Fresh out of the womb, we’ve got about 40 million minutes to work with until our eyes get too heavy to open for another sunrise. It took me one of them to figure out the origin of the $43.25 that showed up in my bank account 10,080 minutes ago: the single paying subscriber to this stream of prayerful rants.
This longtime friend decided a year ago to throw a little light into my personal corner of the darkness that is online publishing, journalistic collapse, and increasing professional editorial irrelevance. He paid for a year of my unwritten words. I’m not sure I delivered. Nine essays in 526,000 minutes? The last one published February 2026? Surely I can do better.
So, here I am, trying to earn what I’ve already been given. Which is very American, right? You don’t get to, my goodness, just live here, you starry-eyed princess of the snowflake kingdom. You have to earn a living, you must earn the right to live (unless you’re rich and your money grows the earning for you in the soil of the laborers’ souls). Bootstraps, pull! Grindstone, nose! Work, gig! Vacation? Ha.
I don’t know what $50 worth of words, spread over a year, looks like. I do know I feel the tug of a contract, the nudge of financial justice, the prod of the idea that I must trade away my life to have access to my life, to trade away my life to have access to my life to … Well, you get the idea. You can ask if you work to live or live to work all you like, and answer it all you like, but the problem comes down to the fact that you have to pose the question at all.
This is where things get funny in that incongruent affect sort of way. You may have heard:
- The federal government of the United States is collapsing (has collapsed?) into homicidal-suicidal fascism. ICE epitomizes this breakdown.
- Our techno-profit-idiotic economy has ended our 10,000 years of Goldilocks climate patterns. Friendly reminder here that the Earth’s “health and our well-being, our very survival is inextricably interlinked, and that we, the most powerful species on this blue and green miracle planet have responsibilities.” I agree. I even wrote a declaration of interdependence about it ($50 earned?).
- Something like 3,400 people around the globe have billions of dollars at their disposal while children starve, and they seem focused on using that money to get more money, kill people without money, and find ways to make sure people besides themselves don’t have a say in who gets access to money. What, you didn’t know they’re above us all? Read up!
Yet I still feel that pull: You take care of me, I take care of you. You gave, I give. I’m like a basketball player focused on returning a perfect pass while fire-spurting demons emerge from a fissure in the court to turn the ball, my teammates, and hardwood into ash. Maybe I’m prancing through a zone of familiar habits because I know something about play and joy, and I don’t know anything about demons. Will they kill me? Do they always do all the brimstone stuff? Are they into board games?
It’s hard to write this essay. Not because of the battle with words it entails. Because of the world that is supposed to receive it. I used to think of it as vast. Millions (no, billions!) of people were ready to listen. What I could give had somewhere to go. Many somewheres. Now it heads to a friend in Pennsylvania who found me on a burning court and sent the ball my way. Maybe that’s how it should be. Catch.
Originally published on Substack.