No. 1
I’M GOING TO TELL YOU ABOUT MONEY FIRST
I am at work right now. It’s 2:50pm on a Monday. I’ve been sick for two weeks. I’ve worked on and off through the holidays. I keep canceling appointments and missing deadlines. I haven’t written a poem in over a month. I have a meeting at 10am tomorrow. My client expects a “beta” version of the site we’re building together and it’s not ready. I have a massage in an hour. The massage is going to cost me $105 after tip. I haven’t drawn a real paycheck in two months. I’m going to get the fucking massage even though it’s financially reckless. A week before Christmas I met with my accountant and, based on estimates, he told my wife and I that we owe the IRS approximately $8,000 in taxes. I have a more or less empty savings account. I only have two credit cards, thank god. I refuse to carry a balance on one card but in order to do that, I transfer the balance to my alternate card once or twice a year. My alternate card has a stupid balance on it. I pay double the minimum every month and believe it or not, I haven’t been able to pay the fucking thing off. My business partner, Joshua, called me up this morning and told me that he thinks we should do this project we bid at $5,000 for free. The other morning, in sickness, at work, I spent three hours searching for the cheapest airfare and lodging arrangements for my trip to AWP (Association of Writers and Writing Programs) 2014, where I would be featured in two offsite readings. At the end of the three hours I drafted emails to the organizers of the two readings, explaining that I would not be able to participate this year. I don’t have $800 to spend on air faire and motels. I don’t have the two hundred-something dollars to spend on AWP event registration. I don’t have whatever it’s going to cost to eat and drink for five days in a row. I’ve been telling Zachary that I’m going to write this essay for like, two or three months now. I promised I’d have a draft to him yesterday. And now it’s today, and I’m starting the draft. I didn’t write the draft because when I’m at my computer I’m working and when I’m not at my computer I’m playing video games. Video games are dumb and relaxing. I close my computer at the end of the workday and I turn on the XBOX Joshua bought me last year so we could unwind together playing Halo 4. Recently, I play Call of Duty: Ghosts. This game is existential and incredible. The game never ends. I shoot fools until I’m either calm or enraged. And then I stop playing and watch TV. And then I get tired and go to sleep. I start the day at the gym, and then I shower and head back to work.
EVERYONE’S AT WORK AND I’M JUST SITTING HERE WRITING CODE
In early 2013, my friend and I founded codeBOX. I am a web-developer / engineer / programmer. I am self-trained. I know a handful of relevant languages. My tools are the Command Line, Text Editors, Adobe Products, et cetera. My co-founder is a salesman. You don’t care about his skills. We had both spent several years at West Coast Technology Startups. When we created codeBOX, our goal was to be a small web development agency while we explored various possibilities for creating a SaaS product (Software as a Service — a very attractive business model which promises — but does not necessarily provide — a recurring income). My co-founder lives in Northern California. I live in Southern California. We are the only two permanent employees of the company. We do not have an office. We each work from our respective home offices. I spend most of my workday in my pajamas watching Netflix or fully dressed at a cafe a mile from my house. I spend upwards of $30 a week on coffee. This is an expense I should not incur. I have to leave the house a few times a week or I get weird. Joshua does the same. We travel up and down the state to work together every month or so. We can’t really afford the plane tickets.
At it’s core, my job is to program websites. I write thousands of lines of code:
Right now, I’m at work and I’m not working because I don’t feel like it. I’m suffering because I’m not working, but I will sleep well tonight. For the first time in my life, I am excited about doing better work. I have clients and I want to do better for them. I spend time talking to Joshua about how we can do better work. I am engaged. I read books about servicing clients and growing a business. When I get up in the morning, I rarely think “I don’t want to go to work today." This morning I got to the cafe and ordered my usual and sat at the table I always sit at, the one near the power outlet in the corner, and I just started writing code. It was easy. It wasn’t something I had to convince myself I wanted to do.
I NEVER PLANNED TO USE MY ENGLISH DEGREE
I never wanted to write poetry for a living. Poetry isn’t a job. If you write poetry for a living you’re Bukowski and I think your poems are mediocre but, seriously, good job getting paid for your poems. My work has never fulfilled me and I never wanted my work to fulfill. I got my degree and then I got a job. The job was meant to pay the bills. The poetry was meant to fulfill me. I did this all through college. I didn’t put myself through school, but I worked the whole time I was in school. I was a short order cook. I enjoyed the long hours and the hostile work environment. Cooks are mean and treat their co-workers as if they’re not real people. The kitchens I’ve worked in were greasy and fast-paced. I was on my feet all day and I always smelled like fries. I didn’t save any money, I bought CDs and concert tickets. I took expensive road trips with my girlfriend. We ate out. I used credit cards and accrued substantial debt. I skipped class frequently and managed to get good-enough grades. It was an English Degree, after all. I always assumed I’d cook for the majority of life, but I didn’t really consider it too carefully. Every time I became aware of the credit card debt I was steadily accumulating, I would panic and then calm myself: I would have a $50,000 salary after graduation and I could pay that debt off my first month. When I graduated, I moved from New Jersey to California. I was working on an MFA because I wasn’t good at making inexpensive decisions. I worked as a short-order cook and then as an automotive repossession agent. I dropped out of my MFA. I was Blue Collar as fuck. I’m from New Jersey, you know, Bruce Springsteen and American men. I never made $50,000. I thought I was okay.
I DIDN’T SLEEP MUCH FOR TWO YEARS, GOT REALLY FAT, AND FELT LIKE A BADASS
I convinced the owner of an Automotive Repossession Agency that I could rebuild his website for $800. This was a lie. I barely knew how to build websites. I hadn’t dropped out of my MFA yet. I was making $11.50 an hour, part-time, as a short order cook. I couldn’t pay my rent. I lied because when I was like, 14, I had a Tripod*** website that I built all by myself. I needed that $800 dollars and I earned it and then he gave me a job with two completely unrelated responsibilities: A) Maintain his warehouses (three of them) which collectively housed, when full, around 350 repossessed vehicles and B) Maintain the website I had built him and build (and then maintain) a website for his other company.
When your car is repossessed, it’s held for up to 90 days. During this period you’ll interact with — or avoid — the collectors who are now going to give you a chance to pay your current debt and get your car back. Once the collector concludes you really are a deadbeat, they’ll send the repossession agency an order to release the car to auction. The auction is simultaneously notified and they dispatch a transporter to pick the vehicle up and deliver it to auction. A few times a week they’d send us this list of 20 or so vehicles and I’d have to organize the release of these vehicles to the transporters, who’d pick them up on the big carriers you’re afraid to drive behind on the freeway because you’ve seen cars roll off the back of them in the movies. I’d get a few of the warehouse gophers together and we’d drive back and forth between the three warehouses and bring all the vehicles on the list to the main warehouse. We dealt, primarily, with high-end vehicles — BMW, Mercedes, Audi, etcetera. I’ve driven vehicles that cost over half a million dollars. I felt like a badass because the monetary value of my responsibilities was unfathomable to me. And because I got really good at dragging busted vehicles around with a forklift. I learned to drive manual — the unarguably sexiest way to drive — and then actually got to repossess cars of my own.
To make extra money, I started working a double shift — 7am to 4pm in the warehouse and 5pm to 3am (or later) in the field. There were nights where I drove directly back to the yard and started my morning shift without any sleep. Working in the field as a repossession agent is the perfect job for anyone who was a punk rocker in high school, has given up on anarchy, and wants to pay his bills. You get to fulfill that desire to fuck shit up. Everything you do is either illegal or should be illegal, but it’s all legitimate and legal at the same time. I learned how to steal cars and what to say to the police when they were called. Nothing I did was ever truly illegal. I was never arrested, nor should I have ever been arrested. The finer details of the laws governing repossession practices are boring.
I got fat because I ate nothing but fast food. My relationships began to deteriorate. I got tremendously aggressive. I destroyed the wall of my tub for no reason that I can remember and then broke down the door from the inside of the bathroom because I was so furious I had broken the wall. I moved everything I owned into my car with the intention of leaving California and going back home to my parents — twice. I had credit card debt and I wasn’t making enough money and I had side projects in web development on top of my double shifts. At the warehouse, I’d frequently beat on already damaged vehicles with my fists, pieces of wood, other pieces of the vehicle, et cetera. I couldn’t relate to people and I didn’t realize that I couldn’t relate to people. And then I just quit. I decided to be a full-time, freelance web developer.
***
Tripod, owned by Lycos, was the Hipster’s Geocities. This was during the time when everyone was building shitty little personal websites and spending all afternoon coming up with the perfect lyrics to put in the AIM away message and “hacking” the AOL Hometown profiles to have all sorts of ~~~~~SHIT LIKE THIS~~~~ in them. My website was a bunch of “Top 5 Lists.” Top 5 Punk Songs, Top 5 Ska Songs, Top 5 Best Friends, Top 5 People with Mohawks, et cetera. It was a pretty incredible collection of juvenilia, which is unfortunately lost and not available on The Way Way Back Machine.
***
I DIDN’T LEAVE THE HOUSE FOR A LONG TIME
I was a freelancer with no office and only one reliable client. I had a lot of clothes but I only wore pajamas. My girlfriend and I didn’t talk much and when we did I yelled about my client. I was depressed in the way that’s only realizable in retrospect. I wrote a lot of poetry. I wrote nearly an entire collection of poems about domestic instability and automotive repossessions. I was published in just about every online journal I had ever strived to be published in. I published a chapbook and then a full-length poetry collection. My freelancing was not profitable. And I realized I had to go get a real job, so I did.
Western Los Angeles and Santa Monica has come to be known as “Silicone Beach” and after a relatively short period of pseudo unemployment, I was hired as a Front-End Web Developer at my very first technology startup. I returned to working insane hours because tech startups provide you with XBOXs and ping pong tables in the office in order to keep you in the building as long as possible. You get the feeling that what you’re doing is very important and will probably rival Facebook one day. I stopped writing. And I got really angry again. I became infatuated with Reddit — another sign of depression. I realized what we were building would never rival Facebook and would possibly never be shipped to the public. I burned out and quit within six months and moved on to another tech startup. I began to get to know developers who did this: they took a job, worked like crazy, burned out, and took another job. One developer got fired from my second startup and was hired at the place I had just left within a week. Within four months I was ready to quit again. I started interviewing at other tech startups. Amazon flew me to Seattle for a full day of interviews. I was offered positions at two other tech startups which I turned down even though they were significant salary increases. I got married and my girlfriend — now wife — decided that I had to have a stable income. So with no plans and very little notice to anyone around me, on the day after my 26th birthday, I quit.
I freelanced for less than six months and then Joshua founded codeBOX.
AND EVERYONE WANTS TO KNOW ABOUT THE FUCKING POETRY
This is my hypothesis. This is the point of the whole thing: we need something that fulfills us creatively. Everyone does. It doesn’t matter whether or not you think of yourself as an artist or not. Artists aren’t the only ones who do creative things. Cooks are creative, repossession agents are creative, my accountant is creative, my dad — who owns and runs a wholesale florist — is creative. While I was in college, working as cook, while I was working at the repossession agency, and while I was getting weird at home as a freelancer, I had nothing creative going on in my career and all that creative thought was directed towards my writing. Part of me has always been paralyzingly afraid that I have a finite cache of creativity inside of me. I’ve always thought that — like so many great musicians who at some point in their career no longer release great music — I would eventually be drained of my creativity and I wouldn’t be able to compose great poems. I’m still afraid of this. But I’ve learned that in order to bring something creative out of myself, I have to put myself into the proper environment and state of mind. I can’t just sit down and write a poem because I want to. I have to give myself a block of time. I have to read and listen to music. I have to turn the internet off. My problem is that those blocks of creativity, since I’ve started codeBOX, have been spent on developing ideas and writing code to support and prove and test my ideas. I don’t have a very clear conclusion, but I’m leaning towards saying that creativity is infinite but time is not. I have to make decisions on how to spend my time every single day and every day, no matter how much I love the idea of being a poet, I choose to spend my time on codeBOX and the remaining time I effectively waste on XBOX and television and relaxation and leisure.
Joshua and I met at my first tech startup. There was this brutal team meeting one morning: The company’s founder sat us all down — we’re all under 35 (the majority of us are around 25), the founder’s 37, and our project manager is 50+ (and knows exactly nothing about technology). He sits us down and says “You’re all going to do what I say and stop suggesting alternative ideas. You’re all young and you all don’t know what I know. I know what’s best for this company, and we’re going to do what I say.” These sort of meetings were normal but this one was particularly harsh. Joshua and I had taken to walking laps around the block a few times a day to unload. It wasn’t that day, but it wasn’t too long after that I told him I was going to quit. He said he was going to quit too. We agreed that the problem with working for someone else is that your emotions regarding the project will always be muted. You may feel bummed out or excited about the project, but the emotional highs and lows are never too far from each other. We wanted our own voice. We wanted to unmute our emotions. And we started to develop this idea of our own thing. Our own thing was exactly that vague. We didn’t commit to anything. Joshua said he could get me some freelance gigs if I quit. I went home that night and told my girlfriend I was putting in my notice. She wasn’t happy but supported me. I told her I can feel that Joshua is going to be a great connection for me. It took us another 6 months to get together and form codeBOX, with intentions nearly as vague as our first conversation where we said we’d start our own thing. And now, nearly a year later, I am just as emotionally unstable as I have ever been. To be extremely dramatic, I teeter on the edge of poverty, I want to scream at our clients most days. Joshua and I have heated arguments about feature sets, project timelines, and our company’s financial situation. I am terrified every single day. My health insurance has doubled as a result of the Affordable Health Care Act. It’s as much as my car payment was before I paid it off. I can hardly afford any of the small luxuries I afford myself. My wife and I want to buy a home but we are not financially stable enough to even begin considering loans and mortgages. And I’m stoked. This is the real world. When I’m finished writing this, I’m going to shut off my messaging client, open my text editor, and deploy a website for a client. My chest aches with this strange nervousness I feel every single time we deploy. I’ve deployed countless sites, and every time I just know it’s going to be fucked. But I pull through and get this moment when I’m finished. I go outside with my dog and cry a little bit because I’m so in love with everything. This is my job. I am making choices that affect me in a very real and painful way. I am creating my art every single day and while that Amazon job would be a better and stable income, I want to feel everything.
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It comes less quick than perfume, these dreams of moments there with that knife and that advice and now, only under truth, I pray I don't reach out when something breaks. All was heaven, brave or noble, and all was worse. The moons are howling and you sparkle the world. It continues that advice and only I know each conclusion. It's all too unravelling, these mirrors speaking, these hallways sleeping. Something breaks the few and I don't make anyone help. The workhorse fingers can make anyone pray. You reach this moment and it comes time. You reach this moment, too.
___
Thomas Patrick Levy dropped out of his MFA program, reads books very slowly, and works full time at the web development agency, codeBOX . He is author of the full-length poetry collection I Don't Mind if You're Feeling Alone (YesYes Books, 2012) and the chapbook Please Don't Leave Me Scarlett Johansson (Vinyl 45s, 2011).
