TYBS#30
Photo by Max Yavno, “Unemployed”
The end of July (2007) marked the termination of my contract with the company I’d been running for the last seven months. For reasons I still can’t go into, the editorial arm of said company closed down.
Well, it was a good run. Still, when I signed the “Quit Claim” document there was a palpable weight lifted from my shoulders. Something I always feel when I cut ties with a full time job, something which I don’t sign up much for, having preferred the freelance trade for a good long while – I detest being tied down to a single corporate entity (without the pay off of prestige or enough monetary counterbalance), am very easily bored, plus I have a reflex loathing for authority.
So now, for the whole month, I am officially unemployed. In reprieve until the new full-timer kicks in by September.
This is old territory. The mental space of it is so familiar that the dull ache between my shoulder blades signals my body pulling out the red carpet to welcome back this state like an old-friend long unseen. I feel comfortable down to my bones; even after the rain-induced throat infection that had me on antibiotics for five days.
Throughout the years I’ve probably worked on hundreds of projects but have only signed up for five full-time jobs in all. It’s odd. I have to explain myself to potential full-time employers every time but the urge to move, especially if the three aforementioned pet peeves come to a header, becomes well nigh overpowering.
Having been raised in a family with Marxist-Leninist-Maoist leanings, I also had a natural distrust for doing work under corporations and other huge organizational entities that, for some reason or another, furthered the cause of the rat race. And that without a smidgen of advocacy or support for the usual pet causes that activists and their placards always waved at three-piece suited men in a strangely agitated manner.
Soon I’ll republish the essay that explains my whole coming of age in the Left, but now suffice it to say I grew up with professions that were either purely advocacy centered or function-obsessive. So the “real world” jobs of my NPA parents went along the lines of NGO worker, community organizer, environmentalist, anti-debt activist or other such cause-oriented job and the jobs of my aunts and uncles on the mother’s side were middle-class and salt of the earth that ranged from dentist, doctor, engineer or teacher.
Meaning the discussions at the dinner table ranged from the calm debate of “it’s not a real job if you don’t make something or do a concrete service for people” to the vehement “how can you take THAT job with the kind of slave wages they pay and the damage they do to the environment?” Though my grandfather was a lawyer there was nary an intellectual among them.
It was in early 2000 that it came to me. I was subconsciously trying to please both sides of this demand without actually losing my identity in my job choices. Psychologists will probably call this a moment of realization.
My friend explained it to me this way: I was a creative and imaginative person who’d be quite content just doing academe work (he probably meant teaching) or writing genre-specific books, but the twin pressures of the two sides – meaning working in a profession that actually made something or did something concrete (and not just a mental construct either) plus affecting social change or having social relevance – had me stumped and so a life of the mind frolicking in fantastic, made-up worlds and just flicking nuggets of dorky wisdom at students just to get by was out of the question.
Well, I didn’t have any inclinations towards the medical or dental professions, I couldn’t do math for shit hence crossing out any actuarial, architectural or engineering jobs and I certainly wasn’t going to just work exclusively in NGOs, wear drab, neo-hippie clothes, sleep in ratty house cum offices or go to demonstrations on a regular basis just to get beaten, firehosed or arrested. There’s got to be a better way to change the world than to tediously sacrifice your body day in and day out.
Journalism was a way out of this dilemma. Through it I could work on as many socially relevant assignments I wanted, still be creative and still be writing. That would be my public face. The actual art would be practiced in secret, like midnight witching rituals that included blood, grand gestures and corpses of small creatures. A life of the mind in two parts.
These days I still think of my journalism, essays, reportage, what-have-you as “Stuff I do for others.” Meaning, a profession. Meaning, I have no ego with them. Meaning, I am an employee at the end of the day when I write them and, like any other job, is subject to the demands and parameters of what the work entails.
The fiction is my private art, written to please nobody else but me. It first has to entertain me before it can even move out to being published, I rarely revise an old story just to fit a particular anthology. For story requests with specifics, I just make a new one. But still, my fiction is built to be read, with the thought that one day it’ll be fit to stand up, go out in the world and shake hands with other minds. But that is done to no one’s standards but my own.
The poetry and other little literary things aren’t even made with that in mind. They’re quite abstract and stay unread except for the rare request for a reading from friends I can’t refuse. When that happens, I usually pick the poem with the most flesh and strap on a guitar for a security blanket when I go on stage.
These confessional essays, that are the meat of the TYBS column (not counting the interviews, features and reviews), fall somewhere between the private and public areas. Like the songs I make for the bands I play for. What you read is a slightly caricaturish me, defined by the causal stuff produced when I move in real life, the unbeheld plot the Great Storyteller is arcing out as you read this.
This is what’s nice about being vagabond and unemployed. How you can just start someplace and end up completely elsewhere. I feel like Spider Jerusalem.
Well, it was a good run. Still, when I signed the “Quit Claim” document there was a palpable weight lifted from my shoulders. Something I always feel when I cut ties with a full time job, something which I don’t sign up much for, having preferred the freelance trade for a good long while – I detest being tied down to a single corporate entity (without the pay off of prestige or enough monetary counterbalance), am very easily bored, plus I have a reflex loathing for authority.
So now, for the whole month, I am officially unemployed. In reprieve until the new full-timer kicks in by September.
This is old territory. The mental space of it is so familiar that the dull ache between my shoulder blades signals my body pulling out the red carpet to welcome back this state like an old-friend long unseen. I feel comfortable down to my bones; even after the rain-induced throat infection that had me on antibiotics for five days.
Throughout the years I’ve probably worked on hundreds of projects but have only signed up for five full-time jobs in all. It’s odd. I have to explain myself to potential full-time employers every time but the urge to move, especially if the three aforementioned pet peeves come to a header, becomes well nigh overpowering.
Having been raised in a family with Marxist-Leninist-Maoist leanings, I also had a natural distrust for doing work under corporations and other huge organizational entities that, for some reason or another, furthered the cause of the rat race. And that without a smidgen of advocacy or support for the usual pet causes that activists and their placards always waved at three-piece suited men in a strangely agitated manner.
Soon I’ll republish the essay that explains my whole coming of age in the Left, but now suffice it to say I grew up with professions that were either purely advocacy centered or function-obsessive. So the “real world” jobs of my NPA parents went along the lines of NGO worker, community organizer, environmentalist, anti-debt activist or other such cause-oriented job and the jobs of my aunts and uncles on the mother’s side were middle-class and salt of the earth that ranged from dentist, doctor, engineer or teacher.
Meaning the discussions at the dinner table ranged from the calm debate of “it’s not a real job if you don’t make something or do a concrete service for people” to the vehement “how can you take THAT job with the kind of slave wages they pay and the damage they do to the environment?” Though my grandfather was a lawyer there was nary an intellectual among them.
It was in early 2000 that it came to me. I was subconsciously trying to please both sides of this demand without actually losing my identity in my job choices. Psychologists will probably call this a moment of realization.
My friend explained it to me this way: I was a creative and imaginative person who’d be quite content just doing academe work (he probably meant teaching) or writing genre-specific books, but the twin pressures of the two sides – meaning working in a profession that actually made something or did something concrete (and not just a mental construct either) plus affecting social change or having social relevance – had me stumped and so a life of the mind frolicking in fantastic, made-up worlds and just flicking nuggets of dorky wisdom at students just to get by was out of the question.
Well, I didn’t have any inclinations towards the medical or dental professions, I couldn’t do math for shit hence crossing out any actuarial, architectural or engineering jobs and I certainly wasn’t going to just work exclusively in NGOs, wear drab, neo-hippie clothes, sleep in ratty house cum offices or go to demonstrations on a regular basis just to get beaten, firehosed or arrested. There’s got to be a better way to change the world than to tediously sacrifice your body day in and day out.
Journalism was a way out of this dilemma. Through it I could work on as many socially relevant assignments I wanted, still be creative and still be writing. That would be my public face. The actual art would be practiced in secret, like midnight witching rituals that included blood, grand gestures and corpses of small creatures. A life of the mind in two parts.
These days I still think of my journalism, essays, reportage, what-have-you as “Stuff I do for others.” Meaning, a profession. Meaning, I have no ego with them. Meaning, I am an employee at the end of the day when I write them and, like any other job, is subject to the demands and parameters of what the work entails.
The fiction is my private art, written to please nobody else but me. It first has to entertain me before it can even move out to being published, I rarely revise an old story just to fit a particular anthology. For story requests with specifics, I just make a new one. But still, my fiction is built to be read, with the thought that one day it’ll be fit to stand up, go out in the world and shake hands with other minds. But that is done to no one’s standards but my own.
The poetry and other little literary things aren’t even made with that in mind. They’re quite abstract and stay unread except for the rare request for a reading from friends I can’t refuse. When that happens, I usually pick the poem with the most flesh and strap on a guitar for a security blanket when I go on stage.
These confessional essays, that are the meat of the TYBS column (not counting the interviews, features and reviews), fall somewhere between the private and public areas. Like the songs I make for the bands I play for. What you read is a slightly caricaturish me, defined by the causal stuff produced when I move in real life, the unbeheld plot the Great Storyteller is arcing out as you read this.
This is what’s nice about being vagabond and unemployed. How you can just start someplace and end up completely elsewhere. I feel like Spider Jerusalem.
~ 30
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