Deleted Scenes - Colony Economics

This is an old blog post from last summer that I never got around to publishing. I publish posts like these with the tag 'Deleted Scenes' [don't ask me why...I don't know]. Point is that it helps you understand what my home is like and why it is so hard to be where we are right now.

Bad jobs can be fun jobs. A good job has you focused on what you’re doing. A bad job makes you focus on what you can get away with. There weren’t many ‘good’ jobs on the colony. The jobs we did were boring, weird and sometimes dangerous. A class system began to emerge on the colony as those who were there to fish, fished and those who were there to scam, scammed. Depending on your scam, depending on who you were close to and what they were doing, you either had it really, really good or really, really bad.

We had it pretty good, I think. We didn’t go hungry and leave for shore like so many did. Some people were so broke that they just cut their moorings in the middle of the night and drifted free. At least I think that’s what happened. We came out at sunrise and there was a big hole in the dock where the boat was. I really hope it wasn’t because they sank in the middle of the night.

“It’s like this, Jim,” he said, picking up a couple of pickle chips from the counter where we were making burgers one night. He flipped both pickles straight out where they smacked against the window. Slowly, they began to slide downward and Dad continued. “You take an idea and throw it against the wall. If it sticks or it slides down, that tells you how good it is. If it’s a good idea – you go with it. If it isn’t, you let it go and pick something else.” Grabbing the pickles before they hit the sill, he popped them into his mouth and then cleaned the window with the front of his t-shirt.

“That’s disgusting,” I said.

“That’s economics,” he replied.