Nobody is Coming to Save Me (redux)
The Base Philosophy of Million Dollar Garage
With so many new folks subscribing…WELCOME! I thought I would go back to the beginning of this publication. For one, it's suspect it would be difficult to understand where all my rambling comes from…if you were to jump into the middle of it. Two, I’ve been getting a little sideways in my machinations…I need to ground myself in the goals and precepts.
Have you heard the metaphor: drinking from a firehose? I feel the opposite. I feel like pump truck trying to blow all my ideas through a tiny straw. That doesn’t mean that what I have to say is necessarily compelling or useful…but I gotta get it out!
What follows is a sort of treatise of my ‘why’. For those who may be bored by the Department of Redundancy Department feel of this email…I have sprinkled a pictorial review of the past six months…I hope you dig it!
To kick off…I delivered Guardian #1 today…here is its new home. It’s not only first of the series, but first to be made on “The Joan of Arc” rig. Here it is:
Nobody is Coming to Save Me
Welcome to the deeper end of Million Dollar Garage. I figure if you are as committed as your subscription signals…I may as well spill it…
There are four guiding principles to all of my endeavors. I’ve alluded to them all for the last ten years… They are life goals and my navigational stars. They are what I have to give to the world. The clarity of them were gifted to me… a little monk, sparse of words, gave a homily during High Mass at The Abbey of Our Lady of Gethsemani ten years ago.
I was on silent retreat for five days at the beginning of a 6-month sabbatical from my restaurant life. I was unwiring all the tangles left from 20 years of 80–100 hour weeks. I had to undo. At the same time, I was laying the foundation for what I wanted my life to be… and what I wanted it to be about. The reading for that day was Romans 12:2:
Romans 12:2
“And be not conformed to this world; but be reformed in the newness of your mind, that you may prove what is the good, and the acceptable, and the perfect will of God.” —Douay-Rheims
This verse hit me exactly where I was at… and where I am now, again. The monk spoke for 2 minutes, no more. His words were loaded and you could understand them like a surface level story, but if you dug in, you may still be digging. The funny part to me is that I do not remember what he said. I do not remember what he looked like. The idea, the words spoken, are imprinted upon my heart. Though exactitude evades me, he packed this verse—this jaw-dropping, already packed and studded with Old Testament prophecy—with the verses that followed and aimed that cannon squarely at my chest.
Romans 12:3–9:
“For I say, by the grace that is given me, to all that are among you, not to be more wise than it behoveth to be wise, but to be wise unto sobriety, and according as God hath divided to every one the measure of faith.
For as in one body we have many members, but all the members have not the same office:
So we being many, are one body in Christ, and every one members one of another.
And having different gifts, according to the grace that is given us, either prophecy, to be used according to the rule of faith;
Or ministry, in ministering; or he that teacheth, in doctrine;
He that exhorteth, in exhorting; he that giveth, with simplicity; he that ruleth, with carefulness; he that sheweth mercy, with cheerfulness.
Let love be without dissimulation. Hating that which is evil, cleaving to that which is good.”
Here is what my heart heard the monk preach: There are two worlds stacked atop and amongst each other: the seen and the unseen. Of the two, the unseen is more valuable. We are unique individuals imbued by God with special attributes. Our sacrifice is to serve others with our gifts. This serves God in the manner prescribed by Jesus:
“Thou shalt love the Lord thy God with thy whole heart, and with thy whole soul, and with thy whole mind. This is the greatest and the first commandment. And the second is like to this: Thou shalt love thy neighbor as thyself.”
Then what?
I am a philosophical person. You cannot tell me what to do… you cannot ask me to follow a system that I have not taken ownership of. I do not trust things at face value. For example: I didn’t trust most of my teachers after elementary school. I had expert teachers, but I felt they were expert at presenting information. Of course, I am overstating the situation, but my young brain had to ask: where does the information come from, who wrote it, compiled it, and most importantly, why was it important enough to hold me responsible for it and the systems it implied. Why was I measured by it? I had a distrustful instinct about the information and the systems. Why are they telling me this? The information was so linear that it caused me suspicion. The steps so rote that my very mind rebelled against it. It did not cogitate with my wavelength. (ha, cogitate!)
I am not writing this as indictment of the education system or as negative statement of my parents’ expectations for me (Parents often drive children to habits and decisions for the their idea of the child’s well-being, but mostly to remove the discomfort and worry of the parent, now and into adulthood), but only to say that the core worldly values of what normal people value doesn't jive for me. I do not want to be or even feel programmed.
(Editor’s note… this is all in hindsight. If you asked my parents, they would give you a different story…one of typical male children that don’t want accountability, but they are not writing here. They have no agency nor editorial rights regarding my recollections, I’m the hero of my own story. Deal with it.)
(Editor’s note #2…please do not read into my ranting any sense of superiority. I do not wish my thoughts on these matters to be valued beyond an authentic attempt to explain how i’ve come to my philosophies. I am not special or especially perceptive regarding truth or finding truth)
You might think: so a kid named KEUSCH dislikes order and systems? An American kid whose grandparents all served in WWII or Korea is against accountability? A kid whose whole community was labeled with names like Thelen, Schrauben, Hengesbach, Koenigsknecht doesn't like rules and building organized wealth and happiness? That kid questions everything he’s told? Probably, I am the only person in the world that would guess that you might think these things.…because I would think them.
I do like systems and organizations. I do like learning. I do like to build things. Organized and efficient things. But they have to be true things. They have to be orthodox things. They must be things no one can whimsically take away. They have to last… they have to be true to us… not just me.
They needed to be tested and proven to me, by me.
I was praying in the sweltering heat south of Louisville at the monastery made famous by Thomas Merton. I was shot in the heart by a monk I still can't remember. I was so stoked to see clearly what I could build, what I could do for the rest of my life, and be true and authentic simultaneously. I had opened 6 restaurants in my life. I had been part of several. I had moved and rebranded several. I had written countless menus and operating cultural documents. I realized that now that I had a foundation (12:2) to begin with, that I could build a simple, not easy, but simple action plan for myself. The action is three thoughts:
Go to Heaven
Do simple commerce
Show people they are not trapped
Go to Heaven
This seems obvious, however, the conspicuous placement of it in the hierarchy of my goals is terra firma. Everything else stands on it. As with any goal, it points to the end of the path and blurs all the little bullshit in between where your shoes are and the destination they wish to achieve.
If my goal is heaven, I can sit and wait in a lot of uncomfortable worldly situations. I can eat peanut butter and jelly for years when I fail to sell paintings or effectively promote this newsletter. I can cope with the failure of not being good at writing or painting and press on. “Why” plays a much bigger role than how it is received by the audience. The reception is not of this world. I can resist the urge to make things for my own gain, though I do make them for my own worldly survival, and remember that what I am making or what I am typing is to serve the world, and Him. I can produce the work for the work’s sake, because the skills are not mine, but gifts to be stewarded. And if every painting sucks and every written word falls flat, even if the whole world seems against me, I understand why I am doing it. I can still find peace about it.
Do Simple Commerce
This world is fucked up. There are so many leverage points to business these days. You don’t get a choice about who gets to eat what you’ve hunted and killed. There are a million middle men dressed as insurance agents and bank officers and government employees. Respectably clean and manicured open palms, legitimized by invasive laws, overreaching compliance policy and people run their little fiefdoms by wielding their power to say no. An accusation is the penalty. Procedure is a tax and ego is the divider between yes and no. Big companies lobby for laws that no small company can uphold, therefore eliminating competition.
There is one thing that I cannot stomach in this world: I hate being leveraged.
I make paintings. I sell them to people. I don’t title them until the buyer and I finalize the name. If the artwork resonates with them, and I liked it enough to post it for sale, there is an agreement, not only in financial terms, but in taste. An unspoken truth between us. I said something to them and they received it.
I minimize every situation that some gimme-gimme bastard can justify saying: “me first.” I am not selling widgets or trying to gain marketshare. I’m afraid to become rich. Camels and needles. I am trying to sell what you are currently reading. Me… my thoughts and work… for God. I’m trading in the etherial stock market of “why”.
Show People They Are Not Trapped
It’s all fake. Your mortgage is a product to sell houses and get as much cash out of you that the bank can get. Do you own your house when you have a mortgage? No. What about the insurance you are forced to buy? Is that insuring your money or the bank’s ownership?
What about the money? Maybe calling it fake is a step too far, but guess what, it is all man-made. I could go on and on about the examples in this world that are man-made and therefore some capricious, dubious or otherwise not-aligned-with-your-needs person, or group of people, can cause a circumstance in which the systems that you depend on, to keep a roof above your head; can be rendered void, change drastically beyond your means and/or become worthless.
Social Security, Medicaid, banking systems, car insurance, health insurance, the food system, the highway system, et el. The reaction of the government to the 1929 crash. The rise of America through the spending of the end of WWII and the cold war. 2007 & 2008?
This is not some political statement, but a statement that all man-made things are subject to entropy, misfeasance and malfeasance. They work when people have confidence in them, for the most part. They die when people treat them like they are something else: like true. If you treat them like they are real and true, at one extent, you’re going to be shocked when the dollar falls or the stock market crashes and you’re going to panic. If you go to the further extreme, you will trust systems so much that you take for granted that you’re getting purposely fucked by them every single day.
This subject is what led me to start Bento Wiz, a separate daily publication. Subscribe below)
Like I said… I don’t mean this to be political. My job is to show you that you are not trapped. These systems and many more are, by their nature, leveraged traps. Many are unavoidable.
I want you to know that you cannot be leveraged by fake things if you do not acknowledge them as true. If the game is rigged… you don’t play the game. I am not saying you should become a homesteader and disappear into the woods and fend for yourself… though I have certainly considered it. (possibly fantasized about it)
These entrapments are a noise that are often too loud for the gifts you’ve been given. It’s hard to see the unseen through a pile of monthly bills and retirement statements. But you can see it….and you can beat it. The size of the Joneses’ house has nothing to do with you. It doesn’t matter what everybody else has or does, what do you do? You are so special that God made you a guardian angel, before time started ticking, to deliver you back to Him. This should be your primary concern: act according to your gifts and eliminate every possible thought or system or person that keeps you from them. This is something like freedom wrapped up into the responsibility of true self-respect.
Be not conformed…
Nobody is coming to save us. Nobody gets out of here alive. There are 8 billion people shaped like you and me. None of them can do precisely what you can do, in the way you do it in the allotted time you’re given. You are amazing because you are almost exactly like everyone else, yet there has never been anyone, there will never be anyone, like your beautiful self.
I believe that one person can cause a chain of events that connects us like the members of the holy body of God… like Paul says in Romans. I believe looking past the obvious seen world into the unseen frees us to serve our community.
I believe that this is my vocation. I believe that little monk imprinted this mission upon me. It's my little place in the Kingdom… “and the gates of hell shall not prevail against it.”
What will happen when I reach someone else? Will it spread exponentially? Will it cause a chain of minor events that 80 years from now culminates in a child being saved from being hit by a car? A Child that cures cancer? What web of holy actions could I leave? What impetus could my gifts provide? Some sort of Christian Butterfly theory with a spritz of Karma and a dash of thermodynamics? Who knows. Maybe I will find out when I get there.
Orthodoxy is the only revolution left.
Thank you for reading. This piece is the foundation under everything I’ll build here. If you're new and it resonates, you can join as a paid subscriber to get the rest as it comes.
Gratitude to Molly, Nancy, and Billie for believing before there was a product. You helped build this.
Jason
Million Dollar Garage
Love your words almost as much as you.