TWENTY SEVEN GRAND, PART II

I’ve been here before.

In fact, I’ve written this before. Two years ago, the last time I was laid off.

I’m 46 years old. The sands are running out on the hourglass. Some days I feel older than I should by all rights. Other days, I forget that I’m not twenty eight anymore. The latter doesn’t last more than a moment. The spectre of time is always just over the horizon.

The question is always there, lingering in the air. What am I going to do?

I’ve been looking for a job since three days after my 46th birthday. Nothing has been quite right.

Everyone has advice. Most of them don’t understand.

Conventional wisdom says that I should give up; pick some corporate gig, dedicate 45- 60 hours a week, shoot for a promotion and a fattening 401k. There’s nothing wrong with a desk job.

And there’s not.

There’s nothing wrong with living an ordinary life. …I just don’t know how to be that person. It’s not that I’m too good for it. I just can’t. I don’t know how to sit down at a desk and be quiet. Every time I go in for a job interview, I try to be the person who gets the job. Smile, don’t talk too much and pretend that I want to work with a leash around my neck for the next thirty years until I have a coronary at my desk. I try. I swear I do.

But deep down, in the back of my mind, I am always thinking “what the FUCK am I doing here?”

Almost every job I have ever had has felt like a waste of my time. Yes, they mostly paid the bills. That’s incredibly important. But nothing I did ever felt relevant. I could have been fired at any time, because the bottom line is that with every one of those jobs, it didn’t matter whether it was me or some other trained monkey sitting at the desk.

I’m not trying to be rich and famous. I just want to be where I belong. The right person in the right place at the right time. I want to matter.

The only time in my life I have ever felt that way was when I was doing my work at Six Flags New Orleans.

The last few months that I was there, I would often finish my workload early and leave my day job to rush down to the park, knowing that I was losing money doing so. I would rush down there to work in harsh conditions, because I knew I was doing something important. For once in my life, I was doing a job that made me feel good about myself. I was the right person in the right place at the right time.

It’s a drug I can’t quit.

A high I have to keep chasing.

Because if I give up, I’ll die. It will look like me at that desk every day, but in reality it’s just a corpse waiting to collapse.

So I keep writing. And I keep shooting. Those moments are the only times I truly feel alive. The only times that the voice inside of me quiets and I can breathe.

Long live the dreamers. May their torches go out in a blaze of glory.