As you know, Howard had been employed as a civil servant, cleaning public parks and toilets for a generous 9 dollars an hour. But after Howard's last check for 760.00, and with his duty to Uncle Sam looming , Howard has quit his civil job and found greener pastures by stepping back into his old role as a catering professional. Howard feels good to be making 3 dollars an hour more, but still balks at the thought paying for his life in this brave new world by carving beef loins at weddings.
But the anxiety Howard feels in his soul is not so much from the size of his debt, it is from the humility he feels when he considers the paucity of his real skills. In college, he was trained in the art of deconstructing Walt Whitman and appreciating Rennaissance glazing techniques, and he has found these skills to be quaint, but not necessarily suited to his life in the world. He often fantasizes going back to talk with himself at the age of twenty, and to firmly lecture himself NOT to take out a bunch of student loans in order to fill his mind up with all sorts of anti-capitalist and leftist ideas from literature. Howard should have gone to business school, joined a frat, married a debutante and gone directly into the financial sector. Then, after amassing a huge personal fortune, and bilking many working class folks of their retirement funds, Howard could have jumped ship and moved to Tahiti to get fat and bloated like Marlon Brando. Then he could have sat on the beach and written tawdry novels that excoriated the Catholic Faith and praised the New World Order.
Oh Howard, it is so sad when you get cynical.
Howard is not, by nature, a cynic. He finds the above paragraph offensive and doesn't even believe he wrote it. It was his demon Jimmy that has these thoughts and he apologizes to his readership for this bit of trash.
Well, it is late, and Howard has an early morning. But he has meant to hold forth on the subject of one's dreams versus one's reality, when one takes into account one's actual limitations. Howard should have learned more from his humble Norse ancestors not to expect too much from himself, but to simply find a means to be contented with one's lot.
In the next few days, Howard is hoping to compile the list of al of his past jobs, which may go well into the low hundreds. He hopes to find a pattern in this list, which may lead him into the next glorious phase of career, which shares the same latin root as careen, as in "Jim's mercedes swerved out of control..."
Careen- to move swiftly and in an uncontrolled way in a specified direction : an electric golf cart careened around the corner. [ORIGIN:influenced by the verb career .]
Lawn-Mower, Corn-tassel puller, fry cook, golf-cart bartender, Mcdonald's cook, car lot attendant, framer, oyster bar cook, line cook, movie extra, window manufacturer, bell hop, sod
layer, landscaper....
