Story Behind the Story
I drafted the “Academy” while working as an onsite tech at a large insurance company in Springfield MA. No coincidence, my workspace was almost identical to Sid Sidney’s, one of the main characters. In a dark way, my small basement shop created its own “little league” dystopian aura:
My employer, an office equipment vendor, provided the insurance company with machines. As the onsite tech, I took care of the company’s printer fleet. The insurance company paid my company for the service; my company paid me Most corporate people would object to working in an underground space where daylight would never find you. I became a cellar dweller in a chain-link cage. When the printer fleet was running, I was free to work on my writing. After ten years, I’d published a nonfiction work (Nature’s Ritalin for the Marathon Mind) and had written a solid draft of The Academy of Reality).
One person’s dystopia is another’s utopia. That coffee-stained chair in a cage in a cellar took good care of me. Job satisfaction; writing, and getting paid. It didn’t last forever. After ten years, a competitor won the contract. I was reassigned to the field. In time, the company that had taken over the printer contract bought my company. Mergers; buyouts; in twenty-five years, I worked for four different companies– five, if you add the insurance people.
The absence of sunlight suggests a sense of darkness; it was the performance reviews that had their own dark—as the famous B.F. Skinner said, “No one goes to the circus to see the average dog jump through the average hoop. . .”