Having worked in the corporate world for as long as I had, I knew (or at least felt) a good thing when it came my way. For years I had done what many writers do to make ends meet. You work the day job, or the night job, or the bits-and-pieces jobs, and you write with whatever time you have left. Of course, we all had to eat. And the roof over our collective heads was a nice touch. Then there were those endless, pesky distractions called bills that had to be dealt with. The good news was, being in management, I didn’t have to punch that godawful clanking time-clock or slide that employee i.d. card with the tiny smeared face-pic that always reminded me of the stunned and disbelieving selfie a prison escapee might take just before sliding over and down the wall and fleeing all jackrabbit in a prairie fire.
The bad news was, being in management, the man pretty much owned me body and soul, 24/7, for as far as my eye could see and mind could fathom. Now don’t get me wrong. All honest work is honorable. And I’ve done my share of pitching newspapers (for any unfamiliar younger minds, those were unwieldy, non-interactive objects of information made of cheap paper and non-drying ink that smeared all over your face and hands as you processed the content), digging ditches, pumping concrete, hanging chemical-soaking animal skins in 140-degree warehouse ovens, yadda yadda yadda. I was also grateful of honest work. And, yeah sure, I always tried to do the best I could, performing it. And that included eventually moving into management and having all those perks executives enjoy, such attending endless, mind-numbing meetings, often with no practical purpose or meaning, and all in attendance feeling obligated to opinionate toward that end. Dealing with that variety of people, otherwise known as employees (for some reason, we called them Associates or, occasionally, Stars), that gave one insight into humanity’s enormous baggage of fears, foibles and frustrations, but also its great strengths and wonderful potential. Then there were those always far-away seminars, conferences and team-building excursions, where all the self-important heads came together to envision the bright, brave, coming-year, and how change just to have change just to justify our existence was the real and unspoken purpose. When, at last and enough already, we would all go bleary-eyed to that final cocktail bash and awards dinner (dear God those schmoozing soirees). When, decorum teetering on the edge of group-implosion, everyone would grab their bags and stampede back onto those same shitty air machines we arrived on, and go home, ready to don the pretense of indoctrinated change in a world that never seemed to, or, if it did, didn’t seem to matter all that much when compared with the rest of our struggle for existence and, occasionally, survival.
Therefore, it was without too great a deal of consideration that when my business environment suddenly changed, and I was offered a full-year salaried buyout, I gave the man the nod and checked out. I can’t fully describe the mixed rush of untethered euphoria and oh-my-God-what-have-I-just-done anxiety I experienced. But, as it happened, I had just received my latest manuscript back from my editor, and now my agent was shopping the damned thing, so I admit there was a bit of now-or-never attitude driving me onward into that dark and unknowing landscape of gun-jumpers and the ill-decided. To make matters worse (or at least a tad more precarious), my tribe also decided it was time we leave behind those comforting and sedating arms of civilization and move to a somewhat remote and abandoned wilderness abode, disarmingly (as we quickly discovered) occupied by an ever-changing potpourri of spike-tailed scorpions, night-crawling tarantulas and the occasional diamondback slithering through. And so there I sat one morning, eating my corn flakes, watching yet another of my new nature’s unidentified creations–all hairy-stingered and dripping-fanged–creeping slowly across our saltillo tile floor, and thought: Sometimes we just have to do it, don’t we? We just have to decide about things and then go for it. Otherwise, how would we know where things went? Where they might take us? Anyway, I had new projects I was working on, and now I had more time to pursue them. Besides, if it didn’t work out in the end, I could always go back to that other place. That other world once again. I heard through the grapevine they were hiring.