...over 50 things I learned in over 50 different careerers (vol. 1)...

"Do not let what you cannot do interfere with what you can do."

-John Wooden-

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According to some websites on the internet the average number of jobs one works in their life is somewhere between 12.1 to 12.5.  By that metric, and likely that metric alone, I am an above average man.  

You see I am a man of many jobs, a jobber…someone who has embarked on many a career path, a careerer.  In my jobbing and careerering I haven’t stacked cash or coin or stock or path…no I have accumulated the next best things; knowledge, sore feet, chafed thighs, and an intense focus on trying to convince old men to smoke cigars with me.

I have worked over 57 (and counting) jobs & careers in this life and figured I’d do my best to promptly take you through a lesson learned from each and every one…there has to be some meaning in this…some clue to life’s purpose…some vision as to what is next…or maybe I have just been dicking around…

…Sparks - "Dick Around" (official video)…

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"It is never too late to be what you might have been."

-George Eliot-

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JOB :: FULL TIME BABY :: AGE < 0 to ~1.5

My very first job.  I sucked.  For a while I sucked full time.  I also shat and slept.  I was paid nothing for this.  Nothing but LIFE.  Remember no matter how simple, boring, or low paying your job is, to be thankful that you are alive.  Because you can’t be thankful you’re a ghost or a zombie or compost or dust.  Or at least if you are being thankful in that form it is going to be a lot more difficult to interpret that thanks from the living perspective.  Unless of course all existence is sentient and as humans our perception of inanimate communication is dimmed by life’s distractions.  I think this bagel just thanked me for smearing it.  It is welcome.

JOB :: CHORES :: AGE ~5 to ~13

Probably everyone had this as their first job.  It is not a job though.  There is no equity to the compensation.  A quarter to clean a car or two of them if I do the whole dang garage afterwards?  Chores are bribery.  They were my first introduction to the political intrigue that will haunt me deep into my elder ages. All my illicit land deals, falsified reporter suicides, and hidden anonymous island bank accounting was because I did chores.  If you ever signed a decree that led to drone bombing babies I guarantee you got a handful of papa’s pennies for cleaning your room as a toddler.  We are all corrupted.

JOB :: STUDENT :: AGE 0 to ~ (because we’re all a student of life yayayayaya)

The other job almost everyone had sometime in their early existence.  This and fishing.  It is a job that teaches you to do other jobs, and in that way being a student makes you a teacher (or at least a teacher’s assistant).  Everything you learn you can share with someone else.  But in this teacher-student relationship you must be certain you understand your role.  Teach a man to fish and you feed him for a lifetime.  But fish a man to teach and you are going to have mermen preaching seaweed logic to grade schoolers.  

JOB :: RAKING LEAVES :: AGE 7 to 10

Catching tree death to make puffy jump piles that filled plastic bags for cold hard cash.  The earth can bring you pain, joy and capital.  Childhood entrepreneurship had the same basic utility of my early adulthood internships.  I assumed I was building towards a mature and meaningful role in the broader economy, yet my value was seasonal at best, and entirely replaceable.  Had my mom thrown me into a sweatshop instead, might I be some captain of industry? Do not throw objects at me when I earnestly opine I should have been raking it in, but I was just raking it out.

JOB :: CARTOONIST :: AGE 9

The compensation for this gig was a free brunch at the Cincinnati downtown Westin for me and my mother and my aunt.  I drew eggs and bacon and I guess they came to life.  I had two drawing courses with the great napkin artist Emerson Quillin to prepare for this job.  After the brunch Boys II Men were coming to the hotel and my aunt made me wait to get their autographs.  I am hoping this was a bottom 10 groupie experience for them, though I did have a sweet bowl cut at the time.  Visualize your dreams (or brunch) and realize (or eat) them. 

JOB :: CAMP COUNSELOR :: AGE 13

This was a 1:1 job canoeing, camping and ziplining with a peer with developmental disabilities.  I have no clever thoughts beyond this was a near perfect job.  When you can help someone, you should.  The more opportunities I found to help someone, the more opportunities I have found to help myself.  Like for instance my buddy Matt never showered and loved drinking cape cods.  He got a nearly incurable rash that could only be resolved with cotton swabs and alcohol rinses.  I bought him a bottle of vodka and q-tips for the holidays but he told me he quit drinking. He also told me I could help myself though.  And help myself I did, happily pouring a cold glass of tasty.  Two weeks later I had the same damn rash.

JOB :: TUTOR :: AGE 13

The learning center I graded papers at was basically an extra homework school.  You can imagine the joy it brought its students.  Hundreds of pages of math and english quizzes to normalize studying abuse for absentee economist parents.  If you want to be good at something you need to do it over and over and over and over and over again…or be born as Little Richard…

JOB :: D.A.R.E. SPOKESTEENAGER :: AGE 16

I was a drug counselor for junior high school students for roughly four days before I got busted by my buddie’s parents smoking weed with their Dutch foreign exchange student, Johanus.  Multiple lessons learned…like parents know you are smoking weed when you rent all 66 Cheech and Chong movies and hide in their basement, and/or that the Dutch know how to roll double baseball joints but not really play baseball.  I don’t think I was ever higher than when my buddy’s mom made me call my mom to let her know I was high.  “Hi Mom,” I said.  “I’m high Mom,” I said.  “Goodbye Mom,” I said.  I don’t think I was ever more sober than when watching the 66th Cheech and Chong movie that next morning.  Be careful with your content choices.

JOB :: 15th MAN on a 15 MAN BASKETBALL TEAM :: AGE 14 to 18

I played a lot of youth sports on behalf of parental urging.  You can learn a lot about yourself depending on the sport.  In baseball I learned life is a lot of standing around until fast hard balls are tossed in your direction at which point you have to do something about it or get hurt and cry.  In football I learned that weird middle aged men love yelling at boys until they hit each other real good (the boys, not the men).  In soccer I learned orange slices are delicious.  In basketball I learned to love hiphop, headphones and trash talk and that you can upset someone a million different ways, but none better than insulting their mother. 

JOB :: RECORD DISTRIBUTION INTERNSHIP :: AGE 16 to 18

This job was all about taking the 1000’s of CD’s and Records that arrived at a warehouse and putting them in piles.  The piles shrinked as they became more valuable to the distributor, only the most pertinent content being worth the time to promote and distribute,  This left endless piles of music waiting to be consumed by the adventurous, bored and cheap.  At the time I was all these things and enjoyed each evening returning from work to sift through piles of sonic mystery in the hope of finding unheard of unpromoted treasure.  This was the original weird side of youtube approach, and brought me some gems like Dr. Octagon and The Frogs, but also led me to listening to far too much euro classical techno hybrids which were kind of a thing back then.  Regardless, you are going to have to dig to find the gems.

JOB :: DJ IN A NOISE BAND :: AGE 16 to Infinity

One of the first and most memorable concerts I ever attended was a chaos filled “noise” festival at an abandoned ice factory warehouse in southeast Minneapolis.  The final set of the show has a dude playing an electric beer can while the band beckoned the crowd to pelt them with snowballs.  Earlier four guys had played amplified oil drums with chainsaws.  From that point on I knew I wanted to be a musician, or at least pretend to be something like one.  Don’t be afraid to embrace the unknown…or to amplify anything…

JOB :: BALLBOY & POP-A-SHOT-KID :: AGE 17

I took a business internship class in high school where the main assignment was to get a job.  I ended up getting a three month pop-a-shot apprenticeship for our wolf themed NBA team in Minneapolis.  Perks included little children tossing you alley oops, buying pretzels in the third quarter, using a lanyard to sit absolutely anywhere you wanted, and walking across the street to catch the end of shows at First Avenue. You gotta shoot it if you want the prize.  You might not make it, but someone else may be there to assist and dunk it for you.

JOB :: SUMMER BASKETBALL CAMP COUNSELOR :: AGE 17 to 19

In some ways this was a promotion from pop-a-shot and playing, if only because the balls were now twice as large and the game was real.  Lots of dribbling, layups, and pretending to shoot a basketball like you were superman shooting out of a phone booth (the metaphor the local coaches used to encourage correct elbow placement for jump shots).  The moral of course being that even superheroes need to practice. 

JOB :: DEVELOPMENTAL COUNSELOR :: AGE 18

I worked a 3 month stint helping a teenager with physical and mental disabilities learn through play and communication.  Occasionally he got so angry he would throw things at me and his mom.  In this way I learned you can be creative with your communication.  You may not have all the tools to say what you want, but you can use the tools you do have to get your point across, even if that tool is a hot wheel and the point is to make me feel pain in my face.

JOB :: RECORD LABEL INTERN :: AGE 17 to 18

All the piss and noise of my youth led me to “interning” with the ever smoking, never sleeping, head honcho of an international experimental record label.  We would unscrew black labeled cassette tapes and make them clear by removing the insert color, because this saved us $.15 cents a tape.  Never mind this action took about 15 minutes per tape which meant we were paying ourselves $.60 an hour for the art.  This was a job filled with ashtrays, cheap jug boozes, and at one point crayon coloring over 6000 bears for a perverse english bluesman.  Cutting costs doesn’t always improve your bottom line.  Consider various methods for improving revenue margins.  Be wary of leadership who aren’t flexible to change.  Buy good crayons. 

JOB :: BARBACK :: AGE 18 to 19

This is a job where you move boxes and bottles and plates, cups and glasses.  You wipe messes, make faces, kind of talk to people, and try your best to help bartenders who are intensely busy have an easier time tending.  All of life is a show.  What happens on the stage wouldn’t work without the set makers, writers, ticket takers, and aisle sweepers.  Whether you are serving Ol’ Jimmy Boy a pint of lager and a shot of peaty scotch, or cloroxing the urine stain he left behind, you are part of the show.  Take a bow and watch where you step.

JOB :: BARTENDER :: Undetermined age for reasons of legality…

Remember when I was talking about all parts of the show being of equal importance.  Nope.  You are a bartender.  You are the star, the reason Ol’ Jimmy Boy will piss his pants with approval, and why Terry and Tanya are going to break up in two hours, while Timmy and Tina get loose, happy and horny next to the ice machine in two pours time.  You are the lead singer, the emcee, the ballerina en evant, and the people are paying for you to wizard them potions of change and rest.  When you get the lead role on life’s stage don’t be afraid to be a total rockstar.  Check the ID’s and don’t overpour.

JOB :: DOORMAN :: AGE 18 to Whenever

The doorman is they who controls the ins and outs of the world.  All of life is access.  The doors we walk through define where we are and what we might do next.  At this pub that definition was who might attend 18+ hip hop night on Saturday evenings.  Through that door you might discover that it takes two to make a thing go right, or that it takes two to make it out of sight.  Some people pay you to get in the door.  Some people bribe you.  Some people don’t have the credentials to gain access and can’t go through the door at that time. 

The differences between the populations on either side of the door are defined not by the people themselves, but rather the rooms the door divides.  In that way you need not be limited wherever you are, and/or wherever you are going, but only by your ability to prepare and be certain that you have everything you need to get through whichever door you choose next. 

Choose your doors wisely. If you are ever stuck in a room without doors you are likely in limbo or some sick architectural prank.  When that happens, perform a focused meditation on becoming the kool aid man and break free.  No one can stop you.

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“I’ve failed over and over and over again in my life. And that is why I succeed.”

-Michael Jordan-