The one major flaw in this whole daily blog post thing, is that when I spend the whole day at the computer, I don’t have anything interesting to write about. On the other hand, on super busy days when I do lots of things worth writing about, I don’t have time to write about them. That’s true with many things in life, though, isn’t it?

My first full-time job was delivering patio furniture for a store that only sold patio furniture. Man, times have changed. Can you imagine a brick and mortar store only selling one product today? Anyway, the job was Monday – Saturday. It was 48 hours a week, mandatory, with no overtime pay for those eight hours on Saturday. I lasted a week, and began a routine of changing shitty jobs every few months. By summer of the following year, I was on my third job since quitting the patio furniture store. I was working for my local park district. The biggest difference between that shitty job and the previous two, was that at the park district I had a set schedule. Monday – Friday, 6:30 a.m., to 3 p.m.

It was a hard schedule for me because I’m not now, and wasn’t then, a morning person. Getting to work on time was extremely difficult for me, and I was drained at the end of every day. Of course, now, I know that much of that was due to an undiagnosed medical condition, but back then, all I knew was that all of my time was spent working, and I had no time or energy leftover to do anything that I wanted to do.

A few months earlier, I bought my next-door neighbor’s 1955 GMC Stepside for $100. I wanted to spend all of my time working on it, but I had this pesky job that was eating up all of my daylight hours. I talked to my mom about it, not so much complaining, but trying to understand what I was doing wrong, and to find out how other people got anything done with a full-time job eating up the most valuable hours of the day.

It was a paradox, as I saw it. If I wanted money to work on the truck, I had to work, but if I worked, I had no time to work on the truck, and around and around we go. She was mildly sympathetic to her teenage son’s realization about what it means to be in the rat race, but she was also like, that’s life kid, get used to it.

I never could get used to it, and so I would bounce from job to job, with huge gaps in between, alternating between having no time, and having no money. For the past five years, I’ve been blessed with time, and just enough money to get by…scrape by. I fill my time with things that interest me, and for the first time in my life, I’m content. Mostly anyway. I still have ambition, but I’m not pissed off and resentful that I have to spend all of my precious time doing other people’s will.

I don’t know what the future holds. It’s probably not bright, though. In all likelihood, I’ll have to get a job in my eighties as a Walmart greeter and work until I drop dead. Hopefully, the goals I’m working toward now will avert such a dark and grim future, but even if they don’t, I will continue to bask in the light of my present, until it goes out.