Campaigns & Barn Washings

I first wrote and published this in the summer of 2016 when the campaign for President was in full swing, when there was still hope in the air amidst the disgust of the fraction of a man the Republicans had put up as their candidate, when it seemed the United States couldn't go that far off the tracks. We know better now. Maybe I should have just moved to the country, preferably in Canada, to a beautiful place with an old barn, one in need of washing.

The piece has been updated slightly and has a fresh ending free of charge to all you who read it.


In today’s email I received messages from Hillary Clinton’s campaign and from Mike, a man offering to wash my barn. It’s a great day to be alive.

The campaign informs me that we are not meeting fundraising goals. At my old school, I used to run candy sales and manage the money at chicken barbecues to finance trips that management had stopped supporting but were no less vital to the kids and our school. I taught English some of the time but seemed to take as much time raising money, pushing kids to sell Butterfingers and Hershey bars. In the process I may have learned all I ever need to know about running a national campaign. It mostly has to do with not hitting fundraising goals and letting everyone know how much harder they need to work. I feel the campaign's pain.

Unlike candy sales and chicken barbecues, the campaign holds less promise of adventure as payoff. I mean, we'll get Hillary Clinton as President, someone up to the job, informed, albeit part of the machine. As long as we don't get the ass-clown the Republicans are putting up, it will be worth it. But that's slim reward compared to the school fundraising. We took kids on three-day trips to a great Adirondack camp and one-day trips into Manhattan. In the mountains there were kayaks and horseshoes and campfires with s’mores. In the city kids wandered Chinatown, bought Foakleys, ate the great pizza on Earth, and had the chance to slip supervision and score some NYC weed. Hillary is nice and all, but kind of like the under-ripe peach I’m reluctantly eating as I type this. It’s not exactly bad, but I can’t get excited about it.

What I do get excited about is barn washing. I don’t own a barn or the land on which to build one. I’m a writer not a farmer, but I have read Wendell Berry and E. B. White enough that it’s time to get out of the books and into a barn. Mike, the barn-washing fellow, first contacted me while I was on vacation in Florida. He sent prices and a schedule for doing the work. I told him his prices were good so far as I could tell, but that my experience with barn washing is limited by not having a barn. There was the chance that my brother, visiting our house to tend the cats and always on the lookout for a project, might have built one out back of our house. Even so, would such a new barn already require washing? I thanked him but regrettably declined the offer.

Mike sent more email a week later. We were home by then and I looked out the back windows imagining the barn, the chickens, a pig, and a cow. But I don't know anything about tending such animals and the city zoning is pretty strict about such things, so I erased the animals and just imagined the barn which seemed a pleasant place where maybe I could set up a writing desk near a wood stove. The whole thing felt more and more appealing with each passing moment. Mike's prices in this new email were the same so I knew he was an upstanding guy. In a P.S. he wrote, “Brian, let me know if you get this email. The last time I sent it to the wrong address.” Following instructions to the letter, I wrote back saying that I had indeed gotten his email and was reconsidering the wisdom of going through life without a barn to wash.

Today’s message, Mike's third, delighted me as I had gone weeks without speaking to him and, I’ll admit, had forgotten about barns dirty or clean. Sadly though, the message was just a repeat of the the second message and included the same P.S. I imagined Mike just in from a barn washing, his wet boots left on the map by the back door. He was at the computer thinking, this time I'll get the right Brian. But no. I, however, was undaunted. I wrote back immediately: “You’ve convinced me. I’m beginning construction of a barn tomorrow. Should be ready for a wash shortly thereafter.” I tell you, I’m still excited about it. I hope Mike is as well.

The Clinton campaign needs to generate this kind of excitement. A barn! What could be more exciting? I have visions of the Amish (and Harrison Ford) coming to raise the frame. My brother and I could side and roof it. Maybe I would get that cow and pig, those chickens and learn to tend them in secret so as not to invite a code violation from the city. Still, no matter how quiet I keep things, they are bound to make a mess. Then I’ll contact Mike to see if the prices still hold and we can schedule a washing. I bet he’ll be excited too.

There's a chicken barbecue every year about this time at a church in the Valley just down from the best ice cream I’ve ever known. The Clinton people can join my brother, Mike, and me for dinner and dessert. We can talk about candy sales, class trips, and livestock while pulling that sweet chicken off the bone. Then we can get ice cream in cones and drive to my house where I'll take them out back and show them the barn. It will be freshly cleaned and Mike will accept the pats on his back and maybe engage a few more barn owners in cleanings. We can finish our ice cream cones and feel what it takes to make people excited about big projects.

I can see it all now. The August sun is shining. We're all full from chicken and ice cream. The pig has come to the edge of its pen to be scratched. There are a few eggs in the barn. The cow is ready to be milked. The night is warm and the company is good. Mike is laughing at something one of the Clinton campaign people has just said. My brother is showing another the hayloft and rope swing inside the door. I stand in the yard marveling at the barn feeling that in this America, nothing could ever go too wrong.

Somewhere far away a cheer goes up for a strange and terrible man shouting incoherently about building dirty walls instead of barns made all the more beautiful by Mike's careful washing. The campaign really needs to raise more money.

Energy & Momentum

My wife said, "I have no energy to do anything and I've felt like this for a long time." Yeah, I know that feeling. I have no energy to respond to email, to search for a different job, to clean the bathroom, to change out of pajamas and a ratty old hoodie. I don't feel like doing any of that. When my wife talked about having no energy I was sitting on the couch reading a book that is good but not pulling me along, one for which I don't have much energy to finish. All of which had me thinking of writing this down. For that I have plenty of energy.

Earlier we had talked about what I'll do for my next job. I did a lot of shrugging because I just don't know. I'll need to find a way to pay bills, but she was right in suggesting I seem to be waiting for some miracle, a $150,000 job for her or a million-dollar windfall out of the blue. I imagined money raining down from our ceiling, enough to buy healthcare, pay the bills, and set aside to get us through. Through the shower of bills I saw myself at the desk typing.

A writing career isn't made on wishes but maybe starts there. Earlier, I took down a notebook and found the entry from one year ago. It was about all I had to do before we went out of town later that day and how I had taken a pair of pants out of my bag to make way for a books and a notebook. At the end there I wrote of feeling like I was on the right track for a change. I had begun to really dig into writing.

I'm farther along that track now. Nowhere near any kind of destination but picking up speed. I'm picturing a long train of pages, cars overflowing with pens, tankers of ink, box cars full of typewriters, laptops, and reams of reams of paper. The train rumbles through the dark early morning. The crossing signal has dropped across the road blocking half four lanes of traffic each way. The people in those cars stare, wondering how long they will have to wait, worried about getting to jobs for which they have no energy. I jump out of my car, run along the tracks, grab hold of a ladder and pull. My feet leave the ground and I wonder if I can pull myself up and where where this train is headed. In the distance behind me, I hear the signal bells clanging. Up ahead the train's horn blows loud and low. I hang from the ladder listening to the rhythmic clack of the wheels and it sounds just like my fingers on the keys writing word after word after word.

Solitude

Lately, even with all the writing I've been doing, I find that I'm not making much time for solitude. My job teaching at-risk kids doesn't allow for much solitude at school and at home my wife and I are raising two girls, but there are pockets of time at school and the girls are both in high school and move through the world with us but not needing our constant presence. It's not the commitments to other things that have kept me from solitude so much as the things I use to keep myself away from myself. Even reading lately I find my mind wandering to this or that thing I thing I ought to be doing.

Leo Babauta writes about "Why We Struggle To Make Time For Solitude" and it comes down to this feeling that we need to stay busy whatever that might mean. One level could be the busyness of our jobs. I know people who bring email home and work on presentations after dinner. I gave up bringing my job home but spend that time writing, so I'm not here to judge. I also had to quit my personal Twitter and all of Facebook because I too easily lost myself in the busyness there, hitting refresh and waiting for someone to start something. I've got the Washington Post and New York Times on my phone and flip to them all too often in order to burn about the latest insanity out in the world. I've lost hours at a time to YouTube watching videos I've seen before. All of this feels busy and necessary. Of course it's not.

Babauta asks: "How often do you take time to go out for an hourlong walk? To just sit out in nature doing nothing but contemplating and enjoying the silence?" In the margin (I print the articles and read with a pen) I wrote: Not often. I haven't listened to a record in ages. I've been playing records most every night as I write or look at nonsense online, but I haven't listened to one in at least a month. To listen requires sitting still and attending to the music. I've played records in the background, but every time I consider really listening to a record I instead get busy clearing my desk, answering email, or do some other thing that seems more important. I'm too afraid to sit and just listen.

Uncertainty and fear of the unknown lead us to keep busy according to Babauta. Sitting still, being in solitude, focusing only on one thing, meditating, or even just zoning out all seem vaguely dangerous. What if something goes undone? What if we forget something important? and, God forbid, What if someone sees us doing nothing? How will we explain that? Solitude can feel like a selfish indulgence, a guilty pleasure, or maybe just a strange and frightening notion, but it is none of these things. It is as necessary as the air we breathe.

That doesn't go only for writers like me or artists, photographers, actors, dancers, and so on. Solitude is necessary (and probably lacking) for every person walking this Earth. I'm equally sure that we are trained not to let ourselves get attached to solitude, to fear it, and to suspect that there is danger in being alone.

"And yet, this constant busyness and distraction is draining us. We are always on, always connected, always stimulated, always using energy." Babauta hits the mark again. Burnout, according to my dictionary, is "exhaustion of physical or emotional strength" and that's what the world offers if we buy into it. My teaching job begins at 7:40 and I work with kids straight through until at least 1:00 most days (sometimes longer) before I see a break, before I can have time alone to do nothing. That level of busyness and lack of solitude is toxic. That's why I can't continue in the job. But If I do the same thing to myself after leaving school, what kind of fool am I?

At the bottom of Babauta's article I wrote this: What if I go for a run not to get in shape or an an obligation to do miles but in order to invest in one hour (or even just half an hour) of solitude? I wrote that and then got dressed in cold weather running gear, took myself outside, left the phone in the kitchen, and jogged down the driveway. Almost an hour later I returned home feeling something I haven't in weeks. It wasn't just the way my body felt having run four miles, though that too was good. It was the relief of having been by myself and in no need to do anything but run. I didn't work on any problems, make any plans, or do anything but run and be alone. It wasn't scary either. In fact, I want more.

I'm going to go put an album. First, I'll tear up my to-do list then I'll switch off this computer. The furnace just came on, the dog is asleep on her bed, and there's nothing to do now but listen to what solitude and the album sing to me.