Workingman’s Blues#3: Capitalism, pure and simple

2011 was a breakout year. I devoted all of my money and most of my time to being a writer. I wrote. I drank. And I spent allot of time in the pool at Oak Run in the pre-dawn hours with a little firefly of a girl who shall not be named. She got hitched and moved to South Carolina that fall and they closed the pool. I was sitting on 4 short stories and a stack of poetry. I had $200 to my name but very little to show for being a writer or a musician. $40 more than what I moved to town with 2 years before but worse-my despair was choking me of all my inspiration. There are many pitstops on the road to living your dreams. They look just like roadblocks though, and it can leave you rueing the words of your Father, questioning your very worth and asking yourself
Who am I to live my dreams?
The pool was closed. I was out of money. I failed.

Then something remarkable happened. Well, two things actually, and they both involved conversations with a firebrand, redheaded hippie-chick from Washington named Gioconda Parker. She’d go on to become a Guru for me and a dear and cherished friend for the rest of my life. But I wasn’t out of the woods yet…

The following is an excerpt from my interview for an Events Bartending position up in Hill Country. You can live your dreams. You’ve got to learn to lie a little on your way there, though-something I never really got the hang of. This is for all you dreamers out there; and for all you dreamless corpses smugly conducting interviews in climate-controlled offices without ever knowing what it’s like to starve to death.

“I know you’re a musician so, hypothetically, what if you were offered a really big gig on a night when you were booked to work with us? What would you do?”
“Hmm. Let’s see…I of course would have to decline on the gig and come work for you and the company. It being that you’re paid $35 for every hour I work for the client and I only see $12 of that, it would pain me for you and the company to miss out on the $23 an hour you usually make off me for doing nothing while I hump trash cans and cinder blocks from the wet bar and am being talked down to by your sawed-off team leader at some filthy rich wedding in the bitter cold sticks of Bumblefuck, TX without a staff meal or gas money.”
“Sounds great, James.”
“Good Juan, I’m glad you approve. It’s capitalism, pure and simple.”