autobiography

Facebook streams a variety of questionnaires that purport to pinpoint our personalities. They are goofy and fun, particularly when friends also take the test. Of course, the results should be taken with a healthy dose of skepticism.  However, occasionally we experience that old shock of recognition—perhaps only because the designation flatters us!

I took the iPersonic Personality Test and I am a Groundbreaking Thinker. What is your type?

The Groundbreaking Thinker

In their work, Groundbreaking Thinkers highly rate challenges and diversified tasks. They cannot stand routine and too detailed work. They love to astound others with bold ideas for an original, new project and  then leave it up to the others to implement them. Hierarchies, rules and regulations arouse their opposition and they love outsmarting the system. It is vital to them that they enjoy their work; if this is the case, they quickly become pure workaholics. Their creativity best takes effect when they work independently; but they are very good at motivating others and infecting them with their optimistic nature. Conceptual or advisory activities appeal especially to Groundbreaking Thinkers. It can happen that some people feel somewhat duped by their flexible, spontaneous nature.

Their sociability and enterprise ensure that Groundbreaking Thinkers always have a large circle of friends and acquaintances in which activity plays an important role. As they are mostly in a good mood, they are popular and very welcome guests. Grumbling and peevishness are unknown to them. However, they do tend to be a little erratic and unstable when it comes to obligations and this makes them appear to be unreliable to some.

Groundbreaking Thinkers are very critical and demanding when it comes to picking a partner because they look for the ideal relationship and have a very concrete picture of this ideal relationship. Mutual aims in life are very important to them. They do not like compromising and would rather remain alone. For the partner, it is often a challenge to have a long-term relationship with a Groundbreaking Thinker. Groundbreaking Thinkers need a lot of space and diversity or otherwise they become bored and feel cramped.

Types who are rather more traditionalistic often have problems with the willingness of Groundbreaking Thinkers to take risks and their often crazy, spontaneous actions. However, if one can summon up sufficient flexibility and tolerance for them, one will never be bored in their presence and will always have a loyal and faithful partner.

As a Groundbreaking Thinker, you are one of the extroverted personality types. Dealing with others, communication, discussions, and a little action are your life’s blood – and some of your strengths. You are very articulate and love variety personally as well professionally. New tasks, new projects, new people, fascinate you because you are always interested to increase your wealth of experience.

Consequently, you have no problem run with the hare and hunt with the hounds; juggling parallel tasks to be accomplished electrifies you, and you are an accomplished improviser. Your enthusiasm carries others along and enables you to create positive impulses in your team. Mountains of paperwork, endless e-mail correspondences, and solitary work tire you quickly, and bore and frustrate you. The appreciation of your work by others is more important for you than for the introverted Thinker types. You measure your own professional value by the admiring glances of your colleagues and superiors.

The psychologist Keirsey once described the Groundbreaking Thinker as the “soul of the company,” and that can be just as easily applied to an employee position, as to an independent chief of a company. Since risk represents less of a threat than excitement, freelance or self-employment are well suited to you.

However, you must take care to have collaborating staff around you, or that you are able to work closely with other teams in order to satisfy your contact and communication needs. You are naturally suited for leadership positions because there you have the ultimate freedom making your decisions and choosing your tasks.As a Groundbreaking Thinker, you are one of the extroverted personality types. Dealing with others, communication, discussions, and a little action are your life’s blood – and some of your strengths. You are very articulate and love variety personally as well professionally. New tasks, new projects, new people, fascinate you because you are always interested to increase your wealth of experience.

Hello Monte,

The stairwell leading up to the Soc. Dept. at Augsburg is lined with posters from our annual Torstenson Lecture.  I have attached one such poster from a few years back.  We invite local soc-celebrities to give a talk and then have dinner with our Sr. soc. majors.

This year, we would be honored if you would give the 2014 Torstenson Lecture in Sociology.  If you are willing and able, we are hoping to schedule the talk for April 1st or 2nd, but we can discuss other dates.  The lecture is typically around 5:30 and we go to dinner somewhere in the neighborhood.  We will also provide you with a stipend for your time.
Please let me know if you would consider speaking at Augsburg.  We would love to have you!
Tim

 

Dear Tim,

When I read the first paragraph, I assumed you were inviting me to attend the “2014 Torstenson Lecture on Sociology.” I eagerly read on to see who you had selected as this year’s “soc-celebrity.” Honestly, I was somewhat stunned when I discovered that you were inviting me to give the lecture!

Rather than a soc-celebrity, I think of myself more as sociology’s most infamous “confidence man,” one-step away from being exposed for the “professor” Ponzi scheme that I’ve been running for the past 40 years.

As long as you, in good conscience, can ask your students and faculty to foolishly invest what Click and Clack called “a perfectly good hour” for dubious return, I am eager to bamboozle any “marks” you are able to gather for this investment seminar on sociology stocks and bonds.

Monte

P.S. April Fools’ Day seems a most appropriate date for my lecture.

I first left my hometown at 15 as a pariah, the cautionary tale of juvenile delinquency. I ended up graduating high school at the Red Wing “Boys Reformatory,” forever banished from the records of the Jackson High class of 1963.

With shame and defiance, I voluntarily emigrated from the soil of my ancestors and its offspring. I remember well fleeing in a battered, grey 1949 Plymouth. I immigrated to a foreign land—eventually becoming a citizen of a more cosmopolitan universe.

Nevertheless, my hometown remained the psychic map by which I sought to distance myself from the provincial culture and values of my youthful years of 1945 to 1960. I could never listen to the songs on Bruce Springsteen’s “Born in the U.S.A.” without imagining that bend in the Des Moines River. In other words, you can take the boy out of Jackson County, but you can never take Jackson County out of the boy.

In 2010, a terminal cancer invaded both my body and my identity. Suddenly my story of dying went viral, appearing statewide in newspapers, on TV, radio, and the internet. Much to my astonishment, a number of former classmates reached out to me with compassion and affection. They had extended an invitation of reconciliation. Hesitantly, I reciprocated.

As a result, when an invitation arrived for our 50th class reunion, I decided to return for the first time as an honorary graduate. I drove southwest for 180 miles with considerable trepidation. Arriving at the last minute without benefit of a name tag with a picture, few recognized me. Of the 107 class members, 22 candles flickered for those who had passed, 53 of the remaining 85 attended—a remarkable percentage. Of the 53, 13 of us had become teachers. Perhaps there was something more than fluoride in that landmark water tower.

After an exhilarating two days, I drove for three hours home, luxuriating in my peers’ welcoming balm that heals the soul. I had not fully realized what a festering emotional wound this 50-year-long estrangement has been. It’s difficult making language express the depth of my gratitude.

It was a godsend for this prodigal son to see up close and personal how each of us have been participants in the same human comedy, sharing a plethora of trials and tribulations, triumphs and tragedies. Along this haphazard pilgrimage, all we really have is each other. To the members of the class of 1963, a heartfelt thank you for sharing the early morning and late evening of my brief, but eventful, sojourn on this earth.

Don’t be a stranger.

Here’s a new premortem: the new tumors growing in my lungs are still precancerous; the skin cancer is not life-threatening; whatever is destroying my hard palate is not malignant; the emphysema remains moderately severe; the six stents in my heart continue to prevent another heart attack; the congestive heart failure is flaring up; the chronic kidney disease remains moderate; the peripheral neuropathy is like walking on Novocaine-injected feet. Nevertheless, as Tom Waits put it, I’m still the “last leaf on the tree.”

They say I got staying power

Here on the tree

But I’ve been here since Eisenhower

And I’ve out lived even he

 

I’m the last leaf on the tree 

The autumn took the rest but they won’t take me

I’m the last leaf on the tree

(Tom Waits)

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Another birthday has passed. It is now three years since I got the news. I was driving to my birthday party when the cell phone rang. The Dr. said I had terminal cancer with a median life expectancy of 14 months. So much for statistical probability! While my body may soon lie smoldering on a funeral pyre, my spirit remains an irrepressible youth. During this precarious existence, I have tried to seize each day with humor, passion, and a dedication to right the wrongs that I stumble upon. Like those candles in the windows during long Scandinavian winter nights, you have illuminated my path along this unlit and bewildering journey.Thank you my family, friends and, especially, my fellow karass members–we are the fingers who support a Cat’s Cradle of significance beyond our understanding.

Famous long ago . . . By chance I stumbled upon some articles I wrote back in the 70s for “In These Times,” the leading American leftist newspaper of the time.

 

  1. Participatory Socialism or Welfare Statism? by Monte Bute, pp. 17-18 – PDF
    In These Times, September 27, 1978
  2. Liberals Must Choose by Monte Bute, p. 17 – PDF
    Serve the Corporations or Serve the People
    In These Times, November 1, 1978
  3. Thoroughbreds vs. Mules by Monte Bute, p. 16 – PDF
    Class Conflict Splitting Minnesota Democrats
    In These Times, June 6, 1979
“We Are One March” Minnesota State Capitol
I am in Bismarck ND. I am here shooting an indie film. I play a bland man who has murdered a Supreme Court judge. I have no memory of the event. Tonight we are filming a scene in prison where I am interviewed by an international journalist. I think I prefer a death sentence to life in a Bismarck prison!/

After I posted “Immunity Deficiency Blues,” I was asked to furnish some more background. This essay, which I published in the St. Paul Pioneer Press on 11-17-2010, will provide some context for the reader.

T.S. Eliot thought that April was the cruelest month. I disagree. For me, spring is a time of rebirth and rejuvenation. I would argue that autumn is the most cold-hearted time of year.

Last fall I was afflicted with a mysterious neuropathy that baffled my neurologist. A couple of months later I had hip replacement surgery and a fortuitous x-ray revealed tumors on my lungs. They diagnosed me with stage 3 granular pulmonary lymphoma, a cancer so rare that there are only 500 to 600 cases in the medical literature. Turns out that neuropathy is a symptom of the disease. Who knew?

The prognosis is poor. The median survival from diagnosis is 14 months. More than 60 percent of patients die within five years. I completed chemotherapy in July and the cancer was in remission. However, within a month troubling symptoms appeared. I was increasingly short of breath, gasping after 15-20 paces.  Pulmonary embolisms formed. Most days I took two naps. I had no energy; the smallest tasks were beyond me. Walking became a precarious adventure.

Heart function is one potential victim of chemotherapy. Mine has declined to 20-30 percent. The neuropathy has also worsened. My legs are numb from the knees down and I have minimal feeling in my feet. The outlook is grim. For me, autumn is akin to what Dylan Thomas called “the dying of the light.”

Even as a small boy, I found fall the saddest season. I grew up on an isolated rural homestead and rode the bus to a country school. As the autumn light rapidly diminished, I trudged up our half-mile lane each evening in a darkening and bleak landscape. The few flickering lights in the house and barn were of little consolation. The prairie’s sinister spell of fall twilight lifted once I moved to the city.

Only after I bought a rustic cabin on a river 22 years ago did those distant mood swings return with full force. I remain exuberant until the Summer Solstice. Then the days begin to shorten, only so minutely through July and August. The dying of the light accelerates rapidly from September until the Winter Solstice, and my spirit correspondingly withers. I always close down my cabin on the weekend when Daylight Saving Time ends. As I finish the final tasks, this idyllic setting is awash in dead leaves and darkness. I go into emotional hibernation until the next spring.

This autumn has been particularly difficult. My retired brother flew in from Vancouver Island for two weeks to close down the cabin and winterize our home in the city. While I appreciated his visit and help, it only heightened my sense of helplessness. This must be what the late autumn of life feels like.

I held up remarkably well during chemotherapy. However, the damaging aftereffects of chemo and the doctors’ dim prognosis for recovery have finally broken my spirit. My primary doctor recently gave me a questionnaire for depression: “Little interest or pleasure in doing things;” “Feeling down, depressed or hopeless;” “Feeling tired or having little energy;” Feeling bad about yourself;” “Trouble concentrating on things.”

The results were, frankly, depressing. I have a new stamp on my passport—Prozac Nation. I am now taking an anti-depression drug. When it kicks in, I hope it raises my low spirits. Regardless, no mood-altering drug will change the results of my latest checkup. Autumn just got a bit more cold-hearted.

The cancer is back. It has re-appeared in my lungs and spread to my liver. I feel no urge to “Rage, rage against the dying of the light.” Nevertheless, I am not yet ready for a calm acceptance of the coming darkness. I will rejuvenate soon, in spirit if not body. I look forward to opening my cabin in the spring and watching the Yellow River flow, where one day my ashes will be scattered.