These are dark days, friends. And not just because that asshole sun hasn’t deigned to poke his fiery head through the clouds in about 52 days. No, the reason for the bleakness is that being job-free isn’t all it’s cracked up to be. I don’t understand, I mean when I grew up in the suburbs, all those stay-at-home moms whose kids were in school seemed to have it great. Mornings spent at the club pool, afternoons popping ‘ludes and a lunchtime quickie with whatever repair man or mail carrier happened to come around. Maybe I have to have kids and then send them off to school in order to experience that. But my job-free life is turning out to be somewhat unsustainable.
For one, I have no need to ever change out of my bed-clothes or bathe or leave the house. There is really no motivation for me not to “let myself go,” apart from the promise of a hairless, manscaped, gay repair man who likes slovenly, stretch-marked, job-free women, dropping by. And it’s making me feel bad about myself.
Secondly, it’s hard to make money without a job. Those two things — job and money — kind of go hand-in-hand, like homosexuality and appliance repair. Or television repair. Or toilet repair. Anyway.
Lastly, I’m realizing that you need money to do things you like. For example, I enjoy eating. You need money to buy food. I also like rubbing velvet elbows with European royalty on the slopes of Gstaad and inhaling African anthill-sized piles of coke, both things which require money. So my job-free days will likely have to wind down soon if I want to eat and mingle with celebs and gorge myself on drugs. Job search, here I come.
But there’s a slight hitch. I’m scheduled for a minor operation in February, which will require that I basically not leave the house for a month. Not a problem, since I’m already holed up in my apartment like a shut-in from “Hoarders,” surrounded by 15 years of yellowed newspapers, a roll-off’s worth of takeout containers and thousands of disembodied doll heads. But I’m going to need a job I can do from home.
And just in case you were wondering what procedure I’m having done, I’m getting a robotic knee implanted that will be controlled by Azerbaijanian elves from a tiny orthopedic laboratory deep beneath the Caucasus Mountains. I anticipate it being a good investment, not only because it will allow me to do physical activity without pain, but because I will be able to take care of any menacing thugs with one swift robotic kick to the babymaker.
(Actually, I’m getting a procedure called microfracture done to my knee because I am aging prematurely in my extremities and have arthritis. Sweet.)
So, I need one of those at-home jobs. I’ve begun brainstorming things I can do from home, but the list is pretty short at the moment. Many people have suggested that I become a sex-phone operator. I could see getting into that. I like to talk and I like telephones and I’m sure I could grow to like the sex piece of it. But I’m not sure about my acting chops. Because that’s what the job is, right? Acting? Like the people calling don’t really want to hear from the real you. They want you to be Tifanniy or Brittanye or Madyysin, not Lauren or some other old, pathetic person.
That’s what I would look like as a sex-phone operator.
It’s not supposed to go like this:
Caller: So what are you wearing?
Me: Currently, I’m wearing a hoodie with spaghetti sauce stain just under my left boob, sweatpants with a dry-rotted waistband, a T-shirt with yellowed armpits and slightly soiled boxers. And a leg brace. And some bandages covering a weeping wound.
Caller: (Click)
Although maybe it would work out here in Vermont, where standards of basic human comportment and attractiveness go to die.
Me: So what are you wearing?
Caller: I’ve got on a flannel shirt with patches on the elbows, a turtleneck with patches on the elbows, a thermal with patches on the elbows, another thermal with moth-holes, a pair of filthy Carhartts, a pair of filthier long underwear, some graying briefs whose elastic has shit the bed and four pairs of ripe wool socks. Oh, and overtop all of that I’ve got some grease-stained coveralls.
Me: Hot.
Another problem with being a sex-phone operator is that there isn’t really a dayside shift. Most people who call those lines aren’t interested in having telephonic relations while the sun is out. The shame is just too blinding during the day. So the sessions happen mostly at night. Which is an issue for me, since I’m in bed at 9 p.m. after watching a few dozen reruns of ”Antiques Roadshow,” circa 1995-1998.
Also, I’m pretty sure if I was to become a phone-sex operator, I’d be contractually obligated to start a blog all about my “crazy” experience. Like this one, or this one, or this one. And frankly, I don’t want to have to do anymore work than is absolutely necessary.
So I think that gig is off the table. Another job that I thought I could handle from home was a wet-nurse. Working moms of newborns still on the teet could drop their kids off at my milk factory cum apartment where I could nourish them in loco parentis. The kid wouldn’t know — a boob is a boob is a boob (except the ones with those giant nipples the size of Frisbees). Rich people used to do this all the time, back when feeding your own child from your own breast was unseemly and it took three hours to get unlaced from your corset.
Hopefully, I wouldn’t have to breast-feed Frida Kahlo.
The only problem I can see with the wet-nurse idea is that I don’t, or rather haven’t yet, produced any lait maternel. I mean, just the sight of these helpless, squirmy, raisin-esque creatures is not going to get the mammaries flowing. Perhaps I can just give them a bottle with their own mother’s milk. But then I guess I’d just be a babysitter and there’s no cachet to that.
One friend suggested I paint porcelain figurines like her aunt did once when she was unemployed. Apparently, she ordered the lead-based figurines from some shady enterprise based in Honduras or Taiwan or Cambodia and they sent her a box with instructions on how to paint on their clothes and faces.Then when she was finished painting, she would send them back to Bangladesh or Papua New Guinea or wherever and they would in turn sell them back to Americans at highway rest stops and amusement park gift shops. And that’s how I know it was a shitty job — because even the sweatshop workers of the third world won’t do it. So no thanks.
I will NEVER paint a cat figurine in blackface.
So the stay-at-home job hunt continues. I’m open to all ideas, unless the include they following: “How about you fucking kill yourself?” ”How about you go fuck yourself?” “How about you fuck me?” Because I’d rather starve to death naked in my hovel surrounding by a shipping container’s worth of feral cats than fuck you.
