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FRIENDS—and I know you're my friends, because you come to this web site to read what I think about things, although true friends would also buy me drinks now and then, wouldn't they? Bastards. But anyway, I digress: FRIENDS, I am by nature a very, very lazy man. Almost every decision I've made in my life has sprung from my desire to do nothing I don't really want to do. Now, most of us, I suppose, make some effort to avoid doing things they don't want to do—but few of you have patterned their entire existence around the concept. I have. I may occasionally dress up my decisions with reasonable-sound—but bogus—'reasons', but the truth is whatever decision I've arrived at has more to do with carving out more time for me to drink beer than anything else.
When I graduated from college many, many years ago, I was faced with a terrible conundrum. For four years I'd done very little with my life. I was an English major, which required about 1% of my attention one day a year, usually a final examination situation. My jobs had all been part-time register jockey type things, requiring less conscious attention than breathing. But all that had ended when I made the fatal mistake of earning a degree. Suddenly I was forced to get a job. This was the source of a great deal of angst, for me. I stayed drunk a long time, hoping some pixie would fly through the window, wave a little wand, and make bags of money appear. I thought this happened a couple of times, but when I sobered up it turned out I'd passed out in the bathroom again, and the pixie had been then-roommate Ken West, going to the bathroom. When I finally did get a job, I took the first thing offered to me, because that minimized my job-search period, thus maximizing the time I could spend getting back to the serious work of planning this zine and drinking heavily. Suckers spent months agonizing over what type of job to get—what industry, what position, what kind of compensation to get—but I knew in my heart it didn't matter. I was never meant to work every day, like a coolie. I was meant for wealth and ease. One look at my soft, delicate hands will show you that! Since the cruel world had seen fit to ignore my obvious quality, I figured it didn't really matter much what I did eight hours a day. That first job turned out to be a godsend, of course: A farm of unmonitored photocopiers, a mailroom staffed by friendly, incurious people, and the home to my personal underground publishing empire for ten glorious years. Who could complain? I sank my feelers into that corporation's flesh and sucked for all I was worth. After a while, as happens with such infections, the host died, and I was forced to pull my chubby little head out of its carcass, look around in fear, and scuttle off to another job. I found one easily enough. Believe it or not—my wife, The Duchess, sure can't—I am a marginally talented and resourceful employee who brings value to the workplace. No! Really!So my period of unemployment was, sadly, boiled down to one self-imposed week spent lolling around my apartment with my cat, Pierre, while The Duchess was out of town on business. What Pierre and I did whilst unsupervised by The Woman, I can't say. But you can imagine what it must have been like, me, a cat, a huge pile of dirty laundry, and nothing to eat but a tub of peanut butter. It was my Bachelor Paradise all over again! I felt twenty-seven. Sadly, it ended, and I started my new job. Despite my best efforts, I am unable to reproduce the aforementioned illicit publishing empire at my new job. Sadly, I am in the unenviable position of paying for my own photocopies, like a sucker. Plus, I actually have to do work. I was horrified, upon examining my job description, to find that the words “Internet Porn” and “Four Hour Lunch” appear nowhere therein. And now, in the eighth paragraph and word 725 of this essay, we come to my point. My point is, I suddenly have much less time in which to create The Inner Swine, and it's freaking me out.
My life has undergone a bit of compression recently, to be honest. In a short span of months I gained a kitten and took on a new job, which may not sound like much, but believe me, it's shaved a few hours off my day. First of all, the kitten—the aforementioned Pierre—is just six months old and tears ass around the apartment all the time, knocking things over and meowing and jumping on us when we sleep, so I have to play with the little man a little bit before bed every day. If I don't play with him for about a half an hour, he goes mad after the lights go out and we don't get any sleep. So right there is about 1.5 hours a day spent entertaining the damn cat, just so I can sleep. I'll tack on another half hour due to what I'll call Pierre Erosion, which is the time spent here and there when the kitten decides to jump on my keyboard, bite my ankles, or once again drops a bottle of beer when he's practicing bringing them from a custom kitten dispenser I built in the kitchen out to me in the living room. My new job has shaved about two hours a day, too—I have to get up earlier, leave later, have a longer commute, and can no longer take two hour lunches. Put it all together and I've lost 4-5 hours a day since March. Aside from being lazy as all hell, however, I am also pretty compulsive in my behaviors. I like a routine, and I like hitting goals on a regular basis—just because I've lost 4 hours from my free time doesn't mean I just shrug my shoulders and give up. I find ways to maintain my output, because I am all about maintaining. Somewhere in the dank recesses of my psyche I think you'd find that I believe, deep down, that if I maintain enough I'll live forever, that death is just a symptom of slack. No slacking, no death. Simple! So despite the loss in free time, I am determined to keep writing as much as before, if not more. Something's obviously got to give, and that something is: Quality. I hear that snickering out there, and I am marking down names, believe me. It's full circle, actually: When I first considered the idea of doing my zine solo—after the other founding members were either driven away by my abrasive personality or simply lost interest—I conceived of it as a place to dump writing I didn't have anyplace else to send. Half-finished essays, rough drafts of fiction, experiments gone wrong--The Inner Swine would absorb all this chaff and maybe I'd get some interesting feedback. Over time, I adjusted my attitude towards TIS and started putting some effort into making it interesting, polished, and original. Now, due to my increasingly compressed free time, all that is changing back again: Pretty soon you'll be getting short stories that stop in the middle of sentences, essays that degenerate into nonsense, and even a few padded articles that literally reprint the first six paragraphs at the end in order to gain a page. Plus I'll probably have to set the font to eighteen point and use lots of nonsequitous images stolen from the web, too.
So, I figure maybe I could ask everyone out there who reads The Inner Swine in any way shape or form to send me a nickel, if you haven't already paid me somehow. One nickel! Why not? If 500 of you send me a nickel, I'll have $25. I'm not sure how that'll help me, but it's a start. And if 2.8 million of you send me a nickel, well, you'll never ever hear from me again. Your first clue that this has happened will be the automated voice telling you that my phone has been disconnected, and the 404 page you get when surfing to this web page. Believe me, I'll already be out of the country by the time you hear about the nickels. E-mail me your outrage here. |
June 10, 2004
