Fuller Wiser

I read an article in the New York Times this morning about starting a small business. And of course, as I feared, the pangs began.

When my wife got pregnant back in 2005 and we started making plans to move back to Texas from child-unfriendly NYC, a major component was me staying home with the kid during the day and running my own business at night. I knew people who had been successful running the sort of business I wanted to operate, so I figured I could pull it off.

Well, a few things happened to that plan.

First and foremost, the birth was a disaster. The short version (I’ll likely reveal the long one in future) is that a natural birth turned into a botched c-section, which turned into major post-natal complications, which turned to post-partum depression for both of us, which to be quite honest, hasn’t completely gone away. Its effects, such as weight gain, chronic sleep deprivation, and the resulting fatigue, are lingering, and will be a factor in our lives for the foreseeable future.

The second obstacle to our plan was the business model. The friend whose business I used as an archetype of my own had gotten his start in the early 1990s, at a time when the industry in question was rather different than it presently is. The thing he got paid decent money to do then was the sort of thing one can do oneself for very little money now, and I hadn’t realized how prevalent the cheaper option had become in the intervening years, and worse, I actually believed experience added value to my offering. Pfft.

But the third stumbling block was in fact the hardest to take, and that is this: Put in a situation to pursue my own business, at long last, after years of corporate subservience, I discovered that I am a slacker.

Not the egregious kind of smokeout slacker, the couch-surfing sugar-momma bait, or the mom’s basement Hutt. But the sort that, when presented with a few open hours, stands a 50% chance of using that time to do completely unproductive things. Even when he knows that his income is dependent upon him using that time to drum up business. How the hell did I become that guy?

I’ve mentioned this before, but I used to think of myself as someone with a very powerful work ethic. That’s the sort of person I wanted to be, the kind of thing people always said about my heroes in interviews. I believed it about myself, and a good deal of the time, I acted as if it were so. I certainly worked harder than a lot of people I knew, and that work contributed to the body of knowledge and experience I currently have, despite failing to derive any financial success from those efforts.

But in amongst all that hard work were large blocks of what could easily be seen as wasted time. I wasn’t a drinker, nor a smoker, nor a womanizing raconteur, but I did enjoy a good party, as described by me and my dorky friends, anyway. Late nights of pizza and RISK, cash-draining road trips, movie outings, aimless drives out in the country searching for inspiration and solace, these were the stuff of my unmarried twenties.

Marriage brought more opportunities for unproductive time, and this is the first time I’ve ever admitted that in writing. I certainly don’t hold my wife responsible, as I am quite capable of driving my own slacker bus, but having a significant other hanging about the house very naturally expands the possibilities for your free time. Fun possibilities, but not productive in a career sense for most of us.

As my twenties progressed, the system breakdowns lurking in my genetic grab-bag began taking hold: Slower metabolism, intestinal trouble, sinus issues, bum left knee, and so on. Who knows, my aforementioned thyroid deficiency may have gotten its start ten years ago. Whatever the case, I still had the same amount to do, but less energy with which to do it.

Add to that state of affairs the regular ego-beatings attendant to an unsuccessful stab at an artistic career, and the available energy begins to slip down the graph southeasterly, year by year. Which brings us to the present, in which nearly all of the already diminished energy left to me is spent taking care of a toddler.

Well, obviously I’m a fool. Attempting to start a business from scratch while learning the ropes of parenthood and simultaneously battling a downward spiral of emotional state and energy level is about as stupid an enterprise as I can now imagine. I have no idea why it seemed sensible to me at the time, but mind you, “at the time” was before the birth of my son, and in the cocoon of idealistic inertia, before any rubber ever touched road. “We’ll make it work,” I said. It’s the sort of thing people say when they don’t know what the hell they’re doing. 

Because of course we didn’t make it work. It didn’t work at all. What we’re doing now is what I hoped we wouldn’t have to do, albeit on better terms than I feared. And I can’t see a way out of it, not really. Idealistically, sure. But the numbers, that’s where I always fall down. Making A plus B equal C. I’m a perfect expression of the old formula:

1. Idea
2. ???
3. Profit!!

I’ll be 34 soon. Given my genes, that’s a little over a third of the way to Beulah Land. Not old enough for midlife crisis, nor for wistful hindsight, but just old enough to start looking silly as a 6-foot-4 man behind a receptionist desk.

I know. I KNOW it’s sexist. I’ll be the first to complain about that, since I know women who have been trapped in assistant positions well into their dotage without meriting a single consideration that maybe they should be promoted. But the fact is, I really don’t know how much longer I can do this. In the rather likely event that I will experience another layoff in my adult working life, would a 40-plus man applying for an assistant job get laughed out of the room? 50? 60? The prospects get worse year by year. Yes, I’m now making more than I ever have, and have more experience than the little sprouts who I generally compete with for this sort of job, but at some point people just get uncomfortable with an old man making their copies for them.

I saw it in action once. I was temping in an NYC finance office, and my agency sent us a new temp to help out during the busy season. The guy was 50 if he was a day, and all of us, including the middle-aged supervisors, felt really weird about giving him the shit jobs he’d been hired for. I mean, the poor bastard. He’d probably been somewhere for a good while, maybe since he was a young man, but just hadn’t felt compelled to climb the ladder. Then wham, they pull the plug on him, like they tried to do to my old man at least three times in 30 years, and he’s up a certain creek without a certain implement. And now he’s doing the best he can, getting work where he can find it, and he gets a damned pity party from the youth brigade.

That experience has stuck with me, obviously. What is the endgame for me, assuming my artistic projects (stuck in the hobby arena for the foreseeable future, as previously reported) never provide me a living?

A couple of years ago, I thought I had a handle on the answer. But then some slacker showed up. A very tired, disillusioned slacker, who might once have been a true believer, who knows. One thing I’m old enough for is forgetting who I once was. I can give you a rough sketch, but how much of it was artifice and how much foundation, I really have no idea now. But I’ll tell you this: I don’t like it, and I don’t know how it’s going to end up. None of us do, of course. There I go, dragged back down to earth with the other mortals. I grieve.