It has been about a year and a half since I've moved down a peg from the Middle Upper Middle to the Lower Upper Middle. This coincides roughly with the close of my business and the failure of my China Deal. When I was rising, I had a good deal of inspiration and was able to articulate it well. This past year what I have to report is that I'm getting a bit more comfy in the Lower spot. This has advantages and disadvantages.
The two main disadvantages are time and money. I have less of both. But then again I knew that coming in. So I don't particularly miss either of them. Like all humiliations, this one can be turned into a different set of expectations. Remind me to tell you the story of the Hamster Funeral.
First off where is the Lower Upper Middle Class? It requires that I review my view of class. Now first off there is African American class, and then there is American class. In African American class there are five segments. The basically revolve around the most significant and telling aspect of one's orientation towards American apartheid, where you live. See, all African Americans were pretty much relegated until after WW2, to live where whitefolks said they must. And even though most of America was rebooted in '32, there was enough leftover racism to kickstart American apartheid again and pretty much through the Brown and then Equal Housing decisions, a good fat 30 plus years. I would estimate that most black families didnt' do much social mobility through that era, although mine did. Anyway, there are {projects, ghetto, 'hood, 'burb, hill}. All of those pretty much stretch from Lower to Upper Middle Class in American class terms.
Indigency is the lowest class. That basically means you can't take care of yourself. Indigents are the folks that show up at soup kitchens, who would get welfare but actually cannot. They are not only below the poverty line, they're just hanging on by a thread. I really don't use the term 'homeless' but that's the fairly common term.
In the UK they talk about the 'undeserving poor' and the 'deserving poor'. I don't make much of a distinction, because it begs the question of what they deserve. While they may be speaking of charity in the UK, here we're talking about welfare state stuff. Which I'd rather not. I also more often talk of the Poor as the Internal Third World. These are people who are not generally able to negotiate the infrastructure of the US to their advantage, and yet persist. These are the guys with irregular jobs who manage to be down on their luck most of the time. I think these are the ones likely to become criminals, not the indigent, who are often criminalized for no good or effective reason. A poor person is able-bodied but just not socialized to hold it down in our society. There ought to be clear paths for these folks and I would subscribe to such things that help them out. I think of the poor in the projects and the sticks. The man who fishes for his own dinner, the woman who works in the small town diner, the man with a bum leg who used to work and is now permanently disabled and lives with his sister in the Fifth Ward of Houston.
The American Middle Class is massive. It goes from the Lower Middle to the Upper Middle. The Lower Middle starts just above the poverty line. The Upper Middle ends somewhere around a quarter million a year. Then you get to Rich. Above Rich is Wealthy. Above Wealthy are a lot of people with American citizenship but they're just beyond the class system. I'm not sure there's much we could say about them as a class that they haven't decided already. They're not constrained by class definitions. The primary difference between the Upper Middle Class and Rich is that rich people don't have to work for a living at all. They can basically live off their money. The difference between the Wealthy and the Rich is just as Chris Rock says. The Wealthy can decide to make somebody rich.
I grew up in the 'hood as Lower Middle class. It didn't feel like it most of the time. I'm one of those who got out into the world saying 'I didn't realize how poor we were'. But we weren't poor. We were known as 'underprivileged'. Which basically meant that we were as smart and well behaved as middle class and upper middle class kids, we just got our bikes from Pep Boys instead of the Schwinn shop. And we only got one bike and we fixed it ourselves when it broke. They say that the difference between the Middle Classes are not very wide, but they are very very deep. That's the truth. We are more accepting of a man with no shoes, than the man who wears the wrong shoes.
In many ways, I can't think of a better way to live, coming from humble origins and getting out successful into the larger society. I mean it's certainly a better way to go than the disappointment of falling from a lofty spot, despite the romantic allure of a slide from slumming to 'this is really belong, dad'. So a person like me becomes a vigilant optimist, naturally one who subscribes to theories of liberals mugged by reality. Our lives of overachievemnet are testimony to the validity of hustling, and if we manage it with any social aplomb we only become more insufferably conservative. We pontificate not only about skills but manners. But I try to leaven that with an equally powerful bromide: never forget where you come from. That means essentially that I recognize the dignity of my relatively sloppy and underprivileged life. I try not to give mini-me grief. I thereby defy the continuing meritocratic esprit de corps but I think it makes me a better person.
But I've also had my brush with being 'made'. I had my Afrolantica Rising moment, that period of sunlit epiphany where you experience the words of validating liberation. For me it was that relationship that put me into the China Deal. I went through the entire journey of preparation for a new life, eyeballing the new house, cultivating relations with potential personal haberdashers, asking the wife what color her Mercedes should be. What I couldn't wait for, aside from the tax free income from Hong Kong, was the big party - bringing my fellow overachievers on board. But that was then, this is now.
Today I recognize that this past semester I have purchased three crutches agains the pain of working for The Man. They are my XBox 360, my mountain bike and most recently, my new Ibanez electric bass guitar. All gimmicks to allow me the illusion of distraction from mind-numbing duty of ex-entrepreneurship. Sure I can dump several hundred hours into those and blogging, but it always comes back to the same stumbling blocks that time and distance don't erase. I remain in debt. My future is a series of gambles that I'll get what I deserve. I'll keep working on what I know I can get paid for and subside on, hoping that what I can actually accomplish gets adopted as one of some wealthy person's numerous projects. I do it with a smile, and I stay away from Beverly Hills and out of the perimeter of folks I'm better than but have way way more money than me. It keeps me calm. It's the drug of activity, an American Middle Class disease.
I think that I am afflicted with a healthy lack of obsession. There is little I can do, aside from writing, after which I find myself completely tireless. But I have worked, and I am continuing to work on bringing this effort into my person. That is to say, I'll lose the weight, color the grey, straighten the teeth, press the suit, polish the shoes, re-ignite the erudition and press the flesh. I think I can put myself in the right midst. I'm placing a new kind of bet on myself and I think I've discovered the secret. It will have its risks, but what doesn't? I already know that brains are a cheap commodity, but face to face trust is not and never will be. So I've got to invest in my face and stop pretending that I can think myself into riches. Labor is labor, but relationships are something else entirely.
It's easy for me to say this now. I work in a half-abandoned building of beige and brown amongst the cubicles filled with double screen PCs of Indian subcontractors. I'm debugging a sculpture of code into perfection, a perfection that allows a legion of middle class folks to be incrementally lazier and slightly more productive. This only indicates to me that they are led by someone who doesn't care about their personal growth. I used to call them all 'users', but now I call them 'functional people'. In my professional world there are 'technical people', 'functional people', management and sponsors. Sponsors are the only group operating on free will and they determine how much time people like me spend playing video games and practicing the bassline for Bob Marley songs. After all, they only own 40 of my hours a week and my commensurate stress level. I think maybe there used to be a time, or perhaps somewhere there is an organization which captures labor and spirit. I'm thinking it's the military, because at least there they understand that they make life and death decisions. Somewhere over the rainbow, there's a sponsorship for me, and I'll become a sponsor with the moola made. That's the plan.
In the meantime, I keep wondering if I can be bothered with keeping up with the Joneses as befits my standing in my current community. I say current community because owing to a string of financial upsets and misfortunes I remain on the outs of the nominally propertied class. Sure most people own only a mortgage and ownership of that kind of debt is a negotiable privilege, especially if you listen to AM radio in Los Angeles. Every day the Mortgage Minute Guy is telling me what fabulous things he could do with a 15 year fixed of a 7 year ARM. I don't have those kinds of arms. I have to keep watching several dozen numbers for the sake of my security, the balance owed on my federal lien, my FICO, my billing utilization rate, the price of premium gas, my HDL and my LDL, my blogs' daily hitrates, my kids' GPA... I know where I am, but what does that make me? I don't tell anybody else those numbers, unless the momentarily peak or dip above some level I think is socially negotiable. Then what? I'm just an insecure asshole for doing so.
I have Emily Post's Blue Book on my shelf. I have a world class BBQ smoker in my backyard and I have MP3s to satisfy the musical tastes of just about any crowd. But I'm ineffective in working these social tools to some satisfying arrangement. I'm a red man in a blue neighborhood, an Episcopalian whose views on gay marriage is lapsing me towards Catholicism. A RINO lamenting the destruction of Colin Powell, while Powell makes money with VCs. Most importantly I'm a man with unfulfilled ambitions living in the shadow of what I think I could be doing. It's a condition of being raised to believe, and experiencing the fact of, my own will making a difference. It's all I know and I am resigned to it, even if it doesn't work. No matter what happens, I am still learning and I'm still getting better. What can I say? I want more, and I think I deserve it, but I need to make the right connection.
In the meantime I continue to live with the pleasure of one living in his own childhood's future dreams. Living near the ocean, driving the high performance V8, cool wife, cool kids, half a dozen computers, component stereo, SLR camera, fraternity membership, tropical vacations, huge libraries. I remember the days, so very well, of conforming my social life to the dimensions of one with a maximum of $40 to spend every weekend. I remember knowing that all I ever needed was my own IBM PC XT and a computer consulting business that paid me 36K a year, back in the days when I watched Hill Street Blues at my girlfriend's house in the 'hood and Michael Warren was the coolest black man on television.
Yesterday I shot the breeze with a couple of associates from Kansas and Tennessee. They're dumbfounded by the housing prices here and the fact that we're foolish enough to stay in California. I guess I am too. But I am renting my moment in the sun, safely comfortable with the discomfort that is the American middle class, always on the verge of rising or falling and watching all the signals.
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