I often joke that, when I was a kid, my career ambition was to be a ninja, or a truck driver, or some G.I. Joe-style combination of both.<\/p>\n
I always wanted some quiet little job where I could be on my own.
\n
\nI admired the mailmen, and their lives trudging anonymously from house to house, or driving their jeeps (now a thing of the past) down some country lane.<\/p>\n
I thought it would be cool to be a small town cop. An interest that went so far as declaring a Criminal Justice major in my second year at college. You can blame Stephen King\u2019s The Stand<\/em> for that, and the short-lived sheriff of Shoyo, Arkansas who takes in a wounded Nick Andros just days before the superflu destroys civilization.<\/p>\n My first major in college was environmental science, with an eye on becoming a park ranger in West Virginia.\u00a0 I wanted to hike around the Monongahela Forest in my polyester ranger uniform and get shot by rednecks.<\/p>\n My other oft-repeated joke is that I want to be a night watchman.\u00a0 I turn it into a joke because I think people would worry if they knew I was serious.\u00a0 If they knew that I found something romantic and appealing about being a night watchman.<\/p>\n It\u2019s these cool late autumn and winter nights that make me think about that profession.\u00a0 I took a job in 1990 as a retail clerk at a tiny little niche bookstore in suburban Maryland.\u00a0 It was two rooms in a big old mansion on a dark 40 acre wooded lot.\u00a0 Something of a fantastical oasis, really.\u00a0 You\u2019d pull off the Beltway, or peel off from the commuting madness on the surface streets, and wend your way through the trees up to this imposing mansion on the hill.\u00a0 My after-school shift would have me running the bookstore in the evenings,\u00a0 from 4pm to 9pm, all alone in the spooky house.\u00a0 At my busiest, I\u2019d see maybe three customers. Most of the time, I was alone from 5pm until closing.<\/p>\n Nobody ever thought to assign busy work, either, so I\u2019d step outside and wander around in the night, kicking leaves and creeping around the empty parking lot, exploring the paths through the woods, climbing trees, or just running around being silly.<\/p>\n In those tumultuous teen years, that late shift was a welcome respite.\u00a0 True private time where I could be alone with my own thoughts.\u00a0 Those three customers who occasionally came up there were always odd ducks and seemed to be of a similar breed \u2013 they\u2019d keep to themselves, coming for specific items and gone in a few minutes, or quietly shuffling around the shelves of books in the backroom.<\/p>\n As I got older, being a night watchman was a perfect combination of all my career ambitions.\u00a0 The lonely ranger in the polyester uniform, the solitary small town cop, and the roving mailman wandering his circuit meets the nostalgic autumn evenings alone with my thoughts.<\/p>\n Getting away from people isn\u2019t something that settled in after my adulthood trail by fire, it\u2019s always been there. I\u2019ve always enjoyed playing alone, and I\u2019ve always distrusted people \u2013 including family and friends.\u00a0 I remember clearly realizing in third grade that my so-called friends were all out for something, and couldn\u2019t ever be fully trusted.\u00a0 And I was almost always right.<\/p>\n I have, thankfully, met a handful of people over the years who have become great and trusted friends, and who I see as great people.\u00a0 It\u2019s probably thanks only to them that you\u2019re not watching them scoop mummified cats out of my bathtub on an episode of Hoarders<\/em>.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" I often joke that, when I was a kid, my career ambition was to be a ninja, or a truck driver, or some G.I. Joe-style combination of both. I always wanted some quiet little job where I could be on …<\/p>\n