Asparagus picking with Ayn Rand

So the first proper job I ever get is asparagus picking in late 1991. All I have to do is get up at 4am, perform back-breaking labour for a few hours, and I get the princely sum of $150 for five days of work. I'm 16 years old and this is the most money I've ever had in my life, so that's fine by me, and 90 percent of it goes straight into comic books anyway.

The job itself is fairly easy - me and a dozen other pickers stride up and down the rows with long-handled blades, lopping off the matured asparagus and tossing it in a plastic bin on your hip. For the first three days, I go at the same speed as most of the other workers, but once I figured out that the sooner we were done, the sooner we could go home, and we'd still get paid the same, I started zooming down those rows. 

There were a couple of other dudes who went at the same pace as me, and the rest just wandered along, taking their time and dragging us all back. And I used to get so fucking annoyed by their pace, and that my labour was being extended through no fault of my own, and any personal capital or pride I had in getting the job done fast and well was watered down by the laziest sons of bitches on the planet.

And yes, I was reading my first Ayn Rand books at the time.

I was 16! Of course I was reading my first Rand books, and was primed for their message about how I was a special little boy, and nobody would understand me, and all I have to do is grind all the other bastards down before they got me first. 

And that could be enough to set me up as libertarian for life, because it's such an impressionable age. But I also read a lot of other books at that time that talked to me about concepts like empathy and helping your fellow man, and that maybe I ain't the centre of the goddamn universe, and maybe some people are slower than I am on the asparagus field, but there might be reasons for that, and those reasons are absolutely none of my fucking business.

I might have followed the Rand path for a while, but then I read Catch-22 a year or two later, and that seemed much more like my worldview, full of absurdity and weirdness, set in an incredibly arbitrary universe, full of young men dying who all thought they were special, but really weren't.

So I don't judge anybody who is a teenager and ranks Atlas Shrugged, with its crowd-pleasing notions of black and white, as the greatest book of all time, because I've been there too. But it's a complex world out there - even when you are just picking bloody asparagus - and you have to grow with it.