Four A.M. Voices and the Week to Myself

My college, Col. Giddens, has suggested that is the duty, nay, responsibility, of all writers to “communicate the in-communicatable,” a calling as daunting as it is practically impossible. Is that, I wonder, the purpose of these notes from the dulling edge of the American Empire? To communicate some incommunicable Truth about It All? Oh, the horror…the horror if this is so for I feel it is a project as far beyond me as the stars of Andromeda; as intangible as the halo the forms around the moon when the night is filled with clouds and your head with LSD; as devoid of meaning as the bleating of Our Glorious Leader, George Dubya Bush.

So much for all that, yar. And so much for my writings here. Dispatches from Within the Empire have been short and sweet in coming due to that oldest of all devils, Circumstance. I am currently embroiled in a transitional phase of my life and times, both as a writer and a man…or perhaps I mischaracterize the situation, investing it with far more Drama than it is due.

In any case, Things have occurred since last we spoke. I have swapped one cube farm for another, changing my job with what, to the casual, must seem a callus disregard for my employment record. As if my resume were some unbroken chain of blameless upright-itude, rather than the erratic patchwork of piecemeal employment that it is today. By the time I am a famous author of notorious public excess I expect my resume to look much worse. I am banking, after my own fashion, to hold more jobs than Mark Twain by the time I am done (while at the same time making much more intelligent investments). I’ve already beaten out another famous Missouri native on this score: that great sage and Beat groupie/godfather, William S. Burroughs, one of the few junkies lucky enough to be born with a silver spoon already at his disposal.

So, yes, I quit my job, and burned the bridge behind myself. I have told everyone I did it out of malignant hatred of the work, but that is not the truth. I’ve told everyone I quit because of foresight and convenience. After all, that cube farm was a 90 minute train ride away, both ways. That’s twelve hours a week lost to commuting alone, another unpaid workday in itself. One hundred and thirty-two hours in all, lost, never to be regained. A lot of time that could’ve been spent writing. And besides, my Fair, adopted City is scheduled to begin a grand maul re-design of its downtown transit hub this coming January. Ground break falls on the 9th of that month and god help all the poor bastard bus drivers who’ll be force to re-route or catch a grill full of civic construction worker. Better to net myself a job on this side of the blasted river, leaving downtown to its own chaotic madness. This I have done, so that is that.

But that is still not the truth of why I quite my job. I could (and will) easily adapt to the gutting of downtown. I can (and will) willing unwrap myself from the sweet embrace of my beloved Partner every morning for no other purpose than to do something I do not care a wick for.

No, I quite my job because on Monday, the 24th of September, I woke from a terrible dream I cannot remember in a cold and clammy sweat at four a.m. I coughed and felt the stirrings of the sickness that (by week’s end) would blossom into a respiratory infection. My tonsils were swollen and tinder. By morning they would be the size and consistency of children’s marbles.

But in the night they were only tender, and they were not what motivated me to call in sick. A still, calm voice in my head did that. It was the voice that woke me at four a.m. The voice that moved my hand hours later when I punched the alarm clock and reached for the phone.

Call in sick, it told me. It did not need to speak again.

The next morning I found the ad for my new job amid the refuse of posting in the customer service section of cragislist. I visited the place, filled out my application and passed my typing test with seventy words per minute, two errors.

By week’s end I was snorting and sniffling my way through my interview, head full of snot and cough medicine. By the beginning of next week my lymph nodes felt like twin golf balls straining to meet each other in the center of my throat...and, somehow, I managed to make myself heard over the phone. Yes, I would love a job with your esteemed company. Yes, I would have to give my current employer notice. Yes, I would love to start on the 17th. Seven a.m.? Perfect.

I gave my current employer exactly one day of notice, more than enough to show up, turn in my badge and collect my last paycheck. Thus have I lied my way into a solid week of no external responsibilities. I’ve kicked cigarettes and am well supplied with booze. There is nothing but sheer laziness standing between me and a full week’s worth of honest-to-god-writing.

Not blog writing, obviously, for blog posts are the vain, self-publishing writer’s crack rock. They are the thing I write when I am too lazy to write the movie reviews that stock my website or (and this is key, here) the fiction that will one day pay my bills.

Those are the projects that have consumed me these past weeks and I’ve charged away at them with a rough single-mindedness that would seem insane to those who do not see the creation of prose expressions as an end unto themselves. Hell, I don’t even do that half the time, but when I do I am more than willing to gather strange looks and sharp comments from those I know and love.

I can only imagine what they’d say if I told them, Yes, I quit my job because the voice in my head told me to. After all, we all have voices. But it’s not everyday they wake you up to tell you what to do.

Unless your name happens to be Burkowitz.

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