Fasten Your Seatbelts

 Where's EGE?

You may have noticed that I stepped away from my computer for a while. Well, mostly. Those of you who are Facebook friends were privy to my lamentations on the state of toiletry in the AssVac as of late – unless of course you did the responsible thing and hid my status updates from your feed. But facebook isn’t writing. It’s not computering. It’s more like running out to check the mailbox and announcing to the neighborhood what you’ve been up to while you do.

“I broke the toilet!”

Ooh, two letters!

“I hope Obama passes health reform!”

Ooh, three letters!

“I’m having SpaghettiOs for lunch!”

Nuthin.

This is all very gratifying, especially when you can make someone laugh two minutes after he posts that his dog died (it was a joke about Celine Dion in my underwear – you had to be there), but it still is not the same as working.

Speaking of which: I haven’t been working in a while. Officially unemployed now for a day short of a month, I spent the first two weeks frantically revising the Big Project I thought I’d finally put to bed, then another week or so polishing my Florence Nightingale impression (for this go-round I added elements of tuna casserole and a dash of apple pie). Then I got sick myself and went to bed for more time than was strictly necessary, hauling my ass out just in time to throw a party for what was supposed to have been 25 but turned out to be just 15. That was Saturday. Yesterday passed in a leftover-appetizer haze, and now here we are at this morning, which I have decided to call my First Real Day of unemployment.

Now, I don’t want to give the impression that I'm a Lady of Leisure. I really can’t afford to take time off. There’s an almost 100% chance I’ll be regretting it in a monumental way, and very soon, but my decision was arrived at as rationally as I am capable of arriving at anything these days – by which I mean to say: feet first and skidding. But I do have reasons, and I’ll present them here in decreasing order of importance. Which is, perhaps not coincidentally, inversely proportionate to their potential for entertainment value.

#1. I have a lot of wounds from this past year that still need licking, and my psyche simply can’t handle an intense job search right now. I’d wind up using my interviewer’s necktie for a hankie if he so much as asked me why I left my last place of employment, and since I did so without so much as a letter of recommendation, I’ll need a bit more time to get my story straight about the twelve-year gap in my CV. Which brings us neatly to...

#2. I’d like to wait and see how the Big Project pans out. I’m under no delusions that it’s going to fund my immediate retirement, but I’d like to wait and see if I’m going to be a janitor at Wal-Mart who does Big Projects on the side, or if the whole idea of Big Projects will get shoved under the bed so I can be the next CEO of Morgan Stanley. I wouldn’t think they’d care too much about the twelve-year gap in my resumé, seeing as how the last time I had a Real Job the economy still made some sort of sense. Which sets us up nicely for...

#3. If I started looking for a Real Job tomorrow, the chances are slim to none that I'd have any luck. And there’s a lot of little things that should be done around the AssVac in case we have to sell up and move out. I haven’t put any thought into the old girl for a while, but she is still, for example, sporting a wood-paneled dining room, two poo-brown linoleum bedrooms, and a giant pile of assorted shit in the backyard, all of which could be productive uses of my leisure time. And all of which, I’d like to think, would pay off in the end. Perhaps not handsomely, but at least as well as mopping floors for Mr. Walton, anyway.

So I’m giving myself another month or two. I intend to get the house in order, stitch my soul together, and (hopefully) get something tangible to fill that twelve-year gap. After that, who knows? But in the meantime, you – my dear, sweet, and almost certainly slightly deranged readers who have stuck with me through all these fevered ramblings and recent blank spots – will get dragged along through the mud for the entire bumpy ride, if you should be so foolish as to accept the invitation.

It’s a dirty job, I know. But if you can't make a person laugh when his dog dies, then what's the point of writing, anyway?

Right, boyo?

Right!  

I missed you, EGE!