01. Writer
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Brian Stout

02. Theme
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Work

03. MUSIC INSPIRATION
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Spanish Love Songs:
Losers 2

04. WRITING
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Sun in my eyes, windows down. I was singing loudly the frivolous pop of Phoenix’s “1901,” which did its best to insulate me from reality that late Friday morning in May 2009.

“Falling, falling, falling.” 

How apros-pos. I had just been fired from a job for the first time in my 17 working years. Still, there was enough going on to make this feel somewhat insignificant. Mom was sick. We found out in January.

At the time, research showed that Friday is the best day to fire someone, and surely that was a consideration. I haven’t kept up with the research (or found out how it works over Zoom, fortunately), but I know people text my current company’s HR department to say “I quit,” so could “You’re fired” be delivered the same way?

For a moment, I felt free, relieved. It was a swirl of that, along with anger and determination to show those elitist fucks I’d do better than them. I got down to the corner before I remembered that stupid pedometer was still hooked on my belt. They wanted us to wear them and try to clock 10,000 steps per day, just like the CEO did, a Steve Jobs wannabe who wore the same fucking dad jeans and black turtleneck every day.

I passed a co-worker or two on my way back to my car. I avoided eye contact after the first one. I wasn’t sure what else to do, so I was on my way to see my parents. I had a passing thought about how I was pissed that I skipped the Yeah Yeah Yeahs show two days prior, instead staying up late trying to meet expectations I knew I’d never meet.

The month leading up to this was hard. A meeting notice sent by my supervisor with no subject, which I’ve come to fear ever since. A set of absurd “assignments” on top of my usual work that we’re supposed to “demonstrate my commitment to the company’s success,” as though I was going to sink this ship that had just been purchased by Johnson and Fucking Johnson. Jump through these fire rings without so much as a singed hair or you’re out.

I should have just quit at that meeting, but I felt like I’d been punched in the gut. I limped back to my desk feeling like I was dying inside. I’d never been told my work wasn’t worthy. My friendship, yes. My affection and attention, yes. But I could always count on success at work.

I had set aside other parts of my life to put all my chips on succeeding in work. I allowed school and jobs to devour my late twenties, with my eyes fixed upon a meteoric rise for myself that I was already late getting started. I put my energy where I knew I could succeed, and it had been going according to plan. 

But then all of a sudden, it wasn’t.  The bottom had fallen out of everything. And at that point, I couldn’t see what was to come–a year of losing my mom, moving home because I was out of money and still unemployed, seeing my once-perfect credit score slip, and looking to faith for answers that never came. My mom died while my life was still a massive question mark, and that haunts me to this day. I don’t believe in something more anymore. I told my kids the best you can hope for is that the good stories will outlive you by a generation, maybe two. 

The “showed them” moment never arrived. Interview after interview, fake smile after fake smile, dashed hope after dashed hope. After a year on unemployment with no career opportunities on the horizon, I wound up back in retail, doing the same job I once did to keep myself in a crummy one bedroom while I wrote my papers and listened to Aesop Rock and Jets to Brazil, planning for a life where I’d be tenured and teaching composition, running a writing center. 

This time, I was trying to pick up my pieces while I helped the wealthiest people in Oakland County pick out bottles of fancy wine and find their vitamins. I hoped I wouldn’t run into one of my graduate school friends, me standing there filling up the Kombucha again before yoga class around the corner wrapped up. I endured verbal abuse from entitled assholes. I helped Geoffrey Fieger buy vitamins and gawked at Barry Sanders. I laughed at the inflated drama of One Percent Problems, but I kind of wished they were mine. I tried not to let it break me. After a few months of Nothing Better, it’s hard not to start telling yourself it would be fine to do this forever, to consider the idea that your goals and aspirations had been undone and may not get back on track. Things being tough all over provides only intermittent comfort.