LEFT BRAIN / RIGHT BRAIN

Alright, logic says that work is something that should be avoided and is bad and arguing the fact is akin to playing Yanni at a Megadeth concert - you get glared at, and likely beer-bottled to death.

It's not that bad. Work, although wearying, time-consuming, and at times disappointing and fruitless, is a necessary evil of the times. The struggle for existence requires work - it's been so for time immemorial, and will be for the next forseeable billion years or so. Back a few hundred-thousand years or so to close to modern times, man worked as hunter-gatherers, trying to scrounge up enough to eat and trying to kill a deer for skins to keep warm when it got cold and trying to do so without getting his/her head bitten off by some grizzly bear. It wasn't the best of times except maybe in the summer when food and game were plentiful and you didn't catch pnuemonia from getting soaked during the monsoon season. Rest was hard to come by. Even picking berries was time consuming and tiring. It was work to live, and apparently, few of our early ancestors gave up, 'cause there's 5.5 billion of us stinkin' human animals crawling on the face of the planet.

Most of us got it good. If you got a job, you've got a means to survival that doesn't include having to hunt squirrels for meat or getting impaled on the horns of a bison. You probably rent, or maybe even own your own little cave. In the winter, you go inside for warmth - in the summer, you air condition. The store is a six miles down the road, and inside there's food, and you don't have to hump that distance with a pack on your shoulders, cause you've got a shiny, nearly-new sportster, or maybe just a rusted-out shitbox in the driveway, and you can drive there. Hell you don't even have to cook - Micky D's got a drive thru, right.

"But nothing's free!" you say? That's what labor is for! A paycheck! It's the cash equivalent of work: a complicated cascade of assumed values for paper worthy only for the engraved artwork, to buy things you need or simply want. No more trading a meaty deer-leg for a few pelts and a stone knife. Six bucks and change for a coupla burgers, fries, diet-soda (gotta watch the figure) and maybe a shake.

Works is a drag, sure, but remember: a paycheck is waiting at the end of the week. Taxes come out, but you still keep most of it. And with a little financial savvy, you might be able to save up enough to get that little caveman statue at the thrift store.

Hey, we agree that work isn't all bad. What stinks is that most of us are working for someone else, all to perpetuate a myth that we are doing okay.

Back in caveman days, hunting/gathering fed us. We hunted to keep ourselves and our families fed and clothed. Everything, we did for our own - and our tribes' - survival. We had it all - connection to the earth, stories around the hearth, nights were we could see ALL the stars, a life with cycles and variables that we couldn't control, but we could easily adapt to. No longer.

Today, the rat race runs us. Consumerism beyond mere survival fuels the economies of most countries, and we are all too eager to run the mazes. And precious few of us do what we like - most of us are trapped, humorless, insignificant worker ants doing meaningless tasks for faceless corporations that would squash us like the insects we are to add three dimes to the bottom line. Too little of what we work for we actually keep. Broken down into a year long timeline, we have to work five months just to pay taxes so that our bought and paid-for government can continue programs to keep the elderly in expensive nursing homes or in retirement villages in Miami or West Palm Beach, to subsidize welfare mothers spittin' out babies like a busted sprinkler, to pay off the problems of foreign countries, and to pay for a thousand other entitlements to whoever got their hand out closest to a congressman. Another three months wages goes to the landlord of your stinking, roach-infested tenement, or to the fee-gouging, credit-raping, multination banks that hold your mortgage with fists of iron but would damn near keel over if they had to add a tenth of a percentage point to your savings account interest. Add a month-and-a-half of wages for utilities or freeze to death in the dark, and another month-and-a-half for the car loan on that hunkajunk parked on the street that would fall apart it weren't for duct-tape and a daily sacrifice of generic oil. A few weeks wages cover food, unless your on a diet, then it's a few weeks wages, plus five days, because it costs money to remove nutritional content. This leaves you a grand total of two weeks wages - about $300 to $800 dollars if you're average. But you can't spend it. Incidentals, like insurance bills, credit card bills, an occasional night at a seedy bar or a nudie magazine to enjoy at home takes what little remains. You're left with little more than the elk-skin draped over your shoulders, a piece of flint, and a few spears.

But hunting licenses cost fifty bucks a season, so cough it up. And damnit, GET TO WORK!