History

"Poetry lies its way to the truth."

-- John Ciardi, How Does a Poem Mean?

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Woke up this morning and my joints ached from so much sleep. There's a passage in No Country for Old Men where Sheriff Bell quotes his father, who said that there was nothing that could set a man's mind at ease like waking up and not having to wonder who he was. Or something like that.

There's a lot of talk these days about what makes you you. Whether it's what you do that defines who you are or who you are that defines what you do, or where or when or why you do it. I don't think it's really a question. It's just one group of folks seeing one circle on the Venn diagram and ignoring the cleft crossover and refusing to see the other circle altogether, the other folks doing the same just on the other end. It's a hockey game without goals but every player a goalie.

Thing is, it all doesn't make much difference when I log onto my online bank account and realize I need another job. That a man--even a young man in a destitute city--can't live on part-time alone.

So I opened old annals, looking for phone numbers I forgot years ago. Job histories. Names of managers, supervisors, co-workers who said I could have folks give them a call in the future. Addresses. Dates of employment, causes for cessation of such. Responsibilities. Duties.

Condensed all of it into a single Word document. All of it, since bussing tables with Mexicans and redneck white boys and database searches for insurance company moguls and watching delinquents spoil even younger minds and pulling for trap shooters in their fifties before the leap to theatre work, exclusive acting and publicity terms, laid out in two neat columns. Thirteen jobs at eleven employers, in eight years. It's what I've done. Seeing that. Seems so trivial and yet I did that every day.

I haven't needed this kind of generic information about my past since I last applied to an entry-level, non-specific job. Sophomore year of college. Three years ago, and a college degree in between then and now.

The last four jobs on the list, or the first four I ever had, bother me the most. The information is sketchy at best. Had to get all the street info from the internet, sometimes from websites that haven't been touched since 2005. One of the companies has completely changed names, and how do you report that on a job application? Not that the employment history section will allow me to go back that far. All for the best, anyway. Don't even remember two of the supervisor's names, and another I heard was thrown in the can two years ago for tax evasion and unreliable accounting practices--I can remember getting paid from that one with wrinkled bills in envelopes with our names on them, every Saturday, come in and count your ones, double-check our figures, boys. The underside of Nebraska recreation.

Arranged like that, the newest job first and the first job last, and looking at it in that order, is like doing a dance in reverse. Tracing origins with tenuous thread. Soupy tracks.

Makes me wonder what I'm building with all this, whether I've ever gotten past the foundation stage, whether I'm still pouring it. Sticking bricks in at random, lathering on the yearly paste with hourly haste, fiscal dreams inside the seams, amassing wages throughout the ages.

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Well.

Steakhouses open at four and it's three-thirty-seven. I've sat too long already.