THEMS THE (POINT) BREAKS EDITION

This was never about the money, this was about us against the system. That system that kills the human spirit. We stand for something. To those dead souls, inching along the freeways in their metal coffins, we show them that the human sprit is still alive. -- Bodhi

I have long wanted to release audiobook versions of my entire catalog of novels, novellas, and short stories. As of tonight, this process has finally begun: DEUS EX and THE NUMBERS GAME are now available as audiobooks on Amazon -- the latter even read in an appropriately British accent. Aside from exposing a few grammatical errors and repeated or missing words which somehow survived gauntlets of drafts and editors, I enjoyed the process of putting them into this format, a process which was considerably easier than I was expecting, and far cheaper (by which I mean it cost me nothing) than doing it myself in a studio. As a friend recently explained, studio time cost between $50 - $75 an hour, which was fine for my short stories and novellas, but more problematic for my lovels, especially the lengthier ones.

These thoughts got me thinking about the role of money in life. The actual role, not the obvious one. Perhaps it is merely the somewhat grim or Darwinian view I take of existence, but it seems to me my take on money is different from that of most people. The majority of my relatives, friends, colleagues, and acquaintances view it merely as the means by which things are acquired. I view it in an almost opposite manner. For me, money symbolizes not the keys to a better life but a bar to same: money, as a concept, is an obstacle to the things we most want rather than a facilitator. This is of course merely a variation on the glass half-empty versus half-full argument, but there is more to it than that.

Since the audiobook process is somewhat tedious, or at least time-consuming, I played various "soundscapes" in the background while I sipped my whiskey and made notes and corrections in the virtual studio. One of these soundscapes is called "Point Break," after the classic 1991 movie. It's a combination of atmospheric music inspired by the film and waves lapping a beach. Very beautiful and inspirational. It did, however, spark some festering resentment within me. Back in 2017, when I was at rather a low point in my personal and professional life, I attended a double feature of "Point Break" and "Roadhouse" somewhere down in Santa Monica. At that time I was both struggling with both my health and my happiness, and I cannot tell you how inspired I was by the message of "Point Break," a movie that had meant little to me when I originally saw it as a college student, but everything as a man facing the proverbial crossroads of middle-aged American life.

For those who have never seen it, "Point Break" is something very rare in cinema -- a style-heavy cop-crook action movie which also aspires to say something profound, or at least important, about human existence. While no "Heat" in terms of its acting, writing, or storytelling, it is nonetheless a profound experience if you watch it at the right time in your life, because the message of "Point Break" is not just that cops and crooks are often mirror images of each other, but that there is an ironic paradox buried at the very center of life: that fear of death prevents us from living.

Having spent a half century on this planet, however, I am now of the opinion that it is not fear anywhere near much as money -- lack of money, I mean -- that prevents us from truly living. Because when you really think about it, the world we live in is in essence a tier system. Those without money occupy the lowest tier, and in doing so, are debarred from the things which, to use the movie as an example, are what allow people to suck the sweetest juices out of life.

In "Point Break," the crooks, led by Bodhi (Patrick Swayze) rob banks to fund what amounts to an Endless Summer: they travel the world to obtain the best surfing possible, and spend the rest of their time making campfires on the beach, where they drink beer, chase girls, and make pot-fueled observations about life. Their favorite observation, once precisely articulated in the quote above but also continuously implied for the entire film, is that only they truly understand what matters -- excitement, adventure, freedom -- and everyone else is gray, dead, and cowardly: emasculated by the rat race, by morning commutes, by flourescent lights and industrial carpeting and 401Ks they'll never live to spend. Even Johnny (Keanu Reeves), the FBI agent tracking the "Ex Presidents" (as the gang calls themselves) down, is drawn to and largely accepts this philosophy as he learns more and more from his quarry-cum-target, Bodhi. But the gang's supposed enlightenment, and their superiority, their campfire bull sessions and supplies of beer and dope, not to mention their surfboards and supplies of Sex Wax, are nonetheless purchased with cold, hard cash. Rebels they may be, but such is the nature of modern society that they can only rebel if they too can pay the freight. In short, there is a paradox within their philosophy just as there is a paradox within the society they despise: free as they are or think they are, their entire lifestyle still requires a hefty income.

You see, when I lived in Southern California, what struck me harder there than anywhere else I've lived is the fact that, in order to be free as the "Ex-Presidents" were -- I don't mean free to rob banks, mind you, I just mean free to spend all your time surfing and trying to bang beach bunnies by bonfire light -- you have to be rich. Or if not rich, at least plugged in to an upper middle class income, which in California is well into the six figure range. I dearly love Malibu, but living in Malibu is impossible unless you truly have some wealth in your pockets, and even Santa Monica costs a pretty penny for extremely modest accomodations well out of sight of the water. Money stands between the poor, the working class, and most levels of the middle class, and Bodhi's dream of surfing by day and philosophizing by starlight. I presently live in the heart of a large town, and when my car is out of service I am debarred even from something as simple interacting with nature. There are no woods, no forests or hills, safely reachable by foot. For people who are poor or struggling worse than I, this is often a permanent or pervasive condition. It is not merely that they cannot afford a "nice" house or a "nice" car or "nice" things, but that they cannot even go to the beach, or hike a mountain, or swim in a river, or go camping or fishing or any other of a million activities which should cost nothing or next to nothing. Like the Beatles, "Point Break" tells us that the best things in life are free, but then admits, without much if any sense of contradiction, that they are also unobtainable unless you pay for them.

George Orwell once remarked that it gave him pleasure that London was home to half a million birds and not one of them paid a penny in rent. Mel Brooks satirically depicted a society in which people paid for clean air. "The Simpsons," through the character of Mr. Burns, found a way for a rich man to block out the sun because he could not abide the poor getting their light for free. These japes reflect a very real and troubling trend which has been unfolding for centuries, and
one does not have to possess great genius to see that life, in its modern iteration, is a place where our birthrights are stripped from us and then returned, one at a time, as privileges for which we must pony up the dough. Nobody who is not a fool expects something for nothing when the "something" is a product of labor, but nobody who is not a swine finds endless ways to wring sheckels out of people for things they themselves did not create and have no right to keep from others.

It strikes me further that most adrenaline-pumping exercises in modern life, the shit that really makes you feel alive, also require liberal doses of cash. If you want to learn how to fly an aeroplane, how to skydive, how to mountaineer, or cliff-dive, or if you want to ride a Harley, ride horses, moto-cross, ski, snowboard, scuba dive, surf or just ride way up into Canada to see the Northern Lights, you'd better be prepared to melt that plastic, son. In any one of a hundred obvious ways, enjoying ourselves is made further difficult by our status and economic class. A thick green paper barrier separates us not only from living life up to its edge, but sometimes even from observing the edge from a distance. When I was at my poorest, living in a dirty, spider-infested, uninsulated garage apartment in Burbank, I would often long for a day at the beach, but between the price of gas, the crumbling state of my car, the lack of cash in my pocket, and the general malaise of the poor, which often prevents them from enjoying even those aspects of life that are within their grasp, I seldom bothered. The almost unbearable longing for adventure, for life, that films like "Point Break" evoked in me dissolved in the ugly glare of humiliating economic realities. The stark fact is that a great deal of what makes life enjoyable or at least endurable is either unavailble to the ordinary person or arranged in such a way that he can enjoy it only infrequently and at great inconvenience and hardship to himself. A Medieval peasant's life was brutish and hard and full of suffering, but even he could put an onion, bread and cheese into a sack, walk into the woods, and enjoy a picnic by a pond once in awhile, without asking anyone's permission or having to clink a coin into someone's bucket.

I am by no means as poor or as broken, mentally and spiritually, in 2024 as I was in 2017, and I make a point, each year since I moved East, of coming up with plans to drink as much of life's wine from its vine as I can get away with. This year is no different, and in fact is even more ambitious than others, but that ambition is tempered by economic reality -- by the barrier money presents in doing anything truly worthwhile in life. Last year my brief trip to Miami to celebrate winning the Readers Favorite Gold Medal required a month of belt-tightening afterwards, just as my lengthy stay in Quebec province necessitated several months of the same. And I will never forget how quickly my carriage-ride to Hollywood's red carpet back in 2019, when I was invited to the Writers of the Future Awards and took a beautiful actress as my date, turned into a pumpkin after the tux was returned, the limo paid off, and I had to return to my spider-populated shack on Avon Street.

The point I'm trying so clumsily to make here is that the finest things life has to offer are ever-increasingly available to us in the manner of the cable packages of the late 90s: basic, expanded, plus, deluxe. Anything halfway decent has to be paid for in cold, hard cash, and the more decent it is the more cash has to be laid down. To get to the decency one must scale the green wall. It's one thing if we're talking about cars or yachts or condominiums, or some other direct offspring of civilization; it is quite another when we're discussing that which is our actual, human heritage: stars, beaches, northern lights. Why I have to save for months to feel beach sand beneath my bare feet will forever be a mystery to me.