I Made A Friend This One Weird Time

When I was still teaching Composition and Rhetoric, one of the ways I forced my students to think about research topics was to ask them a series of questions, which subversively pulled from the deep recesses of their brains some ideas about the cultural and societal issues that they care most about. It was always imperative that I helped them find a topic that wouldn’t become dull or overwhelming when I slapped that 15 page research paper assignment on them. The exercise served to help them think about issues they could spend an entire semester researching without losing their minds.

If you were President/Dictator etc. for one day, what laws would you enact or repeal?

If you were given a million dollars to create your own charitable foundation, what would it be and why?

And my favorite question, the one that most quietly reveals their priorities is this:

If there is some cataclysmic event, an apocalyptic happening that brought the society to which you’ve grown accustomed to a screaming halt, what would be the FIRST ITEM you would try to forage for? What store would you be looting?

The answers to that question are particularly revealing. My student with Type 1 Diabetes said she’d hit every pharmacy she could find to secure insulin. Some students head straight to the sporting goods store for guns and survival gear. Some hoard food, some make massive clothing hauls, some hit jewelry stores under the assumption that perhaps gold and silver would be of use in trade at some future point.

Back in 2010, I was asking these questions aloud during a Friday class, allowing the students a few minutes in between to fully articulate their answers. When I got to my favorite question about the cataclysmic event, a student in the front row with light brown hair and icy blue eyes, a Jennifer Lawrence look-somewhat-alike, shot her hand up Hermione Granger-style and asked: “Are there zombies?”

“Really?” I asked

“Yeah, my answer is different if there are.”

I tried as best as I could to conceal my annoyance, which isn’t always easy for me, but it’s most easy when I’m teaching.

“I guess if you want there to be zombies, then there are zombies. . . I don’t know. No, no zombies. Well, I don’t care . . . just answer the question however you want to.” This was before I began watching The Walking Dead. For the record, I have since decided it was a completely valid question.

I was probably getting ready to start my period, which, as a feminist, I realize is a shitty excuse, but as a fucking human, a completely authentic one. I went home at 2:00 pm and poured an over-sized glass of wine. My boyfriend, now husband, came over and I bitched for a straight hour about how annoyed I was.

“Come-the-fuck-on, are there zombies? What the fuck is this chick talking about?” I complained between gulps and not-quite-yet-husband poured me another glass. One of the reasons I knew he was the person I was supposed to marry is because when I’m a crazy, neurotic mess, he’s always calm, quiet, and focused.

“Did she just want to make a thing about what we were doing?” My vexation only exacerbated by the fact that I had to work in three hours. I had no time for a nap; the super-juggle of day job and night job paradigm, which only served to fuel my already irritated attitude.

No matter how bad I felt, no matter what daily exasperations entered into my world, no matter the hardships and problems of the real me, there was always something liberating about having the opportunity to change my identity and get paid for it. If I had a day like this day, difficult students or difficult situations, difficult children or difficult bills to pay, all of that strips away when I put on my fake eyelashes. When I tease and shellac my hair into a beauty queen coif, when I pull the strings on my corset so tight I feel like Scarlett O’Hara gripping a bed post, all of the outside goes away. The strip club is like a space ship. You enter and you are worlds away from the mundane hum-drum of regular life. That’s probably part of the appeal for customers, come to think of it. Not just the hot, topless girls who actually engage with patrons, but that otherworldly tone that permeates the club. No one feels like they’re in Kansas anymore.

I’d nearly forgotten my disgruntling afternoon when I plopped into a chair at the bar to bullshit with Mike, the manager, for a handful of minutes before I fully entered into the metamorphosis of Jackee the Caterpillar to Betty the Butterfly. I wasn’t paying close attention to the new girl he was talking to, new girls being a constant staple at the strip club. It seems cold, but I often didn’t bother to interact with new employees outside of introducing myself and allowing for the occasional small talk. Part of it was that my work time was so characterized by my motivation to make as much money in the shortest amount of time, and so I was often unobservant to the goings on of the employees around me.

The other reason for my initial distance was that the job, being a stripper, is far more difficult than pop culture would like you to believe, and even some of the most gorgeous, well-endowed in the chest, perfect-butted women cannot grasp that the job is not about being the prettiest. A myriad of factors enter into the success of a good exotic dancer, and general overall attractiveness is but a small sliver. This results in alarmingly high turnover. Girls come and work one night and never return. Some stay a week. Some stay for a collection of months, but give up. There were always new girls and at a certain point, they all started to look the same to me.

The new girl with whom Mike was chatting turned to walk away, lingering for the few seconds that I needed to sense some familiarity in her face. Who was that girl? I know that face. She looks like . . . but that couldn’t possibly be . . . no, I’m just still irritated about this afternoon and her face is in my brain.

After I was painted and coiffed and appropriately cinched in the right places, I climbed into the DJ booth to chat up my buddy, DJ Keller, and complain about my day to ears that understood. The new girl with the familiar face, who had chosen to call herself Bella, was on stage. I relayed the annoying afternoon, knowing that Keller would commiserate with me, and I casually mentioned that the girl on stage looked like the girl who’d annoyed me with the zombie business.

“OH. Bing, she does go to Stephens.”

My stomach sank. Of all the possible students, current and former, of all the predicaments I tend to find myself in, how in the actual fuck was I going to handle this one. I hadn’t been here the day she was hired, and though my rank may have influenced the choice to employ her, she was too pretty to not get a job at the club if she really wanted it.

“Keller, what the fuck am I gonna do? This is one of my current students. This is not good.”

I spent the first half of the night avoiding her, constantly ruminating on how I could possibly handle this situation, fretting over any unfortunate implications this might have for my other job, my real job. Sometime around midnight, after a few shots of whiskey courage, I found myself alone with her in the tiny area between the dressing room and the DJ booth, a small island of seclusion and respite for dancers to sneak a cigarette or take a quick break from exasperating customers.

“So this doesn’t have to be weird,” I said.

“Totally agree.” She responded. Nothing about zombies or how we’d survive, nothing about how we might handle this come Monday in class. It was an immediate mutual understanding. We just would keep the arenas separate and never speak of this again.

We managed to avoid one another for a few weeks, operating on the knowledge of mutually assured destruction should one of us get outta line. At work, we are cordial and largely avoid each other. At school, she comes to class and I teach it but there is little to no unnecessary interaction between us. But then one day we were almost alone in the VIP, me having just finished a dance and Bella just beginning one. I walked toward the exit when Bella’s customer shouted over to me . . .

“Hey, hey you! Can I get the next dance with both of you guys?”

Bella and Betty locked eyes, exchanging a glance that said so many wordless things: Oh God, do we have to? Oh fuck, yes we do. Oh sonofabitch, the customer is always right, Oh fucking fuckaduck, this has to happen. Oh shit we’re getting paid, but this is gonna be weird on Monday morning.

I hate it when worlds collide.

We did it. We smiled. We pretended to make out behind the curtains of our hair. We grabbed each other’s boobs and syrup-sweet talked this guy out of a tip. And when he was gone, and silence hung between us, Bella and I quietly dressing, she broke through the thick muted air:

“Well, that was fucking weird.”

And we laughed. And laughed harder. Laughed hard enough for a passerby to stop and peek in at us, thinking he was missing some stripper comedy show. And all the weird, awkward awful melted away.

Why am I telling you this? What is the moral to this stripper tale? I’ve always asserted that the strip club is a microcosm of the world at large. These stories that are essentially campfire fare, little anecdotes for curious friends and strangers who want to know all about the glamourous life of an exotic dancer, these tales are still applicable to life. I fell in complete platonic love with Bella. I count her among the best friends I made during that long, long period of my life when I was living as two people in one body. The story of us, of Bella and Betty, reminds me that your friends may not always start as your friends. Sometimes the people who annoy you with questions about zombies end up being some of the smartest, funniest, kindest people you meet. It serves as a reminder to unhinge your ego when it comes to petty irritants, because sometimes—perhaps even often—the people you love come in unexpected packages.

A View: a Mini-Trenches Manifesto

I was going to go for a walk, no destination in mind, those kind of childhood walks we took before someone taught us that everything should only be done for a particular purpose. One of the spiritual gurus I fan-girl out on sometimes, Teal Swan, is a big proponent of these walks, and she looks fabulous all time. In New Bern, one doesn’t have to walk far to encounter something pleasing to the eye, or haunting to the eye, or otherwise notable to the eye. This place was founded in 1710. It’s got some old bones to rattle.

 I pulled on shoes and sunglasses and set out for a walk with the following rule in mind: I will not predetermine my destination. But somewhere in the recesses of my noggin, I knew I’d probably walk down Pollack St. and poke through the English and French gardens at Tryon Palace (North Carolina’s colonial capital), maybe snake through quaint downtown storefronts and restaurants, peek in at galleries (of which there are an unusually large number for a town of 29,000 people), poke around graves in the 18^th century cemetery, end up down at the waterfront and read clever names of boats passing by, or look for turtles sunning themselves on the rocks, or try to get close enough to the mallards to see the colors of the feathers on their heads up close, because its iridescence reminds me of gasoline floating in puddles and it weirds me out that something found in nature could remind me of something so unnatural. Or I could watch seagulls eat something disgusting washed up in the pools on the banks of the place where the Trent and Neuse Rivers meet and make way to the Atlantic Ocean some miles east. It’s not a bad place, aesthetically speaking.

While I had no good reason for my walk, no appointment to make, no errand for which I was responsible, I know that when I take off on these spontaneous wanderings, I’m going to think about writing. More likely, I’m going to think about things that I want to write about. Most likely, I’m going to think about my life as if I weren’t the one living it, but the biographer of the person living it . . . the one making a distant observation of this character that is living this life. This is a characteristic I’ve finally realized about myself. I feel like my life has been lived and simultaneously constantly observed by two different people. I’ve probably said this before, and it’s something I’ve certainly examined in my writing for years, but something human I’ve learned this go around is that I should be trying to reconcile the person who gets up in the morning and does the things she does and the voice in my head that is constantly remarking on those doings. On my walks, I ultimately start thinking about my daily living while concurrently constructing some story around it to discern some grander meaning of life. If at this point in my explanation, you find yourself wondering: “What the hell is Jacks going on about now?”, rest assured, you’re not alone. These thinkin’ walks sometimes turn my head into an MC Escher drawing. My brain, examining my brain, and from a distance also designing some story that makes my brain connect to the brains of everyone in the universe. There’s some brain-on-brain criticism that goes on, a lot of René Descartes I think, therefore I am happening.

Thinkin’ walks tend to start with an itch in my soul, something I need to let percolate without the distractions of housework or cat poop or mail-to-be-opened nonsense that I typically allow to interfere with my creative life. And today marks the 4^th day characterized by my sitting around waiting for the phone to ring, waiting on news from a job interview last week. I feel like a homely, hope-filled gal waiting for a prom date to call. If I could get out of the house, I could stop feeling that way. I could also shift my focus from how deeply silent my apartment is, void of the children chattering, the background blue buzz of the television, the sound of Clay’s guitar from the porch. I’ve been here for almost a year, and still haven’t grown accustomed to the quiet. I miss my kids, who are starting another year of school in Columbia tomorrow, and I’m shattered inside that Mommy isn’t there to be a part of that. I miss my husband, who is surely sleeping in a Marine Corps barracks in Iwakuni, Japan right now, our time difference being exactly 13 hours. He’ll call when I’m nearly asleep, when he’s just beginning his day. 

His deployment came as quite a surprise, although it certainly shouldn’t have, and it somewhat derailed a lot of our plans—moving to a larger place, kids relocating out here before the school year began. At the same time, a lot of these plans have been delayed by my inability to find a full-time job in Eastern North Carolina. The closest large city, Wilmington, is still an hour and a half away. This region of the country is speckled with small, old coastal settlements, most of which haven’t grown much past the 50,000 mark in terms of population. New Bern is probably called “the city” by residents of the numerous tiny towns that surround it, most of which have populations under 1000. There aren’t a gaggle of opportunities for employment for a gal like me. I’ve been working in higher education in one way or another since 2002. I’ve been teaching since 2007. I know books. I know literature. I know writing and love and music and people and world events and pop culture and joie de vivre, but that’s about where my skill sets end. It’s been a struggle. The thinkin’ walks help me avoid an overly-critical shame spiral that ultimately results in my needing a glass of wine and a soft bed to just sleep through a real sad patch of time, call a mulligan on that day and start over again the next.

I miss my girlfriends and having people to go to lunch with, I miss my writer friends, who remind me why I call myself a writer, and why I hold onto that identifier.  I miss having a garden, I miss my backyard and my bathtub. And if I had to stay in this apartment one more second, I was going to veritably lose my shit. I had to scratch this nagging at my ear, the pulling of my shirt tail to the world outside to get out of my inside headspace and into my outside headspace.

 I made it to the stairs leading to the ground floor of the building and remembered that tomorrow was trash day, so I retreated to the kitchen again to swing the bag over my shoulder as I headed downstairs. I figured as long as I was taking my trash down, I should roll the city garbage cans to the curb. And while rolling them to the curb, sweat already beading on my forehead in the Carolina August heat, I thought that while I was taking the garbage out, I should take the recycling out, too, just to get it out of the way. Certainly after a long, sweaty walk, the last thing I would want to do is take the recycling out. So I consolidated the recycling materials in the three different bins our building is allocated. And while I was dumping my neighbor’s bin, one of his chew-spit cans tumbled out of the bin and spilled down my leg, gooey brown slime sinking into my shoe and between my toes. I gagged and ran back upstairs, hiking my leg up into the kitchen sink, shoe and all, to scrub his chewing tobacco refuse off my toes.

Those who know me intimately know that sometimes I get the gags from things that gross me out. Bear Grylls eating giant grubs and drinking liquid squeezed from elephant poop have sent me to the toilet for a vomitus review of my lunch. A story a girl told me once about a Japanese porn involving eels and a funnel and her words made me ralph, sight unseen. . . I threw up just imagining the image. I could watch someone having brain surgery or a hip replacement, I can stomach blood and guts and gore, but there are things in this world that are just Jackee-Bugaboos, and it turns out that having the contents of a spit can splashed on me is one of them. While I upturned the whole bottle of dish soap, indiscriminately squeezing it on my foot and lower leg, the underlying aroma of sun-baked tobacco spit hit my nose and pressed my bugaboo button, and I leaned forward and puked into the sink.

I was hot and sweaty and dirty and I’d already puked, and I hadn’t even left the house yet. This is when that veritable shit-loosing happened. 

In a cranky temper-tantrum fit, I dried off my leg and ripped off the dress I was wearing. It wasn’t likely sullied with the spitty mix, but I didn’t even want to chance smelling that smell again. I pitched it into the laundry and flopped face-down on my bed in my underpants. The brain I had planned on having a hearty think with started in on me . . . everything sucks, I miss everyone, I hate this town, I’m sad, I’m lonely, I miss my family, I can’t get a job, my education is useless, I’m impoverished, I’m a terrible mother,  I’ve made so many mistakes, I’m a shitty person, I regret being a shitty person, I can’t do anything right, I’ve failed at everything, I’m an idiot, I can’t even go on a thinkin’ walk without it getting all screwed up. . . you get the idea.

I folded my hands on my pillow, rested my chin on top of them, and stared out the window. This vista from my little apartment gives the onlooker a view of the Mexican Bakery across the street, and the AT&T cell phone tower just beyond it. I noticed that if I squinted my eyes, the tower’s design could look like that of any other tower. If my eyes crop a little square of that otherwise ugly thing (and sometimes reminder that everyone everywhere is spending way too much time on their phones), my brain could pretend it was a much cooler tower. And then I remembered something: A few years ago I spent a couple of hours on a Parisian real estate site, gazing through the monitor at quirky studio apartments in neighborhoods like Montmartre, imagining how amazing it would be to have just six months of peace and quiet in one of those little domiciles, a place of peace and quiet where I could get some real writing done for just a little while.

It’s representative of how my life seems sometimes like a giant practical joke I’m always playing on myself. Back when my life seemed ‘normal’—house, kids, husband, groceries, garden, school activities, and work and work and work—I longed for just some time to get my shit legit, to richly wallow in my writey-hole, to have no other responsibilities to tend to so I could just dive into the world that surfaces when I sit down with a pen (or keyboard, whatever) and let things unfold for me. Here I was, suffering myself the slings and arrows of my own relentless criticism, and it’s like the universe was telling me, “But remember that little Parisian apartment you wanted with a view of the Eiffel Tower? Remember that time you wished you could just write for a while without distraction?”

I got an email from the kindly hiring committee. They said I nailed the interview. They said it was a delight to have met me. However they have chosen a candidate with more experience with non-profit accounting. The thing is, I knew this already. I just knew that though I’d pretty much smoked that interview like I was getting paid for it, I knew that it wasn’t right for me. Besides, I’d read my tarot cards three times, each time getting the same answer that this particular job is not for me, and that I knew that I should be doing something else. 

Prior to the interview, I’d written a Facebook post saying something like: “Dream Job Interview. Wish me luck.” But to tell the truth, no job is my dream job. I dream about not struggling financially, I dream about finally having all of my family in one place, I dream about being fulfilled by the way that I spend my days . . . but that job, that’s not my dream. I don’t dream about a one-hour commute to-and-fro every day, I don’t dream making sure my tattoos are covered lest someone think I’m some sort of trollop, I don’t dream about spending 40+ hours a week working to just have some leisure time, none of which would be spent on writing. These are not my dreams. I dream about getting paid to be myself, I dream about saying things, writing things that people find meaningful. I dream about wearing whatever I feel like wearing that day. I dream about work and pleasure not having such a definitive border between them.

The impetus of starting a blog was to just write the things about the human experience that I notice, to tell the same stories that I would tell to my friends or whoever is willing to listen. It was writing I could do between bigger writing projects. I feel like at this point I owe you an explanation about the title of this blog: Hot in the Trenches. I've been asked, but never really publicly addressed it. 

 “In the trenches”, draws upon the connotation of battle, because it seemed everyone I knew was fighting some kind of battle, enduring some long war with themselves and with the lives that they are living or the choices they make, and I thought that my own battles, my own ongoing war, might resonate with someone. When someone says: “It’s hot in the trenches” they’re indicating that the battle is raging, that heavy fire breathes down the necks of the grunts on the forefront. We are the grunts on the forefront, trying to figure it out as we go along. But I hope to evoke the double-meaning of the word ‘hot’. Hot like sizzling, hot like sexy, hot like “I know it’s shitty in here, but we all still look fabulous.” 

I want the entries of this blog to remind everyone that though we are all in battle of some kind or another, we can still be fabulous. We can still be who we are. We can still feel joy, and wonder, and marvel at the sheer humanity of everything around us. We can find delight in things just outside our window, even if they weren’t the things we expected. That’s what I want to do with these little things I share with you. Despite the heat and humidity, despite the tobacco spit running down my leg, despite the fact that my long thinkin’ walk didn’t get me past the end of my driveway and that my once fantasized-about apartment doesn’t overlook the Eiffel Tower, but an AT&T cell phone tower, despite the fact that I’m still unemployed, I somehow manage to delight in the absolute weirdness being a human allows.

When I’m feeling bad about myself, particularly if I’m feeling bad about myself as an artist, I watch “The Mindscape of Alan Moore.” If you haven’t seen it, even if you aren’t a typical fan of the graphic novel genre, I still highly recommend watching it, especially if you are a writer or artist of some kind. It serves as a much needed pep talk in those dark nights of the soul we all traverse.

With regard to traditional employment, Moore says this: “I found myself working at a skinning yard and tannery . . . I got expelled from that job after a couple of weeks for smoking dope in the men’s room, which wasn’t improving my career curve any. The next job I was able to get was that of a toilet cleaner at a hotel, and it more or less went downhill from there until I finally ended up as a comics writer.”

This took the sting of the job-rejection away, a little. Moreover, it’s an encouraging reminder that entering into an endeavor like being a writer might look like a battle. But I have a room of my own, with a hilariously gross misrepresentation of the Eiffel Tower just beyond, a constant reminder that I can create my own reality and play practical jokes on myself from somewhere in the ether. I have nothing but time to write until something else happens. So keep reading, I’ll keep writing. And remember that despite your battles (and you have them because we all have them), stay fabulous. Stay hot. Let it roll over us in so many waves, reminding us we’re alive.

Bullets from the Trenches (Jacks Gets Fired)

One could argue, if one were interested in such a semantic argument, that a Facebook post I wrote was misleading. Though it seemed to ignite a little firestorm in my infinitesimal corner of the interwebs, garnering something like a comment a minute for several hours, there’s a decent chance that the world at large missed the news. So if you missed the status, here it is:

“So that’s what it feels like to be unceremoniously fired after 7 years on the job. Do not pass go. Do not collect $200.”

The word that everyone latched onto was the word fired. I don’t mean to suggest that I was hauled into an office somewhere, read a list of grievances about my performance, and then Donald Trump-style sent packing. That didn't happen.

It has to be said that my teaching job is always, was always, contingent on a variety of factors, primarily upon institutional need. I was, as I have mentioned before, an adjunct professor. This means I am not a full-time employee, but a revolving contract employee. When an institution has severe dips in enrollment, my presence at that institution as an educator is no longer necessarily required. This has always been a possibility and is a stark reality for many of my friends and colleagues in academia. I suppose I could have been clearer about the firing had I written, students won’t be available to show up to my classes, so I shouldn't either. This happens all the time.

But I had hoped it wouldn't happen to me, hope being a large staple of the adjunct diet. I've been teaching at Stephens since January of 2007, and through all of the structural changes and shifts in leadership and highs and lows of enrollment, I've managed to avoid losing all of my classes in one semester. In fact, as of early December, when I was still grading finals and wrapping up the fall of 2013, I was also prepping articles and assignments for the spring. Texts for the class were chosen, syllabi were undergoing a good tinkering.

I had some warning, just after finals, when I received word that enrollment was down and that some departmental classes were going to be cut and consolidated. But I didn't need this warning to know how easily expendable my job was; that was a basic fact underscoring the role of the lowly adjunct.

After finals, I followed up with the powers that be about the status of my courses, but had yet to hear anything, so I unhinged my tethers to classwork for a few weeks to focus on the holidays with my family. My husband came home on leave, Christmas happened, we celebrated New Year’s Eve.

Forget the image of the board room firing, and imagine instead my sipping coffee in bed, checking headlines on my phone, relishing the last few days I had with the husband before the USMC swiped him back to Pensacola, when I loaded the Stephens page onto my phone to check which classrooms I’d been assigned this semester. Again, I’d heard nothing from my boss regarding the fiscal decisions the college had made, so I assumed I should go ahead as originally planned and prep for a new semester. But my classes no longer appeared on the course schedule. I whipped open my laptop and logged onto my email, where I found the information I was looking for.

See the important word in that Facebook status I made wasn't fired. My job ceasing to exist wasn't that big of a shocker for me. The important word in that sentence is unceremonious.

Resting there in my inbox was a two-sentence email which read:

“Jackie- (misspelled, no less)

            Sorry we had to cancel your classes. We’ll be in touch to retrieve your keys.”

And that, my friends, is fucking unceremonious. After 7 years, hundreds of students, countless papers graded, sleepless nights organizing lecture material, letters of recommendation written, advice given, poems and stories edited, committee meetings, and stellar, I mean STELLAR, reviews by students who've taken my classes, it all ended in a two sentence email. It was like that scene from Sex in the City when Carrie gets dumped via post-it note.

This is reality for 75% of people working in American academia right now. No thanks for the hard work, no sorry you won’t be teaching this year, no see ya around—just ‘classes cancelled, give us our keys back’. There is no recourse, no unemployment benefits, no judicial proceedings. Done. And while some might not call this being fired in the traditional sense, it still feels like fired. You still feel useless, you still feel utterly disposable, and you still lose the money you've been counting on.

But here’s what makes me happy—

First, for three days after I made this little Facebook status, I was flooded with email messages and comments from former students expressing so much gratitude for having been in my classes. Students I had my first semester teaching sent me notes of outrage at the institutional decision to sack me, students reflected on assignments they remembered writing for my class, voiced appreciation for the opportunity to have met me and for the things they learned from me.

And second, as my Composition students can attest, I embrace language as a magical art. Magic beyond the notions of muse and inspiration, but I mean magic in the Bardic tradition. As my magical guru, Alan Moore, would tell it “Art is magic, and magic is art. The word for the grimoire, the book of spells, is simply a fancy way of saying ‘grammar’ and to cast a spell is to quite literally spell.” It is interesting and sometimes strangely informative to explore the evolutionary meaning of words as an almost divinatory practice. This is something I told students when I made them write a definition paper, and showed them how to use etymology to gain a greater sense of why certain words are used the way they’re used, and how they came to mean what they mean.

So I looked up the word fired in the etymology dictionary and here’s what I learned:

In the sense of "sack, dismiss", fired is first recorded 1885 in American English (earlier "throw (someone) out" of some place, 1871), probably from a play on the two meanings of discharge: "to dismiss from a position," and "to fire a gun," fire in the second sense being from "set fire to gunpowder," attested from 1520s. Of bricks, pottery, etc., from 1660s. Related: Fired; firing. Fired up "angry" is from 1824. Firing squad is attested from 1904.

And maybe I’m crazy (a distinct possibility always rolling around in my brain somewhere) but the language of being fired having come from these origins seems beautifully metaphoric for me. Imagining myself closed up in a chamber, and without warning, the firing pin strikes me in the ass, the pressure hurling me forward. And while what is left behind is a now useless tool in the hands of the shooter, I’m zooming away toward something else, soaring through the sky, faster than a speeding bullet.