I know shit jobs. We all have our reasons for finding ourselves in a shit job, whether it's a little bit of self-sabotage, or just general bad life maintenance, or your run-of-the-mill Celestial nut check.
There are times in life where we can be Our Own Worst Enemy, yet there are also times when it really just seems like God's balls are on your face everywhere you go, and no matter what you try to do, you will always walk around being the perpetual victim of a Celestial tea bagging, born to lose. I don't like the concept of God half as much as I like blaming myself, so I try to leave God out of it, though sometimes I do find myself looking up the sky and saying '-fucking really bro?'
When you're down in the muck, working a shit job, or just in a bad place in life, blaming yourself can be very helpful, if it's your fault. Just knowing how much is your fault can be helpful, maybe it's 60/40, or 70/30, or maybe you genuinely just suck at life, or maybe 'God doesn't like you, God never wanted you. Maybe he hates you.'-sorry, I quote Palahniuk a lot lately.
Ah yes, self-inventory, the driest of dry masturbation. That's what I was doing on a windy December evening back in 2013. I was staring out of the windshield of a 93 Dodge Caravan, smoking a roll-your-own, having what I call the 'king Theodan moment', you know that moment from Return of the King, when Theodan realizes how bad things are and mutters 'How did it come to this?', I was doing one of those.
Driving a cab is almost always a terrible job. I averaged about $3 an hour, $6 an hour when I broke the rules. When you hear a phrase like 'the juice isn't worth the squeeze', that's cab driving. As unlucrative and soul-crushing as it can be to drive a cab for a living, there are things that can make it worse. Working for the absolute worst cab company in the county can make it worse. Driving a 20 year old minivan on three wheels and one 50 mile tire that has about 450 miles on it, that can make it worse. Learning that the same 20 year old minivan is referred to all over town as 'the rape wagon' because again you work for the worst cab company in the county, and somewhere along the line there was some raping going on, that definitely makes it a little worse.
After a few weeks of being angry, making the Steven Seagal face and punching your steering wheel, it starts to become routine, and becomes your life, and that's where the true anger is born. After a while spent at a shit job, you stop being so angry at how shity it is, and start being angry at the fact that you've been doing this shity thing for so long, and then comes the depression of knowing that this shity endeavor that you've been set upon and this shity feeling that you've earned might never go away, this might be it, the last job you ever worked. Now we're moving on toward fear, and that's where I was on that dry windy December evening, parked next to a big round trash can in a gas station parking lot on the bad side of a shity town, smoking a roll-your-own, staring out of the windshield, dissecting the nightmare, having no idea that I was on the precipice of a profound discovery.
