I was doing yet another sort through some boxes in one of my closets and tossing out old things I no longer needed.  How did I ever accumulate so much junk?  At the bottom of a box was a stack of game manuals, some from the late 1980s.  Most of these manuals were the rules and mechanics of playing all sorts of role-playing games or board games. One game that wasn’t there was Monopoly.  I hated that game.

You remember Monopoly, right?  A game that almost always ended up with someone getting really pissed off as one player inevitably ended up crushing all the others by ruining them financially.  Most families have that one relative that takes the game too seriously and read all the rules and understood the game mechanics way too well and always had the advantage.  It’s usually that distant cousin you rarely see and can’t stand and this just solidifies that distaste.

Well that cousin grew up.  Those early lessons in understanding game mechanics and manipulating the rules don’t just apply to board games.  We rarely think about life in the terms of game mechanics but some do and they do quite well for themselves.

Nearly everything in your life comes with prepackaged and predetermined rules.  Your job has rules.  Break enough of them and you’ll lose your job.  Driving has rules.  Those that don’t follow the rules either get a ticket or wind up in an accident.  Social interactions have rules.  You break these rules and you might end up all alone.

Those things that don’t have rules?  Either they do have rules and you haven’t realized it yet or some enthusiast is eagerly working out the rules right as we speak.

But two aspects of life have the most rules and have the most effect on our lives; money and politics.  Sure there are other games out there.  There’s science, there’s fame, there’s religion. But money and politics, those are the one’s that can affect all the others.  In all of these games is a cousin that knows how to work the rules.  Money or trade was the first game that we played.

The idea was simple.  Use tokens of exchange to represent value and trade those tokens in order to facilitate trade.  What’s wrong with that?  You provided labor or made something of value and someone paid you for it.  But along the way that cousin noticed something.  Money itself could be made to “work”.  Money couldn’t do anything itself of course but money in motion or the promise of money, well that could move mountains.

In the last century and particularly in the last 50 years, that cousin noticed that manipulating and skillfully moving money around could generate even more money than actually doing any physical labor or producing anything tangible.

So much money in fact that you couldn’t make enough physical tokens to represent all that money.  That money was now just notional numbers floating around in some digital ledger.  Cousin had totally figured out the rules of how to make more money and where the rules were sketchy then cousin made new rules to make even more money.

But somewhere along the way the rules got a little too complicated.  They contradicted themselves and suddenly the money began to eat itself up and shrink.  Cousin didn’t know what to do because the rules that covered this flatly stated that the game was over.  But Cousin also played another game.

I could get into a sophomoric argument of when and where it started, who’s to blame, and what’s the solution is but the game of politics is almost as old and complicated as the game of money.  You could look back in history all over the world and see similar examples and read as the political game became more and more complex and finally one way or the other collapsed either due to outside forces or internal pressures.

Where did our particular game start?  Some said it was a group of jealous old men at the start of the country creating rules to favor their interests.  Others point to the Civil War and the ascendancy of the federal government, and others point to the World Wars and the Great Depression making it obligatory that the political game become more important to ensure our survival.

Any way that it started it was ripe and ready for Cousin to enjoy and use.  We elevated politics from a homespun art form to a sort of science.  I say a sort of science for although we have good solid principles to look at, I don’t think we can quite claim that we can predictably look at politics and determine an outcome based on current conditions and applied forces.  At least most people can’t claim that.  Don’t expect the experts to admit to that.

But nonetheless amazing things have been done.  For example we created a system where spending money was considered to be free speech.  We mastered the art of the backroom deal and the wisdom of when and where to apply pressure to arrive at the desired outcome.  We could take a small sample of opinions from everyday folk and extrapolate the results to determine what an entire state or even the nation was thinking and postulate that this candidate would win where that other one would not.

Cousin played this game as well.  When one has a significant amount of money you can’t help but play this game.  Money attracts attention in a way that few other things can.  People that don’t have money figure that just being around money will lure money towards them and sometimes they’re right.  People that play the political game know that money helps quite a bit.

Cousin argued that the money game was broken and needed the political game to “fix” it.  Cousin knew that the money game could help the political game keep moving and expanding.  So new rules were written and the money game was fixed.  For the good of every one of course.

But now the political game was broken.  Those amazing polls, that nuanced science that could foretell the future, suddenly was blind.  Those political calculations that said this candidate should run instead of that one, those assumptions that underpinned the very rules of the game had suddenly yielded up an unexpected result.

Now the professional class that plays the political game for a living is at a loss as to what to do.  The rules had been followed yet the results were not as they should have been. According to the rules of the game something bad is about to happen.

Cousin won’t suffer.  Cousin never suffers.  Money forgives many sins, it pads Cousin against harm, and insulates Cousin against the worst effects and what’s great is that now, Cousin can make an infinite supply of money.

But for those that don’t understand either the political game or the money game….

As ever they will be the ones that suffer first and the most.  One thing that you may notice is that when you put away the monopoly board that you’re always missing  a piece.  The thimble, or maybe a couple of plastic houses, or a couple of dollars go astray here and there.  No monopoly board ever remains intact and yet even though some of the little pieces of the game may be lost or damaged the game continues.

Insulted? Angry at the notion of plain every day people being considered to be nothing more than pawns or tokens?  Me too.  Why aren’t we doing something about it?

What am I trying to say?  Do I have a plan to fix it all?  Of course not.  That would mean that I played the game (one or the other).  Clearly I don’t play.

But maybe it’s time to flood the game with millions of new players.  Maybe it’s time for people who never thought that they had a stake in the game to get in.  By themselves they would not win, they might not even win in big groups but maybe, just maybe they can force a rewrite of the rules.

Improbable?  True.  But is it better than just being a pawn and waiting for the dice to roll to determine where you will land?

When I was a kid there was this credit card commercial.  Two buddies out on the highway with their ten speed bikes.  They spend the day riding around and then ride into an inn or bed and breakfast where one of them takes out his credit card and books a couple of rooms.  No wallet, no fuzz , no muzz.  This was back in the late 80’s and to me it seemed that the only people who could live like this were rich people.  The rest of us carried grubby piles of paper money and coins in our wallets.  The idea of a cashless society was just a pipe dream.

So fast forward a few decades and there I am in traffic headed back from the gym.  I’m headed to a supermarket to get some fruit juice or something to drink.  All I have in my wallet is my ID and my debit card. I’m stopped at a left turn signal waiting for the light to change.

Just to the left on the median is a guy with a handwritten sign on a torn scrap of cardboard.

“ANYTHING HELPS”

All I could offer was a smile.  The light changed and I drove on.

Typically I do give to panhandlers.  I know the arguments against it and I do give to shelters as well.  I always advocate that people who can give should give.  But when you’re face to face with someone so obviously in need it’s a little hard to say no and comfort yourself with the logic of giving to a homeless shelter for the ‘greater good’.

I don’t give every time of course or I’d be broke.  By some estimates the U.S. is up over 1.5 million homeless people and I just can’t get to everyone.

1.5 million people who need food, water, shelter, and some sort of basic sanitation.  Just because you lose your job doesn’t mean that you stop living.  You still have to somehow provide for your own needs an often adults have to provide for the needs of their children.

Now, not everyone that is homeless begs or panhandles.  Most people try to tap their personal resources of friends and families or reach out for government assistance.  They keep on trying till they’re able to normalize their situation and get back on their feet.

But some people do have to panhandle to survive and feed themselves.  Some abuse the panhandling situation.  They don’t have a desperate need but have normalized this as a way of life.  Lastly, some panhandle to get drunk or stoned and to try to escape the miserable reality of their lives for just a little while.

I wondered what kind of money was involved in all of this?  How much do these people make in a day?  Easy enough to research on the web.  Somewhere between ten and a hundred dollars per day depending on circumstance with an average of about twenty-five dollars a day.

How many people?  That’s tougher.  Not a very stable population to track.  But for argument sake let’s say a fifth of the total homeless population.

How many days a year?  Again this probably varies wildly.  Some days they work, some they don’t.  Some days they make nothing.  Let’s say about 300 days a year.

Plug in some numbers….  This can’t be right. 2.25 billion dollars a year.  Averaged out to about $7500 per year per panhandler.  Most of that money going to basic needs or vices.

Of course that figure assumes that all of us still carry round paper and metal money to give out to panhandlers and that we don’t all carry just debit cards or credit cards.  Tying back to the beginning of this post a lot of economists want us to do away with physical money permanently and switch to a digital system.  Once that happens might we see the end of the panhandling era?

Not necessarily so.  Now I go back to a couple of years ago.  I’m at an art gallery wandering round looking at paintings and sculptures and whatnot.  Someone has set up a credit card reader on a pedestal with a sign urging patrons to support the arts.  Each swipe would donate 5 dollars.  The reader is hooked up to an Ethernet cable and seamlessly debits the donated account from the patrons account.  Several patrons are enthusiastically swiping.  Why shouldn’t they?  It’s been shown that people tend to spend more using credit and debit cards when they don’t have to dig out physical money or write out a check.

So now we go back to my panhandler on the median.  What if this panhandler had been equipped with some sort of card reader.  Not a sophisticated device like those hooked up to a smartphone or to the internet but a standalone device.  Something that needs to be downloaded at a centralized base station like at say a homeless shelter.  A place where the homeless would have to go to cash their earnings.

A place where he would be registered, where homeless volunteers and workers would get a chance to help this person with additional services.  A place that they could keep tabs on this person and suggest housing, food, or medical help for this person.  A place that we could begin to better quantify the problem of homelessness.

The challenges?  The technology I don’t believe is a challenge.  Card readers are fairly robust and reliable systems.  Coding the applications needed should not be a problem.

The banking aspect would be trickier.  Would bankers go for something like this?  Certainly they would want to charge service fees which might make things difficult for the average homeless person.  But perhaps the answer lies in the volume of business.  I mentioned up above that this could turn out to be a multi billion dollar concern.  Even if the bank made cents on the dollar this could add up to be serious money.

Of course abuse could come on the other end.  Card readers being stolen or hacked to extract the funds.  But I think safeguards can be put in place.

The main benefit that I see is that this is a way to get people back into the system.  This allows the system to sit up and take notice of just how big a problem homelessness really is and to allocate the appropriate funds to address the problem.

I believe that we need to address this problem in a modern fashion.  If we expect to go into the future and reap the benefits of a technological wonderland we must be prepared to make sure that these benefits are enjoyed by all parts of society from the richest to the poorest.

If we choose to ignore or marginalize this population then I don’t think that we can ever really move forward into the future.

I’m sitting on an examination table in an examination room waiting for the doctor to come in.  The narrow little room is barely larger than a broom closet and lit by a single sullen fluorescent light that doesn’t seem too thrilled to be here.

My naked feet dangle just inches above the floor.  I look round and see the standard things you would find in any exam room in America, rubber glove dispenser, a sink, anatomy posters that look decades old,  and advertisements for some new drug or some other treatment for diseases that I can’t even imagine.

The doctor walks in.  He looks to be in his fifties and wears the ceremonial white lab coat that we all associate with medicine and science.  He briefly glances at a clipboard, greets me, and gets to business.  He kneels down and starts stretching and rotating my feet around.  After a few minutes he nods his head and announces that he is pleased with my progress.  The ankles are not as stiff as before and the swelling has disappeared. As he washes his hands at the sink he advises me that I should start running again.  Nothing too severe and definitely not everyday.  But it would be for the best he says.

Just like that, doc?  That easy?  Start running.  I think back through the years at all the people who would issue commands or make broad statements and never really gave any thought as to what they were saying.

Start running.  I had stopped running back in November.  In the middle of a step, miles away from anywhere, I stepped down and felt a fiery jolt of pain race up my right leg.  I nearly stumbled off the running trail.  I wound up hopping all the way back home and I kept limping for the next two months.

I then had to navigate through my insurance agency’s tenuous rules and regulations till I found a podiatrist I could go see.  Now, months after the treatment I was ready for the next level of my rehabilitation.  Running again.

I had tried getting back into running before.  If you know nothing else about me you must at least know that I will heedlessly plunge into anything with little thought of consequences.  It is one of my biggest faults and at a few key moments in my life my only redeeming quality.

The results of course were predictable.  After less than five minutes of running.  Pain, cursing, limping, and returning home dejected.  So you must imagine I was not too thrilled to attempt running again.

Treadmills.  No true runner would find it ironic to know that treadmills had at one time been used as a punishment in prisons hundreds of years ago.  The device itself is not to blame and neither are the designers that in their genuine good intentions wanted to provide people with an indoors running option.  No, rather the concept of mindlessly running in place in one spot for minutes if not hours at a time is somehow anathema to those that spend any amount of time on the road.  The very activity seems to be innately linked to punishment.

The newest and latest treadmills offer all manner of conveniences from heart rate monitors to personal fans to virtual reality TV monitors that try to give the illusion of running out-of-doors including inclining or declining the treadmill.  But really nothing replaces the feeling of being out-of-doors and seeing the world move past as you run.  Feeling the heat of the sun, the cold of winter, the rain pelting on your face or the wind blowing in your face and feeling like an anchor trying to drag you back.

This particular treadmill was on the higher end of the machines.  It had a built-in TV, a heart rate monitor and a variety of options to make your run more pleasant.  You could even hook it up to your smartphone and listen to your tunes.

I hit the quick start button and started walking.  I set the machine for a 30 minute workout.  The pace is a glacially slow walking pace so I almost immediately dialed it up.  After two minutes I was bored so I dialed it up again and again.  I finally dialed it up till I was at the edge of a running pace.  How long could I keep this up?  I kept nudging it up.  I held onto the heart rate monitor bar and I was already up to 130 beats a minute.

Finally I was running.  The monitor said I was running somewhere between a 9 and 10 minute mile.  I’ll take that.  I wasn’t trying to break any records.  Just get out of the starting gate again.  I try to focus on the running and keeping my mind off the tendons in my ankles.  Was I tearing something?  Would I feel it in the morning?  Would I throw away months of rehab in a few minutes?

Keep running.  Ten minutes, fifteen minutes into the workout.  I reach for the heart rate monitor.  174 beats  minute.  Right at the edge for a man my age.  Sweat is getting in my eyes.  I feel my cheeks flush as my internal engines kicks into high gear.  Long idle systems springing back to life.

I feel a slight jolt as the treadmill slows down.  I’ve lost track of time and the 30 minutes is up.  The machine automatically goes into a ‘cool down’ mode and a walking pace.  After five minutes I unsteadily walk off the treadmill and head to the weight room.  Sweat rolling off every inch of me.

A couple of the trainers do a double take seeing me walking off a treadmill.  They’re used to seeing me at the stationary bikes.  Riding fast and getting nowhere.

I pass by a kid wearing an Iggy & the stooges cut off t-shirt.  Apropos I guess because I do feel like a streetwalking cheetah with a heart full of napalm.  I should be dead tired but I’m not.  Running always revs up my engine and this workout has released a heady brew or adrenaline and testosterone into a system that hasn’t felt like this in months.  I’m not cooling off at all.  I was heating up.

Everyone has a set routine of how they prefer to workout.  Too many people today, my routine won’t work.  I need to get rid of this excess energy.  So I head for the nearest thing.  The rowing machine is open.  I don’t even check the weight and just start rowing.  Attacking the handles and almost ripping them off.  Before I know it I’ve gone through three sets and still I’m not tired.

It’s almost intoxicating.  This feeling of power coursing through me, needing an outlet.  I feel like I can do anything.  Bicep curls, the ab crunch, the chest press.  Finally I get to the lower back machine and I feel that I’ve done enough.

I get in the car and it hits me.  Like a junkie coming down, the last vestiges of the adrenaline wear off and I feel abnormally tired.  I almost want to sleep.  So many months without anything and suddenly all of this.  It’s too much for my system.

Still, I wonder how my ankles will reward me in the morning.  One day doesn’t cure anything.  It’s just a proof of concept.  I’ve still got a long ways to go and this is just one of many challenges to come.  Enjoy the moment.  Little victories like this are few and precious.  Tomorrow will take care of itself.

I wake up while it’s still dark.  The sun isn’t even of thinking of getting up for another hour.  I dress in my gym clothes or rather my former running gear.  I don’t run anymore.  The last pair of running shoes that I bought still look fairly new even 9 months after I bought them.

I step outside and it’s a typically hot and humid July summer morning.  This Saturday won’t bring any relief from the heat.  I drive down to the gym on the empty west Houston streets.  Last year I could run the three and half miles to the gym in about half an hour.  Not any more.

I get to the gym entrance just as they are opening up for the day and go in with the other early birds and go through my routine. Half an hour on the stationary bike and forty-five minutes on the weights and machines. The same routine four or five times a week depending on my schedule.  I’m thankful for the continuity of the routine. Routines and set schedules are a cold comfort but they are a comfort after what’s happened in the last year or so.

I suppose collapse might be a good description of 2015.  2015 was a year that I expected would be a breakout year for me.  I expected that things would not just get a little better but would totally improve in every aspect and in every imaginable way.  Unfortunately it seemed that things began badly and little by little progressed to be actively terrible.  The year culminated with my health taking a turn for the worse.

The gym has new exercise bikes.  Much better than the older bikes that they used to have but I can feel that this is no substitute for an hour-long run.  I’ve tried the thread mill and the elliptical machines and I still can’t do more than twenty minutes before the pain in my ankles forces me off.  Still, I feel better than I did in December when all I could do was limp from place to place.

I leave the bike all sweaty and I get some sense of satisfaction.  Proof that I’ve done something today.  I go into the weight room and look for an empty machine or a spot with weights without too many people.  My gym is fairly cool about things.  “Leave me alone and I will leave you alone” is the unspoken motto.  A few people like to show off.  They load up the weights as much as possible and make a great show of lifting or they show off their physique by wearing clothes that are too tight or too revealing but for the most part it’s work minded people looking to get in their sets and get back to their regular lives.

Work itself has been a challenge to say the least.  Whether it’s because of a sluggish economy or bad advertising of our company or just my depressed mood it has been a challenge to keep moving forward this year.  We snapped out of our doldrums around February and have been making progress since then, slow but steady progress.  I’ve been able to implement some routines to make the most of what sales leads that we do get and the results are slowly beginning to pay off.  Nothing spectacular but better than the nothing that I was producing before.  I feel happy with the progress but I dare not get slack and relax.

I’ve worked out my arms till everything aches.  I get that odd ropey almost limp spaghetti like feeling in my arms that let’s me know that the workout was effective and a little more progress was made today.

The sun’s out and as I drive home and at a red light I think about my situation.  I no longer have the big goals or checkpoints to check my progress that I wrote down in late 2014.  No lists or anything that tells me “yes you are getting ahead”.  That doesn’t work in this situation.  This year I have to measure success in another way.

I have to measure success in my willingness to get up every morning and to continue battling every day.  To take progress wherever or whenever it comes and to be adamant that no matter what happens that I keep fighting.

In the worst days of December, January, and February I would wake up dreading the coming day at work.  Would I sell anything today?  Would I get any sales leads?  Would I have a job at the end of the week?  I would feel depression and shame as my physical condition slowly deteriorated over the days and weeks and feeling powerless to make things better.

Little by little I’ve had to claw and scratch my way back.  I can’t look up yet and face the gigantic hill that I still have to climb.  The sheer size of it would sap my will.  It’s not time for that yet anyways.

I have to define success as my willingness to continue fighting every morning.  No matter what happens, no matter what setbacks may come up I am still willing to continue fighting.  It’s not the joy of competition or joy of battle that I once felt when I was younger.  Time was that I would savor a new challenge and see the advantages and rewards to be gained by testing myself and winning.  No this isn’t that.  This is a sort of grim determination that I will not quit.  I will not stop.  No matter what I will keep going.

Maybe one day I will be able to set up lofty goals and have grand plans again.  But for now this is what success looks like. Another day of fighting.  Another day of work.