Bouncing Back in a Big Way

I’d like to write a nice blog for the kids teaching them a valuable lesson about how hard work pays off. Something about how if you just work hard enough towards your goals all your dreams come true. It'd be nice to say that all my hard work had finally paid off, but for me, that wasn’t really the case at all. After working hard to try and get a steady a job with good pay doing whatever I thought I’d be good at, I fell ass-backwards into the perfect job. Other than doing well in an interview, I struck gold by chance and by chance alone. I guess it really is better to be lucky than good. 

I wanted to pick up some extra work so I emailed the guy who hired me in Panama City Beach, hoping he might have some projects he could put me on for a weekend or two. There was no elaborate cover letter explaining why I'm such a good worker. In fact, I didn't even attach my resume. He told me they were about to hire an intern for a promotional college football tour, and it turned out I emailed him on the last day of interviews. 

He happened to work just outside of Charlotte and two hours later I was sitting across a desk from him being told what the position entailed. A tour manager and I would be traveling to college towns across the South in the most bad ass RV I've ever seen and going to some of the biggest college football games in the country. My job would consist of organizing promotions for a barbecue sauce company and executing them at bars and tailgates. It was only an internship, but the pay was decent, and the experience would open up some doors for me. I absolutely murdered the interview and walked out of the office with near certainty that I got the job.

A few days later he emailed me. He said the decision came down to me and the guy who had done the same job last year. They decided to go with him because he had the experience of already working the job and he already knew the markets they would be going to. It wouldn't have been fair to not let someone come back who had done well for them the previous year. It was basically the same outcome as almost every job I had interviewed for that I had really wanted in the past year and a half. I was a great candidate, but there was always somebody else that had a little bit of an edge on me. I felt like the wind was out of my sails again and I was back to aimlessly bobbing around in life.

I continued reading the email as he further explained why I didn’t get the internship. They felt that I was overqualified to be working as an intern. Instead, he wanted to hire me as a tour manager for another promotional tour. They had decided to let an employee go and I would be his replacement.  I would be traveling the country to work at NFL and MLB games, I would be making much more money, and I would be promoting one of America’s largest breweries and one of my favorite brands. I’d drive a mobile bar to tailgates in different cities, have my expenses covered, and have a new team of promotional models to manage at each stop. 

It was about as close to being a professional tailgater as I could imagine. Instead of having to pay to travel around and go to sporting events, which was all I really wanted to do anyways, I found a way to get paid to do it. I’d get to do for a living what some people would kill to do. I still didn't have my own car and I was relying on Dan for a place to live when I went to the interview. In a few short days I got one of the only jobs that would've made owning a car and having my name on a lease more of liabilities than assets. I suffered another maniacal laughing attack, but this time it was about how so much that had once been problems in my life and how nothing going at all as planned had suddenly paved the road towards landing the perfect job. 

"Destruction leads to a very rough road
            But it also breeds creation
            And earthquakes are to a girl's guitar
            They're just another good vibration" 

-Red Hot Chili Peppers

Losing Face at "Leather and Lace"

              I finally got the promotion I was waiting for. Good news, right? Wrong. This is when the series of unfortunate events began to get more twisted and sinister than I ever could have imagined. When other jobs I had interviewed with called me I told them I was all set for work. Days later I was told our budget was suddenly cut, work would be slowing down, and the season would be cut short…. right after I killed any headway I’d made on my backup plans. I had a new title for my job and some more responsibility, but I wouldn't be receiving the hours I had been expecting.
             Dan got the job in Charlotte and would be moving there soon. I had planned for either Dan leaving and me getting the promotion, or Dan staying and not getting the promotion. Dan leaving, me not getting any more hours, and being without a car was a scenario I didn’t even consider. The one upside to this was that Dan getting the job gave me the confidence that I would get my shot one of these days, but I was seriously running out of patience. Whatever pride I had left would need to be swallowed as I sunk to new lows in my attempts to pull things together. I was…in a word…fucked. I had spent the summer barely working enough to get by and waiting for the full time job that was always right around the corner. I couldn't fake the confidence anymore. Who was I kidding? I felt like a clown.

I don't mean to get excessive with the bitching about my life on this blog. I would like to say that after the few short weeks it took to lose my money, girl, only mode of transportation, one of my only friends south of the Mason-Dixon, my ability to sleep for more than two hours at a time, my health, my sanity, my dog, and any hope that stability in Raleigh would come soon, that the “Debaucherous Descent” had finally hit rock bottom and it was time to bounce back. Sometimes you feel like you hit rock bottom and bounce right back. Sometimes you hit rock bottom and you start drilling into the bed rock.

It was back to square one. The plan was to move in with my boss and, once again, go for any job I could find in his neighborhood to supplement my income until I had enough to buy a car and figure out the next step. My life was like the Greek myth of Sisyphus. I was eternally damned to keep pushing the boulder up the hill towards my laughably simple goal of stability and car ownership, only to have it tumble back to the bottom when I was about to reach the top.
 Dan wanted me to move to Charlotte to work on his team. Raleigh was a great place when I had a little money and the ability to get around, and I still wasn’t ready to just give up and start over again in a new city.  No disrespect to Dan and his mad amounts of managing skills, but having him as a boss when he only got the job because he was having his stroke of good luck while the timing for me was all wrong would be a tough pill to swallow.

In the end, my decision to move to Charlotte wasn’t much of a decision at all. It’s weird how the most trivial things can happen at a vulnerable time and completely change the rest of your life. My boss had to register his car and get a license plate for it. He wouldn’t have a car for a few days or so, and I wouldn’t have one to borrow to continue my job hunt, get to interviews, or even move my stuff out of my apartment. It seemed like all the forces of the universe were telling me to get out of Raleigh.

"Just a song before I go, a lesson to be learned. Traveling twice the speed of sound, it's easy to get burned". - Crosby, Stills, Nash

If life has taught me one thing it's that the second best asset you can have when you're down and out are reliable friends. The best asset you can have are reliable friends that owe you favors. I had loaned Dan money for months and he was happy to return the favor in Charlotte now that he was on the up and up. 

I drove to Charlotte because I could work there that week and I couldn't in Raleigh. I didn't know if I was gone for good, or if I would come back to work in Raleigh the next week. I would like to say I left Raleigh the way I remembered leaving all the other places: with the sun on my face, "Free Bird" blaring out the windows, and looking forward to the adventures that lie ahead.

But, since brutal honesty has become a theme of this blog, I'll admit that my departure from Raleigh was different.  I didn't drive with the soothing melody of Southern Rock in my ears and the excitement of moving somewhere new. There was no "Free Bird" coming out of the speakers. Just the muffled rage of late 90's rap-metal. I left Raleigh at night in the middle of a thunderstorm and feeling like a chump while listening to Limp Bizkit and trying to convince myself that I “did it all for the nookie”.  

          Sure, some of the major problems in my life were working out. I had managed to save a little bit of money, but it was always one step forward and two steps backwards. If there was a point where it seemed like a culmination of everything that had gone wrong had come together in one moment, it was the morning after I arrived in Charlotte and drove to pick up some food. I was driving when I felt the tire on the car deflating and pulled into the nearest parking lot. I got out of the car to see a massive tear in the tire. I still had all my belongings in the car from moving out of my apartment the night before. Then I realized where I was: the parking lot of the beat up shack that is Leather and Lace Strip Club…. with a flat tire… and everything I owned in the car.  It was just a flat tire, but it was the straw that broke the camel’s back. The wheel was rusted on and I knew there wasn't a spare buried beneath all my stuff in the trunk.

Yes, that is a pregnant stripper that chain smoked cigarettes. Classy lady...

I couldn’t think of a more poetic setting for the end of the “Debaucherous Descent”. It was so perfect that I almost wanted to give up right there. The only problem was I didn’t even know what giving up would consist of at that point. When your life gets so embarrassingly fucked up that you don’t even know how to give up there’s only two things you can do: cry like a pussy or laugh like mad man. I laughed. I laughed hysterically. I laughed harder and louder than I’d ever laughed in my life. I laughed like Walter White when he realizes his money is gone and the cartel is on their way to kill his family:

For no reason whatsoever it was the happiest I had been in a month. Call it a decision to accept the idea that I could no longer control my fate, or call it pure insanity. I had seen the highest highs and some of the lowest lows in the past year of my life, and it never correlated with hard work or lack thereof. I had spent almost as much time regretting decisions as I did thinking every choice I had made panned out perfectly. I didn't care anymore. I had no fight left in me.  I put forth an honest effort at living a stable life with the resources I had, and I failed miserably. I made a decision. If my life was going to be unstable and chaotic beyond my control, I was going to embrace every second of the madness. I would spend the next months moving around as much as I could. It was back to the "go-for-it" mentality and time "to get reeeaaal weird with it".

  

 "It's only after we've lost everything that we're free to do anything".  -Tyler Durden, Fight Club

 

House of Cards

I guess if I’m going to brag about how awesome I was at life when I was living on the beach picking girls for bikini contests on Spring Break while talking shit to all my readers who work in cubicles, it’s only fair to be honest to my readers when things go horribly wrong. When you only need a few things to be happy, you only need to lose a few things for that happiness to escape you. Sometimes it seems like when one thing begins to head south, everything else follows in the same direction. When it rains it pours. I know this is usually a result of taking risks that have led to far more good times than bad times and almost no boring times, and for that reason I can’t regret it or blame anyone else.

I had everything I wanted at my fingertips, but it was all a house of cards. Every day I went back and forth trying to decide if I was either the luckiest or unluckiest guy in the world. I was losing my mind waiting to figure out if the promotion would actually come through. The more time I spent waiting was more time to think too much and to lose the confidence that things would work out as planned.

Countless problems that I had always managed to stay one step ahead of began catching up with me all at once. It seemed like every day another problem came up that I couldn’t solve while trying to save all my money for other things. My health began deteriorating right as my healthcare ran out, possibly due to my diet of hot dogs and ramen. The lease on the apartment would be up next month, and all future planning relied largely on whether or not Dan was staying and I was getting the promotion. My only way of researching jobs and apartments was my lap top, which was barely functioning. Large chunks of the car were falling off and it felt like every turn of the key could be its last. Insomnia was kicking in and money needed to be saved for things other than sleeping. I was wise enough at this point not to rely on the promise of a full time job when it hadn’t come through for me in the past. I was back on the local job hunt and getting the same results as the last one. With transportation being highly questionable, where to look for jobs depended largely on where I would be living next. With each problem being either the cause or the effect of the next one, every dime I had needed to be rationed out to try to solve them in order of importance. They were all problems I had been prepared to deal with if they happened one at a time, but the problems were coming in waves. I thought I’d be working full time soon after I got back from Myrtle Beach, and every day I didn’t was another day I got further from things going as planned. 

“We got no food, no jobs... our pet's heads are falling off!” – Dumb and Dumber

 

Hole in One or Stuck in a Hole?

I knew it would still be a while before my life reached what most normal people would consider stable, but to me everything seemed rock solid. I would have a few months of cheap rent where I could live on a budget, pay off some debt, and buy a car while I figured out a way to move up in the industry. 

As luck would have it, later that week I found out the staff wasn’t getting cut and I still didn’t have a full time job. It was a pretty big slap in the face for my hopes of finding stability in Raleigh. I could stay afloat for a while as long as I was getting decent hours, but with no certainty about how much I could work it wasn’t a very comfortable position.  At least the new neighborhood had more to offer in terms of jobs I could walk to. I quickly learned that that didn’t make a difference with school out and no customers or job openings at any of the businesses. No one would be hiring at all for a couple months.  It was only days earlier that I once again felt like I had the game of life bent over with its cheeks spread, and now it felt like I was the one with my jaws clenched on the pillow.

I got an email from a girl I worked with in Panama City Beach. She was organizing an activation in Myrtle Beach and wanted to put me up in a beach house for two weeks to work it. I was still loaning Dan money and having enough money for just food and rent was becoming a concern. I was going a little bit crazy from passing most of my days staring at the blank walls of my near empty apartment while not having the money to do much else.

I started to realize how people that hated their jobs could still be so happy with their lives. When you dread the way you spend your work day, you’re happy the moment you leave the office just because you’re not at your miserable job. When your job is paying you to go to the places you used to go on your days off, relaxing loses all enjoyment and turns into boredom and feelings of underachievement. My sanity was relying on me getting back to working full time almost as much as my bank account was. At this point in my life I had gotten pretty good at finding ways to survive in financial situations that would make most people run home to their mothers. I could stretch the money I would make in Myrtle Beach until I found another job.

 It was the day before we left for Myrtle Beach that Dan had worked at a conference for a bunch of our company’s executives.  He was pulled aside by a manager from Charlotte and she told him she heard we did great work in Panama City and that we weren’t getting the hours we wanted in Raleigh. She asked if anything was holding him back and offered him a job as a manager in Charlotte. He would be moving there soon after we got back from Myrtle Beach. I knew Dan was never as into Raleigh as me and I was happy that he got the promotion we were both looking for, but I also knew suddenly being out of a car would pose a problem. Raleigh is a sprawling city with absolutely hopeless public transportation. I had lived in plenty of places where getting by without a car was completely manageable, but this wasn’t one of them.

A couple days later my boss called me and told me that with Dan gone, I would be promoted and working full time in Raleigh. It sucked that my hetero-travel mate would be leaving my side, but I had been spending most of my time with a girl anyways and I would be getting an unexpected promotion and the full time work that I had moved there for to begin with. Between a bike, the company car, and rides from my coworkers, I would be able to get around for the time being. I would be working enough to buy a car and I could save up enough money to sign another lease once the summer was over. The plan was in place and this time it had to be reliable…. It just had to.

I spent the next two weeks working at the beaches and resorts at Myrtle Beach. I got back and waited for that email confirming that Dan had the promotion in Charlotte and I would get mine in Raleigh. We waited…….and waited……and waited…….

"Make the best use of what is in your power, and take the rest as it happens".  - Epictetus