Chronological Employment History

My employment history is horrible and extensive. I tried to have as many jobs as possible in my 20s. I managed to get thirty-three different jobs. As far as financial security goes, you could very well imagine how that went. I survived, like a rat. These jobs paid poorly, so it was difficult to get a place to live alone. Sleeping in a car in parking lots. Bathing in apartment complex swimming pools. I gave up on writing twice. I found a reason to write again three times.

My journals are full of descriptions of having “burning with energy” lifestyle issues. Too loud, too much, too scary. I could cycle through many emotions quickly, and my partners sometimes complained of “feeling too many different emotions too much”. At that age, it was fun to love and lose, and love again. I would live 40 years before I was diagnosed with ADHD.

It makes me wonder what my life would be like if I had received treatment that other kids got. “You’re crazy, but good crazy is the mixed bag I always got. But I got really into science and scared away all my wild friends. How do you study robotics and end up teaching kids how to blend colors? You get rejected.

Through jobs and some women, I tried to journal, but it became sporadic. I drank hard, so half of the days I was alive I was going to bed plastered or sweating from a day drunk. I was fit. I biked, but unable to find a way out of poverty. The quality of my writing and thinking was at my lowest during my 20s. I was enduring a really rough mission “to become common” and to understand fundamental truths of the human condition. I read a lot.

I was sometimes homeless AND working, but always, always working. I treated people like stories, places like chapters. I sacrificed my life for the entertainment of people who might be reading me after I’m long dead. Just returning a few favors. Just passing through.

Before the Internet, vagabonds like me “looking for writing material” could move absolutely sideways through low-paying jobs in most service fields unobtrusively. Replaceable, predictable, possibly loyal labor, but labor. Meet the new __________. On more than one occasion I was working with someone who was arrested in the middle of a shift for something they did. It was sometimes dangerous. I always thought I would emerge with a golden insight, that Peter the Great would go home and inform the aristocrats what they fundamentally did not understand about the human condition. I wanted equality.

As soon as I smelled promotions, I considered the experience complete, and I moved on. Game over. Loss of interest.

I piled degrees against the wall. I took salaries. I looked for some sort of routine and security for my kids.

Now none of it matters again. It never mattered before I was alive, and it won’t matter after I’m dead, my grumpy futurist inner child proclaims. I have to deal with a grumpy inner futurist child often. The voice sounds like “old man cantanker”, the seasoned rasp of eldritch focus upon the amount of traffic and gradual bodily system failures.

If I pull back from my immediate life to include in my frame of reference the evolution of nearby galaxies, I see I do not matter. If I look at Earth from a planet in Andromeda, my life would matter even less, so I should be grateful to just exist. But existence is a struggle. And so on. It is sort of an exhaustive hero’s journey to grasp one’s own hand.

The Jobs in Chronological Order beginning at age ten. I was a hustler.