Collaborations

Duos don’t stay together.

PAUL SIMON

I have spent years reading and researching creative collaborations especially in the musical field. As a writer, I am a solo creator. In school, I hated group projects. The dynamics of the relationship between a duo or the members of a rock band have fascinated me. The thing I notice is how fragile these collaborations turn out.

My old man told me to never go into partnership. The problem with starting a rock band is that it is a partnership. That is one of the flaws of the music business. You need other musicians. Inevitably, they have disagreements. Bands break up. Members get fired.

When it comes to music, I think the best strategy is the singer-songwriter. This would be a folk singer or a country singer strumming his guitar solo and singing his songs into a single microphone. A solo artist will never break up with himself. If he does collaborate, it will be with a backing band that he hires and fires at will.

I don't believe in creative collaborations. I used to think that I did, but I don't. These are partnerships, and partnerships don't last. At the end of the day, someone is behind the steering wheel, and everyone else is along for the ride. That is the reality of creative collaborations.

Cheaters, Gamblers, and Grinders

Yeah I did, and you don't listen, I tell you to play within your means, you risk your whole bank roll, I tell you not to over extend yourself, to rebuild, so you don't have to hock for more, I was giving you a living, showing you the playbook I put together off my beats and that wasn't enough for you.

JOEY KNISH, Rounders

Rounders is not a particularly good movie. It does for poker what The Hustler did for pool. Rounders is not a film that will change your life, but it does make you think about life. This is because of the three main characters--the cheater, the gambler, and the grinder.

Ed Norton plays Worm. Worm is a cheater. He cannot play an honest game of poker. He needs an edge to win, so he chooses to cheat at the game. His real gamble is in not getting caught. Naturally, he does get caught and pays high prices for his grift. The people in his life also pay a high price for befriending Worm.

Matt Damon plays Mike. Mike is a gambler. He plays an honest game of poker, but he takes huge risks which result in big wins and big losses.

John Turturro plays Knish. Knish is a grinder. He plays a safe game of poker where he takes small risks and grinds it out by taking small wins and cutting his losses. This style of play involves long sessions at the table where the grinder amasses those small wins. Essentially, a grinder is a blue collar poker player with a serious work ethic and iron discipline.

Of these three characters, I identify with Knish. He is my type of guy and represents a certain moral center to an otherwise empty movie. Though it is about poker, Rounders is also about that other game we call life. Unlike poker, the game of life is semi-permanent. It ends in death. Until then, you are in the game whether you like it or not. This leaves you the decision of how you are going to play that game. Are you going to be a cheater, a gambler, or a grinder?

I am not a cheater. I know of no one who made it for long in life as a cheater. Yet, cheaters won't have it any other way. This explains the high recidivism rate of criminals. In their eyes, doing the right thing is for suckers.

I am also not a gambler. Gamblers are the ones who try to make it as athletes, actors, rock stars, and day traders. The sad thing is that many of them actually succeed with these gambles making them the bait for suckers to play the same game and lose. As I say frequently, for every Brad Pitt, there are a hundred good looking fellows waiting tables in Hollywood.

I am a grinder. Hard work and discipline are the only strategies that I know in life that consistently work. I prefer to win by not losing.

Mike and Worm mock Knish and his grind. Yet, Knish defends himself and his strategy. He has this moment where he tells Mike that his kids eat. Knish doesn't delude himself with dreams of playing in the World Series of Poker. Poker is a job for Knish. Poker is the grind. Knish doesn't have the luxury of taking big risks and big losses. What Knish considers wisdom and prudence is cowardice to Mike and Worm.

You learn to ignore the insults when you are a grinder. Ultimately, you have to play your own game in your own way. I find that the cheaters are 100% losers. The gamblers are 90% losers. The grinders are 90% winners. I wish I could say that grinders are 100% winners, but life isn't like that. You are going to get knocked around. Not every hand is a winning hand. The best you can do is limit your losses and stay in the game.

The real debate is between the gamblers and the grinders. Knish offers a hand to Mike if Mike is prepared to grind. Mike chooses to gamble, so Knish cuts him off. Naturally, Mike turns out to be a big winner at the end of the movie. This is when people get turned off with the film. The fool wins in the end, but you know he shouldn't. Mike learns no lesson but aims for the World Series to try his luck there.

That ending is a bitter lesson of life. Life is not fair. The big wins go to the fools. They always have and always will. No one sees the fools who lost it all. They only see the winners. That is the secret at the heart of grinding. You have to have the discipline to resist the temptation to gamble.

I have lived long enough to see the gamblers win and lose. The losers outnumber the winners. That fact is why I stick to the grind no matter what. I don't care about winning. I only care about not losing. All I can say is I have seen gamblers come and go, but I am still in the game.

I do not play poker. Life has all the risks I care to take. I grind at life. I got busted up awhile ago, but that is also part of the grind. My work is recovery. The temptation is to gamble as if I could win back what I lost. That is foolishness. I never deviate from the grind. I pray, and I work even if it is for just a few hours a day. Unlike Mike the Gambler, I listen. I play Knish's game, and I cut out people like Worm. I know that the grinders are the real winners in the game of life.

A Warning From The Good Book About Lifestyle Inflation

 When thou shalt sit to eat with a prince, consider diligently what is set before thy face. And put a knife to thy throat, if it be so that thou have thy soul in thy own power. Be not desirous of his meats, in which is the bread of deceit. Labour not to be rich: but set bounds to thy prudence. Lift not up thy eyes to riches which thou canst not have: because they shall make themselves wings like those of an eagle, and shall fly towards heaven.

PROVERBS 23:1-5 DOUAY-RHEIMS

When I was a kid, I asked my old man why certain men who worked at the same place that he did had bigger houses, fancy vehicles, and more stuff than we did like swimming pools. He told me those men were "dollar millionaires." They bought all of those things on credit and were laboring hard to make the monthly payments on all of their stuff. They weren't rich but stupid. I made a mental note that day on the phenomenon and have reflected upon it ever since.

Since those days in the 1980s, I have seen much lifestyle inflation among coworkers, family members, and friends. I have never been into materialism, so my lifestyle has remained virtually the same since I was in high school. I never bought a boat, a McMansion, a Harley-Davidson motorcycle, a side-by-side ATV, an RV, and on and on. Those things never interested me. I have also lived long enough to see people lose all of those things to the bank and to the repo man.

I have taken a great deal of flak over the years from the fools who buy this crap. I have had coworkers tell me that I needed to buy a new car. Then, they would ride me about getting rid of my dumbphone for a new iPhone. I am someone who is content to have the material needs met while moving on to the non-material interests of my life. Those non-material interests matter more to me than owning some toys to impress other people that I don't even like.

I am always telling myself that proverb about keeping the knife to your own throat. This is just a poetic way of telling myself to resist all pressures and temptations to inflate my lifestyle. I don't care about those things, but everyone else cares that I don't care about those things. I am going against the mindset and culture of these idiots, and they hate this.

Lifestyle inflation also matters when it comes to the job you work. Because people want to buy things they shouldn't have, this requires a job that pays a lot of money. These are jobs that people tend to hate and require great commitments and moral compromises. A blue collar job making the median income isn't going to cut it.

The final issue is outright dishonesty and theft. I have seen quite a few people ruin their lives with embezzlement and stealing. The thing they all had in common was they liked buying things. Going to prison is a very high price to pay for some stupid toys.

As a corollary to all of this, I have learned that a man should avoid gold diggers like the plague that they are. If a woman insists that you need to seek a better job with a higher income to afford her, dump her immediately. That relationship is doomed.

The antidote to lifestyle inflation is intentional living. You have to decide what makes you truly happy and focus on those things. I like walking, going to church, reading books, writing on this blog, watching birds, and hanging out with my awesome wife. All of these things cost me very little. I don't do these things because they are cheap. I do them because of actual enjoyment. I have a good life, and I am grateful to God for that life.

I don't see the point in buying stuff you can't afford and wouldn't enjoy anyway. I think the pleasure of these things comes from trying to impress people with the fiction that you're rich. It is all vanity. True happiness comes from having trust in God and living a modest lifestyle. Anything beyond that leads to misery and ruin.