Ready-Mixed Joint Compound

In my primary language, words bounce around with meanings that only one group would use such as Chip-and-Dale, Chippendale and Chippendale. The same word twice? Well, one represents women's entertainment and the other...well, women's entertainment, too, but in the form of cabinetry.

This planet is my playground. I understand we are all kids here, some in the sandbox and some on the swingset, some on the merry-go-round and some on the ball field. Some sit quietly on benches or underneath trees. I worry more about the ones who are unoccupied than ones in groups or by themselves.

The news world teems with predictions about long-term unemployment. We love to wallow in bad news because the news world thrives on readers and readers bring advertisers ("April showers bring May flowers and May flowers bring June bugs" ; "The leg bone is connected to the knee bone and the knee bone's connected to the thigh bone."). Let there be commerce!

Doomsday scenario writers aside, I look for solutions within problems. I worry when I have no insight into a problem's apparent solution. Thus, my current book-in-the-making. Disguise reality as fantasy so I can work with players to create a new game that favors me winning.

Here's the situation. Another set of emperor's new clothes on the sale rack, everyone waiting for someone else to take the bait and buy what they cannot see. While the shop was empty one night, I walked in, put the suit on and walked out, the shop power cut off due to electrical bill payments in arrears.

If you could only see me strolling down the street in my ridiculous outfit! I drag the coattails behind me, picking up dirt, my sleeves brushing against strangers who make no room for me in my coronation outfit. I duck to keep my crown from knocking against store awnings, the people around me making odd faces at my behaviour, oblivious to my grandeur.

But when I walked down to the unemployment office and told the people standing in line about the sartorial eloquence of the assemblage on my body, they stood around me transfixed. Although in the mirror I looked like an overweight man in my underwear, to the ears of the crowd I was what they each imagined me to be. I used generic terms to describe my clothes. To some, I wore a cowboy hat and duds. To others, I was dressed to the teeth in the finest business suit while many saw me in the outfit they read about as kids, a multi-colored, fanciful king's attire. A few looked at my hairy chest and wondered if they were missing out. A couple of people laughed along with me at the joke and nodded in agreement that we had to have a sense of humour in this economy.

We're people, with ideas of our own that will not change. However, our brains are still malleable because that's what makes our species the most widespread species on this planet - adapt to change or die.

I'm not worried about numbers. We can have 5% unemployment or 25% unemployment for one year or 20 years, it doesn't matter. What matters is how we see ourselves when we or them are unemployed. Who's wearing the emperor's new clothes in either situation?

Unemployment is just a word to describe economic viability. We employ our brains to do work all the time, no matter whether we work economically as part-time or fulltime employees/employers.

Employing our brains is where the action's at. That's what made me get out of bed early this morning and contemplate today's blog entries. A sense of humour is all well and good when our brains have sugar and oxygen to process but when we're starving for food and oxygen-deprived, look out!

I speak for myself here at all times. I have only my life to influence all the time. In regular economic terms, I am a free man. I can be employed in the class economic sense and contribute to a workplace's business goals and objectives. I can work with my colleagues, friends and associates in pulling the marionette strings of other situations, some in business and some not. Or I can do nothing. But you see, doing nothing means being dead. I am not dead and don't plan to be dead anytime soon. Therefore, I'm doing something all the time that I'm alive.

The world's constantly changing. I am part of the world. I am constantly changing. The brain I employ is constantly changing. Thus, I am constantly changing the world of others around me whose brains are constantly changing. Therefore, there is no such thing as unemployment. There is only a change in the way I and the people around me employ our brains.

It's not a matter of how we get the world economy back on track. It's how we see ourselves constantly changing.

I was once an office worker. I was once a person working down in a sewer. I was once a person flipping burgers as a short-order cook. I was once a busboy. I was once a person who managed the lives of others working for me in an office. Those are all instances of what we call employment. In none of those cases did I think of myself as being employed but it was how I represented myself to others.

Time to stop representing ourselves to others in the words of business. Time to start seeing ourselves in relation to others. I am not a worker bee. I am part of my species. I share this planet with every one of the members of my species, no matter how we dress, no matter what we look like to one another, no matter what we think about ourselves in business terms.

I am not a cog or a pawn or a piece of a business model. I am me. I am your friend, your colleague, your family, who shares 100% of the same genetic material. I want all of us to live happy lives.

Happiness today may mean employing our brains to go back to our living spaces where we grow our own food or help others grow food in shared spaces. The money we earned in jobs was just a way to facilitate a bartering system. We can barter without money and still employ ourselves successfully. If you have machining skills or computer technical skills, you can barter those skills in exchange for food.

We don't need bank loans to restart the economy. We need people with creative ideas, people who are willing to making mini/microloans of bartered goods to help their neighbours live happy lives. We may give away services in exchange for money later on down the road. We may swap houses for a couple of weeks to see life in another part of the country. We may bargain with our rentholders to exchange services for rent payment and then have the rentholders negotiate with banks on loans for the semi-Ds they own, offering flats for free to bankers and other business owners to use on travel, keeping track of these bartered exchanges in accounting books like real cash.

I worry that we don't have enough creative people pursuing ideas like this during perceived economic crises. Instead of waiting around, make the first move. For instance, I give my business service acumen away to my students with no expectation of extra remuneration from the technical institute where I teach. My repayment comes when I find out they used their creative brains for unique solutions in their community. You can, too.

I shop at big box stores but I also shop at local stores and markets. The local shopkeepers are usually the ones best at bartering. The big box stores have yet to catch on to bargaining with customers at the local level - I challenge them to make the next move in that direction. You might find stockholders will reward you handsomely for your creative solution.