The Sadoo Society of Upper Canada

In the past when people asked me what I did, communication was easy.  Consultant, director, project manager, professor, teacher.  Nods and smiles and where do you work and mortgages and marriages and aren’t the olive gruyere pistachio artichoke empanaditas wonderful and children and minivans and everything as normal as America.

Then I became a manager of an outdoor organic fruit&veggie market and told people I was a peach salesman.  Tenure-crazed academics would buy peaches from me and say they wished they were peach merchants but everyone listening knew the scholars were too tethered to their tiny offices to ever leave the circus of knowledge and the prestige of firing degrees into the stratosphere of global commerce.  Following my peach adventures, I became a househusband, creating giggles, curiosity, vague incomprehension, and occasional disdain.

Now, after many years of trying to fit into the world’s standard and non-standard occupations—of trying to please bosses and wives and chairs and executives and girlfriends and gods and entrepreneurs and pleasing none of them at all—I came to the edge of the earth and there found a syllogism—

I have searched the world for the right job and there is nothing that is right.

I shall joyfully destroy my body before I destroy my soul.

I have to create a new job.

Fine, but there were still three paths I had to duly consider and reject.

1.      The traditional religious paths of renunciation (sadhu, monk) I rejected because I didn’t want to renounce anything.

2.      The modern aesthetic paths I rejected because I find artist circles to be as greedy, petty, mediocre, and fame-obsessed as the very groups they are supposed to transcend.  While I don’t particularly care for conventional society—finding it to be rather like sleeping wombats in an overcrowded cage in a zoo—the art industry has simply erected its own conventionality which tends to have the same underlying values as business.  More importantly, any writing of note does not emerge from writing-as-career but as a by-product of something else—writing as spiritual vocation.

3.      
I very much wanted to call myself a flâneur and join The Historical Society of Flâneurs.  But this is so historically Parisian and, via Georg Simmel and Walter Benjamin, has become so abducted by totalitarian academic rhetoric that one can’t use the word without being buried in an avalanche of psychosocial gobbledygook.

So I became a sadoo—a person committed to continually nurturing his passion, wit, perspicacity, caprice, and intellect and never allowing the common pursuits—money, security, reputation, possessions, and fame—to get in the way of this nurturing.  Also to generously share what he has nurtured with whomever wants that sharing and to happily walk away from those who don’t.

Is sadooing really a job though?  Isn’t it more of a delusion? a hobby? a pretention? a madness? 

No.  It’s a job.

Term	Standard Definition	Sadoo Diaper’s Interpretation
Job	A regular activity performed in exchange for payment.	Sadooing is a job.  All I do is sadoo and I get paid exceedingly well for it.
Payment	The transfer of wealth from one party to another.	As a divorce lawyer once wisely said to me, there are many forms of currency; money is only one and hardly the most important.  Naturally, the payment I receive is entirely in non-monetary currencies, which seems appropriate.
Party	A person or group of persons that compose a single entity which can be identified as one for the purposes of the law.	As there are many forms of currency, so there is more than one law:  the law of cops and judges—always imperfect, often unjust—but there are also laws of aesthetics, caprice, nobility, madness, observation, and purity (all also imperfect, often unjust).  The courts of torts and estoppels may not recognize sadooing in its somber ossified halls, but this particular sadoo says that all beautiful things have been born outside of standard definitions and hallways.

So—perhaps because initiating a new occupation is often lonely—I have strange desires.  Not least among these is to begin The Upper Canada Sadoo Society (UCSS):  an odd assembly of sadoos, would-be-sadoos, playful sadoo-critics, charlatan sadoos, and SITs (sadoos-in-training), who would not erect any solid laws and schools and robes and rhetoric and prisons (as do those physical societies and courts that tend to be used by those who have no justice of their own) but would misspell and bend the laws; send them through a prism—swallowing the refractions; continually creating, recreating, and demolishing societies and gods; contriving obscure sadooic passion plays and closet dramas; avoiding and mocking the serious and mean-spirited; never flagging, always dancing; not belonging to anyone or anything but the very air that gives him breath.