Funny to think I'll have been at my current employer for ten (10) years at the start of next month. I remember when I reached the four-year point, thinking "Wow, I've never worked anywhere more than four years before..." -- and here I am, nearing the 10-year mark. I came into it a dewy-eyed 30-year-old with dreams of editorial grandeur (bahah -- yeah, right -- at the time I had no job, having left the other place I'd worked about six months before, so the Asylum served its purposes admirably, back in the day, although I remember thinking "This is the last 925 Grind job I'll ever have.") and will leave it a gimlet-eyed 40-year-old with far bigger dreams (and having seen all sorts of oddities and wonders at the Asylum -- all of which will be transformed and explored in fiction at a time of my choosing). Anyway, I definitely hope to get my 10-year pin before I flee the Asylum.
Led Zeppelin, "Ten Years Gone"
It's just funny to look back on the Year 2000, when I was 30. At age 30, I didn't write fiction seriously (sure, I did as a teen, and wrote my first "real" book at 29, but it doesn't hold a candle to the work I do now -- I've worked long and hard and have gotten better). I didn't have any children, yet (B1 appeared in 2002, B2 in 2005). Didn't yet own a home (did that in 2001). I got fully serious about my fiction-writing in February of 2002 (remember it vividly, writing in a journal -- I always kept journals -- something like "I can just keep going the rest of my life this way, without doing what I really want to do, without creating anything. Just existing." From that moment, I got very serious about my writing, and applied myself to the task). I was untested as a parent and as a father at 30, and found not only that I enjoyed it, but that I was actually good at it. I can't remember the exact point when I zeroed in on Exene as a major source of frustration and woe in my world -- I think it had to have been when the boys entered the picture, unfortunately. By 2004 or 2005, my teeth really began to gnash. 2005-2007 was when I started my first proper blogs, before burning out on them. It's weird to think of the period from 2002-2006 -- those are kind of Lost Years for me, because so much of that time was spent taking care of the kids and working. From 2001-05 we owned The Black House, and I had a daily 3-hour commute by train, which made my workday incredibly long -- although I wrote a huge amount of material on those long trainrides, made them work for me). I wrote a lot of review on Amazon in 2006 and 2007. And 2008, oh, my -- the Year Everything Changed. The Point of No Return. And 2009, the Limbo after that -- like the bomb detonates and then there's a pile of emotional rubble. And then it's quiet.
Anyway, it's 2010, now I'm 40, in a very different place than where I was. The same, and yet completely different. Like slipping out of the prison bars of my cell but still crunching around in the gravel on Alcatraz (barefoot, of course). But hopeful, more hopeful and less angry than I've ever been before -- and, oddly, peaceful. I should be very stressed, but I'm incredibly at ease, and I think it's because I'm doing what I want to do, instead of doing what I think I'm supposed to be doing, am trying to make myself happy instead of trying to make Exene happy (which was a fucking full-time job, without overtime pay).
I'll step out of the Asylum for something else -- ideally (god, yes) I can sell a screenplay and buy myself a year or three to write more. Long odds, but I'll try hard. Either way, if I find another Grind job that'll have me, it'll be only temporary, because I know what I want to do and where I belong. In a real way, I always knew, but I just didn't believe I had anything worthwhile to contribute, or was so busy trying to create worlds for Exene's amusement that I didn't have time to create my own. God, the wasted creativity of those years. Amazing, in truth. But I still have plenty of energy, am in my prime with plenty of time.
