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.

Fill a Blank Page (Jacks Talks to Herself)

Editor's Note: Upon reflection, I probably should've given this a few passes before hitting the 'publish' button, but I'm a glass of Scotch in and, in the spirit of fuckitry, Ima leave it as it is.



There’s nothing more disheartening to a writer than an unfillable blank page. For hours I’d sit and watch that stupid cursor line blinking in and out, in and out, in and out, thinking ‘this used to come so easily to me, what is wrong with me, why can’t I do this anymore?’

I fucked up somewhere along the way and forgot something very important—I think it was in graduate school, because it was there  that the act of writing became something that I was frequently doing entirely for other people—and I forgot, rather, entirely suffocated the single most important member of my original audience. More clearly stated, I forgot that my first audience was me. I forgot that what I loved most about writing, my real impetus for writing as a young person, was that the true act of writing was always initially a dialogue with myself. More importantly, writing stopped being a device through which I talked to myself and started being a device through which I talked to other people. I realized that almost every written endeavor in the last five or so years has been an attempt at dialogue with someone else and not first a dialogue with myself.

Oddly enough, the only written creative projects that have been moderately successful are essays I’ve written spontaneously—all of which were fueled by some need inside to have a hard come-to-Jesus talk with myself. That handful of largely off-the-cuff (although certainly later edited and proofed) stories I’ve HAD to just get out or I’d explode have been the stories that have engaged others in a way that good art is supposed to engage people. Frankly, everything else I’ve done in the past five years is shit.

I don’t even feel bad about it, only grateful for the insight. Things went awry. A compounding of unmet desire to spend my life as a writer and the pressure to keep producing work, and keep producing work that was as well-received as the last bit of work I produced, keep ‘em mesmerized. Then top it off with everything that comes with being an ‘emerging writer’: all the advice from professors and other writers grad school colleagues and agents and publishers merged and made a bleak fog in my head so god damned murky that the act of writing became an act of production. I gotta tell you, I started to fucking hate it. I hated it because I forgot how it all started in the first place.

It started because I was a nineteen year old girl about to marry a guy I didn’t love and I wrote a little story about another girl who was set to get married to a guy she didn’t love. I wrote it after visiting my betrothed who was doing an internship in Florida. We fought the whole time. He made me miserable. But I was young, and silly, and I had a one year old to think about and my mother said “This is the best opportunity of your life” and I suppose I didn’t want to disappoint her. I boarded a plane in West Palm Beach and pulled blue, celestial themed writing paper from my carry-on. By the time I changed planes in Nashville, I’d written a thinly veiled story about a girl who was marrying a guy because he was sensible, and not her longtime love, who was not sensible. It was probably a really shit story in retrospect, but still, from Nashville to Kansas City, I combed over the draft, adding details and changing phrasing. The older woman seated next to me asked: “Am I sitting next to a writer?” and I answered yes, though I really hadn’t thought about it before that moment. I never stopped thinking about that woman. I think of her more often than the boyfriend-turned-husband-turned-ex-husband a month later (. . . you can read all about that in the book, when available.)

I forgot this all started because I need to have a dialogue with myself. So much of the body of work I’ve created is nonfiction, focusing on my roles as both main character and omnipresent narrator, who are sometimes at odds with one another. Sometimes, the narrator has to talk to the main character and vice versa. To put it in more universal, metaphysical, non-writer terms: sometimes my soul has to have a talk with my earthbound ego, sometimes my conscious thinker has to talk to my unconscious thinker.

 Writing stopped being a communication device for me, and started being something like a job. All that talk from those in the industry (Who is your target audience? What are you writing this for? Why are they gonna care? Oh that writing style isn’t trendy anymore. Oh this subject matter is popularly published, why don’t you write something about that?)  it muddied my muse river.

The pressure I place on myself is by far the biggest impediment because there came a time when the pressure from the world became so loud, a stadium-sized chant of do-it do-it do-it, and my inside said no no no and all became too much for me.

There’s nothing more disheartening to a writer than an unfillable blank page.

Somehow, and without my noticing it consciously, the thing I did to make sense of the world became something I did to satisfy the needs of other people and not my own need to understand myself. This is not a manifesto shouting ‘fuck what other people think’, although that’s pretty decent advice, generally. The point I’m so circuitously trying to arrive at is that art shouldn’t be made with a lust for what will come of it when it’s finished. Great art is made for the sake of itself. It is first a dialogue with the artist and the muse. I lost all connection to inspiration when I forced myself to think about what would come of my work when it was finished. I stopped talking to myself when I started thinking: Who will read this? Which literary magazine should I send this to? Which essay fits with which thematic publication this deadline cycle?

I’ve talked to so many aspiring writers over the last several years, and so many of them asked the same questions: how can I get my stuff published, do I need an agent, where should I send this, and I wish I could go back and amend every conversation with this advice: Don’t worry about it. Write it. Make it good. Make it make you feel good. Make the words resonate with your soul. Match the emotional with the intellect and let your work tell you what it wants to be.

Let your art first be a conversation with yourself. Fill a page with the words the universe gives you.  

Experience Required

While I spent a substantial amount of time vigilantly compartmentalizing various aspects of my life, at some point I said ‘fuck it’ and started allowing those different areas of being that make me who I really am to slowly and comprehensively marry themselves back together into what I've become today- a coagulation of previously divided parts puzzle-piecing into this finished product. It’s been an exuberant, liberating endeavor for my soul. It started with scrounging up the balls to write about being a stripper as an undergrad, then again as a graduate student, publishing work that ‘outed’ me to the general public, speaking to writers at a national conference about the act of writing about things of a sexual nature, speaking to feminist forums about the sex industry, doing interviews and writing for independent filmmakers to document aspects of my life I’d previously kept hidden.

What’s been great for my soul, I’m sorry to report, hasn't been all that spectacular for my employability. I've applied for 42 jobs since September when I moved to North Carolina. My résumé, as far as I can tell, meets the contemporary standards of what employers might expect, my cover letters are articulate and insightful and catered specifically to each position I apply for and to the company offering the position, and my references, in my humble opinion, are god damned impressive and include a Pulitzer Prize nominee.

I can’t help but suspect that my willingness to be honest about exactly who I am and about my life experiences has something to do with my inability to get a job. And this bums me out. I've written before about the question I’m often asked regarding whether or not I worry that being forthcoming about my experience in the Unholy Arena of the American Nudie Bar might hinder my ability to advance myself in other fields of endeavor later in life, and I maintain that it’s still more important to me to be honest about who I am and what I've seen and what I think about the whole business of being me. 
But this job search business, as soul crushing as it is, I imagine is equally tough for all of my former comrades-in-arms, my girls, my former co-strippers, who have to find jobs outside the confines of the nudie bar at some point, whether it’s because they're pregnant, or they get married, or they finally graduate from the college that their weekend-dancing was paying for. And it occurs to me that we have such a rich experience that in many ways translates to other industries, but because we have to be so secretive about our pasts as strippers, we’re left unable to document the job experience in applications and résumés.

So this is for you, gals of mine, a letter of recommendation of sorts to justify exactly what you've learned and earned in terms of experience that translates to the wider world of work in America.

Excellence in Customer Service:

We don’t get paid unless they love us. And, my darling readers, I mean that in the most precise and literal sense. Strippers, in most cases, do not get a paycheck. In fact, most strip clubs operate under a maintenance system, where a dancer pays a house fee (sometimes called ‘rent’, sometimes called ‘maintenance’) to occupy that club each night. The DJ isn’t lying when he says: “These girls work for tips and tips alone.” We rely, à la Blanche Dubois, on the kindness of strangers. That is to say, if we are not kind, kindness is not usually reciprocated (unless they’re into that sort of thing, but that’s a whole other tale). We are kind, diplomatic, congenial, friendly, outgoing. We are masters of small talk, wranglers of chit-chat, ready with smiles—at least, those of us who've managed to stick with the job. Any dancer worth her salt has no choice but to become proficient at conversation.

Likewise, we are efficient in our conversational skills. Time is money, as the old saying goes, and therefore we've learned to not be overly chatty, but rather talk until we can piece together enough context clues to discover what a patron wants. Should that man (or woman, in some cases) not be particularly interested in spending any additional time with us, or perhaps have expressed interest in another coworker, we aim to please.

Should a fella be into, say, the blonde, girl-next-door cheerleader type, I’ll be the first to say: “You know what, I have a friend you should meet, wait right here while I fetch her for you.” This serves the whole in several ways: 1. I’m freed up to move on to the next guy. 2. The gal I find as a replacement will likely remember this, and return the favor in kind when a dude is interested in a busty, brunette, pinup girl. 3. Everyone is working at an efficient pace. 4. The customer is happy. We truck in happiness. We are happiness dealers by the bushel. And that’s the point.

Business Math and Cash Handling Skills

The fifth question James Lipton always asks his guests on Inside the Actors Studio is:

“What noise or sound do you love?”

I can say that I unequivocally love the sound of 20 strippers counting their money at the end of the night. Forty hands making that ffffttt, ffffttt, fffttt, sound with thousands of dollars between them is hypnotic and enchanting and so, so fast. We can shuffle a deck of singles faster than you can say blueberry pie. In fact, I’m fairly good at guessing, down to the dollar, a stack of ones slapped into my hand, based just on the height and weight. We are money-counting mother fuckers. We deal in cash, and only cash, and we’re good at it.

Likewise, because we’re obligated to tip gratuity out to our DJ, our bouncers, and our bartenders at the end of the night, we've conquered figuring percentages in our head. It’s part of our job.

Diversity in the Workplace

Despite what pop culture might lead you to believe, strippers come from extraordinarily varied backgrounds. Of course, I've danced with girls who've grown up on welfare and who come from broken homes. But I've also worked with girls whose parents were doctors and account executives and whose parents have been married for 30 years. I've worked with women born and raised in small Missouri towns, and women from as far away as Canada and Australia. I've shared a stage with dancers of every conceivable race and religion and ethnicity. And when you get naked with people every night, any sense of discomfort regarding these differences evaporates. We love each other, we are truly immersed in one another’s cultural variances and accept and cherish our distinctions.

Similarly, we are exposed to every type of person imaginable. We treat everyone we encounter with the same respect and congeniality. We chance upon rich old men and poor college students, men from every country on earth, lawyers and union guys, construction workers, military service members, lobbyists and laborers, professional sports players and famous actors (I’ll never tell, so don’t ask . . . well, I will tell, but not on the internet and only if we’re friends). There is no room for prejudices in dealing with customers.

Determination and Hard Work

No matter how good you are at being a stripper, some nights just suck balls. While a dancer can count on relatively good pay in the long term, there are those nights when she might say to herself, “Fuck, I’d have made more money tonight if I worked at McDonalds.” It’s just the way it is. Because there is no paycheck, the pay varies based on customer attendance and participation, but also sometimes plain old-fashioned luck. Some nights are shit, but dancers know that the next night will be better and we show up, slate-cleaned and determined to make up for the bad nights with good ones.

And while it may look like an easy job, being a stripper is hard, just in the practical sense. We work long, and I mean long, hours. Many a night I arrived at work at 5:30 pm and watched the sun crack the sky on my commute home. And we work long hours in 7 inch platform stilettos. And we dance, dance, dance all night long. It is a physically demanding job. We bruise our knees on stages and bruise our ribs on brass poles, we twist ankles, and we climb up and down stairs, and don’t even get me started on what a decade of stripping does to your lower spine . . . a very real condition my friend, Jenni, and I have coined ‘stripper back’. Frequently, even office jobs require minor lifting . . . can you lift 20lbs? the job advertisements ask—dude, we can lift our own body weight and turn upside down on a three inch diameter brass pole.

Managerial Demands

I've been fortunate to work with some very wonderful managers in my tenure, but there have been severe exceptions to that statement. I assure you, dancers often deal with bosses who are major assholes with a capital A. If a potential boss thinks his gruff demeanor or high standards might be too stringent for a ‘delicate gal who’s only known the coddling environment of a strip club’, that dude is DEAD WRONG. I promise you, that gal has worked for a bigger dickhead than you. Take a chance, she’s got thick skin, I promise.

And I don’t suspect any former dancer will actually use this as an addendum to an application in which she’s chosen to include her experience as a stripper to translate to ‘real-world’ work, but I wish she could. I wish she could be ballsy enough to do it, but even more, I wish a person doing the hiring would be ballsy enough to accept it as true. Because it is.

I love you, my bitches, with all my strippery heart. 

Lloyd Dobbler Philosophy of Occupation

These things are true:

      1.     When I was in high school, I was voted Most Likely to Be a Game Show Hostess. I remember thinking at the time that it wouldn’t be such a bad gig.

         2.   In  college, I worked at the Career Services office and one of my duties was to administer this career aptitude test to help students having difficulty picking a major to hone their sights on careers best suited to them. I took it myself and the results that sifted to the top were: actress/performer, writer/journalist, minister/chaplain, psychologist.

      3.   I’ve recently undergone a major life switcheroo that has, in many ways, left me feeling like I’ve started over from scratch. I left Columbia at the end of September, left my children with their father to finish out the school year in Missouri, also giving us time to settle in the new town and find a house big enough for all of us; rid myself of 75% of my personal belongings, shoved the remaining 25% (constituted primarily of clothes and books and vinyl records) into a Budget rental truck, and rolled southeast to New Bern, North Carolina where I've effectively invaded and occupied my husband’s geobachelor pad.

Up until last May, my husband and I still planned on our ‘separate-but-together’ marriage. But when the my poor-old money pit started absorbing more money than I was bringing in, we knew something had to change and that change ended with me here, kids still temporarily there, and my career still somewhere in the ether, undefined and raw as molding clay.

I have, for the last two months, four days, and about 14 hours been wholly unemployed. That’s not for lack of trying. I’ve sent out 39 resumes (as of last Friday), established accounts on pretty much every conceivable job search website, hunted down employment opportunities at various levels of municipal, state, and federal government, and still I’m sitting here on my couch writing. I did a major revision on an old manuscript, wrote a considerable bit of a horror/thriller novel I’ve been toying with for about a year, and written a few drafts of an essay about contemporary feminism. I’ve been a bad blogger for the better part of this year, a disappointment to my constant readers (the whole handful of you), and I do apologize for my unpredictable and irregular posts. The forum originally was intended to be an arena for me to just bitch about things I’d make my friends listen to me bitch about, but in a slightly more articulate construct, but with no intended regularity. Now that I’m moved, settled, unpacked (sort of), I intend to remedy that. It is quite possible to remedy, because I really have nothing else to do.

Here’s another thing that’s true:

   4.     I don’t want to do anything else but write. I mean, I really do not.

For the first time since I was nineteen and started dancing in my underpants to supplement my income (read: as my primary income in many instances), I am experiencing what it truly means to be BROKE. Not, I really want to go shopping, but I shouldn’t because I’m broke or Let’s eat someplace cheap because I’m broke. Legit, way below the poverty line, broke ass, broke-ity broke broke, ninety-three cents in my checking account, broke.  My husband, God bless him, is keeping me sheltered and fed, but a Lance Corporal’s salary doesn’t allow for my preferred shopping, travelling, gift-giving, lady-of-leisure status.

Still, despite all of that, I’m so much happier spending my days writing than I would ever be sitting at a desk working for someone else, who themselves are working for someone else, who is ultimately selling or buying or processing something that I really have no passion for. I’d happily take a job offered to me at this point, just because I’m broke enough to consider crowd-sourcing my 2000 mile roundtrip way home for Christmas, but it’s not going to be what I want to do. I would resign myself to doing it. I would succumb. This is probably pretty blasphemous in some circles, but I would think about entering into a job in the corporate world as equivalent to accepting the mark of the beast. Calm down, everyone, I’m not saying that’s how it is or that I’m some biblical scholar and here’s a reasonable interpretation of the Book of Revelation, but bear with me:

Revelation 13:17

17) and he provides that no one will be able to buy or to sell, except the one who has the mark, either the name of the beast or the number of his name.…

          I remember as a child reading this and thinking, ‘What about parents who want to feed their kids and pay the rent?’ And I imagined after doing all the foraging and trading and underground shit a parent could do to feed and shelter their families, a moment would come where a man or a woman, head hung in defeat, would file into some queue at some local Antichrist headquarters and get branded with a 666, and then they could go to the grocery store and buy Hot Pockets or whatever.

I know I’m prone to melodrama, and absolutely accept that this is one of those cases, but in order for someone to understand me, you have to understand that within the tragicomedy I’m often espousing, there’s always a foundation of truth. I see myself, shamefully and without a shred of joy, standing in line for Hot Pockets, holding back tears for another lost day in the service of a machine. 

I’m clinging to the Lloyd Dobbler Philosophy of Occupation. You’ll remember, in the 1989 film Say Anything, Lloyd Dobbler (as played by John Cusack), who’ll always be a standard by which I judge romantic gestures, explains to the father of his love interest what his plans for the future entail: “I don’t want to sell anything, buy anything, or process anything as a career. I don’t want sell anything bought or processed, or buy anything sold or processed, or process anything, sold, bought or processed. I don’t want to repair anything sold, bought or processed. As a career, I don’t want to do any of that.” I hear those words from Lloyd Dobbler’s lips and choirs of angels sing, and the clouds part and the sun bursts through, and George Harrison starts singing ‘Hallelujah’. 

There are exceptions to this scenario. I loved teaching because ultimately I felt like teaching students how to think and communicate did something good for the world at large. But only two of the 39 jobs I applied for are in higher education. I’m just not in a great geographical area for that kind of thing, if there is a good geographical area for that kind of thing anymore. (see previous blog Enthusiasm Don’t Pay the Bills, Son).

I remember once making a thoughtless wish and then immediately retracting it, but it went something like this: “If I were in prison, I’d write all fucking day.” Of course, this is bullshit. I absolutely, under zero circumstances, never want to go to prison. Again, though, despite its melodramatic delivery, the sentiment is still the same. To some degree, I feel like I’m in prison. I’m bound largely to my house because I don’t want to waste gas going nowhere. And even if I did go anywhere, I have no money to do anything. If I want to participate in the commercial world, I need money, and jobs are how most people get money, and I don’t want to sell anything, or buy anything, or process anything for a paycheck in exchange for 75% of my life. I don’t wanna do it. So until I have to hang my head, succumb, go get in line for my license to survive in the world we’ve constructed for ourselves, where commerce is king and the arts and philosophy and the humanities are constantly pushed to the periphery of what society deems as ‘important’, I’m gonna keep vigilantly taking advantage of my cushy prison sentence. I have food, I have a roof, I get to leave the apartment for my bike rides, I get my husband and my kitty cats and the internet and I get to talk to my family every day, and I will write until my fingers bleed, because that’s the job I really want. 

My Money Pit (or, Our House is a Very Very Very Fine House)

I moved 29 times in 27 years before I finally bought a house in 2005. Those numbers aren’t a mistake. 29 places that I suppose I had to call home before I was 3o. It wasn’t until I was in my own place, a house I bought all by myself, that I felt some sense of security. No one forced me to live there, no one could force me to leave, it was mine and brand spanking new. I was the first person to bathe in the tub, first to hang my clothes in the closet, first to sit my ass on the toilet in my own master bathroom. For the first time in my life, the American dream felt tangible. And because this house was new, I wouldn’t have to worry about the furnace busting, or termites feasting on the walls, or an ancient leaking roof. I suspected the largest of my concerns would be deciding what color to paint the walls or figuring out just where I should plant the garden.

            Here’s what no one tells you about the American dream of homeownership: it is an endeavor designed for people who know what the fuck they’re doing with any sort of tool, or those wealthy enough to hire someone with those skills. Unfortunately, I am neither of those things.

            The other point of consideration when purchasing a home is that when the need for a handyman arises, the decision often isn’t one that can be shoved to the back burner the way shopping for clothes or going on vacation can wait until times are a little more flush. No, what I've discovered is that when someone needs to come and fix a problem with your home, that problem is usually immediate. For example, say the toilets on the first floor of your home suddenly begin working in reverse, a kind of raw sewage Nile River somehow flowing from south to north, and then a good portion of the main floor of your brand spanking new house is covered with unspeakable awful. That kind of disaster results in urgent prioritizing of funds. That is, getting the running water and toilets functioning in your home is always at the top of the list. But you move on, deal with the minor damage, have 10 feet of sewer pipe in your front yard replaced, and still don’t even spend enough to make a claim on your homeowner’s insurance.

            My latest woe, the rain coming from the second floor hot water heater to the first floor powder room, has pushed me to reconsider the value of the security in owning a home. Let me repeat the most important part of that last sentence: it’s raining in my god damned bathroom. The hot water heater apparently is improperly placed and, unbeknownst to me, has been leaking for some time.

            I discovered this after I decided that filing an insurance claim was likely the best option for me given the scale of repairs that are needed. So I made the call, the insurance people came, and gave me an estimate for repairs that my policy will cover. And while my policy will happily replace the now rusting vents and graciously slap a new coat of paint on the affected areas, the source of the disaster (namely hot water heater and resulting rotten floor beneath it) is NOT covered.

            When I realized this, I couldn’t help but think of the Tom Hanks film The Money Pit. In a particularly pivotal scene of the 1986 comedy, Tom Hanks attempts to fill the bathtub on the second floor of his home with water he’s boiled on the stove. His wife, played by Shelley Long, stands by, exhausted and dejected from the series of disasters that have befallen them since purchasing the too-good-to-be-true residence. As the couple tip the  galvanized steel buckets of warm water into the tub, the floor beneath gives way, and the whole shebang goes crashing through into a porcelain and water explosion on the first floor. They stand silent peering through the gaping hole down to the disaster below and Hanks laughs. And then he laughs harder, and harder until his mouth falls open and guffaws trumpet from him, laughter being the final result of the hysteria whipped up inside a human being after such a series of cataclysms. Because what can you do? And that’s where I am. I can only laugh.

            And I keep laughing. Because though it occasionally rains in my bathroom, I don’t have raw sewage creeping from the toilets. And I’ll probably laugh should the rotten floor just give way and allow a birth canal for the heater to crash through to the powder room, given no one is popping a squat down there at the time. Because what else I’m supposed to do? I can’t cry. I can’t complain, because I still have this house and I’ve busted my ass (pretty literally) to keep it.

            My only other option is to begin an internet campaign to become the most undeserving person in the history of Ty Pennington to get an Extreme Home Makeover. And while my husband is an active duty Marine on unaccompanied tour and I suppose I’m generally well liked among the ne’er-do-wells I call my friends, I haven’t done any sort of impressive thing for my community or adopted 10 foster kids (though I do have an unusual number of cats that no one else wants). I don’t want to leave this place. It’s a poorly and inexpensively constructed pre-fabricated piece of shit but it is MY PIECE OF SHIT, and I like our neighborhood and the schools, and after those 29 moves that were almost exclusively out of my control, I want to stay in the only home that has ever felt like a home to me. And so until I figure out how exactly we’re going to turn the 5 x 5 foot rainforest back into the cute art-gallery bathroom it used to be, I’m going to laugh. And try to find The Money Pit on Netflix.

If you lived under a rock during the 1980's, here's that Tom Hanks bit I was yammering about.

To Tell the Truth

I was recently asked if I worry that the things that I write and send out into the world might adversely affect my future. I suppose namely that question was aimed at what some might call the confessional nature of my writing. I've spent a number of hours in the last few weeks thinking about this and I've decided that I would be remiss to not respond in writing to a question about writing itself. The answer to this is brief. No, I absolutely do not worry about the content of my writing railroading my future endeavors. My position on this matter is quite the opposite.

Here’s the thing- I am addicted to the truth. Particularly over the last few years, I've learned that the most important aspect of anything that is pure and of value is that it not be hidden, nor censored, nor manipulated to avoid any waves that it might cause when presented to the world. I've come to a place in my life in which I can NOT avoid being open and honest about my experience in the world, whether or not that honesty makes people uncomfortable. It isn't my aim to cause discomfort. I don’t write about my life or my perspective on events that affect my life in order to shock, or shame, or embarrass anyone. I just have to tell the truth. And it’s usually the times when I’m most hesitant or afraid to be honest that my inevitable honesty is the most cherished. I was terrified years ago to write about dancing naked because I knew the general perception of exotic dancers, and how that might be applied to me as a human being. But when I embraced that no one else could tell this story, my own particular brand of truth, I was in turn embraced by a loving [if somewhat limited] audience.

So too could be said about my openness about the way in which I was quietly excused from my teaching job. Perhaps if I just kept quiet, pretended I was granted a surprise, unpaid sabbatical, then I might have a wider range of teaching prospects in the future. But the blog I wrote about that experience got more hits in 72 hours than all of my previous blog entries combined. Silence may have saved me a spot to teach at the same institution next semester, but how can my constant quest for truth through the written word be honored in my staying silent? Is it better to take my licks and keep quiet about it, or should I use experience to shed light on something in the world that I think is extraordinarily fucked up? I’m willing to sacrifice poverty wages for a moment of telling a truth that might resonate with people. And I guess that’s what makes me a writer.

 There’s an Arab proverb that goes something like this: When the king puts the poet on his payroll, he cuts off the tongue of the poet. I've been thinking about this as it applies to me, to all of us. Let the king be anyone, any institution, any powerful aspect that sets itself in opposition to the people. I’d rather be a broke poet in the trenches than a writer who never tells the truth because I’m afraid. Writers, artists of any kind, have to tell the truth. It is not my job to give the world, be that my limited audience or a king, what it wants. I will tell you the truth I need to tell you, always, because you need it.

And I think in a broader sense, this may be what is wrong with us. And by us, I mean all of us individual humans walking the planet. I think somewhere along the line we've become afraid of the truth, both telling it and receiving it. And it’s what keeps us separated from each other, and separated from positions of power, and in constant opposition.

This might be wisdom: It is important to be open to knowledge. In order to know, it is important for someone to be willing to tell the truth. And in order to tell the truth, it is important to live a life unafraid of what discomfort the truth might inspire. Ultimately, my truth-telling has created much more harmony in the world than the collected concealment and certain downright lies I've told over a lifetime.

It is much easier to connect to people when you’re honest with them, and honest with yourself. Since my addiction to truth took vigorous hold of my life, the writing that has come out of that period has reverberated much broader and farther than when I was afraid to tell the truth, to places and people I never may have reached otherwise. But I think this is applicable to everyone, not just writers. I dare you to refuse to be afraid of the truth, because I've learned that as soon as you stop being afraid of the truth, you stop being afraid of everything, and then you are liberated.

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.