That's Plenty

I live nearly hand to mouth. Most of the money I earn is neatly divided up between my landlord, credit card companies who, years after the fact, are still reaping the benefits of a series of financial indiscretions I made in my late teens, the electric company, the gas company, and those motherfuckers at Verizon who have me roped in to a nine hundred year contract.

I want to write for a living. That is what I want more than anything else in the world. I want to write for a living. But my life is owned not by me, but by visa, mastercard, coned, and some faceless jew that bought an old factory building in bsuhwick. I've never met the man who gets thirteen hundred dollars of my money every month, but I send it off anyway. If I were ever to stop doing the things that produce money and instead pursue the things that produce happiness in my life, specifically writing, reading, taking classes, talking to people... Well, I'd lose my house, I'd lose the electricity, I'd lose the heat, I'd lose the food that keeps my overweight vessel moving about.

I'm stuck in a terrible cycle here. I work at a job in order to keep my body going so that I can wake up and go to the job again.

I never recieved my bachelor's degree, but I did go through quite a bit of education, and it seems to me like all that preparation was a bit of overkill for what amounts to paper shuffling and phone calls. Right now I work in a job that I like and brings me satisfaction, but once this gig is up and I've got to look for the next one, I can be reasonably certain it will be worse. Probably even bad. I will have a bad job that pays poorly and makes nearly no use of my education.

The idea of doing "art" after work is preposterous. By the time I get home it is after 7:00pm and I have to be in bed by 10:00pm in order to get enough sleep to function properly the following day. After eating dinner, walking the dog (anyone up for bringing me to the pound?), and cleaning up the dishes I've got maybe a half an hour to write or create something before it's off to dreamland again so I can get up and go to work.

I've put in sixty hour weeks to push shit through to completion. I've lost massive hours to real garbage productions. If I want to work on my own stuff - and make it good- I'm going to need serious time. Gathering even just 60 hours, a regular work week amount of time, at my half-hour-a-day clip, I'll eventually have a weeks worth of work done on my own material in, oh, say, six months.

Or I could quit my job and get that much time in on a single week.

Anyway. I'm still here so I haven't given up yet. But that's what I'm thinking about this morning.

Which reminded me of a story I wrote a while go. I'll share it with you now.

Three Liberal Arts Graduates Living in the City

After band practice, he picks her up from work. He stands in the alley behind the club and waits for the bouncers to escort her to the street before they walk the seven blocks to their apartment. They live above a bar called O’Malleys. The name implies to regulars and potential customers that it’s a place for simple good-natured folk to gather and have a few laughs, share a pint. That’s part of the character. Never a beer, always a pint. Because it’s an Irish bar. A pub, really. The bartender has an Irish accent that he has practiced for so long he talks with it all the time. He can’t get rid of it. He wanted to be an actor and he got a job as an Irish bartender to pay the rent until he started getting roles. Besides, he told himself, it’s acting to pretend I’m a working class Irishman. It’s a great character job and the accent is tough to maintain. I can be acting right now in my own bartender show, he thought. Eight years and countless roles in failed productions later and he really is a working class bartender with an Irish accent. He doesn’t know the girl upstairs or her boyfriend. He sees them as they come and go. He nods, smiles. All part of the act. They’re home now. She’s crying. Her boyfriend isn’t sure what to say or do. She’s a stripper. The money she makes there is what keeps them fed and clothed. They’ve got two problems, she says. She won’t be beautiful forever and her job is so ugly.