Nine-to-five

 

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Charles Bukowski famously stated, "The nine-to-five is one of the greatest atrocities sprung upon mankind. You give your life away to a function that doesn't interest you."

I think that's where I part company with him, as I have never had a nine-to-five job even if I had a nine-to-five job, if you know what I mean. I always had a job that interested me and always thought I worked for myself and my own betterment and benefit. And the 'five' in 'nine-to-five' never stopped me from working longer, not for the paid overtime which I never claimed but for what it gave me in extra satisfaction.

I think I really hit my stride when I began contract work when it was not the hours I worked but the results I achieved, finally culminating in becoming self-employed and running my own business where I was free to work as long and as often as I wanted, usually well into the night and over weekends. "All work and no play ..." was never dull for me.

Reading the letter to his publisher John Martin in which he expressed his relief at having escaped full-time employment, I saw something that reminded me of a time-and-motion study I once did in a metal factory. There the operators stood like robots by their machines, performing the same routine movements many hundreds of times a day, day in, day out, year in, year out, with one operator telling me almost proudly he had been doing the very same job at the very same metal press for twenty years. I had to look into his eyes to see if there was any life left inside.

 

8-12-86 Hello John: Thanks for the good letter. I don't think it hurts, sometimes, to remember where you came from. You know the places where I came from. Even the people who try to write about that or make films about it, they don't get it right. They call it "9 to 5." It's never 9 to 5, there's no free lunch break at those places, in fact, at many of them in order to keep your job you don't take lunch. Then there's OVERTIME and the books never seem to get the overtime right and if you complain about that, there's another sucker to take your place. You know my old saying, "Slavery was never abolished, it was only extended to include all the colors." And what hurts is the steadily diminishing humanity of those fighting to hold jobs they don't want but fear the alternative worse. People simply empty out. They are bodies with fearful and obedient minds. The color leaves the eye. The voice becomes ugly. And the body. The hair. The fingernails. The shoes. Everything does. As a young man I could not believe that people could give their lives over to those conditions. As an old man, I still can't believe it. What do they do it for? Sex? TV? An automobile on monthly payments? Or children? Children who are just going to do the same things that they did? Early on, when I was quite young and going from job to job I was foolish enough to sometimes speak to my fellow workers: "Hey, the boss can come in here at any moment and lay all of us off, just like that, don't you realize that?" They would just look at me. I was posing something that they didn't want to enter their minds. Now in industry, there are vast layoffs (steel mills dead, technical changes in other factors of the work place). They are layed off by the hundreds of thousands and their faces are stunned: "I put in 35 years..." "It ain't right..." "I don't know what to do..." They never pay the slaves enough so they can get free, just enough so they can stay alive and come back to work. I could see all this. Why couldn't they? I figured the park bench was just as good or being a barfly was just as good. Why not get there first before they put me there? Why wait? I just wrote in disgust against it all, it was a relief to get the shit out of my system. And now that I'm here, a so-called professional writer, after giving the first 50 years away, I've found out that there are other disgusts beyond the system. I remember once, working as a packer in this lighting fixture company, one of the packers suddenly said: "I'll never be free!" One of the bosses was walking by (his name was Morrie) and he let out this delicious cackle of a laugh, enjoying the fact that this fellow was trapped for life. So, the luck I finally had in getting out of those places, no matter how long it took, has given me a kind of joy, the jolly joy of the miracle. I now write from an old mind and an old body, long beyond the time when most men would ever think of continuing such a thing, but since I started so late I owe it to myself to continue, and when the words begin to falter and I must be helped up stairways and I can no longer tell a bluebird from a paperclip, I still feel that something in me is going to remember (no matter how far I'm gone) how I've come through the murder and the mess and the moil, to at least a generous way to die. To not to have entirely wasted one's life seems to be a worthy accomplishment, if only for myself. yr boy, Hank

 

The movie "Factotum" is based on the author's highly autobiographical novel by the same name and a handful of stories about the poetically debauched author’s primary subjects: drinking, writing, women and gambling. But mostly drinking. That's where I also part company with him, as I haven't touched the stuff in years - except for an occasional glass of retsina because old Greek habits die hard. "Yamas!"

 

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The Unlikely Pilgrimage of Harold Fry

 

 

After a very uneasy night's sleep, I woke up this morning with the most unusual thought in my head: a long list of all those friends and acquaintances who have since died! The list was almost endless and seemed to give me a message.

And here comes the spooky bit: as I switched on my computer, I was confronted with a trailer of "The Unlikely Pilgrimage of Harold Fry"! I had seen the movie when it had come out a few years ago and could see the connection immediately. Had all those algorithms gone telepathic?

 

 

For those who haven't seen the movie, you may want to watch it here, if you understand Turkish, or read the book here, if you can read Chinese.

 

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Is there a Diogenes to give me a hand?

 

 

Diogenes, the ancient Greek philosopher, famously threw away his cup after seeing a child drink water from his cupped hands, exclaiming, "A child has beaten me in plainness of living." I think of Diogenes every time I look at the accumulation of clutter in and around the house. He would have a field day here!

For most of my life I lived like Diogenes, never accumulating anything, or if I did, disposing of it when I moved on, which was scores of times. Everything I owned fitted into one medium-sized suitcase and an expandable pilot case reserved for the heavy reference books I needed for my work (those were the days before the internet!) which I took onto an aircraft as hand-luggage to avoid paying for excess baggage.

The need to travel light through life became almost pathological, so much so that if I stayed in one place for too long — and six months was usually too long — I would do the occasional trial-packing to ensure it all still fitted into the one suitcase. If not, I would dispose of it at once.

Not that I needed role models but I did have two: Noel, my best friend for almost thirty years who never had much because he never had much — money, that is! — and Brian, a latterly-acquired friend who never had much because he didn't want to spend the money — of which he had too much, presumably because he never spent it! Both were living examples of the age-old quote "A man's riches are the fewness of his wants".

That was forty years ago! Against my better judgement, I then turned domestic with a vengeance, acquiring everything that's needed for a comfortable life — and even more that's not needed and only makes life more complex and therefore less comfortable — often in duplicate and even triplicate, to the point that I no longer own the possessions but the possessions own me. That once medium-sized suitcase would morph into several shipping containers if I ever had to move again — unless I did some very radical trial-packing. Is there a Diogenes to give me a hand?

 

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Checkmate, mate!

 

 

I've just been told that, after a hiatus of many, many months, the Batemans Bay Chess Club is resuming its weekly tournament this coming Wednesday at the Catalina Club. What wonderful news!

And the timing is wonderful as well: the chess tournament runs from 5 to 7 p.m., after which we can just move across to the restaurant for a barramundi dinner washed down with a glass (or two) of the old chardy.

Life doesn't get much better than that!

 

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P.S. Mention chess and some people are reminded of the scene in the movie "The Seventh Seal" where a knight meets Death and challenges him to a game of chess in order to save his life. Mention chess to me and I am reminded of my time in Saudi Arabia when I spent all those lonely nights in a five-star hotel with many other lonely expats, some who stood outside my hotel room door at one o'clock in the morning with a chess-board under their arm and, in order to save their sanity, asked me in a timid voice, "Feel like a game of chess?" - click here.

 

Raffles stands for all the fables of the exotic East!

 

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In June 1988, Noel Barber´s “Tanamera” was filmed at the Raffles

 

Somerset Maugham once remarked, "Raffles stands for all the fables of the exotic East!", and ever since this saying can be found wherever the logo of Singapore's Raffles Hotel appears.

 

Yours truly inside the Hermann Hesse suite

 

Maugham fell in love with the Grand Old Lady when he arrived for the first time in March 1921. He used to sit under the frangipani tree in the Palm Court. There he worked every morning until lunch. There and in what is today the spacious Somerset Maugham Suite, he corrected the galleys of his short story collection "The Trembling of a Leaf" and worked on a play called "East of Suez". When he returned to the hotel in 1925, he was writing some stories for "The Casuarina Tree", a rare compilation of indiscretions which helped multiply the anger against him that already escalated in the colonies.

 

Yours truly enjoying a Singapore Sling near the Long Bar

 

I stayed at the Raffles on a number of occasions - and on two occasions in the Hermann Hesse and the Somerset Maugham Suite - but, unlike Maugham, I never worked before lunch because it took me all morning to recover from the night before. However, once I had gorged myself on Raffles' famous tiffin, it was back and forth between Beach Road and the port of Sembawang to keep an eye on my employer's trans-shipment of tens of thousands of tons of sorghum and barley which came into Singapore in bulk to be bagged into 50kg-bags and reloaded onto one of our ships returning to the Middle East - click here.

 

Yours truly relaxing in the Palm Court

 

With the value of our cargoes running into the millions, flying into Singapore in the pointy end of the plane and putting up in the town's best hostelry was little more than a rounding error.

 

 

Those were the days, my friends; I thought they'd never end - but they did because in a fit of misdiagnosed homesickness I resigned, leaving me with no more than one last look at the legendary Raffles.

 

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