One year of retirement

Happy Anniversary to me! As of today, 20th July, I have wallowed in the warm mud of retirement like a happy pig for one full year. A year ago, I reached the plateau of middle age and stopped to enjoy the view without asking for permission from myself. I stole the time from active members of society to whom I could have contributed my skillz without any desire to repay. I look back on that time and remember a phrase from many years ago:

"people deserve to live their lives without fear of people like me, a leech"

[from chapter 12 of the novella, "Passing the Time"]

Ah, a leech, indeed, a person who writes because:

I will always be attracted to someone like you. At the same time I will be repelled by your inadequacies, your humanness. I sit down to write, though, and I only think of you, you who is a reflection of me, a human, yet never completely like me because you are human. How can I ask you to be perfect?

If you stood in front of me right now, I would consume you like a can of soft drink, sucked dry and discarded. You would only provide temporary relief from my thirst and then I would want another. I consume you now, burning my thoughts of you to fuel the writing machine within my head.

[ibid]

I don't create. I deconstruct. Am I just a second-hander in the eyes of a Randian?:

Men were taught to regard second-handers—tyrants, emperors, dictators—as exponents of egoism. By this fraud they were made to destroy the ego, themselves and others. The purpose of the fraud was to destroy the creators. Or to harness them. Which is a synonym.

From the beginning of history, the two antagonists have stood face to face: the creator and the second-hander. When the first creator invented the wheel, the first second-hander responded. He invented altruism.

The creator—denied, opposed, persecuted, exploited—went on, moved forward and carried all humanity along on his energy. The second-hander contributed nothing to the process except the impediments. The contest has another name: the individual against the collective.

[from: http://www.aynrandlexicon.com/lexicon/secondhanders.html, accessed 20 July 2008]

Of course the question tells the answer:

Isn’t that the root of every despicable action? Not selfishness, but precisely the absence of a self. Look at them. The man who cheats and lies, but preserves a respectable front. He knows himself to be dishonest, but others think he’s honest and he derives his self-respect from that, second-hand. The man who takes credit for an achievement which is not his own. He knows himself to be mediocre, but he’s great in the eyes of others. The frustrated wretch who professes love for the inferior and clings to those less endowed, in order to establish his own superiority by comparison . . . . They’re second-handers . . . .

They have no concern for facts, ideas, work. They’re concerned only with people. They don’t ask: “Is this true?” They ask: “Is this what others think is true?” Not to judge, but to repeat. Not to do, but to give the impression of doing. Not creation, but show. Not ability, but friendship. Not merit, but pull. What would happen to the world without those who do, think, work, produce? Those are the egoists. You don’t think through another’s brain and you don’t work through another’s hands. When you suspend your faculty of independent judgment, you suspend consciousness. To stop consciousness is to stop life. Second-handers have no sense of reality. Their reality is not within them, but somewhere in that space which divides one human body from another. Not an entity, but a relation—anchored to nothing. That’s the emptiness I couldn’t understand in people. That’s what stopped me whenever I faced a committee. Men without an ego. Opinion without a rational process. Motion without brakes or motor. Power without responsibility. The second-hander acts, but the source of his actions is scattered in every other living person. It’s everywhere and
nowhere and you can’t reason with him. He’s not open to reason.

[ibid]

Meanwhile, the U.S. economy flounders like a fish flapping about in a dried-up lake, reminders of the warnings of the consequences of global warming and accumulating too much debt. So be it. The days of U.S.'s post-WWII saber-rattling have been tempered by the overseas' ownership of our mortgaged weapons. Hmm...if I was China, would I let the U.S. know how much of the U.S. debt I'd loaned to countries like Iran for "safekeeping?" Makes for a good novel storyline, at least.

In the meantime, I recall the line a friend of mine gave me. He placed a finger on my shoulder and said, "A great leader can touch you like this and Poof! you're gone. That is the only definition of power." Power, of course, means knowing when and where to use that magic finger.

I carefully weigh my options and smile, knowing that as a writer (never an artist), I have a similar magic finger. Use it wisely, I tell myself, and end this writing session.