Letters From Little Rock

As always I’m of two minds about how best to deal with the division between work and life. We all know the day job is not nearly as important as the real work, whether the real work is writing poetry or planting turnips or restoring antique sewing machines. It’s just awfully hard to get paid for the real work. I think sometimes that I’m tied to the day job a little too strongly and would be better served if I quit and went to work for taco bell or something. Of course I’ve been poor and there really is no way to compare the free time I had then to the free time I have now. For one thing working at the lower end even when you do have time off you frequently don’t have time to enjoy it. In the middle class pay range I find myself in now, I can hire someone to fix the car or replace the motor on my washing machine. When you’re poor you get to do those things yourself or they don’t get done. In some ways money really does equal time for me at this point.

On the other hand, I’m finding myself sort of stuck at the day job. Unless I’m willing to go get a business degree, it looks like I won’t ever get promoted again. On the other hand I’m already making way above what a fellow with a high school diploma can reasonably expect to make. The way I see it, four years with no spare time to write poetry and drink wine would be a pretty arid four years. I’m going to turn forty this year and the years between forty and fifty are typically pretty productive years for writers. That’s not to say that writers inevitably decline once they hit fifty, but their aren’t a lot of folks who produced their major works past the half-century mark either. Basically the way I see it is that surrendering that much time out of what I’ve always figured would be my best decade would be giving up way too much.

I’m starting to understand the traditional Chinese idea of retiring from life, someday if I can just lay my hands on a couple of quiet acres in the woods I might try it.

The job is starting to be a major source of stress again. It seems like we go through this every couple of years. Reorganization that is. Or disorganization. What ever you want to call it, it has made me stop and think, “five years ago when I thought this place was @#&@*! up like a football bat, those really were the good old days.” I guess a lot of it has to do with the fact that every time we think there is a light at the end of the tunnel it turns out to be just another train on a collision course with ours. I have sneaking suspicion that every job feels that way a lot of the time if you are the kind of person who has a modicum of dedication and feels obligated to earn your pay, but lately I think we’re even stressing out the slackers.

On the other hand my next book is coming along nicely. I had planned to have it out in the spring of this year, but I may hold off until fall. There are a couple of things that I have already grown to question about it and I think it is really a kind of transitional work in a way. It’s hard to think of it like that when it isn’t even complete, but I see a lot of subtle changes in it that are probably not going to be obvious to the casual observer. Mostly it’s that I have a broader view in this than in my other two books, but at the same time a sharper focus.

I think.

I haven’t written anything new in a couple of months and that is usually a pretty good sign that I have gotten something out of my system so I can move forward to a new mode of expression so I’m a little nervous and expectant about what the new phase may turn out to be. Maybe that is what is exacerbating the work stress. I have coworkers who are more directly and negatively affected by what is going on because they have had to work seven days a week except for a handful of holidays for almost a year and a half now. When you do that your body becomes almost immune to the elevated background level of adrenaline. I know because 2005 was a similar sort of year and it took me almost all of 2006 to actually relax and enjoy a weekend off from work. Working 60 and 70 hour weeks is not just counterproductive, it’s a waking death. I hope we have found another light at the end of the tunnel, and I hope this one will not turn out to be the midnight ghost. Even first class freight trains are a bummer of a ride when they’re on the wrong track.

This has probably been the busiest couple of weeks I’ve had at work since I don’t know when. I used to have a couple of fellows in the office with me who had the same job duties I have but in different departments. We were all under different managers, but the same director. Those two lucky bums are both on dayshift right now and my lot in life is to be the last man standing on second shift. It wouldn’t be so bad but we are currently trying like the devil to iron the kinks out of a new engineering/manufacturing process and still not run afoul of the FAA, so things have been a little hectic the last couple of weeks. I’m not normally the type to stress out too much about work or take it home with me, but I have to admit I’ve been bugged and it’s creeping into my dreams lately.

I can usually tell when things are getting me down because for some reason I always have dreams about school when I’m stressed. Usually though it will be some weird combination of school and work. There were times back when I worked at a warehouse and had to work a lot of twelve and fourteen hour days, that I dreamed I had to pass a spelling test or something before I could load pallets on a truck, or maybe I would find myself in dispute with my supervisor and wind up having to go to detention hall. I’ve had that type of dream abut every other night for the last two weeks. I barely remember the one I had last night, but the general gist of it was that my high school friends and my coworkers and I were all employed at some kind of boy’s ranch/flying boat excursion service and there was some danger of not going to college if we didn’t make our flights on time. It was pretty neat to watch the flying boats take off because they were roughly the shape of a paddle wheel boat except with big stubby wings and a tail. They pulled a kind of Disneyland stunt on the passengers. They would take off from an ocean front area and fly around the city for a while then the pilots would pretend they were having engine trouble and make an “emergency” landing in a canal and boat their way around the city and wind up back at the harbor. Meantime me and my buddies were trying like the devil to get one up and running and someone cheated on a true false question and the flying boat took off with one of its wings held on with duct tape or something. Needless to say it crashed. The odd thing was that we weren’t really upset about the fiery deaths as much as the idea that we would have to repeat a grade and not make it to college on time.

Weird little dream. I didn’t get to finish it though because someone was making ungodly racket on the street in front of my house at 7:00 in the morning. I couldn’t figure out what it was but it sounded like someone dragging a metal trashcan down the asphalt.

I was thinking yesterday while I was at work that I was overlooking something. For years I used to work in a warehouse that expected us to be at work before sunup and stay until after sundown most days. There were plenty of days that it was rather like working in a cave, especially during the winter months when the days were short anyway. Unless I made an effort to go outside on break it was easy to lose track of the weather entirely. There were several occasions I worked through tornado warnings and never even realized we had had more than a friendly little shower. I was thinking about that without really paying much attention to what I was thinking. What I was really thinking was about how far away some of the departments I have to visit on a nightly basis have become. The business I work for is expanding and the footprint of the facility keeps becoming more and more splayed out. I have to walk further and further to perform the basic functions of my position. Despite the fact that I have basically a desk job at this point I probably log more miles than I have since the days when I was working in a warehouse. However most of those miles are outdoors now. It’s something I might not have noticed or appreciated if it hadn’t been raining. It’s hard to explain to a lot of folks that one of the perks of the job is the occasional stroll in the rain. Heck, sometimes there’s even freezing rain, you can’t get that working inside.

I stayed in all day, feeling low and mean. My day-job, which is actually a night-job, went a little crazy towards the holiday season last year. I work for a corporate aircraft completions center (the planes fly to us plain-Jane and are supposed to leave as luxury jets) and our schedule was pretty much ten hours per day during the week and eights on Saturdays and Sundays for the last two months of the year. Needless to say, I’m not the sort that likes having his routine affected in that way. One of the reasons I quit my warehouse job several years back was to get away from nonsensical working conditions.
Corporate jets just seemed like they couldn’t help but be built in a more professional environment, and by and large they are, but the last two months have been pretty basic business 101 affairs. You know what I mean; “If one man can do a job in 40 hours, can forty men do the same job in one hour?” The answer is pretty obvious, but we kept running the experiment just to make sure. Luckily, I work in one of the few industries where there is still some competition for employees. It’s our custom to shut down for two weeks at Christmas. There was some danger of not getting that break this year. I must say I’m just as spoiled as the rest of my co-workers because I felt pretty much entitled to it and pretty hacked-off that we might not get it. I did remind myself from time to time that when I worked my warehouse job I had to work Thanksgiving and Christmas day more than once. Luckily, the magic number was reached and we did in fact get our time off for the holidays. But I still don’t feel like I’ve had a day off since about last November.

I can’t say that the work is so stressful or that my life is either, but sometimes the creative bug begins to grow and metamorphose and you become somewhat anxious about the end result; begin to wonder whether there is a butterfly or a hopeful monster lurking in your future.

I’ve been going through some slow process of evolution as a writer and I know I’m on the cusp of something substantially different than what I’ve written before. Of course, we all grow and change—that’s not unique to those of us who have a creative streak—but sometimes a change in style or voice can be a little trying while you’re still finding your way. The endless days of overtime held me in a painful state of suspended animation, certain I had new wings but unable to test them. Even during shut-down I couldn’t seem to get back on schedule and only half-heartedly made the attempt to write. It’s difficult for me to adapt to fluctuations in my schedule and it’s only with difficulty that I even sat down to edit what I hope will be my next collection of poetry, a sequence of some five-hundred or so haiku forming a loose narrative. It will be more-or-less the diary of a year with a strong taste of the seasons as is customary with haiku. I hope to have more news about that soon. I spent several days during shut-down trying to find a better deal than 1stBooks.Com currently offers and it looks like I might self-publish through Lightning Source next time. I’m not sure when I will have a definite announcement to make on that account as during the editing of my book I discovered that there was some imbalance in the final structure and to correct this I really should write another twenty-five or so haiku just to flesh out certain ideas I want to give proper exposure. That is the crux of yesterday’s miserable feeling. Most of the haiku—practically all of them—were written last year and prompted what I feel is the current change of direction in my poetry. But I’m not certain I won’t be strangling the changeling in its crib if I stop myself from exploring the bounds of these new rhythms and voicings to go back and complete last year’s thought. Still, this sequence of haiku is important to me for a number of reasons I won’t go into, and if I don’t bring it to its full realization, I’m quite certain I will regret it one day.
Of course, I’m going to try to finish off the thing with as much grace and panache as I can, and no small amount of affection, but the difficulty is real, though surmountable. It reminds me of when I was in school and quite certain I would one day make my living as a cartoonist. Every summer I would see my skills grow and change and then have to endure the nine months of stagnation and atrophy we call high school. It used to take me a couple of weeks at the beginning of every summer to get back to where I was the previous fall when school interrupted. Compounding my frustration, then and now, is the fact that October through December is my most fertile period. Don’t ask me why, I don’t really know, but just like there are morning-people and night-people, I’ve always been at my best in the fall. I like everything about it, from autumn leaves to Halloween to peace and goodwill to my fellow man. Actually, I think it’s my life-long curse of procrastination that makes me feel fall is so productive. In my early twenties I always added up the total number of poems I wrote every year as though it somehow mattered and inevitably somewhere along about September I would go into a state of deep depression about my lack of production for the year and somehow or another turn out most of my work for the year during those last few months. I know it’s silly to add up poems like so many bushels of peas, but at the time I was trying to prove something to myself (showing off in front of god, I think they call it) and having something to show for my effort was a vital part of living with myself. I guess that is the reason the timing of the current change of style has been so stressful to me. Thinking about it, it occurs to me that there have been many watershed years for me as a writer. In fact, every few years I find myself looking back and saying, “You know, that is the year I really started to get the hang of it.” I’m sure I’ll look back one day and realize I didn’t get the hang of it until someday that’s still a long ways off.

Now there’s a comforting thought for a winter’s night.