What do I want from my job? What do I want from my job? I want money! That’s why it’s called a goddamn job! If it were fun, it’d be called a “gig.” No, I get my ass out of bed at the ass-crack of dawn and drive through godawful traffic so I can sit at my desk and try (with less success as the week progresses) not to fall asleep, and degrade myself for the next ten hours because if I didn’t, I’d be stone broke and I’d have to live out of my car like that crazy guy I saw driving around the other day. Don’t get me wrong, he looked incredibly cool and I bet if I’d had the chance to talk to him and not just honk because the light turned green and he didn’t care because HE didn’t have anywhere to go, unlike the rest of us who are trying not to get fired, I probably would have found him the most interesting person I’d met, but I didn’t get a chance to talk to him, so I can really only judge on looks. He sure looked happier than I felt.

So you hippies are probably wondering then why I bother going through all this crap every day for a job that’s far from lucrative. Well, I tell you this: it pays the bills, it does not involve deep-frying, and as soon as I’ve been here long enough to be able to get a better, better-paying job, I’m outta here. Gone. When this thing has run its course, then I’ll run the hell out of here lickety-split. Right now I’m still in the middle of dues-paying hell-on-wheels, which actually isn’t as fun as it sounds. Don’t get me wrong, I’ve had worse jobs, it’s just that I had them when I was younger and didn’t care at all and they were summer jobs or otherwise fairly temporary, but now I’m getting marginally older and reserve the right to be cranky, god damn it. Sure, I’m not mucking out the drain in the fish market like I did that one summer, pulling out god only knows what kind of slimy, decaying organic matter that had gotten stuck in the catch and was slowly trying to kill us all, and sure, unlike the temp job I was at a year ago to the day, no one here under the age of 30 has had a heart attack yet, but it’s still remarkably unpleasant.

But if the money isn’t all that good, couldn’t I just go pay dues elsewhere? Yeah, well, maybe I could, but that would be a pain in the ass to find out, now wouldn’t it? And chances are I’d end up in a similar job with similar pay, only I’d have to start over with the whole “dues” nonsense and I’d really never get anywhere. As Dave once said, “life sucks; we’re gonna die.” Actually, he wrote it. As lyrics. As the entire lyrics to a song. Just over and over “life sucks (doo doo doo doo doo doo) we’re gonna die (doo doo doo doo doo doo).” Catchy tune, actually. I wish he’d recorded it. In any case, here I am, doing what I’m doing, and the paychecks are technically coming in, and every once in a while I find myself in an elevator with someone like Richard Lewis or Tonya Harding or that “leave Britney alone” kid from the internet, and I’m forced to think of that as a tax-free perk of the job. I’d rather have the taxable dinero, gracias.

And when I’m not treading water at work, watching my life slowly circle the drain of Time, I do actually have some time free to do fun things like write essays, or write or read novels, or photograph really bizarre things in this god-forsaken city, or occasionally meet people who are something like fascinating, and if all else fails I could always go do interpretive dance on the Promenade for spare change, which now that I think about it would be an awesome thing to try this weekend. And until that weekend comes, I’ll sit at my cramped desk at my job that I love so dearly and collect my paycheck on Friday and hope that somehow I’ve managed to position myself in this industry in a place where someday, someday, if I manage not to get fired, I’ll be able to work my way up to a gig.