I Want to Be a Motivational Speaker or Some Shit

Or, maybe not.

I don't know.

Thing is-- I know I can't do what I'm doing right now forever. It's not a forever job. Most people who work where I work, for whatever reason(s), kind of don't make it to retirement. Chances are, I'm going to leave, either of my own accord far in advance of retirement age, or I'm going to leave of someone else's accord, also far in advance of retirement age. That's just the way these sort of things happen.

And I guess I'm okay with that.

I'll just do some other random-ass thing that has no business amongst the cavalcade of other inappropriate, bizarre, what-the-fuck jobs that have somehow landed on my precious little resume since around the time I graduated college.

Hey-- what's one more, right?

But I was thinking today of things I might like to do that I haven't yet done. Not necessarily things I have a whole kit bag-full of aptitude for-- after all, when has that ever stopped me?-- but things that appear, at least superficially, to be interesting, engaging, challenging, rewarding, fun, stupid, easy, offensive, confusing and/or on-track to keep me flirting with the poverty-line, as I seem to be destined to be for the remainder of my life.

Here's what I've come up with so far:

* A manicurist

No real sound, logical reason for this one, other than the fact that you get to spend inordinate amounts of time with attractive females who give you inordinate amounts of money to paint their fucking fingernails (I do this for my wife for nothing-- and pretty well, too) and I would really be breaking through that cultural stereotype barrier that dictates this position only be held by 17-31 year old Vietnamese women with an English vocabulary of exactly twelve words. I mean, before you accuse me of being a racist bastard, ask yourself how many heterosexual, Jewish male manicurists you know?

* A surgeon

I'll be honest, I just want to cut some sleeping motherfucker's belly open and see all that crazy shit in there. I'm sorry, but that's what I want. I once had the (privilege?) experience of attending an autopsy, but everything was cold and still and nasty and smelled like shit and, well, the motherfucker was dead. I want a sleeping motherfucker. How many times have we heard me say that this week?

* A voice-over actor

Let's face it, I'm awkward as fuck to look at. Those of you who know me know this. But I don't think I'm jerking myself off too badly when I say that I do fabulous voices. I'd happily go off to work for Pixar or Warner Brothers or some shit, have them draw some gimpy-ass cat or a homicidal pelican and have me voice that bastard. I think it would be successful. Just give me a chance!

* A research scientist

That way, I could spend most of my time doing not very much, while justifying it as "brainstorming" or "engaging in hypothetical analysis" and then conduct some inane study on, I don't know, say bats and wind turbines and then ruin somebody's perfectly good idea with the results of my inane study, thus, getting me a grant to do a new one!

* A motivational speaker

I'd be all like, "SHUT THE FUCK UP, YOU SNIVELING CUM-WALLET!"

* The host of "The Price is Right"

Is everybody in this country completely fucking synapse-fried, or does nobody notice that Drew Carey is single-handedly destroying the integrity of this show? He's spiteful, he's degrading to the contestants, he's brusque and rude, and, worst of all, he's insincere. You can tell by the wan, mincing way he reacts when the female contestants come up and kiss his cheek.

Me? I'd stick at least three fingers up each of their assholes. And I wouldn't be insincere about it either.

* A dockworker

I've always wanted to wear a pea-coat. Do dockworkers still wear pea-coats?

I'm a Checker

HEY! Remember my phoneterview?

Yeah, it turned out that it was for a part-time job. No benefits. No point.

Queen Quieff on the other end of the line wasn’t exactly apologetic about the fact that the job listing made no mention of the fact that it was a part time job. Instead, who apologized? Me.

“Well, I’m sorry for wasting your time,” I said. Oh my God, my balls must have been the size of Grape Nuts that morning.

Sad, isn’t it? I even went home that day and checked and re-checked and re-re-re-checked (because I am a checker, and a re-re) to make absolutely sure that the listing really said nothing about the job being part-time. It didn’t. Of course, it didn’t say anything about the job being full-time either but, really, when you’re looking for jobs, don’t you assume that a job is full-time unless the listing states otherwise?

I do. But maybe I’m wrong about that. Sorry for wasting your time.

I have another interview coming up, though. Soon. This one is live and in-person, but the interviewer will be male, so I won’t have to worry about getting caught ogling pert boobage. I’ve been emailing back and forth with him for just over a week, trying to coordinate a mutually agreeable time for me to come in. He’s a good-natured guy, you can tell, because I would have told me to fuck off and not bother a couple of days ago. Wednesday at 7:15am. That’s right, children—7:15am. Since my blogs post at 7:18am, you know that the early morning business bothers me not. In fact, it’s my preference. I needed to interview either before my current job starts (9:00) or after it ends, (3:30). This guy’s work-day doesn’t start until 8:30, but he’s coming in at 7:15, just for me. In fact, nobody in the building will be there at 7:15, except the two of us.

I sent him an email asking if this was business casual or business formal, “the difference in my world,” I wrote, “is the subtraction or the addition of a blazer.” He wrote back that I would be “just fine without the blazer.” I like him already.

I’m still scared I will throw up on him, or blurt out the N-word, or fall down a flight of stairs, our spill piping hot coffee on his genitals, all things that can happen at a live, in-person interview, but I guess it will probably end up being okay. I am, after all, only looking for a job to do from the time my own job ends in late August, till whenever a police department comes knocking on my door saying, “Son, we want you to join us.” But, you never know… maybe this will be the chance for me to get paid every week for… you know… writing.

Maybe this will be a career, instead of a job.

I’ve never had a career before. I might like me one of those.

Maybe.

A New Job Applicant

We all know that my final day of employment at my quaint little non-profit is August 27th. Well, okay, maybe "we all" didn't know that, but now we all do. Sorry-- sometimes I think you're a little more involved in my life than you probably are. After all, I'm not the only one on your blog-roll, even though I should be.

(Love me. Pet me. Reassure me and, while you're at it, switch on the nightlight, too, please.)

The current plan is to go back on the street as an emergency medical technician, scoring a job at a first-rate ambulance company and enjoying the pleasures of a uniform allowance, twirling and flashing red lights, a stiff pay cut, and coming home to my wife smelling like a mixture of blood, urine and diesel fuel every day until my back gives out.

While that's the plan, it doesn't hurt to have a contingency plan. That's just what my parents advocated when I told them I was going to major in theatre in college. And look what happened.

After last night's passage of the historic health care bill, I think I've decided what my contingency plan is going to be. On the off-chance that I do not get hired at an ambulance company, I am going to apply for a position on one of these new-fangled "death panels" everybody's talking about.

While they haven't officially been formed yet, I know President Obama is hard at work on the creation of these panels, which will be critical to the success of his new healthcare initiative. After all, nothing says "healthcare" quite like "death panels."

I think I would truly be an ideal candidate to participate on a death panel. While I admit that I don't have any actual, practical experience in killing people, I certainly have enough scholarly knowledge about anatomy and physiology to complete the task expeditiously. I know all about the choice killing points in the human body: the carotid artery is a good one to slice & dice, as is the femoral. Of course, if you're not into gore, you can always smother grammaw with a pillow. Pillowcases are easy to wash and there's no insidious-looking "murder weapon" that you need to worry about hiding from the po-po.

There are other key points that make me a superior death panel candidate:

* I despise old people.

Let's face it: they smell and are relatively useless. Get one to start yammering on about the price of a loaf of mayonnaise in 1937 and you'll need to ram a loofah bar down his throat just to get him to shut the fuck up. I'm not some teary-eyed sentimentalist who would leap at the opportunity to sit at the gnarled, hammer-toed feet of some crinkly-assed cardboard-face and listen to her drone on and on about shingles or Sears & Roebuck or whatever the fuck old people talk about and pretend I'm getting pearls of wisdom dripping from the corners of Merlin's eyebrows. Man-- fuck that. Let's ice these creaky people.

* I can make the tough decisions.

Not that it's a tough decision to pull the plug on some wasted away, Chicklet-toothed, ventilator-hogging great-great-grammaw with one lung and a partially-deflated basketball for a head. Just like at the Colosseum: Thumbs DOWN, motherfuckers!

* I like the word "panel."

Discussion panel. Wood panel. Panel curtains. Panel saw. Solar panels. The National Mathematics Advisory Panel. The Walt Disney World Moms Advisory Panel (for real). Crossing the English Panel. Seriously-- I'm all about that word. I even like the sound of it. "Panel." It's not pronunced "Pain-ul." Because that would be too close to the word "Anal." And that's just wrong.

* I'm obsessed with death.

What better job could there be for someone who can't get enough fetid detritus, decomposition, and demise? I mean, besides being an on-scene accident investigator for the National Transportation Safety Board or a vulture.

I'm always talking about death in one respect or another, and I live in constant fear of my own death, contrary to my mother's instructions. I constantly go to doctors and have them inspect moles and cut them out and show them my penis because I'm convinced I have some life-altering social disease and I am always looking for sores inside my mouth because I know I have oral cancer because I smoked cigars when I was twenty and maybe being around actual as opposed to imaginary illness and death would be a good thing for me.

* I like to get dressed up.

I'm assuming that, being on something as serious-sounding as a Death Panel would require at least a shirt and tie, if not a sport coat or an outright suit-- at least on decision dates.

I certainly hope these panels get started up and that the White House starts disseminating application materials for interested applicants soon. I'm sure they will-- I know it's the Obama administration's ultimate desire to murder as many elderly and infirmed people as humanly possible. And he'll be great at it, too. If he hires me to help out, of course.

I can't wait to get started on my new career!

The Girdle Man

I went to have breakfast with my father on Thursday morning.


"We should do this more often," he said to me afterwards. "And you should be the one who is inviting me."


At least he didn't say that I'm the one who should be paying.''



My father always says what he is thinking. At least, I think he does. If he holds back, well, that would be scary, because I wouldn't want to know what is going on in his head if it contains a vault of things unsaid.



In dubious English.



He invited me to Saxby's, a burgeoning coffee chain that has franchise shops sprouting up like zits in this particular part of the world. The first time he asked me out to breakfast with him, he told me to meet him at "Sexboys." This was, to the best of my knowledge, an unintentional malapropism. Since he has been corrected, he persists in mispronouncing its name, but now does so cognizent of the error, and he now jokingly refers to our breakfast haunt as "Sexyboys," "Sexy's," and, most recently, "the Xylophone place." That last one I can't figure out for the life of me. My wife, in great consternation over this moniker, proffered, "Well, do they play xylophone music there?" In a stunning role-reversal, I put my hand on her shoulder and said,



"Honey, don't think so much."



When I pulled into Sexboy's parking lot, there was only one other car there-- my father's jet black BMW. I can't help but shake my head when I see this car. My father has a notorious hatred for cars, and they don't like him very much either. His first year in this country, he backed a car into a patrol car during a traffic stop for speeding. The next year, some maniac slammed into his car in a shitty section of Philadelphia. My father threw his car into drive and chased the guy for five blocks. At a red light, my father jumped out of his car and stormed up to the driver's side of the offending vehicle only to be greeted by the muzzle of a pistol being pointed at him. He wisely retreated.

Since the rockin' 1970s, my father has obliterated several other vehicles-- Oldsmobiles and Buicks, a Pontiac Bonneville. He's never killed a foreign car, so I guess it's good that, somewhere in the mid-1990s, my family decided somehow that it was too good to drive American cars anymore. Though a 1987 Volvo 740 GL quit on him in the middle of a snowstorm on the George Washington Bridge. My father took out his briefcase and stormed away from the car. "It abandons me? I abandon it! Fuck that!" he said when he got home two days later.



My father has always had a strained relationship when it came to cars. "A car is to get me from Poin' A, to Poin' B," is his most notorious vehicular catchphrase. Then what, you might argue, is a man espousing that philosophy doing behind the wheel of a BMW? Well, all I can say about that is, we're human beings. And what would we be if we weren't constantly contradicting ourselves? We wouldn't be being very human now, would we? Make too much sense and people will start calling you an animal.



Getting out of my car at Sexboys, I turned and caught a glimpse inside the window of my father's BMW. Thank God for cameraphones:

My father's BMW looks like a cubicle in a "Dilbert" cartoon. If you look really closely, you can see a sticky-note placed right in front of the speedometer. I guess this isn't really as dangerous as it looks: my father never looks at the speedometer anyway. He might as well have Post-Its covering the side and rearview mirrors, too.

I got my usual: meat, cheese, egg, bread-- coffee: whole milk and the sugar container upturned for forty-five seconds. He got his usual: light cream cheese on a sesame seed bagel-- coffee: black. When our food was on the table, I looked at the two disparate meals and wondered if I would be getting the bagel and black coffee someday, my unhealthy, poor-postured son seated across from me consuming copious amounts of sodium and sugar. Some day, maybe. Hopefully. I don't know.

Our breakfasts together are, well, unpredictable. I never know how they're going to go. Yes, there's always pontificating and swearing and at least some laughter. Or at least a derisive smirk and snort. There's always coffee. Ever the Israeli, he gave me my first taste of coffee when I was eight years old, and it flows through whichever veins of mine are not obstructed by pork detritus. Yes, I eat pork. And he eats shrimp. And God laughs at us, and at those who keep kosher. I think he's only ever really disappointed at the people who shoot each other in the world's alleyways, and when Joy Behar opens her mouth.

I told my father that I will be leaving my job in August to return to the streets as an emergency medical technician. It's funny-- I was afraid of telling my parents this because, as someone who holds a bachelor's degree (admittedly, it's in theatre, which is as useless as holding a bachelor's degree in strawberry cupcake development) and a master's degree, I was worried they would chastise me, maybe appropriately, for wasting my intellect and my life on a, well, manual career of certain poverty and servitude.

But, you know, my father rose to the occasion like the hairy, Israeli phoenix that he is. He didn't cut me down, or berate me, or make me feel guilty. He didn't tell me he was wasting my life. He was just my Daddy, and expressed his fears that I could be hurt in an ambulance accident, or be attacked by a psychopathic patient.

"Or partner," I chimed in, reminding him of the thick-necked paramedic who once tried to brain me with a clipboard.

He smiled. "Right. Or partner."

Lots of boys grow up thinking that their fathers are brilliant men. My wife's father, for instance, is a brilliant man-- and I suspect that being brilliant isn't easy, because my father-in-law takes forty-five minutes to put on a pair of pants and, if you go to "Target" with him and you're not careful, he will outright vanish-- possibly teleported to a Mensa meeting. A longtime friend of my wife's family described my father-in-law this way,

"He'll never look you in the eye. His eyes are always up, staring at some invisible chalkboard-- that only he can see-- and it's probably got all these complicated equations on it-- stuff you and me would never understand."

I don't know if my father is brilliant or not, and I'm not sure I remember ever thinking, when I was a boy, that he was. One thing I know for sure is that he and I are well-matched, in spite of the disparity in our command of the English language, and how different our breakfast choices may be. My wife's father has his invisible chalkboard. My father has his dashboard cubicle. It's all the same, really. More or less.

"What do I know?" he said to me one day, during a discussion about one of life's greater questions, "I'm just a girdle man." This he said with a twinkle in his eye, parrotting something I said to him years ago. He's the president of a company that makes undergarments for women-- and men-- and I said to him one day, not in anger, but definitely with great insensitivity, "Daddy, you're just a girdle man." I said it to him after he asked to see some piece of creative writing I'd done at age 12.

Just a girdle man. God, what an asshole I am. At least he's able to laugh it off now. Come August, I'll be "just an EMT." The son of a girdle man.

Praise be.