DeFuniak Springs is an older town, with
older homes, around a sinkhole lake.
It's the winter home of the Chautauqua.
Old Folks worked in a community behavioral health care center outside town on Highway
331.
It was a long commute, from Panama City, and mostly he remembered the
drive, writing poems in a composition book, as he drove, and the contrast between
the unspoiled country he was driving through and the overdeveloped country to the
south, where the beaches were-between north and south Walton County. They were as
different as Loxahatchee and Palm Beach.
* * *
At first, Old Folks didn't have an office, and he worked from home, several
days a week. After he got an office, he felt a pressure to come in, and work from
work.
So he also had a sense of agenbite of inwit about his job.
Remorse of conscience. Guilt.
He procrastinated. He surfed the Internet.
He typed up what he had written on the way to work.
There was also fear.
Fear of the sack.
It wasn't an irrational fear.
If you work on a
computer, supplied by the company, Big Brother is watching you, and the protections
you have from the government, as a citizen, you give up the minute you accept a paycheck.
The Bill of Rights does not apply to an employer.
* * *
Old Folks quit his job to promote and sell Bukowski Never Did This
when it came out, and write books about doing that.
One place he would promote
and sell Bukowski Never Did This was at a used bookstore in DeFuniak Springs.
He went in there most days at lunchtime.
If something happened to delay
the publication of Bukowski Never Did This, he would write about how that
made him feel. What a bummer that was.
* * *
Nobody wants to read books about what a bummer your life is. But if your
life is a bummer, what can you do? Old Folks finally got someone to publish one
of his books and things started happening to fuck him up.
It was just Bush,
the economy, the War on Totoism, junior stores boarded up, with We Support Our Troops
painted on the plywood, they didn't see the connection between the War on Totoism
and boarded-up junior stores.
Old Folks offered to write a column for several
left-wing magazines, but they weren't interested in what Old Folks sent them.
So he did the job himself, he called himself a senior fellow at the prestigious left-wing
think-tank the Point and Shoot Institute (PSI).
He said that the PI
novel didn't stand for post-inaccrochable, what you wrote when you couldn't
sell what you wrote, but for public intellectual, a man with no visible means
of support.
No, ha ha, day job.
Don't quit your day job, boys.
Old Folks quit his day job prematurely, he had begun to fear. And a prospective
employer would want to know why he had quit his day job. Would he quit them, to
write books he couldn't sell, if he sold one?
Old Folks might quit.
He had a history of quitting. Or of being let go for having an attitude.
Old Folks had an attitude.
Would you hire an older person with an attitude?
A person who would quit his job in a recession?
Such a person was a loose
can on the deck.
A 55 gal oil drum of aviation gasoline, unleashed from its
moorings, rolling to and fro on the deck.