vocation:vacation

a journal of work, poetics, & play

[vocation-vacation]

No. 4

____

Melissa Kagerer is originally from Georgia, currently living in Seattle, WA. She graduated from Columbia College Chicago in 2012 with a BFA in Photography. Melissa is attracted to the raw, candid, and intimate moments that she experiences with people and places while going about her daily life and traveling around. The work does not rely on any destinations but is more about the relationships formed with people she is with and how those relationships grow and change throughout the duration of each adventure.

[vocation-vacation]

No. 3

This is to notify you that the group insurance policy provided for part-time employees has been cancelled effective 1/1/14.

Steel dust in the nose, eyes, throat, clothing fibers, under nails, in the hair. Fryer grease coating pot handles, face, floor, walk-in cooler.

To search positions, click on link at left.

On behalf of the College, I am pleased to offer you the position of Adjunct Instructor. The position is on an at-will, contractual basis. Instructors receive compensation of $1,500 per course, to be paid out in monthly installments over the coming 16 weeks.

RUSH ORDER

To cover the cost of the employee uniform provided to you, $45 will automatically be deducted from your first paycheck.

“I hope your replacement is half as competent as you.”

Please send letter of application, CV, statement of teaching philosophy, writing sample, evidence of successful teaching, and three letters of recommendation to:

Glasses should be worn when spending long hours at the computer. The glasses will cost you $250, which does not include office consultation and fitting.

Describe any other experience, hobbies, or interests that make you well suited for a barista position:

Holy shit, I just found twenty dollars!

Hiring is contingent upon successful completion of on-line training module (approximately 36 hours in duration) and attached quizzes. While candidates are not paid for training, their time is in exchange for practicing advanced methods and for exposure to valuable industry knowledge.

Going to therapy and only talking about work and worried about being able to afford the session.

“How in the world did i fail with an f what!!”

AREAS OF EXPERTISE

Thank you for your application. If Human Resources determines that your qualifications are a match for the position, a representative will be in touch with you in a few weeks.

Monthly credit card minimum increase after late payment to newly mandated health insurance provider.

As is standard with fluctuations in market values, rent for the next leasing cycle will see an increase of $100 per month (for a charge of $1,285 monthly). Please let us know within 10 days whether or not you will be signing your renewal agreement.

The course policies are quite clear. Refer to course syllabus for policies regarding late work and absences, including sports-related absences.

Cant do dncing this wkend no $ - sorry!

Due to budget reductions, the company will not be able to provide employees with the standard 3% cost of living increase in the next fiscal year. Know this was not an easy realization for the company and that we value your continued hard work and commitment.

Student Loan Deferment Request Approved

Consistent with the company’s image, an apron must be worn during all shifts.

The apron should be presented in a clean and orderly fashion.

FACILITIES RESERVED FOR MEMBERS ONLY

“The position has been filled. While I won’t be offering you the job, know that I was impressed with your interview and application.”

ADJECTIVE or ADVERB?: 1. She (quick, quickly) completed the test. She adapted (quick, quickly) to any environment.

Failure to abide by these standards could result in termination of your contract.

Winter storms and Skype sessions.

Doctor places order for 9 physical therapy sessions to relieve neck pain caused by stress and “sedentary working conditions.”

Test Notification from local Temp Agency; Log-in Session ID#892651

Inform clients who request but have not ordered phone consultations that you will be assisting them through email-based services only.

If I had stayed working as a DRAFTER or RESIDENT CARE ASSISTANT or LINE COOK I would probably have benefits, a steady income, little to no debt.

No calls or emails please.

“I don not know what i did wrong on the paper i read what you said and we talk on Thursday plz.”

Your dream job is out there. Sign up now for mobile alerts and never miss an opportunity.

/ / /

house afloat

all else salvaged

bridge aloft

all else spent

wonder where the candies went?

use Saturday to pace the driveway

a blimp went down over town

sighing was heard

was strange

“behold our skillet”

paper to fire once more

I’ll build it for you upon

--------

NICOLE WILSON is the author of the collection Supper & Repair Kit (The Lettered Streets Press 2014) and the chapbook Amazing Face (Phantom Limb Press 2013). Her poems have appeared in jubilat, Court Green, Handsome, Ghost Proposal, Versal, and elsewhere. She lives in Ohio.

[vocation-vacation]

No. 2

ON GETTING TREATED LIKE SHIT BY YOUR JOB

There’s something wrong with the bookstore. Sometimes at night, when we’re closed, two adjacent toilets in the men and women’s bathrooms somehow get so backed up that they flood the store. When I unlock the front doors and glide my bike through the foyer, it’s too dark to see the piss and shit that’s been puddling by the office doors all night, a steady stream of human excrement pooling all the way through the Art and Architecture aisles, stopping just short of the cash register.  Of course this path directly blocks the door to the back office, where all my days start and end, spanking a punch clock for time spent, each hour amounting to about $9 before taxes.  

I lost count of how many times I unlocked the front doors to a store in this state.  Each time, I’d be forced to open the store despite it and wait for plumbers to arrive—which usually wasn’t until the afternoon. One day, I sent my manager an email saying that, although I knew it wasn't her fault, I really would prefer not to work in feces for health reasons.  It never happened again after that.

THE BOOK THAT CHANGED MY LIFE

By the time I started high school, I was already serious about writing.  I was lonely.  My home life was not good.  I knew very early on that writing was an escape rope.  I wrote to entertain myself.  I filled entire spiral notebooks with stories, usually about young women who moved away from the small towns they lived in to intimidating metropolises.  So obsessed was I with writing, some stories ended up hundreds of hand-written pages.  I wrote during lunch, in between classes, through spring break.

It was around this time that I discovered poetry on the bookshelves of the only bookstore in town, a Barnes & Noble several miles from home.  One day, I picked up a copy of an E. E. Cummings book. His poetry was the exact opposite of anything I had ever read in school.  I became fixated on the way the words looked on the page, the music in his language and presentation, how poems that were outwardly indecipherable to me captured both the bodily frustrations I felt and the imagistic beauty I found in words.  

So I decided to pursue a career in poetry. I am hesitant to use the word "career" because it wasn’t really a career decision; I simultaneously committed myself to a life of “day jobs.”  I envisioned myself waitressing or working behind a cash register, serving a bunch of red-faced working class people such as myself.  I didn’t care about buying a house.  I didn’t intend to ever get married or have kids.  Writing was my way of walling myself off into my own world anyway -- what else could I possibly need?

Years later, when I applied to college, I only applied to Columbia College Chicago, because it was the only place I could pursue a degree specifically in poetry. College prepared me better for a career in arts than a life of being a starving artist.  I worked throughout college, saved money, and networked with my professors and classmates.  By the time I graduated, I was living in a storefront art collective, organizing a lot of arts events, and publishing a lot of poems.  I was able to support myself entirely off of my writing.

I felt I was living out a dream. I had no idea what I was doing.  

THE AMERICAN DREAM AND THE WAKE-UP CALL

One month, a freelance client violated our contract and didn’t pay me.  It was only $300, but I couldn’t pay my rent without it.  I had my uncle in Michigan draft a letter to him, threatening legal action if he didn’t fulfill his obligation.  I didn’t see the money for two more months.  In the meantime, I applied for a job at the bookstore and called back every week until a position opened up.

I didn’t plan on working there long -- the minimum wage, part-time hours were only enough to supplement another occupation.  But since I wasn’t available whenever my clients needed me anymore, I lost all my other gigs. Soon my part-time, minimum wage job was the only thing I had to sustain myself. My savings went dry.  I racked up a huge amount of credit card debt buying inexpensive groceries. I ate avocados on plain white bread. Ramen noodles with eggs and sriracha.  Pasta with butter and parmesan cheese.

The most immediate way for me to make more money was to try to impress those who controlled how much I was paid and how many hours I worked.  So I worked as hard as my body would let me.  Most of my job was shelving books, a somewhat endless task--I’d shelve hundreds of books in a day, which sometimes meant reorganizing entire sections just to make room for a few books.  I alphabetized the poetry section and another coworker got credit for it.

THE DIFFERENCE BETWEEN BENEFITS AND PERKS

I really liked working in the bookstore.  The hard, physical work was satisfying. I think if I had been working with a different inventory -- say, shoes, or cement blocks -- I wouldn't have put up with it for so long. For one thing, my coworkers were the most intelligent and fascinating people I had ever met. They were fellow poets, visual artists, actors, medievalists, bookmakers, philosophers, musicians and jacks-of-all-trades.

I was surrounded by books on every subject.  It provided endless intellectual stimulation, and it taught me to see the world in ways college never did.  When I studied creative writing, no one taught me about Alexis de Tocqueville, Ludwig Wittgenstein, Frantz Fanon, or Kara Walker.  In addition to reading a lot more poetry and literature, I read books about archeology, historiography, psychology, sociology; arctic exploration, serial killers, the Transatlantic Slave Trade, Ancient Phoenicia -- anything I ever wanted to know was at my finger tips.

A few months after I started working at the bookstore, I sold nearly my entire book collection and began curating a personal library.  I acquired the first editions of “The Autobiography of Alice B Toklas,” “The Mandarins,” and “Gravity’s Rainbow” for under $10; an autographed Gwendolyn Brooks collection; slipcases of “One Hundred Years of Solitude,” “Native Son,” “Of Mice And Men,” and so on, usually borrowing money against my paycheck to do so.  

My library of poetry books.

The bookstore taught me about basic human decency, mostly through witnessing all the ways I did not receive it.  The aggressions I faced from customers were so intense, I began to feel like my daily tasks and interactions undermined my sense of humanity.  Fellow poets who had applauded my work at a reading a month ago would walk into the store and not even glance my way.  My manager got phone calls from people complaining about me when we didn’t carry books they wanted as if I had something personal against them.  People ignored me when I greeted them, or became irate if I didn’t greet them quickly enough.  

What made me feel the least human was the way those “above me” treated me.  I was sent constant messages that my job was actually to not have human needs. A liveable wage. Working in a sanitary and safe environment.

A lot of the reason why the bookstore was so shitty was because of who was at the top of the food chain: the owner, Boyd and his dinosaurian hyena of a girlfriend, Norma.  Boyd was very committed to having our books priced as cheaply as possible, which meant no one was getting paid more than $11/hr. I only got one raise in the many years I worked for the bookstore, despite always taking on additional responsibility.  

Norma, in addition to being the self-appointed unofficial matriarch and scolder-of-all-employees, was the Human Resources manager, meaning I never had health insurance.  Right before I quit, I went to request time off for Christmas and found out I hadn’t been accruing vacation time for six months.  She took away my benefits without telling me.  

Besides spending no short number of days working in a puddle of human fecal matter, my safety and comfort was constantly de-prioritized.  When I called the police on a man who tried to expose himself to me in the store, I was chastised by a coworker for not intervening on my own.  Once, another coworker confided in me that for an entire week, she’d been complaining about a customer who spent hours staring at her and following her around the store, and no one had done anything about it.  I was embarrassed one day when a woman came to clean our bathroom and found a naked man bathing himself in the sink.  

“Is it okay for people to be doing this in your store?” she asked me.

“No, it isn’t,” I responded.  But I wasn’t sure how to explain that if I intervened on what made me feel violated and uncomfortable in my workplace, I would be punished as insubordinate.  

A month before I quit, someone broke into the locked office and stole my wallet.  It wasn’t the first time something like this had happened.  The police told Boyd that if there were cameras in the store, we would have been able to identify who had committed the theft, if not deterred the thief altogether.  He said that the cameras would probably cost more money than whatever was stolen.  Nothing changed.

We started locking the bathroom when someone needed to clean, which was more than anyone had ever done for the rest of us.

WHY I DON’T BELIEVE IN MERITOCRACY

I worked at the bookstore for over two years.  In addition to taking on whatever extra shifts I could, there was never a time that I wasn’t looking for another job or building my resume.  

I realized very early on that my quality of life would never improve as long as I earned wages that were not enough to sustain me.  My poverty was cyclical -- I had lost a larger source of income because I had started working retail.  Doing volunteer work in schools and arts organizations to build my resume and network often meant taking time off, which meant less money.  Even editing resumes, writing cover letters, or just searching for positions required hours out of my workweek, or even scheduling days off if I had an interview.  A few times this meant I couldn’t pay the rent.  I could borrow against my next paycheck, which meant that I’d spend time working off debt.  

I had many job interviews and was always a promising candidate.  I had callback interviews with The Poetry Foundation, Chicago Shakespeare Theater, and many other non-profit arts education organizations.  A lot of places would ask me why I wanted to leave the bookstore. My response would always be, "I love working there, but I believe my experience and ambitions would be better suited for this job."

Eventually I did get a second job as a miscellaneous employee for Chicago Public Schools.  I was an assistant and lecturer to a few high school English and Writing classes. I mainly ran an after school poetry program.  My goal was to bolster the writing and critical reading abilities of the students at the school.

I was successful at this.  I had years of experience as a volunteer teacher, and my experience in art organizing prepared me well for classroom leadership.  My success was demonstrated by the endless standardized tests given to my students, as well as their reviews of my teaching.  I was told my position was only starting out part-time because I was being hired in the middle of the year -- by the next year, I would be full-time and salaried.

I accepted this job because I love working with teenagers, and because it would be my ticket out of wage-laboring and into a career that would reward my passion and dedication.  But it meant a grueling work week.  I had to clock in 80 hours before accumulating overtime in either position.  On the days I taught, I’d get up at 5am, spend an entire day in classes, teach after school until 6pm (8 or 9pm if it was a Tuesday night and my students wanted to go to the poetry open mic), and then go home and grade papers.  On the days I worked at the bookstore, I’d get up at 6am, arrive to work around 8am to open the store by myself, stand on my feet all day, and clock out at 5pm.  On top of this, I continued to focus on my career as a poet and performer.  I did nearly every major reading series in the city and traveled to compete in four different poetry slam competitions.  

My body shut down.  I stopped riding my bike to get around -- I was too exhausted.  I slept about three hours a night.  The lack of sleep meant I gained weight -- nearly fifty pounds.  Although I tried to accomplish everything, I was only able to do so with a bad attitude.  No one at either job ever truly seemed to understand that when they had their weekends, I was on the clock for someone else.  When they went home at night, I was up grading papers or performing (either task unpaid).  When they had social lives, romance, and self-care, I had coworkers, an online dating profile I never used, and a McDonald’s across the street from school.

By the end of the school year, Chicago Public School budgets had been slashed by 25% across the board, and 200 schools were slated to be closed completely.  My classroom hours were reduced to 10 a week, and my after school program was cut entirely.  I decided not to return to the teaching position because I could not sustain myself on the pay they offered me. I picked up more shifts at the bookstore instead.

ALL’S WELL THAT END’S WELL (EXCEPT FOR THIS, WHICH ENDED BADLY BUT TURNED OUT OKAY)

Before sitting down to write this essay, I hesitated in deciding how honestly to air my grievances about my former employer. Even though I was the one who was impoverished and working in environments that were dangerous for my health and bodily well-being, speaking frankly about it means that a future employer may find this essay and choose not to offer me a job. The burden still falls on me to appear "professional," not for those who determine my standard of living to treat me humanely.

My slow exit didn’t begin by finding a better paying job, but rather when the coworkers I loved started to quit the bookstore.  First, the experimental actor I worked with put in his two weeks.  Then, the managers I liked -- a married couple -- were offered retail positions at more promising stores with better pay and benefits.  The visual artist quit.  The writer quit.  A few remained, but we got split up. The new hires couldn't open or close the store on their own.

My new manager was a man who had been hired at a different location around the same time I had.  He didn’t know how most things worked in the store where I worked -- a shortcoming he readily admitted to me a bit too often -- so I trained him.  I also trained all of the employees who had been hired to replace my old coworkers.  When I asked for a raise, I was told it would be considered in four months -- they wanted to make sure I wasn’t going to get another second job again.  

My rent was more than half of what I made in a month again, but this time I was still paying off the credit card I’d maxed out when I first got the job over two years earlier.  I was treading water.

It was Halloween.  I requested to switch a day and instead my new manager cut my hours.  I tried to call him and explain to him that I already could barely get by on the amount I was making before.  He wouldn’t speak to me for several days.  The next time I saw him, he yelled at me until I cried in the middle of the store. He reprimanded me for calling his boss when he let my phone calls and texts go unanswered.  

Quitting that job on the spot was one of the few things I did because I was able to recognize when it became necessary to respect myself.  I know it sounds crazy.  I didn’t have any money saved up or any other type of safety net.  I didn’t have any  job interviews lined up.  Everyone knows the job market today is not a good place to be for a 20-something with an undergraduate degree.  

But no one seemed to judge me.  That dude was an asshole.  I was underpaid, and I was being exploited in unfair, if not flat-out illegal, ways.   My mom congratulated me for standing up for myself.  My roommates, who knew all too well about my financial difficulties, said “Yeah, that sounds like a reason to quit.”  The higher-up I had texted while freaking out about my cut hours told me that I’d always have a job if I ever wanted to come back.

As if there is some sort of higher power in the world, on the day I put in my notice, I got an email from a Chicago non-profit that I’d been approved for a grant to restart my after school poetry program in the spring.  

THIS ISN’T A SUCCESS STORY

It's been four months since I left the retail world. Now, I teach poetry after school.  Investing fully into my role as a mentor to my students has been one of the most fulfilling decisions I’ve ever made.  After working with the same group of students for two years, I’ve witnessed their craft improve to levels that compete with my own.  A lot of my students come from different cultural or socioeconomic backgrounds from me.  But when I work with them, I remember the sad girl I once was, and how poetry was a method of survival.  It was, at times, the only thing that got me through the day, week -- really, I believe the only reason I made it out of high school was because I found a creative outlet that kept me in the classroom.  

Although I still do volunteer work, I stopped doing organizing for art nonprofits that couldn't afford to pay me.  I joined a cohort for poetry educators at a local university.  I moved out of the apartment I had been struggling to afford and now split the rent on a one bedroom with my boyfriend. We have a dog.  I read and write every day.  I’m writing the best poems I’ve ever written in my life.  I make the same amount doing this as I did working at the bookstore.  According to my bank statements, I'm not any richer, but I feel incredibly wealthy.

People are resistant to the idea of seeing poetry as a commodity. Unlike the used books I used to peddle, it doesn’t adhere to the same laws of supply and demand.  People who decide that poetry is an unprofitable (even irrelevant) art form as well as seeing poetry as an individualistic practice fail to understand that it is, in fact, very reliant on community and legacy.  My poetry has thrived only because I surrounded myself with people who wanted it to thrive.  

A discarded copy of The Adventures of Baron Munchausen, Halcyon House Illustrated Library ed. 1935.

I may not be fortunate enough to always have an income to pool off of art making (as I consider teaching to very much be an artform, both in pedagogy and in what it requires of my knowledge and dedication to craft).  But that’s okay.  If I’m ever destitute, I’m not above going back to the bookstore for the job that was offered to me when I quit.  

As Americans, we are taught to see careers as linear.  But as millennials, we've learned early that doing well in school doesn't mean getting a job, getting a job doesn't mean getting paid well, and getting paid well doesn't mean tenure or self-fulfillment.  We’re told about work ethic and competition as a means to obtain wealth.  When we don’t become wealthy, we are supposed failures.  Our entire generation is being blamed for making the poor decision to pursue higher education (or to not complete high education); we’re told that our poverty is due to our inability to compete, our poor work ethic, or a bad decision to study something we found interesting rather than to go into Engineering, for example.   

For artists, however, this is not news to us.  At times, I feel that my early devotion to artistic accomplishment over economic success has put me at an advantage -- I entered the job market already understanding my career would not be measured by how many zeroes were at the end of my paycheck.  For most of my life, I've been resigned to feel rich in other ways, and to spread that wealth in whatever ways I can afford.

///

  Tell me, Chicago, what about that

grid system?  As if you could know

how my streets were meant to be

wheel spokes, left half-broken, as if

I were not a city but just a waiting

grave.  Tell me again how you were

there when they brought boxcars full

of mull over Mason-Dixon.  Brought

Jim Crow.  Their triangle-factory fire.

The big four squadron, men beating

curfew like human skin was drum

face, or gutter skillet.  Burned me

like a witch.  Did not hear the crackle

of my skin too. My shattered windows

don’t grow back.  Why don’t you tell me,

Chicago, everything you know

about prodigal sons.  I’ve been

waiting on mine, all of me holed

up in a tower named Renaissance

trying to let my hair down, down.

Tell me what you know about

Michigan Central: fifty trains a day

to Egyptian ruin.  Packard Plant

curdles from nation’s blood

into crack den. Beauty parlor

turns to funeral home.  Don’t tell me

Michigan Avenue.

          Neighborhood beach.

                   Top ten university.

Don’t tell me you know what vacant

land feels like.  Feels like my surface

scraped.  Like I’m done.  Naked.  

Like they ain’t done scraping me

away fifty years later.  Don’t tell me

how to grow on soil so spat on it’s

mud.  Tell me what you know

about Motown.  Garage rock.

Which five mile stretch you

can walk on Sunday mornings

on one street in your city and hear

gospel sung seventy-two

different ways because we

ain’t stopped singing here.

I got my worker’s song.  

It sounds like riverboat

twice over.  Sounds like

you took your shoes off

at the international border.        

Like how they used to call me

arsenal, democracy, like I

was born national anthem

but I wasn’t born this way.

I did it all with my voice and we

ain’t stopped singing here.

____

STEPHANIE LANE SUTTON is a performance poet, educator, and Chicagoan by way of Detroit.  Her poems have been featured in elimae, Button Poetry, The Legendary, Yes Poetry Magazine, Euphemism, and others.  She is the author of a chapbook, Blood Dowry, and her first full-length manuscript was a finalist in Write Bloody Publishing Author Competition in 2013.  

[vocation-vacation]

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.

///

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).

[vocation-vacation]

Beautiful promo teaser from Michael Heck. Issue One coming at you next week!