The Stones.

Living as I do now in New England is very different from having grown up in New York.

In New York, while there may be old buildings--structures as old as those up here in Connecticut--the vibrancy and commercialism of the place means that most everything is built up and torn down every few decades. 

As my father used to say, "New York will be great if they ever finish it."

Up here in the country however, as you drive past old farms and older wooded areas, you see long stretches of low, stone walls. I'm not talking about crafted stone walls, like the hundred-foot one around my house which is neatly designed with a flat-top and a regularity to the sides bolstered by trowels of cement here and there, punctuated by splotches of lichen.

I'm talking about the ones Robert Frost wrote about in his great poem "The Mending Wall." Those are made of stones removed from land farmers wanted to plant on, or have their animals graze on. These stones are placed one on top of the other like kids' shoes in a pre-K classroom. They're balanced, most often precariously.

These walls are everywhere up here. Unplanned, really, not built by contractors, but assembled large excavated stone by large excavated stone. They were built by impoverished, enslaved and indentured people working, forever, off their bitter and sad legacy. They follow the contours of the land and the boundaries people drew that demarcated theirs from yours.

While I have no more than a dilettante's appreciation for the walls which are all about--most often random like veins in an old woman's legs--I am curious about them. It's been said there are over 100,000 miles of these stone walls still standing, or crumbling, in New England. And that they can be seen from space, or like ancient Mayan temples in an over-grown Guatemalan forest, detected after thousands of years of unknownness by new technologies like Lidar. They are at times buried under mounds of forest detritus and the encroachings of suburbs but their remains remain.

By the way, as a basis of comparison to the 100,000 mile figure above, the US interstate highway system is less than half that length, just 47,000 miles. I would guess the walls in my current environs will outlast, ultimately, the highways before they too, like we all will, return to our over-heating planet.

I think about walls because I think about work. 

I think about work because I think about how much work it takes to build a world. How much doing the same thing over again, how much tedium and repetition, how much showing up, rolling up your sleeves and toiling matters when you're building.

I read a book once called "The Ruin of All Witches," about my little section of New England when it was the frontier--a battleground between English colonialists, Dutch, French and of course, indigenous people. All the Europeans vied for alliances with the indigenous people so they'd have the strength to kick others out. Add to that dynamic the warring ideologies of Protestants versus Catholics, of tribe versus tribe, and you have a world every bit as perilous as today's red-blue amerikkka or the Sykes-Picot-induced dementia of the modern Middle-East.

With death behind nearly every hillock, worlds had to be built nonetheless. If you think about New England and all the bricks you'll see in the old mill towns, every one of those bricks had to be made by hand.

Mud had to be dug from rivers, clay had to be found and excavated, straw had to be mixed, then the whole concoction had to be shaped into a BLO (brick like object) and dried, usually in the sun, since there were no brick ovens to dry the bricks that weren't made yet. This was, though people don't know this, a time of severe labor shortages as well. amerikkka was a land born of the poorest and unluckiest and most-ill-used. Debtors, criminals, catamites, young boys and stolen Africans. That's who built all these walls and made all these bricks one-at-a-time. The few landed who were here were catered to by debtors, criminals, catamites, young boys and stolen Africans.

I think about this because I think a lot about what it takes to build. I think about the nature of the work I do, and the every-day-ness of it. I don't lift heavy rocks and place them atop each other for sixteen hours a day, but all the same, I dig, I lift, I mold, I shape and I do it over and over again. Often what I build collapses despite my efforts.

Working in New England in the 17th Century, building those walls, shaping those bricks was a solitary affair. You were on your own. Maybe there was a neighbor who could help you lift something. But most-likely it was up to you.

I don't think we think any more about the quantity of building it takes to build. The mindless over-and-again-ness of life. We vomit the word "scalable." We copy and paste. We have fabricators and duplicators and we build mostly in pixels not substance.

What's more, you don't get the same sense of struggle when you work for a giant company. Your tasks are usually smaller, often cut down to be an incremental part of a larger effort. And there are people around you, and a process and system in place that feeds the machine.

That's not that way when you build your own world.

It's harder when you roll your own.

Even when you're feeling like it's futile, no business is out there, or your one-trick-pony-ness has been found out, even when you feel like you've played out your string, you can't just fold your tent, as much as you say to yourself "I should have stood in bed," you keep on keeping on.

You place a rock on a rock. You lift another. And place that. You lift another. And place that. Your hands bleed. You are alone. No love awaits at the end of a long day. Just another day of lifting, placing, lifting, placing.

I've made millions of ads in my life, or thousands. I have no replication machine to do it. No system of allies or reinforcements. Support comes here and there, but usually it's me. Lifting, placing, lifting, placing.

I think it might be better that way.