Monday, February 2

TRANSITION. June 12 - June 26. 42,000 words. Brew is sacked. Or laid off for lack of work, with a severance package of ten weeks pay and the use of an outplacement services consulting firm. He begins working with Si'ne Di'e, in Atlanta. Gerald and Lowell talk Brenda into living in the old home place for seven years, when the deed will mature. She will sign an unrecorded deed, deeding it back to her siblings. We start thinking about moving to Parker and fixing up Granny Brown's house, saving up to buy it from her brothers and sister when the title is clear. Looking for jobs in Panama City. Brew meets with a counselor, takes a Resource Center orientation, to learn how to use job-search databases on CD, and takes two Core Competency classes, learning how to write a resume, interview for a job, negotiate a job offer. He networks with former OFÉ employees, wandering around with a 1,000-yard stare, lost as a haint. Brew does a career-focus, self-assessment inventory tool and realizes he does not want to jump back into the corporate rat-race as a senior information development specialist (technical writer), but might prefer to lower his standard of living and relax. He and Brenda discuss this, as they move forward, Team WUPPIE (willfully underemployed professional), moving (transitioning) into the next phase of their life, a kind of a pre-, or semi-retirement, full-time temporary, part-time permanent jakeleg, for-the-nonce bricolage type-deal, Swiss Family knacker-in-an-abattoir. Brew finds this liberating, and might even lighten up, man, lighten up, in his writing. Brew casts back over their life together as he summarizes his employment history, strengths and liabilities, wants, needs, and desires for his job search, and interviews with the counselor, to whom Brew is off the scale. A tough case. I continue to write YU News Service parody news and disiniformation syndicate bulletins from Slap Out, Alabama, making fun of the Bush Administration's War on Totemism, and posting them at The Daily Bugle. Brew is the YU News Miami Bureau Chief. Why you, why me, why anyone? Nobody knows the mind of an empty beer can but Jesus. I see parallels between my situation as a displaced employee and as an unpublished writer, and try to use the lessons of my consulting firm to help me find a publisher for TRANSITION. Begin writing FLORIDA BOY, but see that "Week One" of FLORIDA BOY is "Week Three" of TRANSITION and that Stinking Badges: Four Books About Art Brew is Stinking Badges: Three Books About Art Brew and Stinking Badges Revisited: A Book by Jack Saunders.

Oh, shit.

What was Brew going to do?

I worked here six years and all I got was a pink slip?

Well, a pink slip, ten weeks separation pay. And outplacement counseling.

Plus, when OFÉ bought APRF from Suent Scientific, Suent Scientific paid Brew what was in his retirement account. He rolled it over into an annuity. In five years, he could start drawing that.

That was more than he had when he hired on with Suent.

Minor chord. Fate motive in Faust.

Did Brew think he was going to hold a job in corporate America long enough to retire from it? Brew wasn't retirement material. Brew was expendable.

He had always know that. How had he suckered himself out of position?

When the 4 x 4 came through the convenience store door, after Alec Baldwin, in Miami Blues, he said, "I let this soft life I have been living lull me into a false sense of security." As his landlady sewed up his eye with a sewing needle and polyester thread.

Then Shirley Stoler cut his fingers off with a machete and Fred Ward tracked him down and shot him.