Waste

The other morning I went to the dentist. 4th time in 10 months. Same issue. And because healthcare in America is coercively tied to employment, I've been going to one of the dental schools.

The dentist-in-training has been incredible, following up with me and finding ways to get me the right care in spite of the system that's obviously built for billing rather than healing.

“It’s toxic,” he told me.

Bet.

I wonder how much faster and more deeply he would learn if he was allowed the time to think, talk, and work with each patient the way he is clearly capable of and interested in doing.

They would have spent less time and resources on me too. And I would have saved time as well.

Waste.

After I got free from the chair, I grabbed a bagel at Tal, and a fat black marker at the 99 cent store for Enkidu, and then went back north to find a park I had never sat in before.

After cutting west off the avenue, I stumbled on a guy in an electric wheelchair with his front wheels on the sidewalk, his back pinned to a white van, and his rear wheels hanging free over the gutter.

He's got a wild man's beard, a gnarled, horrific big toe poking out of his bare sock, and a blueberry pie on his lap.

After I get him back on the sidewalk, I realize I can't just leave him there or he'll get sucked back into the gravity well, so I start pushing him, and at that point I’m committed.

"Where you headed?" I ask him.

"Hospital," he says, pointing east.

This is an electric wheelchair in name only. It doesn’t motor, so he‘s pretty much stuck wherever I leave him.

Plus, the back is floppy, so I have to lean over and push from the arm rests. With all four wheels spinning freely, it’s a hair-raising ride over the sidewalks, cobbles, and blacktop.

"Beep! Beep!" he yells, clearing the path.

"You wan't some blueberry pie?"

"I'm good," I say.

"I hate blueberry pie," he tells me.

We make it past the heavy UN traffic on 1st avenue, and right as we're about to go into the main lobby of Bellevue…

"They hate me here."

"Oh cool," I say.

As soon as we're inside, the security guard looks right at me and says, "Are you with him?"

"No, man. Just taking him where he wanted to go."

Then the security guard looks at the guy and says "We JUST released you."

His face says why in fuck you back here so quick.

The guard looks at me again.

"Sorry," I say weakly.

I make sure the guy's ok where he's at - in the middle of the main entrance to Bellevue - and I bounce. I thought I was doing something good for somebody, but it turns out I was just creating a problem for someone else.

And who knows what happened to that blueberry pie.

Waste.

I ate my bagel in the park inside Bellevue, then walked around behind the hospital and past the medical examiners building (huge).

Bellevue butts up against the FDR, and as I'm walking past, a dozen cop cars are closing down the northbound lanes. One of the motorcycle cops gets off his bike in the middle of the FDR, tugs on his crotch, then starts joking with some other cops in a car.

I walk a few blocks north, and soon there are cops at every intersection, some of them high cops in suits and black SUVs, blocking traffic with their little metal barricades, a cluster of officers on each block doing nothing.

Actually, they are doing something. They’re snarling traffic and messing up the flow for thousands of people.

Because the UN is in town, and all of them got to be protected from all of us.

WASTE.

MONEY is an abstraction for caloric surplus. Our entire economy, our entire output as a species is built on caloric surplus. We were able to build castles and cities and yoga and hula hoops because we EARN more calories than we BURN.

A hawk has to catch more calories than it spends hunting, or she dies.

A goat herd has to eat more calories than it takes ‘em to get up to that high field, or they die.

A family of farmers must grow more calories than they consumed in production, or EVENTUALLY, they will die.

Caloric surplus IS everything, and money is an abstraction of this caloric balance.

Once we had enough food stored over, we could afford for increased specialization - toolmakers, miners, and healers to start, and later Bakers, Bankers, and Poets.

But you and I live in an unprecedented bubble of caloric plenty. We burn the calories that Mother Earth stored up over millions of years to heat our furnaces, bake our bread, and mow our lawns.

So we are culturally and cognitively distant from the reality

That you must EARN more calories than you BURN.

And money is an abstraction of caloric surplus.

Money is a storage of value, and value is created through work (direct and indirect), and work is at heart, the burning of calories in order to store them as value somewhere else.

Make sense?

We never talk about this. Few people understand this. And whenever I talk about EROI and money, I get pushback. People tell me I’m overreaching. But nobody has ever given me a situation where this isn’t what’s happening.

LMK your thoughts in the comments.

Here’s the rub.

When we do too much work that doesn't produce value... that doesn't earn more than we burn… that doesn’t transmit the caloric store to future use, we enter the metabolic rift and we start dying.

And having a thousand cops stand around snarling the day of thousands just to protect a few hundred, that is a sign of an economy that has lost track of its caloric expenditures, and an economy in decline.

EROI... Energy Return on Investment, is the first calculus of a free humanity. Only by recognizing the constraints of physics, natural law, and planet earth, can we ever really live free.

Also, I went miming. More on that soon.

DF

Written on the 6th floor of Hotel Hayden, in The Well, on the train, and finished on the steps of the Skidmore House at 37 e 4th St.