January 22-28, 2012: Shop Talk

It occurs to me that I’ve devoted a lot of space on this blog lately to talk of Fluffy and cigarettes and the holidays and dirty dishes and the electric guitar and Twilight and iPads—you name it. Looking back, I’ve covered an impressive amount of ground.

But there’s an elephant in the ether, and it’s not the morbidly obese Fluffy. I’m referring to—grimace, grimace—my employment situation, which seems to be the one topic that isn’t broached on Unemployment Lines. By now, you might find this omission to be disconcerting. Maybe you think I’ve given up. Or worse, gone mad.

And while those are both plausible theories, they’re wrong. I’m not writing this entry from the loony bin—I’m at my usual spot at the end of the dining room table—and giving up is never an option. On the contrary, I’m on the rebound. At least I think I am. Maybe.

It’s merely been a matter of adjusting my definition of the word career. Some background: In the aftermath of my unceremonious exit from Crushed Soul, my spirits were understandably low. What I really wanted to do was crawl under the covers and sulk for the next 16 to 20 months, but my family needed me—you know the drill: mouths to feed, bills to pay—so I lurched forth.

The first painful steps involved reaching out to people I’d met through the course of my career who I thought could help me. Those interactions went something like this:

ME: (small talk)

PERSON I’D MET: (small talk)

ME: (heart of the matter)

PERSON I’D MET: (heart of the matter)

ME: “Well, let me know if you think of something.”

PERSON I’D MET: “I will.”

I’m no dummy. Times are tough all around, and I was pretty sure nothing would come of these conversations. Still, I had no choice but to keep lurching forth. At one point, I reached out to a former colleague whom we’ll call Andy.

ME: (small talk)

ANDY: (small talk)

ME: (heart of the matter)

ANDY: (heart of the matter)

ME: “Well, let me know if you think of something.”

ANDY: “I will.”

Now, the weird thing about this particular conversation is that Andy actually thought of something. He called me back a few days later and said, “Yeah, I have some work for you.” As fate would have it, he was part of a new venture, and he wanted me to do some writing for it.

At first, it didn’t amount to much—certainly not anything that would even begin to cover my mortgage. Slowly but surely, however, this little venture has been growing, and now I’m building and managing and editorial group for him. Though it still hasn’t taken me where I need to be financially, I’m starting to see that it has real potential. At least I think it does. Maybe.

Along the way, I’ve garnered other freelance gigs (while continuing to scour the landscape for a suitable full-time job, of course). Sometimes this piecemeal approach seems pretty tenuous; other times it feels like the safest route. I mean, when I worked at Crushed Soul, I had zero control over my destiny—it was in the hands of people I barely knew over in the corner offices. Now I’m the guy in the corner office—or at least at the corner of the dining room table—and I’m not flying blind.

So maybe this is my new career. Who knows? Either way, I’m on the rebound. At least I think I am. Maybe.

January 14-21, 2012: Smoked Out

An hour or so after I was laid off from Crushed Soul Publishing, the conditions were perfect for me to crack.

I exited Crushed Soul HQ for the final time and trudged across the blacktop to my car, which was parked next to the smoking area. Fate, it seemed, was about to play another cruel trick on me: A good friend of mine was standing right there with a cigarette in his hand. As I explained to him what had happened, smoke billowed through the air and into my welcoming nostrils. It was the first pleasing sensation I had experienced since being delivered the gut-slamming news that I no longer had a job.

Maybe just one cigarette, I thought. Lord knows, I deserve one right now.

I had been down this road many times in the past. One cigarette would lead to two cigarettes, whether it was the next day, the next week or the next month. And two cigarettes would lead to three cigarettes, and so on. Ultimately, I would be a “smoker” again—the guy huddled somewhere with a butt as the “non-smokers” eyed me contemptuously while walking past.

On the other hand, this was an extenuating circumstance. I had just been laid off, for crying out loud. “It's okay to have just one,” whispered the little red man on my shoulder. “You won't go back to smoking again.”

This time, however, I didn’t crack. Instead, I shook hands with my friend, got into my car, fired up the engine and drove off to an uncertain future.

Not that the little red man hasn’t reared his little red head since then. There have been plenty of moments during these past several months when a smoke would have calmed my frayed nerves, such as:

• The time I needed a root canal. Doctors, big needles and pain in general tend to bring out the worst in me.

• The time Fluffy was prone on the bathmat, his fate hanging in the balance. A world without Fluffy is just too grim to fathom.

• The times I’ve popped out of a deep sleep at 3 a.m.—for some blasted reason, it’s always 3 a.m.—and wondered, What the hell am I going to do with the rest of my life?

Or there have been plenty of moments these past several months when a smoke would have given me a much-needed boost of energy, such as:

• Right now. Nicotine is like a steroid for the brain—a shot of it makes me more lucid. For years, I relied on cigarettes to help me get my creative juices flowing when I wrote, but that era has passed. I was once Sammy Sosa hitting tape-measure blasts—now I’m Craig Counsell just trying to dribble a grounder or two up the middle.

Or there have been plenty of moments these past several months when a smoke would have made a happy occasion that much happier. Such as:

• The time our friends the Plelis gave me a bottle of Johnnie Walker Blue Label as a “present” for being laid off. What better way to complement a glass of this wondrous spirit than with a smoke?

• After every workout. Sick and counterproductive as it may seem, this was always my favorite cigarette—it enhanced my high after an endorphin-releasing round of exercise.

I’m pissed off that I can’t smoke anymore. It means I’m getting old and wise, and I don’t want to be old and wise. I enjoyed being young and reckless. Back then, I was indestructible, and nothing bad was ever going to happen to me.

As the years have passed, however, I’ve learned the inevitable lesson: Bad stuff can happen to anyone, even me. For starters, I’m old enough and wise enough to realize that being laid off is a walk in the park compared to lung cancer, emphysema or a good old-fashioned heart attack.

January 9-13, 2012: Home Cooking

Cassie and I aren’t extravagant people. We don’t drive fancy cars, we don’t fill our house with designer furniture, we don’t take trips to Paris (okay, we did once, but it was for our 15^th wedding anniversary), we don’t buy clothes at stores that have a lot of accent marks in their names, and we don’t send our kids to private schools. (Okay, we sent them to a Catholic school, but that doesn’t really count. There’s nothing extravagant about those places. Ours would still be using computers from the punch-card era if not for the generous donations by parents.)

Our one indulgence is dining out, and I make no apologies for it. Neither Cassie nor I is a domestic sort, so it’s only logical that we’d rely on other, more skilled people to prepare most of our meals. But that’s only part of it, at least in our rationalizations. Through the years, we’ve viewed it as our civic duty to support as many of the local restaurants as our waistlines would allow. (Now you know why I became so obsessive about excercising.) And if one of these establishments went out of business, we’d mourn it like the passing of a friend.

Of course, things have changed—the belt-tightening of the past several months has been a real kick in the gut, quite literally. (The local restaurateurs can’t be happy about it either.) Gone are the days of eating out on a whim. Most of our meals are now cooked at home, and it’s been nothing short of a disaster.

There haven’t been any fires, but there has been a fair amount of indigestion. And you should see the unseemly spectacle that is our kitchen sink. (Who knew that eating at home produces so many dirty pots, pans and dishes?) On any given night, the sink looks like something that might be featured on a TLC special. 

No, this lifestyle change hasn’t been pretty. Here’s a peek into the horror of it all:

Monday, January 9, 2012

In the glory days, we might have opted for a spaghetti dinner from one of the many Italian joints in our rotation, but instead we fend for ourselves. We turn to a gift from the gods: frozen food.

Cassie pops something into the oven, which is more of a challenge than you might think. The knob that controls the oven’s temperature broke off several years ago, forcing us to use pliers to turn it. We never bothered to fix the knob because we used the oven so infrequently, but now the situation is kind of a bummer.

Tuesday, January 10, 2012

In the glory days, we might have taken a smorgasbord approach to dinner—say, Jimmy John’s for Cole, Culver’s for Liv, and Thai food for Cassie and me—but not tonight.

Cassie has decided to cook—and I run for cover.

Actually, Cassie has come a long way as a cook. When we were first married, her repertoire consisted of one dish: chili mac. Though this chili mac tasted like something from a Soviet gulag, I dutifully ate it whenever she fired it up. After about five years, however, I felt comfortable enough in our marriage to say as gently as possible that I simply couldn’t eat the chili mac anymore.

Tonight Cassie prepares sloppy Joes from a Weight Watchers recipe, and I have no complaints. Besides, if anyone should be doing the cooking, it’s me since Cassie is the main breadwinner in the family these days. But I’m ashamed to report that my attempts to improve my culinary skills have been half-hearted at best.

Wednesday, January 11, 2012

In the glory days, perhaps we would have gone the Italian route again for dinner, but instead it’s all about leftover sloppy Joes. The dishes in the sink mount.

Thursday, January 12, 2012

In the glory days, some tasty Mexican fare from a nearby hole-in-the-wall would have hit the spot, but instead we turn to our freezer again. The meal is so nondescript that I can’t even remember what the hell it is as I write this. The dishes, meanwhile, continue to confound us: Though we cleaned them all this morning, a new batch is starting to mount.

Friday, January 13, 2012

The glory days have been reduced to a glory day. Typically, our one family meal out each week is on Friday, and we play it up for all its worth. Tonight is no exception. We go to a restaurant-bar in our downtown and order ribs and barbecue chicken and chicken tenders and chili and tomato Florentine soup—all the stuff that tastes so much better when someone else cooks it.

Since I’m out of practice, I’ve clearly forgotten the finer points of portion control. Afterward I stagger into the house, glance at the sinister assortment of dishes in the sink, stagger onward to the bedroom and lapse into a food-induced coma. And it’s only 7:30.

January 1-7, 2012: The Prince of Tides

Tuesday, January 3, 2012

Pat Conroy’s novel The Prince of Tides contains a wonderfully poignant passage about whales that have washed onto a beach:

For hours we walked from back to back of the dying mammals, speaking out to them in the cries of children, urging them to try to return to the sea. We were so small, and they were so beautiful. From far off, they looked like the black shoes of giants. We whispered to them, cleared sand from their blowholes, splashed them with seawater, and exhorted them to survive for our sake. They had come from the sea mysteriously, gloriously, and we three children spoke to them, mammals to mammals, in the stunned, grieving canticles of children unfamiliar with willful death. We stayed with them all that day, tried to move them back to the water by pulling at their great fins, until exhaustion and silence crept in with the dark. We stayed with them as they began to die one by one. We stroked their great heads and prayed as the souls of whales lifted out of the great black bodies and moved like frigates through the night and out to sea where they dove toward the light of the world.

And so it is with Fluffy. Mysteriously, tragically, he has washed onto the bathmat in our main bathroom.

By 9 a.m., he has been on the bathmat for an hour—motionless, save for the heaving of his great black-and-white chest.

It’s now 10 a.m.: still no movement.

By 11 a.m., Cassie and I are worried. Fluffy is obviously ill, and we don’t know why.

“Should we call the vet?” Cassie asks.

“Not yet,” I answer. “He’ll snap out of it—this is Fluffy after all.” I exhort Fluffy to stand up for our sake, and for the sake of my wallet: “C’mon, Fluff. Fight it off. There’s no need to go to the vet.”

Sometime around noon, Fluffy rises. At first I’m encouraged, and then I’m not. Like an apparition—like a frigate moving through the night toward the light of the world—Fluffy waddles onward. He enters Cole’s bedroom. He stops at Cole’s desk. He throws up on it. He waddles back to the bathmat.

The mystery begins to reveal itself. Must be something he ate, I think. He’ll be fine.

By 3 p.m., I’m starting to have my doubts. Fluffy is still inert on the bathmat, his eyes expressionless. “If he’s not better by tomorrow, we’ll call the vet,” I say to Cassie.

Fluffy beached on the bathmat.

We have four other cats (yes, we’re batshit crazy), and they are all subservient to the mighty Fluff. His most ardent admirer is Charlie. She follows Fluffy wherever his travels take him, be it a windowsill, the corner of a bed or the top of my basement bar. Surely she has never seen her beloved Fluffy in a position of such weakness. Her face fraught with worry, she periodically checks on him in the bathroom.

At 4:30 p.m., Cassie and I place a paper plate of Fancy Feast and a bowl of water next to the bathmat. Normally the Fancy Feast—and perhaps the plate, too—would be gone within 20 seconds; today everything goes untouched.

At around 4:45 p.m., another of our cats, Penny, enters the bathroom. Penny is our wimpiest feline. If Fluffy so much as looks at her, she’ll spin around and run away. On this day, however, the world order has unexpectedly changed. Sensing that Fluffy the Tyrant is powerless, she saunters right up to the bathmat and eats his Fancy Feast.

At 5:30 p.m., Liv is back from her after-school activities, and she goes into the bathroom to make sure the Fluffster is still breathing. He is, but the situation seems dire nonetheless. Liv speaks to him, mammal to mammal, in the stunned, grieving canticles of a child unfamiliar with such unspeakable horror: “You poor thing, Fluffy.” After a remarkably long sigh, Liv pauses. A giggle then escapes—she just can’t help it. “He’s so fat, he looks kind of funny,” she says.

At 9 p.m., Cole works around the beached Fluffy while drying himself following his shower.

At 9:15 p.m., Liv is careful not to jostle him as she brushes her teeth at the sink.

At 9:30 p.m., I step over him en route to the toilet, as I’ve done throughout the day.

At 10:15 p.m., I’m lying in my bed, looking at a picture of Cole’s swim team on our new iPad. Suddenly, I feel something akin to a potato sack land on my stomach.

“Ouch,” I yelp.

I gaze up from the iPad and see Fluffy. For dramatic effect, he has jumped on me with all the force he can muster. After a few unsteady moments, Fluffy gets his footing on my stomach. His pupils dilated, almost psychotically so, he looks at me as if to say, “I’m back.” I reach over to pet him, and he bites my hand—though, as is his custom, not hard enough to break the skin. Indeed, Fluffy is back.

Somewhere in this tale is a lesson for the new year. I’m just not sure what it is yet.