What do you want to be when you grow up?

This is coming up more and more the older I get:  Where do I want to be in life?  It’s like I’m a teenager again!  SAT time!  If you put your name in the right spot you get to go to college and do drugs and have sex with fast women and drunkenly pass out in a drainage ditch during a storm.

I think I can say with some certainty that I don’t want to be trapped at my thankless day job forever.  A job that makes a grade school assembly look more mature than Congress as I spend the day talking to abusive customers and barely tolerating the overmedicated, manic-depressive drama of my braindead, uncultured co-workers.

Removed, in hindsight, from the outside looking in, it’s possible to argue that all jobs are the same and the mindless cruelty of customers and co-workers is par for the course.  But it’s worse than that  and I have a harddrive of documentation to prove it.

To the alarm and concern of my friends, I’m forced to supplement my day job with side-jobs.  A toilet-plunging, let aristocrats spit on you weekend job where, when not being spit on or dealing with co-workers who should be institutionalized, I’m twiddling my thumbs for ten hours listening to my brain atrophy.  Then I write.  Or, rather, I edit.  Editorial jobs are the bottom of the barrel, really.  Make someone else look good, or just blandly set shit into whatever arcane format is required.  But, at least, it’s a job that I can do at home, in my bathrobe, while guzzling gin.

I’m constantly told (always by people who are, themselves, struggling along) that I can do better.  I can magically find a better, happier, higher paying job.  Perhaps in Narnia, or Brigadoon.

I don’t doubt that I can trade up and do better, or at least get to a position where I can stop some of these retarded side jobs, but the fact is that I’ve hit a glass ceiling.  Not only is that thanks to my weak BA in history and my lack of real skills, but I also have a crippling lack of ambition.  Or, perhaps, an inability to deal with the service industry.  I want to escape customer service forever.

So I think… Okay, what do I want to be when I grow up?  What’s my ideal place in life?  If I am allowed to dream, then my ideal is to live in Brampton, which I’ve wheedled on about before, and author the definitive (and entertaining) guide to Victorian-era follies.  Which, as far as I know, exists online but not in a handy guidebook that you can tuck in your pocket and take with you on holiday.  Or…maybe it does.  I haven’t researched it too well because I’m always moved to tears whenever I have a book idea and discover that someone has already done it.

Though, if you do have a folly book you’re putting together, don’t forget that I’m a publisher.  Contact me!  I have international distribution and I can promise you sales figures in the mid to high teens!  Which is what publishing is all about today, right?  Target the few, the individuals, the Facebook generation…  Even a few sales are a success.  We all know that it only takes 12 men.  And a suspiciously convenient arrest.