I'm Doing All I

know. I am living in a fairly messed up world right now. There has to be something I’m missing, a key of sorts, because I cannot imagine why there is nothing out there for me. I have considered the fact that perhaps I am over-qualified for most positions I am applying for, but what kind of place is it that does not want somebody they know will be able to do the job? That has to illustrate something, right?

But all I really want to do sometimes is cry myself to sleep because of my apparent inability to find employment—although it is not for a lack of effort. So much time spent filling out applications and submitting them and re-working my resume and writing cover letters and investigating who’s hiring, and yet not a single nibble on the end of my job-fishing line, so here I sit, doing just about all I know how to do: write. Even that is questionable, I suppose, as I have never had anything technically published.

Let’s run down a list of occupations I have had—as I have been working since I was about fourteen. I started my working career with a paper route I worked with my mother. She drove the van, but I rolled the papers and stuffed them in their blue plastic bags and delivered them to the doors of people who would probably not even read them. I got a job at the grocery store across the street which ended badly and I don’t really want to talk about it. Let’s just say that youthful exuberance was too much for me to handle at the time. After that, I got a job at Maggie Moo’s Ice Cream and Treaterie as an ice cream technologist serving specially mixed ice cream to the masses. From there I graduated, literally from high school, and obtained a position as a construction laborer for a dodgy construction outfit. Then I went off to school and obtained a position as a janitor in the University of Nebraska at Lincoln’s student union. That summer I came home and managed to land a job at Target where I worked as an overnight merchandise processing agent for the time when the Target at 169 and Barry Rd was still new. I changed schools at that point and moved to Iowa where I worked in the mailroom of the school and sorted, delivered, and distributed the mail for the campus and the post office. After a while, it became very apparent that this was not nearly enough (5.25/hr) to fund my college experience with, and I got a second job—both of which I retained for my entire career at Simpson—with a wealthy older gentleman who needed strapping young fellows to maintain his yard and his house and his land. This was truly a landmark position for me because, as I like to say, if you could –ing it, I did it: mowing, cutting down of trees, removing said trees, painting, patching, fixing, building, conversating, driving, planting, dusting, organizing. I did it all, and I got pretty good at it—I even started cutting down trees with a chainsaw sans shoesus. Then I went to New Zealand where I was studying to be a teacher. I found out I could work up to fifteen hours a week to help fund my stay in the country, and I hooked up with Adecco and worked in a plastics factory as a quality control agent, an astro-turf laying agent, a grocery store merchandiser and re-fixturer, and I was basically interning to be an educator. Upon returning to Simpson I re-acquired my pair of jobs and worked them until I graduated with a Bachelor’s degree in English. I was planning to move to New York City and pursue a graduate degree, which I did, but there was an awkward couple of months in which I was living back at home with my mother and father and needed a job, so I became a substitute teacher in the Park Hill School District. A couple of months there and then it was off to New York City where I acquired a job on the overnight merchandise processing team of one of Fortune’s Top 100 Companies to Work For: The Container Store. I graduated from St. John’s University with a Master’s Degree in English and then got promoted to Full-Time at TCS. Three months after my promotion, my supervisor was fired, the other full-timer quit, and I was left to run the operation. They can say what they want, and titles aside, I was the overnight supervisor for six months, managing values and attitudes, ensuring efficiencies were met, communicating, and insisting on TCS core cultural values as the way to get that truck processed.

It occurs to me that I have screwed up a lot of these jobs. Something in me revolts when it starts to sit wrong. I am a bad, bad man sometimes. I get flighty because I have very definite thoughts about oppression, and sometimes all I really want to do is sit in my room and play my guitar for hours, or sit at my computer and type and type and type and let the click clickety click click click of the keyboard help me find zen, or read and read and read until I think my brain is going to overflow. “Gilgamesh went abroad in the world, but he met with none who could withstand his arms till he came to Uruk.”

“Rage: sing, goddess, achilles’ rage, black and murderous, that cost the Greeks incalculable pain, pitched countless souls of heroes into Hades’ dark, and left their bodies to rot as feasts for dogs and birds, as Zeus’ will was done.”

“Paul stood in the bookshop facing a shelf of books.”

“I can feel the heat closing in, feel them out there making there moves, setting up their devil doll stool pigeons, crooning over my spoon and dropper I throw away at Washington Square Station, vault a turnstile and two flights down the iron stairs catch an uptown A train.”

“I celebrate myself, and what I assume you shall assume, for every atom belonging to me as good belongs to you.”

“ “The Bottoms” succeededc to “Hell Row.” “

“In the beginning, God created the Heavens and the Earth.”

“While the present century was in its teens, and on one sunshiny morning in June, there drove up to the great iron gate of Miss Pinkerton’s academy for young ladies, on Chiswick Mall, a large family coach, with two fat horses in blazing harness, driven by a fat coachman in a three-cornered hat and wig, at the rate of four miles an hour.”

“We were somewhere around Barstow, on the edge of the desert, when the drugs began to take hold.”

“The village of Holcomb stands on the high wheat plains of western Kansas, a lonesome area that other Kansans call “out there.””

“I’ve been called Bone all my life, but my name’s Ruth Anee.”

“It is customary for those who wish to gain the favour of a prince to endeavour to do so by offering him gifts of those things which they hold most precious, or in which they know him to take especial delight.”

“A squat grey building of only thirty-four stories.”

“A spectre is haunting Europe - the spectre of Communism.”

But what good does it do me? I think I’m going to go fishing, but if you want to know about Post-Marxist Critical Theory or the importance of Hunter S. Thompson or Joyce’s Hamlet theory imbedded in Ulysses or how to play guitar or how to shade a drawing (I can only work in gray-scale right now, but I’m working into color) or how to tie a fisherman’s knot or how to fillet a fish or what it means to make a good business decision or how to string a guitar or how to roll a perfect cigarette or what Skip James and Robert Johnson meant to the world of music or why Led Zeppelin is so important or why I can’t get enough of Jeff Buckley or what the difference is between Tom Wolfe and Hunter S. Thompson or the appropriate way to style a conversation in a piece of fiction or what is meant by Zoom in reference to writing or how to make biscuits from scratch or how to make your own pasta sauce (and your own pasta for that matter) or how to play cribbage successfully or how to average three-hundred and fifty points in Scrabble or how to make a “Perfect Manhattan” or what it means to bruise the gin (and what gin’s made of for that matter) or what’s meant by Kia Ora in Kiwiland or what Surfer’s Paradise, Australia is like or how Fiji is one of the most beautiful places on the planet the philosophical understanding of the sublime or what I mean when I say “The Act reveals the subconscious desire” or how religion and spirituality differ or what Whitman is doing in Leaves of Grass or the appropriate way to create a pyramid introduction or the appropriate things to check before starting up a chainsaw or how to check the fluids in your car or what it’s like to wrestle in Bulgaria under the care of what can only be described as the Bulgarian Mafia or why I know that Les Paul still plays every week in New York City at the Iridium Jazz Club or the difference between an objective and a goal or what is meant by the perfect balance of speed and accuracy or why it is important to not be paying more in rent than in payroll or how to make a Red Devil or if you want go swimming or if you want to go hunting or if you want to sit around and talk or if you want, then maybe you could give me a call.

Or maybe a job.

In New York City they do a lot of painting in the subway, and they always put up very helpful signs that let you know when the paint is wet that say (you guessed it): “Wet Paint.”

I used to take two of those signs and create an alternate message for people to ponder:

We In Pain.