As I willingly sacrificed my Friday night after a long, long workweek to cover a fundraiser at an art gallery, knowing I had to go home and write a last-minute on it, I realized something.

I take that back. All of it.

I love this job. I've never worked this hard for something so satisfying.

Spent

Two days into it, and I can already tell this is going to be that period of my life where I actualized how much, and to what depths, that I hate myself.

Between adapting to normal-people office hours and being a salaried employee, I am feeling the plug that held everything in my heart dissolving. I may sound like a big baby, and I probably am a big baby, but again, I've pushed myself out of my comfort zone. I might as well have moved to Egypt. All of a sudden, I don't keep the same hours as my friends, and my evenings will be spent working on tedious drink special spreads and scrambling to fill white space. And if I'm lucky and plan well, which might take awhile, that white space might eventually have actual content.

But until then, the heart's dissolving. Broke for 3 weeks, and working non-stop until then. This always happens with a job change, and most people have savings for that sort of thing. I don't. I suppose as long as I can pay my rent, I'll be fine. I'd like electricity, but I'm not picky. I'd like some food, but I suppose I can deal. Done it before, but with each two-month period I live stressed for basic needs like this, it gets a little less fun.

However, the one amusing factoid about this job is that, no matter how many times they drag me into the office at 9am, I'm still writing everything when I get home. I can't write in an office. I tried; does not work. As soon as I get home, I make a pot of coffee and get to work like I've always done. Work and writing cannot be cross-bred, else I develop a burning hatred for the trade.

Playin' Hookey

Well, not really. I do have some sort of food-borne illness, for which I refuse to go to the doctor, because I frown on the dignity quotient of pooping in a cup within the sanitary, weird-smelling walls of a doctor's office bathroom.

So I took today off, which is rare, because I woke up with a horrifying backache that felt as though someone had set fire to my spine. A valid reason: spine fire.

I have a lot to do before Monday. This..."Job" fell into my lap a few weeks ago as the entertainment editor/staff writer for a new magazine called "Dig". It started on Craigslist. As a freelancer, I am doomed to haunt the Craigslist job listings every day, for all of days. So I found a listing asking for people who wanted to write REAL journalism.

Now, REAL journalism is a childhood dream of mine. A dream that dissolved under the unbridled lunacy of today's "branded" journalism. I gave up on it a long time ago, when I started reading (well, really when I started watching) the news. I wanted to be a muckraker, a digger, a revealer of dirty secrets. A world-changer. When I realized I'd have to overhaul the entire industry to write what I wanted to, I gave up. Prematurely, too easily, and without any sort of fight. That's a bad habit of mine.

I didn't know there were others braver than me. I didn't bother searching them out, because I'm a coward, and when left to my own devices (or at least, in that period of my life), I'll just scrape by so I can fart around in all my free time.

So I met up with the editor a few weeks ago, at Perk's, and he got me very, very excited. I felt these childhood yearnings sparking inside of me for the first time in a decade. Taking a shot at Baton Rouge. Cease feeding them the fodder they want, and start forcing down some truth. This city needs to be changed, and this new magazine is setting out to do it. Right off the top of my head, I made a list of things I could write about. All these injustices people bitch about all the time, but never do anything about. Kickbacks, dirty politics, racism. It's all here, festering in the basements, waiting to be aired.

And, uh, this editor was impressed by my overzealous enthusiasm, probably because it was real and unfiltered (I was saying things like "OMG, THIS THIS AND THIS! YUEAHHH!). When he found out he had money in the budget for salaried full-timers, he called me. Annnnnd I signed a contract. He gave me homework--"The New Journalists" and things of that sort--and I start Monday. So he basically hired me solely based on enthusiasm, because all I've got on my resume' are a few shitty articles that I didn't really care about, and I've never held an editing position.

Whatever. I'll take it.

There's Always Time

...to get salmonella. But that trip was awesome. Happy 2011.

Grandma's Favorite? This is Fucked Up.

At every family gathering this year, there has been a point when the older folks switch the topic of conversation from living to dying. I don't know if they've been doing this the whole time, or if I've just happened to walk in on it this year. It's not subtle either--straight up things like, "I just know any day now, I'm gonna roll over to wake him up and he's gonna be cold."

It's not just talk of dying, either.

The family, generally speaking, knows about my grandma's brother and father. How they weren't right in the head, how they were alcoholics. How they were predators. My grandma left them behind in Massachusetts, but not before my mom was exposed to them. It's ugly and sick and shameful, and I can't imagine how it must feel to be harmed, like that, by people directly related to me.

We all know of it, but it's not detailed in our minds; in fact, I'm sure they left it that way because they didn't want us to feel like we'd been through it too. We don't need specific instances, we don't need to know what room it was, or what time it happened.

But it's part of the story of my family, and the stories of my mother and grandmother. They were altered as people because of those events, which affected every part of their lives--their emotional distance, the way they raised their children, and their ability to show (and be shown) love.

I picked up a Christmas card on my aunt's table while sitting around on Christmas day. It said, "Hope you all are OK. We are OK. Lou is not so well. It's hard to see", and then the pre-printed Christmas message. It is the saddest Christmas card I've ever seen in my life. A bit later, I'm outside with my grandma, and I ask her about the card from her sister. All she said to that was, "I don't talk to them no more." I asked why, and she tells me that they neglected to notify her when her brother died. She didn't know until three months later.

Then, she started talking about her brother. I wasn't asking her anything about it at this point--this is free-form grandma, and grandma doesn't talk much, and very rarely complains. She said he was her favorite, but he had a bad streak in him. She said he picked her up from school one day and got a ticket because he didn't stop for the school bus. And you know, I laugh, cause it's funny to me. And she laughs, and then tells me he didn't stop because he was trying to put his hand up her skirt.
"...and you know, I told him not to do that..."

My little sister, who was sitting there listening with me, audibly gasped. She looked at me for a cue, and I didn't have one. I just looked at her, wide-eyed.

All I had was confirmation that my happy childhood had only existed because all of them--my mother, grandmother, aunts and uncles, families by marriage and the like--had put us in the middle and made a human barrier to keep out the darkness. They were the Atlas that held my world on their shoulders. They'd all looked at it so we didn't have to.

Once you get to a certain age, you know or at least suspect as much. A few years ago, I started to see the reason why it's so hard to hold other people to my expectations: because everyone is from a different world, has had different struggles, and has seen different amounts of darkness. You don't know how warped they are, or if they've ever seen true darkness. Or if they've seen too much of it and can't trust anyone because of it.

Not all my memories of my grandma are good ones. She had it out for me when I was young, for reasons still kind of unclear. We'd stay at her house a lot, and she'd always accuse me of random offenses, like eating her lipstick. Furthermore, she'd make fun of me in public, or straight-up TRIP me when I was 7. She cackled like a demon, she thought it was so funny. The terrible thing was that I wanted her to love me more than anything. I'm sure she did, but when I was 7, that shit didn't feel like love.

She's clearly outgrown that phase, but after talking to her on Christmas, it occurred to me that maybe she resented her grandkids back then--just the tiniest, childish little bit--because growing up was made so easy for us. Paired with our generation's excellent complaining skills, she doesn't get it, and felt like she got the shaft. Why do we get nerf guns and hundreds of barbies while she grew up eating expired food from the restaurant her family lived behind? In the bitter cold Massachusetts winter, with an abusive alcoholic predator of a father? After the depression? WITH 8 SIBLINGS? I guess the least she could do was trip me in public to make me feel a slight smidgen of how painful growing up was for her.

Every Christmas feels more and more like "The Dead". All the kids leave, and the spirit dies, and all that's left is the old ones talking about their impending death like they'll put it in tomorrow's coffee.

on junkies

When I see the junkie at the gas station, while I'm dressed comfortably and freshly-showered, a little bit of my stomach sinks and starts fucking with my sense of well-being. An overwhelming sadness, with flecks of worry and fear. It's caused by the knowledge that a day in my life might come when I choose that path. Being a junkie doesn't just happen to people--they choose it, right? And I have those same choices to make in my own life.

I might be making them right now. My car needs gas, my rent is still unpaid, and I have this little itch in the back of my head. Yes, I want to get fucked up.

Oh God.

And then I think about God.

God, what soul would think of free will as a great gift to mankind? Perhaps, a soul who has never been among them, has not faced these choices every day, and instead sent his son to die at the hands of the junkies.

God begins to make no sense to me, though I'm not sure I really thought about it before. The junkie has "turned away from God", and as a kid, when I'd see a junkie, my mom told me that's why he was a junkie. Why?

I start to dissect the logic, and discover that there is none. And like most people, I do not have a clear grip on what God is. The Christians tell you that you aren't supposed to understand. God is a nebulous, celestial entity who created life, and gave the glorious burden of free will to humans alone. Not the cats, not the hamsters, but me. Me.

Perhaps God is a feeling that you get when a path is set in front of you, clear-cut, and you have no choice but to keep walking on it, and a large portion of the world accepts you and praises you for it. The pure kind of love that comes with security, acceptance, and peace of mind, often found in infants.

Perhaps Free Will is called a gift because that's the only way we can be happy about it at all.

Perhaps turning away from God is a feeling you get when you realize you can jump over the shrubs, scale the fence, get as far away from that path as you want to. Perhaps those "without god" know free will is not a gift, but a burden, because we have so many options. You could be a cabbie, rob a bank, breathe air atop Mount Fuji, or fall to your death. You realize you can do anything, and that there is no path.

Perhaps there is no God/Satan dialectic. Maybe it is the God/Free Will dialectic. The Set Path/Erratic Tumult.

The night after I saw the junkie at the gas station, the sinking churned my stomach into a restless, fruitless sleep, because all I thought about was how tomorrow's choices might land me begging in front of a gas station in five years, with my infected track marks and my decaying teeth. Of course I won't make those choices, I'm better than that, but there's no way to be sure.

All of a sudden, the road was littered with sinister pot-holes that I swore I'd never seen before. Maybe I'd just been overlooking them--is that how it starts? I wanted to go to my parents' house, my childhood home, my alma mater, with an urgency that I haven't felt since infancy, or what I imagined infancy felt like (Isn't it funny that we don't remember it? What God felt like?). I wanted to be coddled, to be told that I am a good person, and that I don't have it in me to end up like that.

But the thing is, I do have it in me. That's the God-damned truth.

And tomorrow, at any point, maybe sitting at a desk or in the middle of a phone call, that sinking shadow in my gut could crawl up into my stomach and start convulsing again, sprouting thick, scarred veins and a mugshot-worthy complexion. My safety net, hand-crafted out of questionable mythic materials, evaporated and I might be halfway to the bottom already. I'll hit the bottom before I realize there was never any safety net. I'm not any different from the Godless junkies.

Sometimes, I have these dreams. I'll be out with my friends at a bar, and we'll all be having fun. Then all of a sudden, I am a zombie. I cannot talk, walk, or function, and all I want is another of something. It doesn't matter what it is, the It is always variable. But I want it. Need it. After I turn into a zombie, I don't remember who I'm with or what is happening--only that I need another.

And I wake up so convinced that it happened, that I don't remember how it started. As if I blacked out. When I wake up from dreams like this, the sense of shame is almost unbearable. Sure, it was a dream. But in the back of my head, there's this itch.

Ask Me To Pull Through

I feel sorry for my neighbor across the hall tonight. She's got company, and I absolutely must listen to the entire Ben Folds discography, including Ben Folds Five. In a few hours, she'll want to take an axe to my door, throw my cat out the window and destroy my hard drive via explosives. Ahh, too bad for her.

I took the mystery editor's freelance offer, despite my misgivings and disillusionment with journalism. I could say I did it for money--that's certainly part of it, but it doesn't account for the whole. I've been in a slump for the last month or so, not because of any particular reason, but rather...a lot of pixels come together and create a feeling of woe, like Poe's all-inclusive mood style. But the one thing that seems to consistently pull me out of it is directed writing. Not this blog--sometimes it helps to dump everything out, but this is not one of those times. In a way that has a lot to do with pride, I hate admitting it, but it's nice to have someone just tell me what to do. Especially when it's writing, and especially when I don't know what else to do.

And the assignment I just finished was one of the most intensive I've ever done. Definitely the most journalistic thing I've ever written, much different from the fluff pieces and movie reviews I've written in the last six months. It was hard, on several levels--the first being I only had 3.5 days to do the research and interviews necessary, the second being I was required to come to a conclusion after interviewing six people. Six people rarely come to a consensus, so the consensus had to be mine.

I know it doesn't sound like a tall order, but real-world-related writing that must conclude something is asking a lot. You really have to put yourself out there, and be okay knowing that someone's going to disagree with you vehemently. To someone like me, that's a billion times more terrifying than writing fiction, because it's real. Personally, I spend as little time in reality as possible. Therefore, my opinions about reality are often completely incorrect, and I go into it expecting everyone to disagree with me.

But I really needed an assignment. Something that was DUE. And when I finished at 8:47pm tonight, after four hours of dissecting, transcribing and deciphering recorded interviews, all I wanted to do was bask in the afterglow and eat a healthy meal.

I'm not going to think about it too hard. They pay well, anyway. I'm clearly just doing it for the money.