This is coming up more and more the older I get:\u00a0 Where do I want to be in life?\u00a0 It\u2019s like I\u2019m a teenager again!\u00a0 SAT time!\u00a0 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.<\/p>\n
\nI think I can say with some certainty that I don\u2019t want to be trapped at my thankless day job forever.\u00a0 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.<\/p>\n
Removed, in hindsight, from the outside looking in, it\u2019s possible to argue that all jobs are the same and the mindless cruelty of customers and co-workers is par for the course.\u00a0 But it\u2019s worse than that\u00a0 and I have a harddrive of documentation to prove it.<\/p>\n
To the alarm and concern of my friends, I\u2019m forced to supplement my day job with side-jobs.\u00a0 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\u2019m twiddling my thumbs for ten hours listening to my brain atrophy.\u00a0 Then I write.\u00a0 Or, rather, I edit.\u00a0 Editorial jobs are the bottom of the barrel, really.\u00a0 Make someone else look good, or just blandly set shit into whatever arcane format is required.\u00a0 But, at least, it\u2019s a job that I can do at home, in my bathrobe, while guzzling gin.<\/p>\n
I\u2019m constantly told (always by people who are, themselves, struggling along) that I can do better.\u00a0 I can magically find a better, happier, higher paying job.\u00a0 Perhaps in Narnia, or Brigadoon.<\/p>\n
I don\u2019t 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\u2019ve hit a glass ceiling.\u00a0 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.\u00a0 Or, perhaps, an inability to deal with the service industry.\u00a0 I want to escape customer service forever.<\/p>\n
So I think\u2026 Okay, what do I want to be when I grow up?\u00a0 What\u2019s my ideal place in life?\u00a0 If I am allowed to dream, then my ideal is to live in Brampton, which I\u2019ve wheedled on about before<\/a>, and author the definitive (and entertaining) guide to Victorian-era follies.\u00a0 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.\u00a0 Or\u2026maybe it does.\u00a0 I haven\u2019t researched it too well because I\u2019m always moved to tears whenever I have a book idea and discover that someone has already done it.<\/p>\n Though, if you do have a folly book you\u2019re putting together, don\u2019t forget that I\u2019m a publisher.\u00a0 Contact me!\u00a0<\/a> I have international distribution and I can promise you sales figures in the mid to high teens!\u00a0 Which is what publishing is all about today, right?\u00a0 Target the few, the individuals, the Facebook generation\u2026\u00a0 Even a few sales are a success.\u00a0 We all know that it only takes 12 men.\u00a0 And a suspiciously convenient arrest.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" This is coming up more and more the older I get:\u00a0 Where do I want to be in life?\u00a0 It\u2019s like I\u2019m a teenager again!\u00a0 SAT time!\u00a0 If you put your name in the right spot you get to go …<\/p>\n