Thursday, March 12, 2009

Okay,

It's been about a week since I popped this cherry.

I've descended from a retreat to the windswept alps of New Hampshire where some friends and I hiked across the moonscape and emptied our heads for a few days.

It was 40 yesterday, and now it's 20 and windy, and the little boy has pinkeye, but hopefully he's recovered enough to not have daycare call me to collect him early. I've got a book to work on and a house to clean and probably should be looking for some kind of job but I don't need that kick in the nuts just now.

So yes, the book. I'm fully aware that I am not an author, and I understand what real authors keep telling us pretenders.

So what.

Writing is something I've been passionate about for as long as I could form sentences, so why not work on cheesing out a book while the professional world has decided it has no further use for me? At the very least I can say I tried while pumping gas after the severance runs out.

Yes, it was inauguration day, I was driving to work listening to all the hopeful people on the radio waiting for the big event, and a tear even crept from my eye at all the exuberance. Two hours later, I was driving home, ditched from the career I'd had for the last 13 years, with a tear creeping from my eye at the thought of having to go through the utter horseshit of pretending to be interested in something less interesting than what I'd been doing.

Gar put it right when he got me the position way back when, by telling me that this wasn't something to quit from in two weeks when it got frustrating. Of course within two weeks he was dead, and I was trying to figure out how to sink or swim in an organization that had finally taken me on after two years of applications.

I bit down on my pride, learned to suffer through the monotony of the 9-5, and struggled with the fact that good ideas were not necessarily what innovation was about. Often they took a back seat to politics, and of course expediency. 'We're not building a grand piano/stealth bomber/rome!', etc. As the company and technology matured, we got bought and sold to repeatedly larger and dumber organizations, and our management was replaced over and over again by people brought in by other people who did not understand the fundamentals of our products. We'd lost our way.

Then the economy shit the bed, so we began losing our jobs: not the people making the bad sales projections, or the ones manipulating the stock price; but the ones who knew how the products, customers, and industry, worked. The slide was long and painful with ever more poorly thought out ideas to expedite for month after painful month until their progenitors in the corner offices took the time to understand that their misinformed notions had failed.

It's all moot when you're sitting there in your cold kitchen in february with your ex-wife telling you she needs money, the COBRA paperwork demanding money, the daycare needing money, and the house a mess and the groceries unbought. The tipping point came when I flipped open the nice corporate blue dossier sent to me by the 'career transition team' my former employers had thoughtfully signed up for me on my departure. It was an entreaty to 'foster a sales and marketing approach' to finding a job; to become a 'product' to be 'marketed'.

Something snapped, and besides the futility of shaking my fist at the silent heavens, I decided there had to be a way to scream my rage at the stars. At about this juncture I began joking with a publisher friend about writing a book about it all. We laughed about potential titles and left it at that, but over the next few evenings I found myself laughing about it some more, so I began writing.

Proposals, tables of contents, chapters; it's all forming up, which is interesting from the standpoint of somebody who's unsure of how the book will end: it's evolving; it's ALIVE!

So this blog will keep track of progress and whatnot, but it will not be a reflection of the books' contents nor will it be written in the style I'm using for the book. This will be a raw and unedited brain dump from the mind of a newly divorced dad who got laid (off).

Now to find out where all this is going next.

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