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We turn another corner together today

By Ed Goldman

Today is the fifth birthday of this column and the 74th birthday of this columnist. I realize most writers don’t like to reveal their ages, lest readers peg them as too old or too young to understand what they’re writing about, but I have no such qualms. I’m merely astonished to have made it this far and enjoy sharing things that astonish me.

I began writing The Goldman State when the daily column I wrote for the Sacramento Business Journal for eight years ended. This happened because of a California Assembly bill intended to make everyone everywhere in the state a union employee rather than a footloose and dues-free contractor.

The bill mandated that freelance writers like me—I was never an employee of the Business Journal, by mutual choice—could now sell stories to the same media outlet a maximum of 25 times a year. That was soon upped to 35, but in either event, the math didn’t work in my favor. By writing five online columns and one print column per week 52 weeks a year, I was writing for the Business Journal around 312 times a year—roughly 277 times a year too many.

My final regular column for the paper ran in September 2019—on Friday the 13th, no less. Exactly two months and two days later, I began posting The Goldman State. Readership is now 10 times higher than the first time we measured it. The column now has readers in every state of the union and even a few in Europe and Canada. This is another number that astonishes me.

Of course, it could be that I started the column with only three readers and in five years it multiplied 10 times to a grand total of 30. And I’d tell you the actual number but have been advised not to by my archivist, production manager and priest. —Okay, you’re right. I don’t really have an archivist.

You probably won’t be surprised to learn that about 10 percent of my readers are retirees. I hope they won’t be surprised to learn that, either. 

(That calls for a pretentious literary aside: T.S. Eliot wrote, “I grow old, I grow old/I shall wear the bottoms of my trousers rolled.” E.B. Goldman writes, “I grow old, years are scant/I shall save my dollars for a hair transplant.”)

Okay, we’re back. I’d originally hoped to garner a few dozen readers in California and planned to focus my essays and profiles on what happens here in the so-called Golden State, which explains the column’s pun-ishing title. But as readership expanded, I realized that California—while leading the nation in agriculture, film production and idiotic trends—isn’t all that interesting to someone in Saginaw, Michigan; Spearfish, South Dakota; Baraboo, Wisconsin; or even New York, New York, that little east coast island where I was born.

Some readers have commented on how often the Goldman State is posted. I hope they mean this as a compliment, though you can’t always decipher intent or subtext from an email. But if the general idea is wondering how I’m able to write and usually illustrate these pieces, three days a week, my response—which I don’t mean to sound flippant or, God knows, modest—is to ask them a question: How do you do your job five days a week? 

I have it comparatively easier. I haven’t dealt with gridlock or parking fees since February of 1984, when I began working at home fulltime. I’ve heard from a lot of people who reluctantly began a hybrid workplace/home-space schedule during the COVID years and now can’t imagine life any other way. Meanwhile, for the past 40 years, I haven’t been able to imagine going to an office other than one a few feet from my living room.