Henry David Thoreau In my early twenties, I read a book called "The Three Boxes of Life." Overall, it's a fairly forgettable career counseling, find your niche in life type of book, save for one unique insight it impressed upon my mind.

The book describes how, in a conventional American life, there are three major classes of human activity; Education, Work, and Leisure. We cram these activities into three "boxes of life" in a chronological fashion, although there is, of course, some small bit of overlap.

From birth until the end of our formal education, we experience the box of Education. Then we spend most of our life stuffed into the box of Work. Finally, at retirement, we enjoy the box of Leisure.

The author then offers advice for integrating the three boxes in a different fashion, so that we may learn, work, and play throughout life.

It made great sense to me, though I managed to forget the advice for almost two decades.

I strive to be an opsimath. There seems to me to be much more to be learned in life than that which can be crammed into a few decades of learning, no matter how intense. Yet with the notable exceptions of some professionals that attend seminars and the like to stay abreast of new developments in their area, and computer geeks, that have long ago resigned themselves to the rapid obsolescence of their knowledge, and the need for continual learning, the overwhelming portion of the adults in our culture never crack a book after the day they toss their graduation caps into the air.

We work too hard. Years later, after I had returned to school, I read a study anthropologists had done of the lifestyles of extant hunter-gatherers. The study stated that in these primitive societies, people only needed to work a few hours a day to meet their simple needs.

Meanwhile, as we as a culture have become more prosperous, we have less and less leisure, and work longer hours. The invention and ready availability of cheap lighting was only the first innovation that helped to bring this about. Our material cultire is another. The increased number and variety of consumer goods we now possess, bought in large part on credit, provides a goad of debt to keep us working hours much longer than are healthy for us, at jobs we dislike.

We are overworked and overstressed for most of our lives, largely because we have been conditioned to lead complicated lives full of stuff that we don't need and can't afford without pledging ever-larger fractions of our lives to making money.

But, I think that's a whole 'nother subject.

At any rate, over the last five years I've gotten smart enough to arrange my affairs so that I can learn, work and play every day. I spend hours each day reading stuff that interests me, both on paper and on the net- history, science, current affairs, fiction, whatever. For me, it's hard to draw a line between that and play, but I play in other ways, too, - concerts. meals out, dancing, and the adult games that CG and I play with our friends. (Sex, my friends, is the best toy there ever was :-)

As, for work, I do a bunch of different things. Doing the same thing every day would make me crazy in short order, as does "working" more than an average of about twenty hours a week. The work I choose to do is also sometimes difficult for me to distinguish from play- working at Renfairs being the best example.

I work for myself, I don't have a boss, and my schedule is largely my own. But there are tradeoffs.

I don't have a huge home, a brand new car, the latest fashions hanging in my closet, scads of fine jewelry, so on and so on, ad infinitum, ad nauseam. I used to make boocoo bucks, and I was never more unhappy and stressed out that when I had to worry about maintaining that income stream, and keeping that business alive, not so much for my financial sake, but that of all the employess that depended on it for their livelihood.

Now, my needs are much simpler, and my stress level is just about nil. When I do get an urge for some big material item, like a new computer or whatever, I'll go on a work binge for a few weeks, and then go buy it. I refuse to go into debt for a consumer good, to include automobiles. A mortgage on a house, is, of course, a different case, as it is largely an investment.

I don't miss being wealthy.

More troubling, actually, is the feeling that I am capable of so much more than I do, but I attribute that to lingering effects of the Puritan brainbinding we all experience growing up in the culture we do, the priciple that equates hard work with virtue, "doing our best," as exemplified in the Bible with the parable of the three stewards.

My family is also a source of some of this - though not quite so much as before. My father, a child of the Depression, in particular, took boodles of vicarious pleasure in having a son that had "made it."

I don't really know why I feel compelled to publish this; it must seem like gloating to many of you that are hemmed in by circumstances, and chained with golden handcuffs to a life you might wish to be free from. That is certainly not how I mean it.

I'm preaching to you.

I'd like to encourage anyone that stumbles across this entry to do everything that your circumstances allow, to get free, to get out of debt, to simplify as much as you can, to get out of whichever of those boxes you find yourself in, and to somehow manage to learn, work, and play each day exactly to the extent and proportion that makes you most content.

Life is just to short for it to be otherwise.

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"It is no measure of health to be well adjusted to a profoundly sick society."

-- Krishnamurti --

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As advertised, CG and I loaded up Otto Saturday morning and made the run up to Excalibur.

Attendance is measured in the hundreds, not the thousands, so the feel is completely different from TRF, where I've worked and played lo' these many years. A vendor pal of mine told me that they'd had 1,200 folk through the door last Saturday, an all-time record for the faire, and a few of the cast members I talked to confirmed that. As a comparison, TRF commonly has over 30,000 a day.

It may even make it. Most faires don't, as the infant mortality rate is undogly. That particular location was once the setting for a faire yclept Cavalier Days, set in the 17th century, but it went tits up years ago. It all depends on how deep the owners' pockets are, as I doubt they've even reached breakeven yet.

It'll still be an uphill battle. This faire only runs four weeks, and for a reason. They can't extend it much farther into the summer, as they'll run smack dab into Scarborough Faire, which will not only compete with them for customers, but drag away about half of their performance cast and two thirds of the vendors. Nor can they extend it back earlier in the year without running into weather that'll keep the patrons away in droves.

Furthermore, they're stuck in the spring slot, as it's man-killing hot there in the Hill Country of Texas in the summer (and all the top-of-the-line entertainers and vendors are doing much bigger, established shows up north) and nobody is gonna want to try and mess with the 3,000 pound gorilla (that's six 500 lb. gorillas) that is the seven week run of TRF in the fall.

We saw several shows, to include the Renaissance guitar of one of our TRF Saturday Night ChowHound pals, SturmRitter, and a three girl Bawdy Wench Act, whose name I didn't get. They performed the standard songs you expect from the wench acts, One-Ball Reilly, No Balls At All, Roll Your Leg Over, and so on. They were better than the crowd was, especially the dark-haired lass on the right.

So, when it came time for the limerick, I shot my hand up and waved it around.

"Do you have a limerick?" the dark-haired lass asked.

I stood up on the table where I had been sitting.

"Yes, good lass, I do!"

I took a deep breath and started to belt it out...

"Wait! Wait!" cried the red-haired lass. "No Nantuckets! No Nantuckets!'

I laughed. "Indeed, no Nantuckets at all."

"You understand what I mean, right? No Nantuckets."

"Yes, I know what you mean. Nooooo Nantuckets."

Finally, the were comfortable that I wasn't going to use one of the Words You Can't Say Onstage At A Renfest. So, in my semi-famous stentorian tones, I held forth with my favorite guaranteed showstopper limerick...

"There once was a lassie named Alice, Who used a dynamite stick for a phallus. They found her vagina In North Carolina, And bits of her tits in Dallas."

The crowd howled and applauded, while the girls nearly fell off the stage. I doffed my cap and bowed, enjoying, as always, that rosy glow you can only get on stage. It was surely the highlight of my day.

After the show, I tipped the girls a fiver, and talked to them for a minute. I told them to feel free to use the rhyme if they'd like, as I'd stolen it from somebody so long ago I'd forgotten where I stole it. (Later, I did a google search, and found about 300 hits for that limerick and it's variations.)

After the show, I ran into John, another TRF veteran. At this faire he plays some French nobleman of some sort - he told me the name, but it was about five names long, and I don't recall it. At TRF, over the past coupla years he's been a barbarian named Smash, and last year, he was the Goblin King, nearly unrecognizable under his makeup and partial mask. I handed CG the camera to get a pic of us, just so I'd have at least one pic to show I was actually there. :-) I spend most of my time on the back side of the camera, so I end up with hundreds of pics, but none of me. Probably a good thing. :-)

Speekina witch, I took a lot more pics than you'll see here, but my cantankerous Agfa digital decided to act funky. It ate the rechargable batteries in it right off, then devoured the only set of alkaline backups I had with me. It is sometimes capricious. It acts as if everything is fine as you take the pics, leaving you to find only later that since it didn't like the flavor of batteries you fed it, it tossed a tantrum and didn't actually bother to write the images to the memory card, even though it appeared to. :-( It has something to do with the delivered voltage and the automatic low battery shutdown or some such, I've been told.

We talked for a bit with a lady that sells handmade angora wool items - rugs, scarves, vests, and yarn from her booth. It was most interesting, as while I had read about the process, and seen pictures, I had never before actually seen anyone spin wool before.

She had a scrapbook with pictures documenting the entire process from shearing the goats (which they raise on their own ranch) to the weaving of the yarn to make the finished product. She explained to me the difference between combing and carding wool, something I'd been unclear about, and the difference in the sort of thread produced by the two processes. I'd joked before that we oughta make a sweater from all the hair my wolfhounds shed, especially Caesar, and now we know somebody that can spin it for us :-)

The show at TRF has lightly armored (chain-mail coifs and hauberks only) cowboys on little cutting horses (they really are, in Real Life, working cowboys on the quarter horses they use to work cattle the rest of the year) playing "shield tag," busting light balsa lances on each other's shields. The show is fast and furious, with the jousters barely slowing down to grab a new lance before they turn and charge for the next tilt.

While at Scarborough, the jousters are clad in full plate mail, barrel helms and all, and are riding monster draft horses. It looks a lot more impressive, and it certainly appears more authentic, but they run at each other a lot slower, no faster than a canter, and there's a complete stop in the action after each tilt.

By mid-afternoon, CG allowed that she'd had her fill, and was ready to leave. I think she likes working at faires a lot more than playing at them, and considering the money she makes at them, she may have a point. (As it turned out, she had an ulterior motive.) So, we said our goodbyes, and laden with a bunch of stuff she'd manged to buy while I wasn't looking, we left for home.

We didn't manage to make it there very soon, but that's a whole 'nother story.

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