4 September

Happy Labor Day: What Work Means To Me. Today, I Am What I Do. 45,220 Posts Later. Celebrating The Bedlam Farm Journal

by Jon Katz

A friend recently asked me if I was what I do. I still don’t have the answer. But I’m inching closer.

Last week, a nurse also asked me what I do in the hospital. I was a writer and a blogger, I said. I didn’t have to hesitate; it came out easily and quickly. I’m not interested in being wishy-washy—it’s time to decide.

Since my writing now focuses around my blog, photography, and life, I guess I am what I do in many ways. I am also increasingly concentrating my work on doing good – the Army of Good – but that is not how I identify myself to people. It sounds too self-serving and holy.

So, I guess I’m thinking about my blog when I think about Labor Day today and what it means to me. I’m writing this at 5 a.m. I had a restless night as I recovered from my brain bleed.  What other helpful thing might I do at this hour?

Maria took this photo of me yesterday;  I was doing the first thing I did the morning after I returned from the hospital: go outside to check on my flower beds so I could take some pictures for my Blog yesterday.

Lying in my hospital bed, in too much pain to move, I reached for my Iphone and posted that I was not blogging that day. Maria laughed.

That’s you, she said.

You are always thinking about the Blog.

And for a good reason: my Blog saved my hide in many ways, helped me be authentic, heal from an awful breakdown, grow as a writer, grow as a human, and transition from writing about what other people told me to write about what I wished to write. The blog made it possible for me to be a real writer.

To find out who I was by sharing my life and telling the truth. No more dodging reality. The Blog is the good and the bad me all into one.  The good one is growing.

There is little space between them. Next to Maria, the dogs, and my daughter, the blog is the most important thing to me. It is my living memoir told in the virtual world, not the paper world.

The blog defines me and gives my life structure, purpose, and an outlet for my creativity and long search for a writing home.

It helps me be honest and share my vulnerability; I still have much of that. How does this fit into Labor Day? It has taught me to speak up for myself and my true identity and talk back to the peckerheads who live and feast online to tear other people down.

 Our holidays are getting old and dusty; our culture doesn’t think much of what they mean, only how much time we have to sleep, shop, or travel. We celebrate Martin Luther King Day as the country seems to forget what he was about. Christmas is as much about shopping online as it is about Christ, more perhaps.

Labor Day offers a similar disconnection between reality and history. The holiday was founded in 1882 New York City to celebrate the labor unions fighting for higher wages and safer workspaces in our greedy country.

It’s odd to celebrate a holiday that has lost its purpose. I have to make it my own.

Labor unions in America have been struggling against hostile legislation, stagnant wages, and a flow of new workers who don’t care to pay union dues for years.

Companies like Starbucks and Amazon spend millions of dollars fighting to keep unions from organizing in their coffee shops and warehouses. This wasn’t what working people had in mind when they created Labor Day.

State legislatures have increasingly passed legislation to curb organizing and make it more difficult.

Working people have a tough time in America; we are a Corporate Nation now; profit is the national religion, and money and prosperity are the national mission.

Morals, democracy, and working conditions come later. In modern America, one percent of the people have 90 percent of the wealth.

That was not what the labor unions and their members had in mind.

Our world differs from 1882; most Americans feel labor unions have become too powerful, hindering growth and corporate profits.

Most of them have been out-lobbied by billionaire money and co-opted politicians. Like most things in a divided nation, this holiday has little focus or consensus.

Big business is good now at dividing us and getting us to blame each other each other, not them, for our troubles. They call it brainwashing.  What is it we are celebrating today? I’m celebrating my blog. This is my work.

I like to think about the holidays’ meaning rather than find another reason to go out to eat or buy something. For me, Labor is about the meaning and importance of work and its importance to me and my identity.

The photo above was taken by Maria yesterday; it shows me tending to my flower garden the first thing the morning after I got home from the hospital. I was told not to be alone or walk alone as I was dizzy, light-headed, and in danger of falling.

I thought Maria would blast me for getting up alone when I was still so unsteady, but she smiled and said this was what she loved about me: my dedication to my work and my blog. It’s true.

The Blog is my work, the focal point of my creative life, my work with the Army of Good, and my photography and farm and animals.

I guess this is my identity now.

Maria and I identify ourselves with our work; I’m unsure who I am without it. I started the Blog in 2007 when I sensed publishing was changing and felt increasingly confined by it.

I took the giant leap (at the time) of starting a blog when very few book writers wanted one. I liked the freedom to write what I wanted, not what marketers wanted.

My publisher thought me out of my mind. And I was. This was a fearsome leap of faith.

 

A few years later, I also decided to become a photographer, something my editors thought foolish and a waste of time.  My Blog was the reason. With pictures, the words had credibility. The images became as important as the words.

I met Maria and sensed a fellow writer and creative and offered her space on my Blog to write her journal, and she took to it naturally and beautifully. We fell in love, married, and shared our life on the farm.

Bedlam Farm and our blogs are the binding center of our life together. She is also a videographer, poet, photographer, and artist. Her Blog made that possible. Her art is her identity, but the Blog helps to make her art possible.

I gave up books soon after I began the Bedlam Farm Journal  (and my publisher gave up me); thus, this Blog became my work, livelihood, and only source of income.

The Bedlam Farm Journal was named after the Bethlem Royal Hospital in London, also known as St. Mary Bethlehem, or Bethlehem Hospital.

It is a psychiatric hospital with a famous history that has inspired several horror books, films, and TV series, including Bedlam, a 1946 movie starring Boris Karloff.

The hcitizens of London loved to go to the prison on Sundays and throw tomatoes and jeer at the inmates and patients.

So many people came to make fun of the mentally ill that Bethlem (a name soon to evolve as Bedlam) became associated with chaos and mayhem.

That seemed a fitting name for my Blog. I was smack in the middle of a nervous breakdown when I started it.

The Blog kept me grounded and creative. I was also inspired by the old farm journals I was collecting and reading.

I was amazed at how honest the farmers were and how much life they could fit into a few words. Their diaries were tiny and leather-bound, with no photos illustrating their complicated lives.

But they did a remarkable job of chronicling their lives. That’s what I wanted the Blog to do.

 

Today, I celebrate my blog with love, gratitude, and commitment. As a Dyslexic, I was challenged by the task of writing a lot while having trouble seeing words clearly and in the correct order.

The blog became a vehicle of affirmation for me; I was told it would be impossible to publish a daily blog myself.

My typos anger and disturb some people, but the Blog has only grown. My core readers are as loyal to me as I am to them. We have grown up together.

I was a New York Times best-selling author five times and posted my 45,220th Blog yesterday. That’s the credit I am most proud of. Hundreds of thousands of people all over the country read my Blog every month.

I have been a husband, father, reporter, producer, critic, and author, but that’s not how I identify myself.

I am not only a blogger, but that’s who and what I am when I identify myself.

On Labor Day, I give thanks for my decision to start the Bedlam Farm Journal. And to the many people who follow my life there and support it. I’m told that I nearly died last week. I’m unsure if that’s true, but it felt and looked like it.

Before I die, as we all will one day, I wanted to mark Labor Day by celebrating the Bedlam Farm Journal and the many people who make it possible: you.

Thanks.

6 Comments

  1. I enjoy reading your posts. As a retired school bus driver who belonged to a union that fought for its members, I agree with what you said about many of today’s attitudes towards unions.

    Our current public corporate attitudes seem to be me first and to hell with our employees. We can always find more.

    Done with my rant.

    Wishing you continued improvement with your health. You have a wonderful and loving support team.

  2. I woke early this morning up in the country…your book Saving Simon is in my kitchen in a basket of save items…it caught my attention and I thought of you(and Maria)…so I searched on google…and here is your blog. I read with interest and awe. I do wish you well. I suffered a brain bleed in June 2022…my life changed…I survived…I am fully recovered…am grateful…I am back to journaling and planning my “retirement” and wondering what my future will be like. My mantra: “living my life, living my purpose with curiosity in a creative way”.
    Thank you for your blog and inspiration! And thank you to Maria because I have pieces she has created on the walls of my home office that inspire me…especially one on seeing the spark of creativity.
    Cheers to us…our recovery, our creativity, our curiosity, our living our purpose in life…until the end.
    Keep writing your blog! We luv it!
    Best, Ellen (Manhattan & Gardiner,NY)

  3. I am always so thankful for your work, I found your book, Izzy and Lenore, in a small library in Monroe, NC. I found it powerfully meaningful. My Dad was dying from congestive heart failure, and I was often making the trek back up to Ontario to see him. I remember getting on the train to take me to Toronto airport, book in hand, and weeping, waving goodbye to mom and Dad, I was never sure if I would see him alive again. He died in late 2009. All this to say that your words touched me deeply then, the animal sagas of Orson, and Elvis and Winston, and Julius and Rose and Rocky. The story of the young farmer charged with animal neglect, Ed Gully, and Scott the Pizza maker and all the many other people I came to “know”. I appreciate it all……all these many years. Thank you Jon for your Labor of love to us, your readers.

Leave a Reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *

Email SignupFree Email Signup