Work as I Knew It
5/3/96 WORK AS I KNEW IT
Why is it that I get that sense of impending doom every time I ask an ATM machine to give me my checking balance? Because my checking account is having a permanent near-death experience. It's hovering above my neighborhood cash machine, calmly observing me as I desperately try to resuscitate it with checks from my credit cards, which are, of course, nearing their own near-death experiences.
I guess I ought to knuckle down and get a job. But you know what I've discovered during my seven month (so far) sabbatical? I'll tell you in a minute. First you should know that I, as administrator of my own life, saw fit to award myself this sabbatical for years of unremitting labor. And, as is so often the case with self-administered benefits, this ad hoc leave of absence includes neither salary nor eventual return to my previous place of employment. One takes one's leave at one's own volition and one sometimes finds one's behind out in the parking lot at the local 7-11, offering to wash windshields for whatever the market will bear.
But to return to the question of what I have discovered. I have discovered that work, as I knew it, was bad for my health. It wore me out and gave me, literally, a tremendous pain in my backside.
In fact, the whole time I was working at my previous place of employment, I felt as if I were sitting on a Maori war axe. I spent most of my free time and money going to mainstream and alternative healers, shopping, in vain, for an axe-ectomy. But as long as I was planted at that desk, in toxic proximity to that employer, the pain remained. It was, in fact, my constant companion at work and at home, weekday and weekend, prone and supine, vertical and horizontal, awake and asleep. Yes, even in my sleep the pain remained, for I would dream of being cured, only to wake up to find myself more wretched and twisted than ever. Ceaselessly, sciatically, I danced the lumbago.
Worldclass orthopedic surgeons x-rayed my spine, pronounced it more deformed than that of an octogenarian hunchback, and offered to give me operations more complex and expensive than the construction of the Verrazzano Narrows Bridge----and with an 85% chance that I'd be left a gibbering basket case who'd need a staff of five to spoonfeed me apple sauce.
Neurologists tested my strangulated nerves, found them deader than a ten year old bargain battery from Sav-On, tsk-tsked, and asked me if I had become incontinent yet. "No, not yet," I'd lightly say, "that's an experience I'm still looking forward to." Count on a neurologist to shine you the sunny side of life. I can just imagine them breaking the news about an especially virulent brain tumor: "Well, there's a round thing in your head, and it's not your brain, and it's smaller than a breadbox and bigger than a golfball. But it won't be smaller than a breadbox for long."
But I digress. And digress and digress and digress. The long and short of it was that I, not getting the cheap and cheery cures I had hoped from mainstream medicine, began to trip the light fantastic into the world of alternative medicine. And I do mean trip, because that pain in my lumbar region so numbed out my left leg, so clumsified me, that I made Gerald Ford look like Nureyev. Let me say this about the innumerable chiropractors, rolfers, physical therapists, acupuncturists, deeeep tissue massagers, and various and sundry crackpots and witch doctors to whom I made my desperate petitions: None of them worked for free, for the sheer joy of healing....which was, in my case, a good thing for them----because they did not heal me.
What they did do was deal my checking account a series of mortal blows which made me wonder if it was a closet bulemic, secretly binging and purging behind my back. All I knew was that I kept making hefty deposits, and the next time I checked my ATM, the deposits, and then some, would be gone, and a tiny voice would come from the wide-open beak of the bank machine saying, "Feed me! Feed me! Feed me!"
After five years of gainful employment which proved to be, in my case, five years of painful impoverishment, I concluded that I could not run to daylight on a treadmill. Weary of my role as office Quasimodo, and facing the fact my job was plunging me deeper into financial debt as well as a sort of oxygen debt of the soul, I resolved to go into debt on my own time.
That was seven months ago, and I suppose a happy ending to this sad tale would be that my born-again financial resurrection is just around the corner, that I have finally found a way of supporting myself joyfully, on my own terms, without giving myself a pain in the lumbago, by doing the one thing I have found I was always specially cut-out to do, if only I had had the courage and daring to realize it: phone marketing chia pets.
But no. I'm not just taking a bungee cord plummet into the Valley of Deepdish Debt, I'm freefalling without a bungee cord, golden parachute, or severance package to my name. I dive like a fragment of The Challenger, the earth rushes up to meet my face, and I'm laughing my head off. Why? Because my back feels great!
Suddenly, in mid-air, I'm graceful again!
Caught between the Scylla and Charybdis of work and debt, I have charted a course directly for debt, and a terrifying maelstrom it is proving to be. But I'm trying to keep a cool head as my craft spins in currents beyond my control because my time, though perhaps growing short, is at last my own. --FIN--
Why is it that I get that sense of impending doom every time I ask an ATM machine to give me my checking balance? Because my checking account is having a permanent near-death experience. It's hovering above my neighborhood cash machine, calmly observing me as I desperately try to resuscitate it with checks from my credit cards, which are, of course, nearing their own near-death experiences.
I guess I ought to knuckle down and get a job. But you know what I've discovered during my seven month (so far) sabbatical? I'll tell you in a minute. First you should know that I, as administrator of my own life, saw fit to award myself this sabbatical for years of unremitting labor. And, as is so often the case with self-administered benefits, this ad hoc leave of absence includes neither salary nor eventual return to my previous place of employment. One takes one's leave at one's own volition and one sometimes finds one's behind out in the parking lot at the local 7-11, offering to wash windshields for whatever the market will bear.
But to return to the question of what I have discovered. I have discovered that work, as I knew it, was bad for my health. It wore me out and gave me, literally, a tremendous pain in my backside.
In fact, the whole time I was working at my previous place of employment, I felt as if I were sitting on a Maori war axe. I spent most of my free time and money going to mainstream and alternative healers, shopping, in vain, for an axe-ectomy. But as long as I was planted at that desk, in toxic proximity to that employer, the pain remained. It was, in fact, my constant companion at work and at home, weekday and weekend, prone and supine, vertical and horizontal, awake and asleep. Yes, even in my sleep the pain remained, for I would dream of being cured, only to wake up to find myself more wretched and twisted than ever. Ceaselessly, sciatically, I danced the lumbago.
Worldclass orthopedic surgeons x-rayed my spine, pronounced it more deformed than that of an octogenarian hunchback, and offered to give me operations more complex and expensive than the construction of the Verrazzano Narrows Bridge----and with an 85% chance that I'd be left a gibbering basket case who'd need a staff of five to spoonfeed me apple sauce.
Neurologists tested my strangulated nerves, found them deader than a ten year old bargain battery from Sav-On, tsk-tsked, and asked me if I had become incontinent yet. "No, not yet," I'd lightly say, "that's an experience I'm still looking forward to." Count on a neurologist to shine you the sunny side of life. I can just imagine them breaking the news about an especially virulent brain tumor: "Well, there's a round thing in your head, and it's not your brain, and it's smaller than a breadbox and bigger than a golfball. But it won't be smaller than a breadbox for long."
But I digress. And digress and digress and digress. The long and short of it was that I, not getting the cheap and cheery cures I had hoped from mainstream medicine, began to trip the light fantastic into the world of alternative medicine. And I do mean trip, because that pain in my lumbar region so numbed out my left leg, so clumsified me, that I made Gerald Ford look like Nureyev. Let me say this about the innumerable chiropractors, rolfers, physical therapists, acupuncturists, deeeep tissue massagers, and various and sundry crackpots and witch doctors to whom I made my desperate petitions: None of them worked for free, for the sheer joy of healing....which was, in my case, a good thing for them----because they did not heal me.
What they did do was deal my checking account a series of mortal blows which made me wonder if it was a closet bulemic, secretly binging and purging behind my back. All I knew was that I kept making hefty deposits, and the next time I checked my ATM, the deposits, and then some, would be gone, and a tiny voice would come from the wide-open beak of the bank machine saying, "Feed me! Feed me! Feed me!"
After five years of gainful employment which proved to be, in my case, five years of painful impoverishment, I concluded that I could not run to daylight on a treadmill. Weary of my role as office Quasimodo, and facing the fact my job was plunging me deeper into financial debt as well as a sort of oxygen debt of the soul, I resolved to go into debt on my own time.
That was seven months ago, and I suppose a happy ending to this sad tale would be that my born-again financial resurrection is just around the corner, that I have finally found a way of supporting myself joyfully, on my own terms, without giving myself a pain in the lumbago, by doing the one thing I have found I was always specially cut-out to do, if only I had had the courage and daring to realize it: phone marketing chia pets.
But no. I'm not just taking a bungee cord plummet into the Valley of Deepdish Debt, I'm freefalling without a bungee cord, golden parachute, or severance package to my name. I dive like a fragment of The Challenger, the earth rushes up to meet my face, and I'm laughing my head off. Why? Because my back feels great!
Suddenly, in mid-air, I'm graceful again!
Caught between the Scylla and Charybdis of work and debt, I have charted a course directly for debt, and a terrifying maelstrom it is proving to be. But I'm trying to keep a cool head as my craft spins in currents beyond my control because my time, though perhaps growing short, is at last my own. --FIN--
posted by mobydoug at 12:45 AM
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