March 4, 2005
Is It Retirement Time Yet?

Damn. I wish someone had taken me aside at my college graduation—okay, I didn't actually attend my college graduation as I had more important things to do, like drinking Olympia beer in a parking lot while speculating on just how much time I'd just wasted attaining a degree—but I wish someone had come up to me in that parking lot so many years ago and pointed out to me just how much time a typical day job sucks away from you. I'm not sure what I would have done differently these past ten years or so if someone had. If someone had actually appeared to make this announcement, I probably would have challenged them to a fight, and who knows where that might have taken me? Chaos theory, a butterfly causing a hurricane and all that.

Most probably I'd have just humored whoever it was, offered some tepid, watery beer, and gone on exactly as before. I'd forget about them almost immediately afterward. Heck, maybe this did happen.

I've rambled on about the unfairness of wasting your life in cubicle hell, but this time it's different: My job has, for the first time ever, started to interfere with my writing. With The Inner Swine. This might sound silly, but damn, it's never happened before. In a career defined by laziness, ineptitude, ennui, and suicide attempts in public restrooms, I have always managed to do my own thing when at the job. I might be sitting at their desk for eight hours a day, but I will never be their monkeyboy!

Until recently.

I can't put my finger on what's changed, all I know is, recently I can't get squat of my own stuff done at work. Getting my own stuff done on the job is the goddamn linchpin of the Somers Domination Theory, but the wheels have come off that train now, and now I'm just another sucker with a job. The thing is, a year ago I was a) hauling free copies out of my office by the truckload and spending most of my days laying out Cafepress vanity projects, not to mention the two-hour lunches and catnaps throughout the day. Now I'm lucky if I manage the two hour lunch and the naps—there's just no time for real work any more. And if you're suggesting I give up the naps or the lunches, you're fucking crazy, sister. I need those naps. Without those naps there'd be even more suicide attempts in the public restrooms, and no one wants that.

This is all, of course, More Shit I Gotta Do.

There's a reason, I think, why so many novelists and writers in this world are rich bastards. Only rich bastards have the time to just sit around writing all day. Rich bastards and, of course, insane unemployed people, but the insane unemployed people tend to write rambling, nonsensical things on garbage, which they then wave around threateningly while they scream at everyone, so they don't really count. So: Rich bastards. With no jobs to suck away their time, they can write all day—or, worse, they can nap all day and wake up energized to write. Or, hell, they can take six months off to sit on a beach drinking maitais until they black out, then crawl home to write about it. This is why they are rich bastards.

Working stiffs—whether you work behind a register or at a desk—have it hard when it comes to something like writing. In many senses I should be the last person to complain—I'm not begging for pennies on the street, I eat like a pig, get drunk frequently, and have a gorgeous wife who tolerates the times when I do both to excess and wind up pantsless in a public restroom. . .again. My basic needs are obviously well satisfied, so boo-hoo if I don't have hours and hours of subsidized time in which to doodle in my notebook and pretend I am an artist. But, the thing is, it is a shame, because we all only get one life, a brief span of years, and lord knows what I might produce if I didn't have to rot at a desk all day—or at least if I didn't have to actually perform work while rotting there.

The overwhelming odds are that I'd produce lame fiction of middling quality, but that's neither here nor there.

Oh well—at least I had a few glorious years being unproductive and a black hole for corporate resources, and I have hopes of someday becoming unproductive and a known security risk again. While I feed my fever dreams of larceny and laziness, I will somehow find the time and energy to keep putting out your beloved zine, The Inner Swine, because history demands it. Actually, it is the imaginary leprechaun that gives me all my instructions, McEgo, that demands it. Same difference. Until next time, email me your disappointed rage at mreditor@innerswine.com, as usual.

Jeff