Summer Fundraiser 2014, Day Four
“The past is prologue”, right? Well, let’s get our prologues to the Baron’s life as Gates of Vienna’s curator and mine as the fretter observer of crossroads out of the way.
I have said that this blog is our “mission”, but that was always qualified by the voices of our audience and team. If ever a point came when there wasn’t enough financial feedback then it would become necessary to figure out our next step.
So that is our crossroads at the moment, and that is what y’all will help us decide. Not an easy task. Women generally speak with a more personal voice than do men, and this post will be no different. The Baron is a reserved introvert and says less about himself generally; I am a flaming extrovert who can say more than you want to hear.
Ah, well. At least there is no confusing us.
The Baron’s Prologue
The Curator has spoken again, and with great clarity accompanied by a wonderful image. I don’t know where he digs up those pictures, but invariably they have a certain élan. Perhaps they succeed because he prefers period pieces, sepia-toned anachronisms. Heck, sometimes I think that’s why he married me.
Now it’s my turn again to stand in the box, though I am one of the Baron’s biggest fans and think he’d do this better. However, since I’m the one who chose to focus on the crossroads it’s up to me to figure out a way to tell you my concerns. Besides, he already carries too much of the weight of this enterprise.
Now he writes effortlessly and well. But at the beginning of GoV, the Baron found it necessary to begin using those old verbal muscles — the ones he’d flexed back in his youth via intensive A-Level studies but even in college hadn’t had occasion to utilize as intensely as would come to be his custom after a few years on this website.
At any rate, when he began to write again after such a long hiatus it was as a commenter rather than a blogger. The ferment was The Belmont Club with Wretchard’s genius for creative analysis. Among the people who commented there, several from that period went on to form their own blogs. We certainly weren’t the only ones in that comment section who felt the need to move off on our own. In all decency at some point one had to stop taking up so much bandwidth on Wretchard’s dime and time. That was way back before Pajamas Media, though.
After all these years of writing so frequently — and sometimes intensively — not to mention his labors as a curator of others’ endeavors, the Baron’s writing has become finely honed. That wasn’t always the case. In the beginning of our joint public writing life he was taken aback by how stiff his written verbal skills had become. For a long time he’d been away from any requirement for that part of his brain — though in a foreshadowing of this work here, we once collaborated on a screenplay. It was his idea and it was his perseverance that saw the project to completion. And, yes, he made it fun — though now if I were to re-read it, I’d be in a frenzy of re-writing while he’d be content to observe an occasional good line or some character delineation he found well done. (One of the best parts of that experience was creating a variety of characters; they weren’t all likeable.)
In our life before Gates of Vienna (which continued more or less the same through the first few years online), a strange and most serendipitous thing happened to the Baron: without so much as a pause between them, he moved from his real vocation of many decades as a painter of rural landscapes straight into a full-time job which utilized his secondary strength as a mathematician and programmer. Suddenly after all those years sitting in the midst of fragrant cow patties he found himself in an urban office setting working as a systems analyst/programmer in the midst of other people. Yes, he landed on his feet quite skillfully, especially considering his introversion.
They tell you not to take a job that requires a new wardrobe, but in his case it was necessary. I doubt his co-workers would’ve thought much of his painting gear (though the jeans were so ripped and painted and worn, he could probably sell them today).
What happened was this: a very good friend of many years, a friend who’d generously bought a sizeable number of the Baron’s paintings over the years, called to ask him to take on a computer job at the company where he hinmself had been for some time. The Baron had kept up his computer skills in the off-season (i.e., deep winter when it was too cold to sit outside). That offer turned out to be serendipitous: after the contract was over, he found other work. This led to a whole new life, one with enough money in it that we lived at a new level; suddenly we were consumers. Not big spenders by any means, just not pinched anymore. I doubt you could have told the difference, really. Except for the clothes. The Baron noticed he was treated more respectfully when he had on a coat and tie. He hadn’t noticed a lack of respect in his painting clothes, but he could feel a discernible response to his costume in public, at, say, a restaurant.
That life of contract computer work and commuting evolved into a salaried job among other groups of congenial people. The Baron was able to pay our son’s way through college and we saw no end in sight for a working life. But all that changed when the private company for which he worked was sold and the new brooms wanted to sweep, as new owners often do. Their main change was to move the senior programmers out of offices and into cubicles — to save rent space on square footage, probably. Years earlier, when the Baron saw others working in that environment, he’d wonder how people had evolved the coping skills required to function in a noisy environment and still be able to do deep thinking. For introverted types like him, he figured it would be torture. In short, the new brooms made a path for him to be laid off graciously. He’d had no trouble finding new work in the previous years and he didn’t think this would be any different.
By then, Gates of Vienna was up and running and the future Baron had fledged and gone. During those fat years before the advent of cubicles, I stuffed money into savings. We’d never had the chance to save before and I investigated every trick I could think of to compile self-employment savings during his contract years, and then those company pension funds during his salaried work. Had I not done that, we would have long ago had to quit the project that has become Gates of Vienna. And then again, our years of living on the edge while he painted had been good preparation for this time when the Wheel would turn again, past the fat years and back here to the lean times. We already know well how to live this way.
Dymphna’s Prologue
While the Baron was busy being a programmer, my own life changed in some radically unexpected ways. Not too long after the Baron became a working stiff, I’d had to leave my job because of severe fatigue. It would eventually turn into full-blown fibromyalgia, though that process took years, and after that years of accepting what it was. I didn’t go down without a “mind-over-matter” fight, but as anyone with this disorder can tell you, fighting it off makes it worse.
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Despite vigorous protests by local residents in Bendigo — an Australian city north of Melbourne in Victoria — the city council voted 6-2 to permit the construction of a $3 million mosque. The demonstrators were concerned that building the mosque might invite jihad into their city.
Images have a propaganda value of their own. A carefully-crafted graphic statement — such as the one at left — can grab attention, excite discussion, and induce viewers to see important issues in new ways. It’s hard to track how much influence they have, because they tend to spread without any link to our blog or any reference to where they came from. One out of every twenty or thirty may have viral tendencies, so I keep churning them out.
