When Obsessions Collide

Some things aren't made to go together. On the other hand, sometimes seemingly incompatible items are forced together by circumstances. For example, the more you spend on your car, the less you have left to spend on your house. Or, conversely, the less you spend on your house, the more you have left over for a really nice car.

Day 83 - Crisis of Faith

          I called Stew this morning and told him thanks, but no thanks. I wished him good luck, and I meant it. Looking back over my history with Henry and his family I suppose there are lots of good reasons for me to relish their flaming out, but knowing what it’s like to face an uncertain future without prospects and suffused with self-doubt, I wouldn’t wish that on anybody.

Besides the futures of many more people than just Henry and his family are at stake. Henry and Stew employ a lot of hard working and industrious people who depend on the success of the business every day. They’ll all be facing that uncertain future, and not because of anything they did or Henry did or didn’t do, but because a banker somewhere saw too much risk in a loan portfolio and decided to get rid of some of it. It hardly matters that the banker bought into the risk in the first place—that the bank is heavily invested in securitized sub-prime mortgages or over the counter interest rate swaps. It only matters what the numbers look like today and damn the lives and the hopes and dreams of real people represented by that risk.

We are, all of us to some degree, at the mercy of the computer models of speculators, MBAs, and math wizards—smart sumbitches ‘fiddlefucking’ around as Henry would say—who bring no value to the game. Rather they game the value of the poor dumb bastards who are doing actual work.

          I’m already past the point of working this setback to my advantage. It’s obvious to me that I’m not going to get a job soon enough to be able to bank my severance as surplus. Under the best of circumstances it will be January before I get a job and February before I start work. By then my severance will have run out, but even that less than rosy scenario grows more and more unlikely with each passing day.

If I don’t get a job in January I’m going to have to move out of this house, this lovely neighborhood, by February 1st. That means I need to start thinking about where I’m going to live now. I don’t want to do that. It seems so defeatist. I’m trying to stay optimistic, but there comes a point where cultivating the optimistic attitude that helps you get a job just leads you down the path to disaster. Prayerful, trustful surrender—the Christian ideal—seems foolish under the circumstances.

          I’m a devout Catholic. I pay attention to the homilies at Mass. I read Scripture. I read and study theology. I have taught a survey of sacramental theology to teenagers preparing to be Confirmed in the Faith for six years. I know stuff. I don’t pretend to know everything, but I know more than most at least about what constitutes a proper Christian attitude in times of distress. ‘Let go and let God’ is the phrase that captures its essence. That is what I know I’m supposed to do. Unfortunately that sound theological advice is diametrically opposed to every bit of advice available from secular sources for the job seeker. The job boards and career coaches don’t want you to sit around in blissful hope waiting for God to show up with a basket of blessings. They want you to take a more proactive approach. They want you to set goals, to network, to circulate, to think outside of the box, to differentiate yourself, and to broadcast the message of your suitability to the widest possible audience.

          I have tried to reconcile these points of view with another well known platitude: “God helps those who help themselves.” As platitudes go this is a good attempt, but somehow it fails to satisfy the thoughtful Christian. The obvious snag is that the more you help yourself the less trust you are putting in God to provide for your needs. The less trust you put in God the less generous are you likely to find His bounty. The platitude simply cannot be true. God does not help those who help themselves. Why would he? Those who help themselves help themselves. They don’t put their trust in God, else they wouldn’t be working so hard to make their own destiny. They just give God lip service. They are in fact lacking in sufficient faith to warrant much of God’s munificence. It’s a trick bag, a Catch 22.

Every shred of advice available to you and most of the anecdotal evidence suggests that succeeding or failing in this world is up to you. If you don’t do anything because you are waiting for God to do it and you fail, it’s your fault. You didn’t believe strongly enough, or you put what faith you have in a practice that has no validity, a god who does not exist—depends on your outlook, doesn’t it? If you don’t do anything and you succeed, you have to give God all the credit. That’s okay from the believer’s perspective, but all the non-believers rankle at the injustice of it—that you succeeded without any effort. If you don’t do anything to deserve success, well then you don’t deserve success. That’s the path to diminishing self worth. Let’s face it—it is hard as hell to trust in heaven. That’s why no one ever suggests that you actually do it…except in church…on Sunday…when God is listening. Any other time, it’s just not American, or practical, or sane.

          The problem is even deeper than this, deeper than just having to decide at one point if you are going to trust God or trust your gut as it were, your instinct for self preservation. You have to decide constantly, and every decision you make undermines the essence of the sensibilities that support the other choice, the one you didn’t make. So you vacillate, first one way and then the other. The result is that you end up whipsawing yourself into a constant state of tension between personal crises of low self esteem and faith, between not believing in yourself and not believing in a caring God. You never see the positive side of either a life of spiritual peace or personal actualization.

I see myself at the end of this in tatters, one shoe sole flapping a syncopated jazz riff, the percussive accompaniment to an iconic, blues-infused, street life of poverty, meanness, addiction, and uselessness…and that’s the romantic outcome, at least provided there’s an occasional Aston Martin with a windshield I can wash. The more likely outcome, the one with all the hardship but without the romance and the sound track, is too depressing to contemplate.

Day 75 - The Brief Shining Moment that was Camelot...Only Better

          Nothing is happening on the boards today, and I’ll bet nothing significant happens until January. Everyone is worn out from worrying about the economy. They’re all hunkered down and trying not to draw attention to themselves. There won’t be Christmas parties this year for a lot of us. For the rest there are sure to be more chicken drumettes and soft drinks and a lot less lobster rolls and champagne.

It’s a busy time anyway, sure to be made more so by the anxiety induced need to appear busy with the daily essentials of work and still get all the personal holiday exigencies dealt with as well. It’s probably actually a good time to be unemployed. It will take a lot of the pressure off, and no one is going to expect me to be spending a lot of money on them either.

          I managed to get off the oxycodone while I still have some left. For a while there I didn’t think that was going to happen. When I tried to just quit—usually the best way—I found I had a lot of difficulty getting to sleep. It took me about three fitful nights to get through it, but now I’m not having any trouble at all. I do have strange dreams though. That’s kind of a new thing for me. Last night I had two—not weird really, but hard to fathom where they came from. In one I was riding around my home town in Ohio on a bright yellow motorcycle. I have no idea where I was going or what I was doing with a motorcycle. I’ve never ridden a motorcycle, and apart from some adolescent yearnings, long since discarded, I have no real desire to. It seemed quite natural in the dream.

          The other dream had to do with playing baseball. I was at the plate, wielding a green bat. I was determined to get a hit, but went down swinging. For some reason the last strike was a big disappointment to me. I woke up at that point vaguely disturbed that I hadn’t been able to get a piece of the ball. I had taken a huge cut at it. I really wanted to knock it out of the park. I don’t know where that one came from either. I’ve never been particularly athletic. I’ve never enjoyed team sports. I was pretty bad at baseball and softball as a kid. In retrospect it was probably an eye hand coordination problem resulting from pretty severe myopia. I never thought to make excuses when I was a kid though. I just thought I sucked…except for one brief magical moment when I didn’t.

          It was the last day of school for my eighth grade classmates and me, a sunny day in mid May. The air was warm and redolent with the long promise of summer. A softball game had been arranged for the lunch recess break—eighth grade versus seventh, a tradition I suppose. I never played much so I was unaware of how the game came to be. The reality was there was a game every day. It was softball in the early fall and spring, basketball otherwise. This one didn’t seem any more special than any other except for the convergence of two unusual conditions.

          Since we were playing one class against another, the eighth grade class was going to be short a man if I didn’t play. In other words I had to play. The other thing was that the girls came down to watch the game. That meant that Connie Staugler was going to see whatever embarrassment I managed to bring upon myself. Normally that would have given me pause I suppose, but it was the last day of school so, surprisingly, I managed not to dwell too much on the potential downside.

          We played until we ran out of time. I don’t remember how many innings we got in—probably not more than five. I managed not to make a fool of myself through the first four. I played right field. Thankfully nothing came my way. That’s why they put me there. It was good asset management. My first at bat I flied out to center. I got a good piece of the ball so it wasn’t embarrassing, just typical. We were down one run by the bottom of what was going to be the last inning. It got pretty exciting from there.

          I didn’t figure on getting up, but sports events usually aren’t determined by what I figure. After five batters we had three men on and two outs. I was up. There was no one in my class who would have wished it so. I figure most of them were thinking they were watching their chance at snatching a victory evaporate before their eyes. Still they were for the most part gracious. It was the last day of school. Everyone was feeling expansive. My classmates made no derogatory remarks. The seventh grade outfield moved in closer though, and I found that a little disparaging. In fact it kind of pissed me off. I picked a big bat. The bat belonged to a kid in my class named Herb. He was a big kid. I don’t know where he got the bat, but it was the biggest one I had ever seen—certainly way too big for me, but I liked the feel of it.

I used to shag a lot of fly balls in my neighborhood. Kids would spread out at one end of our yard. I would stand at the other and knock towering flies and sizzling liners to them. I was good at it. I could hit a ball a country mile. I had a good swing, good rhythm. The rhythm is what made it work for me. The rhythm told me where the ball was going to be—information I was not easily able to discern through my thick glasses. I was never able to translate that ability to hitting a pitched ball, not even a slow-pitch softball, because the rhythm and placement were determined by the pitcher. With a pitched ball I had to rely on my eyesight, a decided disadvantage no matter how beautiful my swing.

I got a lot of advice when I dragged Herb’s big stick up to the plate. Mostly the advice centered on the idea that I ought to get a smaller bat. When it became obvious that I was committed to the big bat, they started telling me I needed to choke up on it. ‘You’ll never get that tree limb around on the ball,’ they said. I was not swayed. I liked the big, heavy bat. It felt like respect in my hands. I wasn’t about to choke up on it either. I knew I could get it around. I just didn’t know if I could get it on the ball.

          I took a called strike on the first pitch. No one ever swung at the first pitch in grade school. I guess it was some kind of prideful thing among the players. I knew the rule, knew I had to do it to be cool. It seemed like a waste of a good fat pitch to stand there and let it pass, but that’s what I did. I took the bat off my shoulder and held it across the plate right where I wanted the next pitch. The next two weren’t anywhere near there—one high and away, one bounced in front of the plate. The count stood at two and one. The next one came in flat right at shoulder level. I stepped into it and whipped that bat around hard as I could. I got a lot of wrist into it at the bottom of the swing—another advantage of rhythm. I knew how to leverage that monster stick into formidable bat speed. It made a whoosh sound as it came around. It moved a lot of air, but it was too heavy to get up to where the ball was. Two and two, the count. The next pitch came inside. I really wanted it. I stepped cross-wise to open up my swing and hefted the bat off my shoulder, but decided at the last second to pass. It wouldn’t have gone anywhere if I’d hit it. It would have been a ground ball down the third base line, and a force out before the runner on third could score. I didn’t really think all that through at the time. I didn’t know enough to think like that. I just knew I wanted to connect. I didn’t even really care about a hit. I wanted to feel that ‘whump’ when ball meets too much wood, that split second in time where everything stops and all the kinetic energy in the world is concentrated right there in your hands, and it all uncoils from there and goes sailing away. I wanted that, so I waited.

          The next pitch was perfect. I had no right to expect that. No one does, but every once in a while the wonder of what you don’t deserve gets delivered to you as if by angels. The ball peaked halfway between the mound and the plate. I knew it was a good one. I shifted my weight onto my back leg to slide my front leg forward into the swing. I bumped the bat up out of the crook of my elbow and started to pull it around. The pitch cut the outside half of the plate, falling at about a forty degree angle across the strike zone. When it got to the level of my waist it was met with more wood than it had ever encountered in its life in elementary school sport. The ‘whump’ I had been hoping for resounded across the playground. The center fielder who had pulled in because he didn’t think I could hit it far enough to get where he was watched the ball sail over his head, past where he would have positioned himself for someone he thought could hit, past the edge of the grassy field where we played, and over the paved basketball courts. The ball bounced once on the tarmac and glanced off the school building—an automatic home run—officially out of the park. I trotted round the bases behind the other three runners.

          When I cruised over home plate amongst the general jubilation of the eighth grade class, Connie Staugler was standing there with the other girls. There were ten of them, but I only noticed her. I only ever noticed her. She had a pretty nice smile working—congratulatory, admiring, beatific. At the time it was the best smile I had ever seen.

“You should play more often,” she said.

I don’t remember what I said. Something stupid I imagine. I do know this. Eighth grade geeks are not supposed to have moments like this. Eighth grade geeks are supposed to continue to fail miserably at all life’s challenges except the academic ones. They are supposed to end up embittered, anti-social, and culturally inept so that all their focus and energy goes into achieving technical success and amassing great wealth which they then use to buy golden moments such as the one I just had. Whenever I think that one day I will drive back to my home town in my brand spanking new Aston Martin DB9 and wearing a $1,200 suit, I remember. I already had my moment, and I’m not going to get another one. My life reached its zenith on the last day of eighth grade and it’s been all downhill from there. This is why I’m pretty sure that I’m not going to get another job. This is why I can picture myself living in a refrigerator box with all my stuff in a stolen grocery cart without sinking into a profound and suicidal depression. I may already have had my moment...but it was excellent.

Day 70 - Excellent Written Communications Skills Only Get You So Far

          I applied to 5 jobs today through Indeed, although all of them were on CareerBuilder.com. CareerBuilder seems to have the most and the best listings. I joined a pay site called The Ladders that specializes in jobs that pay over $100,000 per year. It cost $30 to get a basic membership that gives me access to their jobs and the content of the articles they put up. They are great at promoting themselves. That is to say that they are really good at making themselves sound really good which is why I parted with the thirty bucks. Now we’ll see if they can actually deliver. Like all the rest of the sites they allow you to search their postings by job title, key word, and geographical location. I still want to stay in Florida so I turned that filter on. I wouldn’t mind going back to Arkansas, but anywhere else I’d just be biding my time until I could get back to Florida. It’s expensive and hot, but it suits me somehow. Besides I have a lot of family in Florida including my children and grandchildren. Living here just cuts down on the travel required at holidays and family gatherings.

          I check my Triond account about every hour. So far 2 people have read my article. It’s nice to know that someone did, but since it only pays a penny for every 7-10 people who click through I’m certainly not going to be buying an Aston Martin with the proceeds. The trick of course is to have a lot of articles up. It’s best if they’re all related and on a topic that you have some expertise in and credentials for that’s also of general interest to a lot of people. Even then you have to work at driving traffic to the articles through the judicious and creative use of blogs and social networking sites. This may be harder than it looks. I’ll have to post some more articles on different topics and see what people are actually interested in reading.

Digitally disadvantaged as I am I realize that I’m going to have to amp up my online presence if I’m going to get anything cooking with writing. I’m going join FaceBook and create a blog. I’m already on LinkedIn, but that’s a network for professional connections. It’s supposed to be useful for getting a job, but I’m not seeing anyone beating my doors down just yet to offer me a cushy position. Like anything else on line it requires constant attention and tweaking until you’ve reached a critical mass of contacts. It also requires a combination of constant activity on the message boards, publishing, and cross-linking all your activities to establish some kind of professional credibility.

There is one other problem with all this digital networking. I have to keep my writing activities segregated from my accounting activities. The silly poem I put up yesterday on Triond is fairly innocuous, but my other writings—I have a number of short stories and a novel in progress—tend to be a little more outré shall we say, a little more earthy. Now I’m not talking about anything offensive, but it is different from what most business managers would expect of their accountants. The novel for instance features what is generally known as a gentlemen’s club and several exotic dancers, a crime boss, a priest having a crisis of faith, and a ponzi-scheme operator. What board of directors would care to have their financial matters in the hands of an accountant who knows enough about such things to make a compelling story out of them when they are able to choose from among a slew of candidates who have not a creative bone in their body? No, no one on LinkedIn must ever be able to connect the dots to anything I might write and post on line—at least not until I get something published and start banking fat royalty checks.

Day 62 - Beautiful Sheet Metal and Curves in the Road

          I went to visit another recruiter today. This one was way over on the west end of town. She indicated on the phone that she had a controller position open so I agreed to see her today. When I got there something seemed amiss right off the bat. First of all I had to fill out an application and some other paperwork before I sat down with the recruiter. They already had all the information they asked for on my résumé so I was a little confused about why they needed to capture it again in a different format. Still I’d already driven all the way across town so I filled out forms without complaint. The other thing that seemed off was that there was quite a parade of candidates going through the reception area, all filling out packets like me, all with appointments at the same time, and all very obviously applying for clerical rather than executive positions.

          When I finally got in to see the recruiter who had called me I found that she didn’t even have a cubicle. Her desk was in the midst of an army of recruiters in a large open space. I sat in a chair next to her desk. Every other place I have been I was at least taken to a conference room for the interview. This was a high volume operation with, as it turned out, low paying positions to offer. The recruiter was happy to tell me that I had excellent credentials and experience and she was sure that she could place me in one of a number of positions they were trying to fill. She then gave me the salary range of the position she was actively working. It was less that a third of what I made last year. I was flabbergasted. I couldn’t wait to get out of there. Another colossal waste of my time! What the hell was going on?

          One good thing about this particular appointment—the only good thing—was that the recruiter’s office was right next door to an Aston Martin dealership. I love Aston Martins. I think they are among the most beautiful cars built today. The DB9 model that I would most like to own comes in at around $170,000. Stopping to gaze at the graceful sheet metal and opulent colors was a bittersweet moment. I’m unemployed. If I don’t get something cooking in my job search within a couple of months I’m going to be homeless. Maybe then I’ll be able to run out into the street at stoplights and occasionally polish the windshield of an Aston Martin with a filthy rag while the owner yells obscenities at me from behind the leather clad steering wheel—something to look forward to, huh?

*****

          I got a strange e-mail from an anonymous source while Alicia was off in Florida with Fische. The gist of the e-mail was that Fische had been bragging around the water cooler that, in his opinion, Alicia could be had if a fellow played his cards right. The sender of the e-mail was concerned that Alicia was about to become the victim of blatant sexual harassment and that Fische was exposing the company to a lawsuit.

          There were a number of other employees from our Arkansas facility who also had gone to the open house, mostly sales people and technicians from our service department. These folks came back with stories that made the hair stand up on the back of my neck. Chief among these was that Alicia had been seen leaving the open house in Fische’s car with her feet sticking out the passenger side window. There was a lot of speculation about how far that particular posture had caused her skirt to ride up and how much of her nether delights were thus exposed to Fische’s view. Another story was that Fische had been seen leaving her hotel room early in the morning wearing the clothes he had been wearing the previous day. Either Fische had been correct in his assessment of Alicia’s availability or Alicia had been an enthusiastic participant in the tryst—seen by her as an essential component of her new career path. This was all new territory for me, certainly not the kind of thing they teach you in business school. Oh how I wish that they had.