Introvert

I recently built a very large house, and now I don’t go outside.

I’m not kidding. I work in my office all day, and I work with my laptop on the couch at night. I have a gym, and I get on the treadmill a few minutes each day. I have food, TV, internet, cats—what more do I need?

For the last 14 years, I have rented an office in downtown Myrtle Beach and commuted about 35 minutes each way, to and from work. The thinking was that I needed to put on some clothes and get out of the office to establish a routine. Time to make the doughnuts, and all that. I started to think about the fact that since 2010, I have spent 70 minutes in the car each day, times 225 days, times 14 years, which comes out to 153 days of sitting in my car—almost half a year. There was an article recently about some dillweed who commutes to NYC from Delaware, two hours each way or more, and claims that he is saving money. Perhaps he is. But you know what is more important than money? Time. You can always make more money, but you can’t make more time. I’m not a big fan of long commutes. 35 minutes isn’t too bad, and even in New York, I had a short commute. These people who take the train for two hours into the city are nuts. I suppose now you can do some work on the train, which is better than staring off into space, but still. Not for me.

Now my commute is: I roll out of bed, take a shower, put on a T-shirt and shorts, and head down to my office. I get 70 minutes of my day back. What do I do with that time? Work? Exercise? Hang out with cats? Pretty much anything is better than driving, which is incredibly dangerous, especially in South Carolina, where the drivers are inattentive, at best. If you find yourself looking at Instagram ass models while you are speeding 65mph down the highway, you should stop. The ass models can wait.

I go back and forth on the work from home thing. I am very surprised that a bunch of the Wall Street banks went to WFH or shortened weeks. There are big benefits to having everyone on the trading floor at once; network effects and such. I am a bit medieval in my thinking about that—you should put on pants and go to work. But we have computers and internet and phones and Zoom, and you can be pretty much anywhere in the world and do your job. People have been talking about this, with the implications for office real estate, for a while. It’s probably the one big unintended consequence that came out of the pandemic. And the irony of the pandemic is that it happened right at the precise moment that the technology existed to enable people to work from home. In 2006, it would not have been possible—we would have been totally hosed.

For the early part of my adult life, I was around lots and lots of people. At the Coast Guard Academy, 1,000 cadets piled on top of each other, butts-to-nuts. On a 210-foot cutter with 70 other guys, butts-to-nuts. On the Lehman trading floor, butts-to-nuts. Then I rented a closet on Third Avenue and started working by myself for 12 hours a day. I liked it a lot. As far as introverts go, I am pretty far over on one side of the scale, and I’ve basically spent the last 16 years of my life sitting in a room by myself, starting at screens, and making up stories. It suits me just fine. Little-known fact about me—I actually spent a few days underway on a submarine, the USS Portsmouth, a fast attack. I was there doing secret squirrel intel stuff for the Navy. Most people ask if I found it claustrophobic—actually, not at all. There were a lot of really smart guys on that sub, and they took their jobs very seriously—I liked being around them. I will say that it was cold. It’s chilly once you get a few hundred feet below the surface, and they don’t make much an effort to warm up the ship, even with a giant nuclear reactor onboard. Everyone wears sweaters.

I will tell you a quick story—this was from my book STREET FREAK, but that book is 13 years old, so I will repeat it here. I interviewed with a NASDAQ trader in 2000—in the book, the guy’s name was Hank Hsu. Hank asked me if I liked managing people. I really didn’t, but I hemmed and hawed, trying to give an answer that wouldn’t preclude me from employment. So he said, “Well, I hated managing people. I took this job so I wouldn’t be responsible for other people’s fuck-ups.” Left unsaid is the idea that you are still responsible for your own fuck-ups, but I was okay with that. After scaring the bejabbers out of me with that question, he ultimately passed me through to the next round. I was responsible for a lot of people’s fuck-ups when I was in the Coast Guard. No fun. I once had a sailor have a threesome with two 16-year-old girls in town. The mom got pissed and called the ship. The XO had a talking-to with me, and I had a talking-to with the sailor. He was 19, so it wasn’t illegal, but we had to have a discussion about maturity and representing the Coast Guard and such. I had a tough time keeping a straight face.

Also, one thing people tend to forget is that I have spent practically my entire career in a male-dominated environment. From Coast Guard, to Wall Street—really, the only experience I have working with women is when I went to grad school for my MFA, where I was the only male student in my entire class. I guess you would say that I have masculine tendencies. I burp and fart and take risk—that’s the sum of my existence. By the way, there are fewer and fewer male writers these days, especially in the fiction world. If you go back 30 years ago, it was about 50/50, and now it is about 80% female. I guess if you go back to the 18^th century, all writers were men, but boy, have we done an about-face. Also, more editors are women now, and I think women editors tend to acquire the books of other women, and they certainly don’t acquire the books of men who burp and fart and take risks, so I am on the outs in the literary world. I am something of a unicorn—there aren’t too many other writers of literary fiction who had both a military and finance career before becoming a writer. I don’t know the secret handshake. Maybe I need a beard.

I will tell you one thing that makes me enjoy working out of the house—the geothermal HVAC system. In the old house, we had this rattletrap POS air conditioner that would crap out a couple of times a summer, and we’d be choking to death in the heat and humidity. Also, the temperature never really got below 76 degrees, and we were paying a fortune in electric bills. So if you’ve never heard of a geothermal HVAC system, here is how it works: the theory is that during the summer, it’s cooler underground than the air, and in the winter, it’s warmer underground than the air, so they dig about 30 feet underground and lay some pipe and suck out the air from underground, then do some magic shit to it and voila, you have air conditioning. It cost about 80 percent more than a conventional HVAC to install, but it works better, it’s quiet, and it uses about 90 percent less energy. The government likes this, so offers generous tax credits to new geothermal HVAC systems, so we will get it all back. It also requires almost no maintenance, and lasts forever. It’s 72 in here all the time, with no humidity, and no fluctuations in temperature, and like I said, it’s quiet. It really is a miracle piece of technology. If you’re thinking of building a house, you should really look into it.

I am an introvert, no doubt about it. I had my wife read all of my stories in NIGHT MOVES, and at the end of it, she said: “You spend a lot of time in your head.” Yes, I do. I have a big imagination, and the imagination needs solitude to thrive. Writing fiction is an unnatural act—think of the imagination it takes to build those worlds and create those characters. It’s not a social endeavor—just you and the computer. I just navigated to a website that listed some notable INTJ authors: Jane Austen, C.S. Lewis, Emily Brontë, Ayn Rand, Lewis Carroll, Friedrich Nietzsche, Stephen Hawking, Isaac Asimov, and Christopher Hitchens. Probably pop psychology, but who the hell knows.