(This entry originally appeared on 9-10-2009 in a journal I no longer keep)
I've been back in Detroit for three weeks, and despite my best intentions I did not find a nice well-paying office type job, and failing that I did not find a shitty well-paying office type job, nor even a shitty poor-paying office type job. Rather than climb to the top of a tall building and hurl myself off, I decided to go back to Buddy's Pizza and see if they had work for me.
Luckily, they do. Monday I go to finalize things like pay, hours, etc. I am for all intents and purposes on the manager track, and it doesn't look like anything is going to pull me off that track any time soon. I have only one application / CV out for a job I'd actually like (prof at MCC) and everything else was sort of a shot in the dark.
This is all probably a good thing.
When I went to Buddy's, I wore my best suit. Why? Because frankly I had a really wicked case of the crazies. Seriously. I talked to my old manager, was offered work, went home, and did not change out of my suit. I sat on the couch watching True Blood with my little sister until my dad came home, and only then did I change so that I could go out to the boat to pick some things up. Then we came back to the house and I got insanely drunk.
It sucked, but I had a long (and again, insanely drunk) talk with my dad about what I was doing, and about how deep down inside, all I really wanted to do was come back here and work at something like Buddy's while I continued to send out submissions and work on my game. I didn't want to make a nice middle-class salary in exchange for 40 hours a week.
In short, I did not want to go back to the exact same shit that I left when I went back to school six years ago.
There are worse things for an artist than a job that just expects you to show up, and there are many better things for an artist than a steady and comfortable paycheck.
So I'm going to be poor for a while, but it's the kind of poor that I'm used to: 40's on the porch poor, not having a nice car poor, and still hungry to create poor.
So congratulate me on doing what I need to do, and come buy me beer - I'll be the guy who smells like pepperoni.
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