The wicked workaday world of the West.

When I graduated and moved to the city, I knew I was in store for what some warned would be a rude awakening. Despite these warnings, I strode headlong and cocksure into the world with that most foolhardy of chips on my shoulder called youth. I am ready, I thought, for whatever the world can hurl my way. Celestial aspirations, brute will, and fearless resolve will make up for my lack of experience and render success inevitable.

What I underestimated was life's capacity for rudeness and, indeed, the inventive methods it would employ to bend me over and violate, humble, and humiliate me in ways that defy the limits of imagination and human flexibility. In fact, the world wasted no time making its supremacy known to me with a swift and definitive smack-down. The vehicle life chose for this metaphorical cock-punch? A job.

Don't get me wrong, I've worked before. I've been everything from a "backroom boy" at a pizza joint (a job whose duties seemed to include all of the tasks too foul for anyone else to partake in) to a door-to-door newspaper salesman ("Would you like to subscribe to the SunScribe for the low price of...Yeah, I wouldn't either. See ya.") to a caddy for a lesbian, country-club golfer ("Will your husband be joining us this afternoon...Oh. She is quite a catch, ma'am."). In spite of this wealth of worldly experience, there was something missing from these jobs that effectively shielded me from the realities of the working man and allowed me to maintain a level of dignity and sanity: they were all part-time.

Now, lo these few months later, I am working full-time as a bellman (a "frontroom boy", if you will) at a local, faux-swank hotel. The hours are long, the work is by and large thankless, and the amount of time left to devote to my nobler pursuits -- be they honing my shotgunning abilities or perusing the culturally edyfying offerings at gapethathole.com -- is virtually nil.

All of that is to say that the world is pushing me hither and thither and what I've come to recognize is that (gasp!) it will continue to do so. My humble pledge to you, to myself, to whoever reads this little corner of the blogosphere (myself), is to return to my original goal...

I want to write. I'd like to be able to call myself a writer. And legend has it writers write. My small taste of the working man's life would lead me to wager that the majority of them do it in spite of and because of the external forces of the world threatening to pull them apart and push them under at the expense of the relentless stampede of survival. This is what I must do. It is my compulsory but self-inflicted millstone. And so I write...