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Gonna Spend My Cash

“Why do you buy organic bananas?” asked an older visitor. “They have a peel, so pesticides won’t transfer into what you eat.”

I told him that I had seen a documentary that showed pesticides being sprayed on a banana plantation while workers were picking the bananas, because the corporation that owned the plantation didn’t want to stop the harvest long enough to spray pesticides and interrupt the work. So for me, it wasn’t about the bananas, but about the workers.

“I hear that,” commented our visitor. He then went on to relate that when he was young, picking hops in the Fraser Valley, the company also sprayed pesticides while the hops were being picked.

We try to keep ethical and sustainability issues in mind when we make our purchases. Fair Trade coffee and chocolate are frequent purchases of ours. If you search “Child Labour and Slavery in the Chocolate Industry”, you will come across an article by the ‘Food Empowerment Project’ that gives some details about how the chocolate industry is involved in the worst possible labour conditions in the world in our time.

Yet, we are inconsistent in our efforts, even as far as buying chocolate. Some fair trade and organic goods are only sold in stores that are some distance away from our home, and thus we would have to spend more time, money, and fuel, to go and purchase those goods – which creates an opportunity cost and additional environmental sustainability issues in itself.

Every purchasing decision is on some level a compromise, and there are so many such decisions that have to be made. The individual consumer in our society should not have to bear this burden alone – but our society is insufficiently committed to ethical purchases, production, and environmental sustainability, and mostly just sees it all as a bother, so it seems unlikely that governments will be elected in the near future which will encourage and support change on a broader level. There are powerful corporate and political forces that benefit from the status quo, combined with a societal inertia and malaise, so this is likely to be an ongoing issue.

While I want to continue moving toward an ethical and sustainable lifestyle, I also really do enjoy getting paid. Getting a paycheque provides a bit of a sense of recognition for work accomplished, and I feel that it’s natural to want to celebrate that. There’s a cloud of guilt that lingers over progressives, because of the level of ethical compromise involved in almost every act of every day. Even sitting at this keyboard to type has environmental consequences.

So my song “Gonna Spend My Cash” relates to that internal conflict of feeling joy and wanting to celebrate my remuneration, while at the same time wanting to be a more ethical and sustainable consumer. I haven’t ever heard a song like it, so it needed to be written, in my opinion. Here are the lyrics.

Gonna Spend My Cash

Gonna spend my cash, ‘cuz I got my pay
There’s value in a dollar and that’s okay
Gonna spend my cash, but watch where it goes
Cuz I want it to be love and not blood that flows

I’d be lying if I’d say gonna give it all away
Got a family with dreams and bills to pay
I earn, so I’ll share, but I won’t throw it away
There’s a balance in the balance, and a price to pay

It would be great to get around the degradation
It would be great to get rid of financial oppression
It’s tough to fight a system that I live in
To avoid a depression, but reduce my possession

Gonna spend my cash, ‘cuz I got my pay
There’s value in a dollar and that’s okay
Gonna spend my cash, but watch where it goes
Cuz I want it to be love and not blood that flows
Cuz I want it to be love and not blood that flows

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I Do What I Do (And I Don’t Pay No Mind)

It was an understandable mistake. The first time the recording studio producer typed in the name of the song, it came out “I do what I want”. That one word difference, though, was too much – I had to change it back to the original “I do what I do…”.

The song is not so much about doing what I want, as about continuing to press forward – without being distracted by unproductive criticism, or past mistakes, or regret. It’s about finding meaning in work – although getting paid for what you do is lovely and provides resources to meet goals, meaning is what helps a person to endure and persist. It’s about being prepared for opportunity by putting in the necessary groundwork so as to be ready to go when the right time comes. It’s about being authentically oneself.

It’s not a complicated song, and the words in it aren’t particularly difficult or unusual. The grammar is definitely not proper. But all that stuff in the paragraph I just wrote, was stuff I wanted to express in a straightforward way and with a tone of dogged persistence and a sense that there is a wealth of experience beneath the words.

Here are the lyrics;

I do what I do, and I don’t pay no mind
to what naysayers say, or what muckrakers find.
I do what I do, and I don’t pay no mind.

Like everyone else, I’ve left stories behind.
Some I think of fondly, some I’d like to rewind.
I’d like to retouch some of my history,
but I’m not looking back, ‘cuz that’s no place to be.

If you put in the work, your heart will be satisfied –
it’s not seeking reward, it’s not stroking your pride.
If the world needs what you bring,
you know you won’t be denied –
but the far greater thing is the warm glow inside.

I’ll sit back and wait –
I’ll know the time when I see it.
I won’t rush to be great –
don’t wanna fake it, but be it.
I’ll sit back and wait –
I’ll know the time when I see it.

Well, I do what I do, and I don’t pay no mind
to what naysayers say, or what muckrakers find.
I do what I do, and I don’t pay no mind.

**The other unusual thing about this song, for me, is that it’s in 6/8 time. Generally my songs are in 4/4 time, but this is the first of two of my most recent recordings that is in 6/8.

You can find my music on any streaming service, and it can be downloaded as well from Apple Music and from Amazon, to name two.

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Getting On That Train (Living With a Non-linear Mind, Prologue)

Sometimes my mind just runs along all on its own, and I couldn’t tell you what I’m thinking about if you asked me.

And there are moments when that rambling mind grabs up many of its assorted ideas and weaves them together into a new whole, something special, that was not there before.

The ideas conglomerate and shift until they make a new picture, or a new set of pictures, like a kaleidoscope. And when that happens, I often feel like I have to go with it. I have to get on that train, and take those ideas where they are going to go. For a couple of reasons.

First off, if I do let go of that new set of ideas, I’m taking a risk. Something might happen to scramble them all – I might get distracted and forgetful, and just drop them all and they’ll lie shattered in a confused pile for a long time before I can take them up again.

More likely, though, I just won’t be able to concentrate on anything else. My mind will have grabbed that set of ideas, and if I don’t go with it I will find it difficult to concentrate. My dreams will be full of confusion and shifting scenes that I can’t keep track of. My conversations will tail off and people will wonder if I’m having a stroke.

So I have to, if you will forgive the cliche’, seize the moment. If everything has come together into a complete picture, I have to somehow record that assemblage of thought. It’s a kind of drive, which is equal parts unpredictable and infrequent.

So what counts as a goal for me, is to in some way make progress toward my larger goals – even small progress – on a daily basis. Blog. Practice guitar. Do things around the house so that I can be more efficient or have free time later. Listen to music I haven’t heard before, to stimulate my mind. Anything.

Because I can’t count on inspiration, but I can do my part to be ready for it if and when it comes. If I’m gonna get on a train, I better make it to the station on time – so attending to the daily tasks are what gets me there.

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Seeing Value

In the past year, I met a goal I had set about something trivial. I have a point to this story… you’ll have to be a bit patient, though, to get to it.

I wanted to be the top-ranked Facebook Scrabble player in my peer group, in all 3 categories of highest ranking, highest word score, and highest number of 7+ letter words, all at one time. I did it by taking an approach to the game that most people have never tried, as far as I can tell.

The key to doing well at Scrabble when you break it down, I figured, is to get more point value out of your letters than your opponents do.

If you were to take a superficial look at the value of Scrabble letters, you would probably say that the 5 most valuable letters are the Q and the Z (worth 10 points), the X and the J (worth 8 points), and the K (worth 5 points).

The way I play the game, the most valuable letters are S, R, E, I, and D, in roughly that order. Why? Well, I figure that since players get 50 bonus points for using all 7 of their tiles at once, the best way to get the most out of your letters would be to get the most 7 letter words. And, the way to do that would be to use word-extenders (plurals, suffixes, prefixes). And so, the letters that show up most often in plurals, suffixes, and prefixes would be letters to hold onto, in order to get the most out of them. S is the letter most used for plurals. -er and -ed, -ier and -ied are common suffixes. re- and de- and dis- are common prefixes. There are other letter combinations I consider after that, but you get the idea. In addition, if you add an s or an e or an r onto many existing words, you get a new word or version of the existing word, providing a connection point for your word placement.

So when I play, it’s more about the letters that I don’t use in a turn than the letters I put down. I will often sacrifice the opportunity to score more points on one turn, taking the chance that by holding onto my more ‘valuable’ letters I can score a ‘bingo’ bonus for using all 7 of my tiles in a turn to come, depending partly on luck to do so.

I reasoned that, while many other players may have a larger vocabulary than I do, and while some players (not likely in my peer group, but among ‘random’ opponents that may be chosen for me) may be tempted to purchase the ‘Teacher’ app on Facebook Scrabble (which shows you the highest possible scoring word from the previous turn), if I was willing to play in an unorthodox way I could potentially win games by giving myself more opportunities to score large numbers of points.

And, long story short, it worked. I had a theory, based on reasoning; I applied my theory; I met my goal. The reason it worked was that I was able to see value where others did not, and was willing to take chances that others were not willing to take.

There are applications here. Sometimes we may be tempted to take the easily measured values of our society – amount of money, titles and status, letters behind names – as gospel for how we ought to measure the value of people. But all people have contributions to make in our lives and in society, and maybe what really needs to happen is that we need to take a different point of view in order to see the value that is being overlooked. Maybe if we can work as a community, we can all extend our abilities in order to add up to more than any of us as individuals can achieve alone.

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Living With A Non-Linear Mind; Making Yourself Useful (Final Segment)

You are walking down a pathway on a sunny day. Suddenly, someone bursts out of some bushes beside you, bumps into you, stops long enough to say “I saw a bird over there”, and continues walking.

That is how linear thinkers often experience non-linear thinkers. This is not to say that non-linear thinkers have to completely conform to the world around them… but a certain amount of compromise will be required in order to foster the sense of community, acceptance, trust, and teamwork to make it possible for anyone to even be willing to listen to the kind of unusual ideas that tend to emerge from non-linear minds. We have to make ourselves useful – to establish that we can and do contribute to our societies, and do not merely disrupt and disturb the calm progress of our friends and neighbours.

Part of communicating effectively means organizing your thoughts in presentation to others, whatever form that presentation may take, so that they can follow along with what you are trying to express and see the purpose in it. The fact that thoughts do not come to a non-linear thinker in a ‘pre-organized’ fashion does not in any way create license for those thoughts to be presented as they come, vomited out in a massive unsorted stream. Other people should not be required to do the work of sorting through a non-linear thinker’s ideas and figuring out what to do with them, and they won’t.

It took me until I was in university to learn that I could write an organized essay – just not by following an outline. I would read a lot, take many notes, write down many ideas, being careful to take note of all the necessary information about my sources so that I could quickly reference them later on. I would frequently refer back to the main topic, to make sure that I wasn’t getting too far off track and working super hard on something I hadn’t actually been asked to do. Then, having gathered a critical mass of material, I would lay it all out on an enormous table, and cut it into pieces. I would lay out the pieces in the way that they made the most sense, numbering them.

Frequently, I would find that some transition was required. I would ask W5 and How about each sentence, to see if terms needed to be defined or if I had skipped explanations that reflected a logical sequence of thought, and write the transitional paragraphs necessary to fill the gaps. I would number the new paragraphs, with letters, to fill in spaces (for instance, if the paragraphs fit between piece 6 and piece 7, I would number the paragraphs 6a, 6b, etc.). Then I would tape pieces back together in order, and type out the essay. That was how I got my best marks.

Now, with the proliferation of computers, it is technically possible to eliminate the scissors and tape. However, a single screen might be insufficient to look over all of the necessary information and bear it in mind simultaneously, so it may still be worth doing such a task in the ‘old-fashioned’ way.

My point is that, even if a thinking process is non-linear, the final product of any kind of project or presentation will need to make sense to people and will need to be properly thought through. Only organized work is likely to receive the acceptance and approval of a majority of stakeholders, and may be the only way that all those great ideas ever see the light of day. It will take work, but as I used to say to my high school students, “The question is not “Is it difficult”, but “Is it worth it?” – and I believe it is.

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