...the gig is up...
“A lot of people don't think they can count on me, but I've never missed a gig in my life.”
-Johnny Thunders-
I am a man who if nothing else has worked. In fact I have worked in over 72 different jobs thus far in my careerer. But who is counting? I am. I am counting on you to care enough about what I have been doing to keep reading about all of this doing I do. You see, I am a doer. I can’t help but do do. I tried being a don’ter. But even those who don’t, do don’t. I have no choice but to do do.
Last summer I got laid off. Let go. Got gone. Took a hike. Scrammed. Swammed. Turned into a swami, ate baloney, broke into a Shoney’s and stole macaroni. And with a chin of dusty rigatoni I present to you this testimony on how to live a life of parsimony.
While the majority of my days have been spent jobbering, there has been many more moments of workless moneyless space filling materialessness anti-enterprising tieless tryless attemptering. You see I am not only a doer, I am also a tryer. A do will get you done. The try on the other hand is but a one rung ladder. You can try on a try and if the try don’t fit, try on something else. To do try, you try try. But you can’t try do, unless you are willing to undo, at which point you will don’t and that would be trying. Undon’t do that.
My immediate instinct after getting laid off was attempting to get laid on. I like to get laid on, usually by dogs, and no not that way you filthy animal. But I also like to lay it on. Real thick sometimes. Like starting a blog about craigslist with multiple attempts at try/do wordplay and a joke that may or may not have been about shagging fur beasts. Anyhoo, I laid one on myself all summer long and tried doing what needed to be done to keep doing what I usually do…I gigged.
The gig is the try of jobs. It’s like a work one night stand. Or actually it is more like a smokey sleazy back alley handjob next to a dumpster full of half eaten hoagies. It is non committal employment, that if you enjoy enough will take you back to that alley every night, carting a jug of mayo and a cell phone speaker blasting love street.
After being laid off my first line of work without work was to get unemployed officially. When you are canned, the government will give you just enough money to give back to them via a legally mandated private health insurance plan. If you are extra lucky they will also give you a debit card worth approximately 25 pounds of pasta.
The enterprising amongst the paid unemployed will find ways to improve their health with that pasta (eat all your carbs and run run run), thus negating the need for the insurance they are buying. The even more enterprising amongst that subset will instead find ways to maximize that insurance purchase, and get continually sick and tired. A soft hospital bed tied to a morphine drip while a steady electronic pulse beeps you into daydreaming a night discoteching in Ibiza is a fine way to spend your hard earned health insurance.
After multiple failed attempts to return my insurance to the insurance corp, and in the hopes of obtaining extra cash for sauces, I determined paid unemployment wasn’t for me. I, man of many careers, he whom hath had tried try to do do, needed instead to labor properly. So I did what anyone looking for employment should do and headed immediately for Craigslist.
Craigslist is a beautiful website, created by a man named Craig Newmark, all soft grey, white and bright blue as though Papa Smurf gargameled himself into a data table. You can do anything on Craigslist, from find a house or an apartment or a community or a job or even a Petaluman couch friend.
But of all the magic you can conjure on craiglist, of all the joys of connective workering you might find, none are more thrilling, specific and disappointingly lucrative as the jobs you can find working on craigslist gigs.
Craigslist gigs is a special subsection of the Craigslist posting board reserved for small jobs, one time affairs and tiny tasks. If you want someone to come help clean your vending machine for instance, you would probably start here instead of offering a full craigslist job. I pulled into craigslist gigs ready to find and take the first role available that matched my skill set.
First stop Midtown.
“I'm just thankful for gigs.”
-Tony Hale-
As a supremely hairy man I felt equipped to handle such an excavation. I was also intrigued to know what did or didn’t work in this gentlemen’s previous postings. How did he happen upon landing an old unfit smelly man to trim his private area, and did they at least perform an adequate trim job?
I reached out and let the hair king know I had electric trimmers, a scissors, a couple of face blades. I was only mildly odorious depending on the hour and whether or not I wore wool undies that day. But by the time he got back to me he had already been shorn, waxed and well worked on. My first gig was a shaggy bust.
This second potential gig was right in my wheelhouse. This person required no special skillset, just someone available to help work on something, or even better to just direct someone to someone else who could work on something else. I could definitely be someone who could direct someone to do just something.
The specific something this person wanted someone for was called the exit pill. Details on how the pill worked were vague during the interview. I was handed multiple pills, large, small, blue green and beige and told to consume them all. Several hooded and cloaked team members stepped out from the motivation poster strewn walls of the office, and I grew hesitant at acing this part of my interview. As the CEO and her team began chanting and clanging smoked pots I decided I that instead of exit pilling I would be exit gigging. I left to look for something more innocent, specific and tuned to all the skills I have beyond my skillessness.
My third attempt at gigging I found something that I was truly ready for. This person needed things moved from the place that they were, into the place that they were. I showed up with my golden rusted truck, found out what needed moving, and immediately got to work. I grabbed a soft felted velvet couch, put it on the truck and then promptly took it off the truck and put it back to where it was. I repeated this very moving dance until all the furniture in the house had tangoed tweenst my truck and the house and back and back again.
The homeowner returned confused and unsatisfied with my work. But my self satisfaction of a day’s labor was enough for me to know I had performed a job well done. I shook the houselord’s hand and gave a tender longing rub to the sofas.
While I left the gig unpaid monetarily, I had made positive material connections, and I was certain that if I ever needed any chair or couch to vouch for my talents this Oakley furniture would happily pass praise of my space maintaining value. They had all been moved by my work.
My next gig was to get filmed nudely rubbing my balls on some rubbery squeaky rainbow clown balloons. From dancing with cool cloth couches to boning balloons I was beginning to think I might be developing a niche skill set in objectification.
Could I build a career based upon getting in touch with things?
I touch things all the time. Right now I am touching a keyboard, while a computer touches my lap, and my legs touch the couch, while my toes touch the insides of a sock that is touching a blanket that is touching the same couch as me.
I never realized just how touching the material world can be. I suppose in that way we are all connected. We touch something that touches something else until everyone's touch has touched something that has touched someone. I hope you were touched by that thought (and that the touch was consensual). I thanked the balloons for their letting their airy latex touch my soggy scrumnuggets and moved onward unto the next gig.
The next gig was all potential. A Liam Neesonesque job taken. I had never taken a job taken before, but I was ready to get in on the take.
I called the poster and they told me the job was taken. I let them know I had read the post and indeed saw that the job was taken. I asked what kind of tasks the job taken required. They said there would be no job because it was already taken. That meant a taken job means no work and no pay? Yes they said, this job offers no work and no pay because this job is taken. I took that to mean I wouldn’t be taken this job. I thanked the poster for taken their time with me and let them know that if they ever had another job taken I would love to take it.
Then I found Shirley.
Shirley needed to find Gary. I called Shirley and offered to find her a new Gary but she only wanted the Gary. I let her know that Gary is ranked as the 27th most popular given name in the United States with an estimated population of 1,391,682 and that finding an exact Gary on craigslist would be like finding a needle in a haystack. Shirley informed me that this was one of Gary’s many skills and thus the reason she needed just him. I asked if she had ever worked with a CansaFis before, as we are pretty easy to find and far less common, but she just wanted only Gary. I let her know that Gary’s are becoming extinct and recommended she could also try a Jim or a Jeff sometime as they tend to be good workers. But nope, just Gary. I also let her know that according to Albert Mehrabian, professor emeritus of psychology at the University of California-Los Angeles, Gary’s tend to be unsuccessful. But alas it was Gary or bust for Shirley. I headed back into the gigs unsure if maybe I should consider changing my name to Gary or something more successful like Steven.
“A good name is rather to be chosen than riches.”
-King Solomon-
My inability to find the right gig was getting a little depressing until I stumbled upon this wood wall making $100 dollars per event. Could I be a wood wall? Would I work as wood? As the posting stated there were so many possibilities with a wood wall. I dreamed of myself as a wood wall taking in those possibilities. Being trailered from party to party, pinned with accoutrement and flair, helping those celebrating birth, success and love with my ability to stand tall firm and stoic amongst the masses of each occasion.
I was Steven “Gary” Woodwall and my career lasted for decades until someone bought me outright and turned me into a bench where I was sometimes sat upon in a covered porch in Tucson, AZ. As my buyer turned older they left their home and failed to sell me in a last second yard sale. In a bitter irony, they posted me onto Craigslist as free wood and a construction crew came and took me apart.
My legs ended up burning in a bonfire celebrating the high school graduation of a pair of lacrosse loving brown haired brothers. Half my limbs were sawed into shims and clumsily made their way from job site to job site, slowly being lost to post build clean ups until most of the pieces of me filled dumpsters and lonely lots, conscious of my growing eternal separation from myself.
The other half of me was kindly smoothed and shined and nailed into a frame shape. It holds an oil painting of a dog biting a balloon string that a hobbying grandma made for her daughter in law and I now sit on a right corner wall in a mildly sunlit New Mexican basement.
I could definitely be a wood wall.
Something larger was dawning on me though amongst all this searching and seeking gigs. Craigslist Gigs is a space where people try. They try to find doers. And someone who tries doing is a helper. Everyone and everything needed help on Craigslist Gigs. As I searched I found trash trucks, puppies and St. Louis kittens who needed help.
I found vans and computers that needed help.
I found wizards that needed help.
I even found non smoking patriotic rodents that needed help.
Maybe after all this I really needed the help also? Maybe I didn’t need a gig, I just needed to be the gig. I needed someone out there to understand who I am, what I do, how I try, and to try letting me do my do. I needed to help. And I needed this to happen on Craigslist gigs.
So I gave it a shot and posted myself.
My gig went unanswered, but I had learned several things. I had learned I could try. I could try anything and by that virtue I could do anything (…why hello mr. balloon…). I had learned that a gig has only as much value as you bring to it, and that some have no value at all because they are already taken. I had learned that there is a hooded corporate cult trying to make unemployed giggers eat exit pills somewhere downtown San Francisco.
But most of all I learned that if you set your heart on being or doing the best you can, you might one day become a wood wall and get paid to party. We can all be wood walls. So after weeks without anyone accepting my gig, I decided to give Craigslist one final shot and look again to see if someone else’s gig might need my help.
The word gig has musical origins. It came from as a french fiddle (the gigue), a horse drawn touring vehicle for musicians, and it went into printed word as a jazz era slang for a playing engagement. If I was going to find my gig, I was going to need to find something musical, hairy, and objectively material to every piece of me I knew to be true.
I opened craigslist and there it stood.
I had finally found my gig.
This is wildd :). I like how the first few paragraphs read like something from a Dr. Seuss book
Endless fun reading you, I chuckled every other line throughout!
What an excellent exploration of a quirky topic, with literally incredible real life examples. :D
Congrats on publishing, this turned out so well!