The Coffee Marxist

Out of money already—simply amazing. Well by Jove old boy, you’ve really done it this time now, hadn’t you? You didn’t see the rent check coming, no? The utilities almost as much as the rent, they were. The aircon was a pretty penny. Damn these Atlanta summers! Now you’re back to borrowing from Peter to pay Paul once again! Well, enjoy it while you can, old bean, since all students end up in debt.

I have continued to live quietly and frugally in Atlanta, working by night, sleeping by day. I am a helpless prisoner in my own study/bedroom during the hot summer, and exist as a wanderer during the spring, autumn and winter months. Of course, this simple formulation is not to garner sympathy. My position as a writer/recluse does not exclude occasional trips out of state or out of country, nor meeting with friends and foreign correspondents. Apart from frequent so-called “vacation” trips to places such as New Orleans, I customarily travel to Maryland during the Christmas holidays and visit members of the “old gang” on excursions through my beloved Atlanta.

During an era of economic depression in which literary employment is increasingly precarious, the most I have managed to obtain is a vague promise of a spot on a literary presentation forum to present a research paper, a few essay contests and perhaps a small shot at an assistantship. Please note that while all of these adventures are worthwhile and will raise my prestige, none of them pay a single cent. Right now my only dependable source of income is a rapidly diminishing savings reserve.

Despite my slight recognition as both a political and, to a far lesser and more writers-blocked extent, a fiction writer, I have recently become exceptionally critical of my work to the point of paralysis in the field of fiction, all the while writing political tracts more easily than ever. I have the problem of thinking of my fiction and science fiction as too uncompromisingly noncommercial for popular lists, and yet unworthy for preservation as a serious, hardcore literary endeavor. When judged by historians of the new nanotech age, if some shadow of a scholar bothers to write a dissertation on my efforts, they will find my financial situation due to writing is desperately poor, an abject failure even by depression standards. Though, how could it be otherwise for an overtly ambitious yet unpublished writer who spends his time protesting the capitalist system and all its machinations?

Still, what a man does for a living is not the final measure of him. What he is, his essence, is everything. I never ask what a man I have just met does for a living, because it does not interest me. Some are offended, since I do not ask, and when told forget quickly. But the essence of someone—that is wealth that shall persist far beyond death, and it shall be the only wealth I have for many years.