Gay Cowboy Boots

It's been bothering me lately that I've slipped into lazy habbits here lately, and pondering why that was I reasoned that it's been a lack of writing. However, it's just struck me that, really, that's untrue - I've been writing quite a bit here and there, it's just been job applications. Taking into account the dreary nature of such a thing, you can no doubt see quite clearly why I didn't consciously consider it writing, no? In any case, here's the latest, dear reader, should you be interested. It's perhaps not of great narative merit, but it's something, certainly.

It's rapidly approaching two thirty in the am, and I've spent the last hour or so lying naked on the floor smoking a cigar and listening to bad Japanese pop songs. It's been one of those days. I woke up at about a half past noon in the suit I'd been wearing the night before. Lighting a cigarillo for breakfast, I stumbled out to the couch and flicked around on the TV until I found Top Gear to watch until I felt awake enough to venture out into the streets. By that point, I noticed that I was hungry enough to eat the couch, so streetward it was.

Eventually I found one of those kebab places. I don't even know why there are so many around; they're all exactly the goddamn same. They all have the same pictures in the window, the same prices, the same menu, the same slightly bored, brutally casual staff - how does something like that get carbon copied so many times over? Anyway, I just got something with lamb drowning in an ocean of chili sauce. There wasn't anywhere to sit myself down, and I was a bit too ornery at that point to care much, so I just turned the corner and saw a closed down shop front with a dilapidated table out the front. I collapsed on the thing and hunched over in one glorious, timeless moment, grease dripping on my chin, burying my face in cheap meat and bad salad.

Really, it's amazing what something like that can do for a man's morale. Spiritually refreshed from my King's Feast, I felt ready to start handing out CVs again. It's a depressing business, it really is. Then again, I assume you already know that - presumably you must've thrown out at least a few in your time, eh? Even so, it's a bleak process. People pretend like they're doing me a close personal favour by even deigning to talk to me. Why is that, I wonder? I mean, these aren't prestigious vocations I'm applying for, here. I'm just going into florists, clothes shops, book stores, housewares places; retail jobs, you know?

Well, that takes it out of you something chronic, so after another unsuccessful day I dragged my feet home again and played bad video games drinking an ancient bottle of coke until we come back to the jolly old start of our bed time story here with me naked on the floor. What's my point with all this? I'm looking for work. I've had a lot of shit jobs, I really have. I've worked in a solar pannel factory stacking crates throughout the night, I've worked in kitchens where I had to unclog dead cooked rats from the bottom of the deep friers, I've worked in new age hippie crystal shops serving self-styled druids and warlocks. I did phone surveys and door to door sales, two jobs which both paid me to take abuse eight hours a day. Hell, I worked night shift at a pancake place where almost every other member of staff was constantly high.

What's my point here? I graduated univeristy at the start of this year with my bachelors in Professional Writing. Talk about limited job options, huh? Look, I know I can write. I can write damn well. Writing is the one thing I do that makes me feel like I'm not wasting my life doing nothing. All those shit jobs, I'd come home feeling dejected and lonely and pathetic, and I'd write. Writing can be about anything! Truth, beauty, humanity, inhumanity, nobility; tender care, mad desperation; anything. It's humbling, thinking about that.

I want to write. That's it. Just write. That doesn't sound like a lot, put like that, but all these job applications don't seem to want that. They want me to answer questions like "what three words would your closest friends use to describe you?" "could you rate your need to succeed from one to ten?" and, my personal favourite so far, "which of the following colours would you say you most associate yourself with and why?" I don't want to jump through hoops of pop psychology bullshit. Every time I fill one of those out I feel like sitting down and staring at the wall for a very long time.

So that's the long and short of it. I really want a job where I can just be me, where I can just write. If you have any vacancies, I'd be delighted if you could rescue me from this circus of banalities. We could sit on the roof drinking tea in the rain. Doesn't that sound nice? Or even if you aren't hiring any writers at the moment, maybe you know somebody who is? Really, at this point, I'd take any lifeline. I hate this pit of misery that is job searching.

Help a guy out?

- M. Stone