Jon Hakes. Writer. Official Online Outpost.

On Monday, John Scalzi posted an excellent piece, deconstructing the idea of a “self-made man” (and here I had the impulse to write “self-made person,” which is funny, because generally, many of the people who believe in Self-Made as a brand seem to think of it only in male terms) through a concise analysis of his own life, and the people who helped him along the way.

Because he was writing in a clever, artful way, Scalzi didn’t say what I’m about to say now:  There’s no such thing as a self-made person.  To paraphrase Scalzi, at a very minimum, two people had to push their DNA together to make a new person.  Beyond that, there are other broad problems with claiming to be self-made, especially when we’re talking about economic success:

-If you are speaking English, or one of the many other languages we feature here on planet Earth, you are using a system of communication that you did not create.  Same goes for telecommunications systems, and, really, the whole idea of communication, which depends heavily on someone else being at the other end to hear your drivel.

-If you are using money, perhaps to measure the quality of your self-madeness, you are using a system that you did not create. From printing money, to moving money between institutions, to economic theory, to the markets themselves, there are huge swaths of economics that you did not create, and on which your success depends.

-If you are running a business, you need other people to supply labor, services, infrastructure, a customer base, etc., before you can do anything big.  I’m interested in the pathology of the idea that somehow paying other people for labor, services, or infrastructure flattens out their contribution to your success and makes it invisible. Unless you are Paul Bunyan, you can’t build that interstate system with just your two hands.

-If you have any sort of education, public, private, home-schooled, or otherwise, you have taken in ideas from people and smashed them together with ideas from other people.  The very idea of education is that you don’t come pre-equipped with all the knowledge you need, that you are, by nature, an incomplete person, who needs a little help to reach your potential.

-Somebody taught you how to wipe your own ass after taking a dump.

None of this is to say that you aren’t integral to your own success in directing money toward yourself.  The point is that it’s all symbiotic.  You need other people, other people need you.

At the risk of beating the deadest of all horses, we’re all in this together.

We have this framed picture of Led Zeppelin, gifted to us by a friend during our college years, that features a low-quality, painted-over photograph of the band standing in a field, their logo, a zeppelin in the sky, and the words “FINAL TOUR” in blocky letters.

I have no idea about the history of this picture (and I refuse to do any additional research this morning).  I’m pretty sure that Led Zeppelin’s final tour was not called a final tour in promotional materials, given that it only became their final tour due to the death of John Bonham.  And if the picture was made after the band had broken up, in the aftermath of Bonham’s death, it’s sure a lousy tribute to the final tour.  It doesn’t even provide any details (tour dates, show locations, etc.).  It simply says “FINAL TOUR, and just be grateful I told you that much.”

Alyssa has wrapped the picture in bubble-wrap, and it’s sitting on its side, waiting to be stuffed into a box.  Meanwhile, we are continuing our Final Tour of Tallahassee, trying to see as many friends as we can, and trying to stop by all of our favorite haunts.  Last night, we we went to our favorite Thai restaurant, Reangthai.  We had a fabulous meal, and said our goodbyes to Donna, the owner/chef. Ricky spent a lot of time taking the place in.  That’s only proper; he’s been going there since before he was born.

Reangthai is one of several places we wish we could take north with us.  If I could rent a truck big enough to take them all, I’d do it, and happily keep paying off the bill into the next century.  Because I’m told that’s unrealistic foolishness, we have to settle for seeing everybody one last time.  I can only hope that someday, someone produces a bland picture of our family with FINAL TOUR printed in block letters across the bottom.

Let’s see how much more I can mangle the Litmus Test Metaphor.  I was just thinking that if our society continues to degrade science and education (and especially science education), there may come a day when no one remembers what a litmus test is.  As a reminder, you use a litmus test to determine whether a solution is acidic or basic.  For more information, consult the Internet.

But that’s not why I brought you here this morning.  I brought you here this morning to note that this is Day 3 of the New Blogging Era of Jon (for semi-illumination on the whole “litmus test” thing, see Saturday’s entry).  And that’s the last we’ll speak of it.

To continue rambling in any direction I see fit to ramble, let me close by saying that the baby has already rejected the bouncer chair as a morning hangout spot.  He is now interested in grabbing everything from the laptop to my phone to the burgundy pillow to my left.  What he intends to do with all of these things is anybody’s guess.  I’m pretty sure he’s never seen MacGyver.

Okay, maybe that should have been the title for yesterday.  In any case, we spent seven years in Baton Rouge, and two years in Tallahassee, and now we’re moving to Wisconsin.  This is cool by us, because we are Midwesterners at heart.  Lately, people here in Florida have been saying to us, “…but, the winters up there…,” to which I always emphatically respond, “Yeah, but the summers down here…”  We have good friends in Louisiana and Florida, but we’re ready to go back north, and our good friends will continue to be our good friends.

We spent several hours packing last night, and made a lot of progress.  The cat did not care for the activity and the shifting landscape in the living room, so she abdicated her throne and went into exile in the bedroom.

I have this feeling that this might be the least-last-minute move of our lives.  I feel like we should be more or less completely packed by mid-week, well in advance of picking up the truck next Sunday.  So far, so good.

Well, it’s the Day After the Last Day at the Day Job.  I’m sitting in the living room, with a cat sprawled on the chair next to me.  My brain is starting to come out the other end of the decompression process, sort of like a car going through a car wash where the jets have been turned up so high that you come out thinking that the car must be super-duper-uber clean, while also feeling certain that your car’s paint job couldn’t possibly have come out intact.

It’s Saturday, and I’m shifting gears, both in terms of writing, and in terms of our move Up North.  Alyssa and the baby are flying up later this week, and I’m going to be driving a moving truck early next week to meet them.  And then, the new life really gets cooking.

Now that I’ve (mostly) successfully excised the Day Job from my brain, I plan on posting a lot more often on the website (stop me if you’ve heard this one before), and also annoying the world with constant Tweets about the subtle variations in my mood.

I know you’re skeptical.  Let’s do a litmus test and see if I return to post tomorrow, and also on Monday.