I DON’T want people saying they didn’t see this coming, they were caught completely off guard, why didn’t he warn us, any of that. If guys like Mike Eisner and Jay Leno have the courtesy to give a heads-up, there’s no reason for me to be coy. So I’m telling the world right now: I’m going to retire. Any great enterprise must be willing to make personnel adjustments, even at the very top, when circumstances dictate. I recognize that it will one day make sense for me to withdraw from hands-on management of Mark Singer Global Diversified Cottage Industries, whose core endeavor—the writing of magazine articles and the once-every-few-years book—I’ve now guided through three decades of consistent incrementalism. Even as I lay the groundwork for my transition to emeritus status, I’ve continued to appraise the merits and potential pitfalls of my projected scenario for October 19, 2015, when I intend to “celebrate” my sixty-fifth birthday by driving to the most conveniently situated bridge and pitching over the railing my laptop computer, which will serve as a tidy stand-in for all the word-processing devices I’ve been chained to across the decades.
Questions are bound to arise regarding the short- and long-term impact of this decision upon the Mark Singer brand, which has become synonymous with glacially slow wordsmithing in the pursuit of middlebrow accessibility. Let me address some of those.
Does Mark Singer Global Diversified Cottage Industries possess valuable contingent assets?
Possibly, several, though predicting their cash equivalency is no simple matter. I continue to believe, for instance, in the marketability of “Silly Silly Juxtapositions,” the prototype of the “irony flash cards” that I developed twenty years ago, when I first became concerned about the interpretative challenges that preschool-age children confront in coming to terms with postmodern cultural dislocation.
I retain extensive notes for scathing biographies of Wayne Calhoun and Phil Dooley, who, in 1960, hoisted my new bicycle to the top of the school flagpole, let go of the rope, and claimed that it had “slipped.” Could such viscerally experienced raw material be entrusted, during my golden-years phase, to the imagination of a ghostwriter? If not, perhaps Wayne and Phil, who went on to lucrative careers in, respectively, gravel processing and agricultural waste management, could be approached by some buffed-out hirelings armed with blunt objects and be persuaded to render a reasonable tribute—a way of saying, more than a half century later, “Hey, what we did was sort of wrong.”
The possibility also exists that a rich body of epic poetry might effloresce from meditations upon the mystical qualities of certain of my household possessions—my underutilized NordicTrack, the backyard hammock where I so often lay while pondering how soon the stately hemlock infested with woolly-adelgid blight would land on the house, the snowblower that brought such manly pleasure to me and my neighbor Ralph. Or, in the event that my surrogates fail to grasp the inspirational promise of these nonliquid assets, they might nevertheless, in the context of a garage sale, be monetized.
What about contingent liabilities?
Assuming that the statute of limitations has expired for tax-fraud prosecution for fiscal 1997–1999—when, owing to accounting and/or document-archiving irregularities, I neglected to retain receipts for postage expenditures that I went ahead and claimed anyway on Schedule C of my tax returns—none.
Once I’ve formally ceded authority, who will be in charge of day-to-day operations?
I’m aware of criticism that my micromanagerial tendencies and allegedly combative style as a chief executive have undermined what might otherwise be an orderly process of designating a successor. Yet I wonder if these detractors fully appreciate the inherent difficulty of cultivating a protégé within what is essentially a one-person organization. To cite just one timely example: During the interval between the composition of the previous paragraph and the building up of steam to segue to this one, I replaced a lightbulb, folded the laundry, ate a snack, brushed my teeth after a refreshing nap, began alphabetizing last year’s Christmas cards, and chatted with a telemarketer about the weather in Lahore. In addition, even as I’ve been writing this essay I’ve been simultaneously ignoring the deadlines for four others. Easy enough, you say? Try it.
Yes? And? The point?
I’m reminded (who could forget?) of that awfully-sure-of-himself reviewer of my memoir of my adolescent years, Stuff I Wish Hadn’t Happened, who noted, “What we have here is a prime specimen of the classic roomful-of-monkeys school of composition and editing.” Beneath the surface of this rebuke would seem to lurk an inadvertent vision for the ongoing viability of Mark Singer Global Diversified Cottage Industries during the post–Mark Singer era. To which I can only say, sure, technically speaking, some number of chimpanzees, if properly incentivized, might be expected to churn out prose in a voice that would approximate my own. But could they also be relied upon to replicate my probably unique repertoire of writing-avoidance strategies? Please.
In brief, what Mark Singer Global Diversified Cottage Industries is experiencing is a natural evolutionary process. You’re born, they send you to school, you settle into a career (or a checkered employment history), you occasionally contemplate the whole dust-to-dust thing, and when you finally retire maybe you get replaced by a relative youngster, maybe by a primate, or maybe you’re just terminally downsized. Yes, things change. In the meantime, there are horizons to be glimpsed, perseverance to demonstrate, clocks (or irritating individuals) to be punched. Work remains to be done—or, depending upon my mood, put off until after I’ve tested the batteries in the smoke detector.
2004