (or queens) seems to result in everyone being a little ruler. Is that anarchy or freedom? Might be either, or neither. Not knowing, I’ll put off making the call.

Doing nothing, neither adding nor detracting, can be a decent choice. Can’t it?

Not meddling, not trying to fix everything is OK, isn’t it? I mean, how can we expect to fix things we don’t understand or control. After all, isn’t anarchy monarchy where everyone is king-queen or T, all anointed to govern, where all are ruled by whoever has power?

If nothing else, explains why revolutionaries kill one another.