i don’t want to start any blasphemous rumors but
i think that god has a sick sense of humor
and when i die i expect to find him laughing
–Depeche Mode

I was 22 and times were tough. I walked over the Willamette River on the Hawthorne Bridge. Rain soaked in through the holes in my shoes and socks. I made it to the program office where they had computers long before the Web for job searches and writing resumes, but I already knew where I wanted to work, and quite a lot about where I didn’t.

The program gave out a small number of bus tickets and this partly solved the soaked socks problem. I was a dutiful attendee at the sessions and eventually I got ready to graduate.

Graduation was a mock job interview that they videotaped for later critique.

Even then I had a good handle on what to say and how. I aced the interview. But then something strange happened.

The guy across the desk, whose name was Marv, turned off the camera and looked at me. That was fine, he said, but something was bothering him.

He took a breath and continued, working up the courage to tell me the truth. Eventually it came out this way.

“The real problem here is that somebody told you you were shit, and you believed them.”

No one has ever been more right, and I knew it immediately on some cellular level. This was the opposite of fake news.

The story of my life and especially my working life since was written as an attempted response to that truth.

It isn’t easy to change an ingrained belief like that, but I have tried honestly.

The someone who told it to me was of course my father. My father, The Man.

Rejecting his injected belief has looked the same as rejecting The Man. Even during the years when I was working so hard to believe that I myself too had what it took to be as a man.

I got the job I wanted soon after. It was at a library. Life started to change for the better.

In my most recent interview, at a library, I told the ladies of the committee that libraries were (professionally) the last best place, and I do believe that. Academia is the Mater, the Mother, and the library is the most motherly part of it, the part most intermittently insulated from the way of The Man.

There isn’t any better or less false place to have a day job.

***

I wrote that late on Saturday. It is now first thing Tuesday which for me is 10 AM.

Meaning, writing it sent me into a 2.5 day funk of unsuccessfully trying to forget that I let them get to me.