I once lived in a rented room in a down-ish neighborhood where the landlord had ducks in the back yard. He had set up a nesting box out of plywood, and these ducks had some straw available, and would build their nests in their box. This man was not wealthy — or so we say — but he had an wealth in those fowl, in the sound of them sopping on water in their kiddie pools that ratified our deepest urges toward agriculture, the inborn beauty of the FORM of the nests, the abundance of having your own eggs and the control it implied over industrial food. It was a world of beauty and ORDER, and it came straight from Nature.

Yet his was the only garden in the neighborhood. All else was a wasteland of bad grass.

One of the structures of the working poor is slatternliness. Everything is always a giant mess, and there is practically nothing you can do about it, especially males, but there are evidently reasons for this structure that involve fitting in socially.

Running off and getting married used to be a time-honored way to get past parental disapproval. The newlyweds fended for themselves upon such a marriage instead of relying on the resources of their families. That was the Deal. Yet one fellow in my father’s family was murdered for marrying “above him.” These two young lovers did too well in marriage for everyone’s taste, it had to be wrecked, for he was evidently muy caliente and Mexican while she was Anglo and richer rather than poorer! He was shot and killed.

I believe it is the novelist Alice Walker who describes a wealthy African-American man who owned a very expensive car called a Cadillac and wore a chauffeur’s hat while driving it to fend off such an attack, while I have witnessed African-American males driving expensive European cars routinely pulled over on this one particular stretch of old money white peoples’ road in Houston called Memorial Drive. You can hiss and spit about the tickets, but why not just STAY OFF MEMORIAL DRIVE?

Or drive a beater with an immaculate engine!

Class has been roughly enforced, and the appearance of one’s home and personal items was such a marker.

Thus we see in some milieus people earning the same money have very different levels of personal habits, depending on class.

I am always astonished by the plasticity of rent.

Three rooms at the same price point can have very different appearances and social structures.

Thus it was that my father’s family, the Big Fish people, kept themselves very low in certain ways so as not to arouse the ire of the WORLD. It was an unfortunate habit of mine as well, and caused me as much consternation everywhere, including my own heart, as it defused invidia against the Mexican who was just a little too good.

In my early youth, I spent all my vacations with my maternal grandparents, who were the exact opposite of my paternal ones, impeccable in their physical effects but lacking the frenetic intelligence and curious drive of those other people who were men and women of the world. No, these perfect beings were stately and restful, and enjoyed the richness of the details.

There was always a kitchen garden with exotic plants like asparagus which they had grown back home in Washington. You had to send out for them from a seed catalog. They came in the fall and were carefully “banked,” which is to say, put under a layer of dirt. In the spring the spears would peek up out of the ground and be clipped, ready for the plate.

We only had a few spears each season. Every single was one them was a precious treat and an honor. In the fall, they would be banked again, to come up the next spring, and again for years until they finally failed and had to be replaced, which they were. Everything was carefully tended and all in a state of perfection while Nothing. Ever. Changed. And the hustle and bustle of those other places where I was taken by my father was not known.

Why know the Mayor in person when you can know her on television?

Such care with the daily tasks causes people to be very close and very fine. I spent every minute I could with them, even in my twenties. It was a respite from the perpetual strife of THE WORLD.

After they died, I had to cast about for something that would give me those elegances and came upon the symbol system of Hermetics wherein my father’s family’s mental energy could rest.

It wasn’t until I put the slatternly energy of self-defense into the form of the lodge magic(k) and astrology, in all of those solfeggio on the principles of the elements, the planets, the houses of the chart, and everything in step with the Anglos who were neat, that I could start to organize my life.

My family got this exactly the opposite in terms of how I should live. My father’s people would have had me make a lot of money and hire a criada to clean the house whereas the Protestant work ethic required me to perform the impossible task of keeping it clean myself. Perhaps I always had criadas in my soul — it came so naturally when it did come in.

I never had kids because I was a giant mess and how am I going to be a playwright if I have two or three other mess machines in the house and only me to clean it? It was always a crippled life until I had the lodges, then it was strictness and discipline and lots of rehearsals, and gradually the marble got chipped away from the great world of that statue ART and those works of literature rolled off the press.

I was happy.

At a certain point, it became clear that I needed to really WOW it with the objects that were always disobeying the requirement of making sense on the physical plane, but to cause a giant LIST of those objects. Like on Excel. And put them in identical boxes with the lists on the box, carefully tended inside of the computer.

So I made a list of every object that was not used all the time, and put them into these boxes, and the lists COMMANDED THE WORLD such that I could get my theatre done and not just fall over chaos every time I walked through a room.

But long it could not be.

The world of the theatre offered me a post at a higher level, and, as we know from the Peter Principle, You rise to the level of your own mediocrity.

The requirement was to toss out THE GREY WORLD of Hermetics that had solved all of the problems with executive ability and change my religion to one that didn’t clean the house!

It all fell apart and no one could say why.

I now say that THE GAME unsolves your problems so that it can solve them.

While also not!

I have worked as a health care aide for all social classes.

The rich alone are very uneven in their material possessions. I always say, they have forty shirts and no pajamas. When it is time to get them ready for bed, they sleep in a suit.

They are still working, even as the lights go out.

I can’t fathom how a person with two million dollars in the bank cannot afford $10 Walmart pajamas, but no.

This is equally true of toothpaste, which is impossible to own and even more impossible to keep the cap on. Every day is a giant battle with the pale green cement. Eventually you give up.

I know caregivers making less than $20/hour who buy the toothpaste for their pathetic millionaire clients.

Meanwhile the poor have fifty pajamas, all in a pile on the living room floor. When it is time to get them ready for bed, there are no pajamas that are acceptable. No, not one. They sleep in their high school football jersey.

I have concluded that the rich own all the pajamas and, a few blocks away, the poor keep them and care for them.

These are people with Alzheimer’s. It is not social conditioning — it is a neurological structure. Feudalism is probably a biological functionality of the reptile brain and when adequate food is available, the housing and material effects naturally are arranged like this.

Meanwhile, the middle class who occupies these JOBS looks on, hating them both, really.

I hate the rich, with their feckless chaos.

What I want is a pajama drawer with about five pajamas, neatly folded and ready to be worn in succession so as not to overuse the favorite.

The middle class, the lodge class, with its own magic that doesn’t really need to work off of anyone to have reasonable effectiveness, even if some people smoke a dooby on the side.

I can see THE GAME bumping people up if they get an organization or smashing them down if they have too much going on that isn’t quite genius but is not all on welfare, either.

Hence the astral plane’s destruction of our hidden talents.

No doubt THE GAME explains this differently but I see the structure functioning. I speculate that it is considered magnetic and the framework worked with exactitude. More to come on these structures, and hopefully we can again involve ourselves in being worldly and having intelligent and functional lives, as I predict will happen when large numbers of the intelligentsia get tired of destructive nonsense and being super powered magicians when all they wanted was to excel at their jobs! At that point, and I do look forward to it, many will simply move to the ATR where there can be some dreams, a lot of operative magic(k), guidance from beautiful archetypes, and not so many deads all over the spoons.

I do not think many are available for our Path, of preparing folks to do Renaissance magic, but if interested, inquire within.