The Tenth One

So after about two months and ten blog entries (counting this one), we take a moment to quickly survey how things have improved for this intrepidly procrastinating author.

I started writing this blog when very down and depressed due to a lack of income caused by my not being employed. The night I wrote the first entry I had just sent about twenty emails to various employers on craigslist and felt pretty desperate. Imagine my surprise when the next day or so I heard back from one of them and eventually went on to work for the window cleaning company I'm at now. This development has improved my money situation significantly, although I'm still playing a pretty desperate game of catch-up with my bills and money owed to friends and family who loaned me money during my long stretch of joblessness.

The unfortunate side effect of this job is a lack of time for writing the things I want to be writing. You'll notice there has been a real slowdown in blog entries from this last month, that's because I'm working an average of eleven hours or so a day and that's six days a week. It makes writing even this thing pretty difficult, but I think I've already touched on that in an earlier blog entry.

As for the series of stories I started writing this blog to procrastinate from writing, well, that too has slowed down considerably. This development is the most depressing one that has come from my job. I find myself looking over the stories I've already competed instead of working on the current one, picking out countless flaws and grammatical errors. I'm able to fix the grammar, correct the syntax, but the underlying flaws--the bad writing--I can't help but agonize over. The stories all look so bad to me, and I have no way to see them objectively. I find it harder and harder to make myself write them, the more I procrastinate the more I start thinking that the ideas I have are stupid, and that even if they are okay that no one will ever read and enjoy them.

It's all very disheartening.

Still, I don't want to stop. I think that is the important thing. Parts of me see the stories I write and think "yeah this is shit--Twilight is better written than this crap," but another part of me still feels that urge to keep writing. So I suppose as long as I feel that urge to write I'll keep doing it.

Or writing here to procrastinate anyway.

I feel that last line would be a good place to stop the entry, that sort of fancy, thought-provoking stinger I'm so fond of, but I don't feel like being too thought provoking right now. I'm just using this entry as a sort of "state of the union" thing for all my hordes of loyal readers.

So the state is that I am working a lot more, and don't need a blog as much as I used to in order to procrastinate effectively, but I still enjoy writing the blog and writing my fiction, and so I will endeavor to continue to do both. I've heard from one person that I don't have sex with that my blog was entertaining so I suppose that's enough to keep me typing it for at least another month before I get bored and stop.

As for the collection of stories--which are tentatively subtitled Bookhunter--I plan to continue writing those as well. Perhaps I'll be able to tie those two things together a bit more as I move forward, this blog might provide at least a sense of urgency even if not providing any actual urgency about the schedule of writing I'm taking on.

So let me try to lay it out. My plan is to have the current short story I'm working on in the bank by Christmas. With that done I'll have one more story left to write before editing and proofing can start on my entire collection of seven shorts which will hopefully weigh in at about two hundred pages--which I think is a pretty respectable collection for my first venture into attempting to actually make money off of. If that sells anything at all then I'll be able to start cranking out another collection and hopefully have two or three "books" available for purchase by August of next year.

It's also very possible I'll just sit here and watch those deadlines fly by and continue to never ever get anything actually done in my life while complaining about it on the internet.

But that would be no fun, so let's not do that, okay?

(See? still had a stinger)

The Hardest Hue to Hold

On Tuesday I had a job cleaning the windows of a cardiologist's office. It was a nice office, near a large hospital and several other offices and other medical buildings. It was a one story building so I didn't need to use a pole or ladders or repel or anything. I worked alone that day and actually figured I would be able to enjoy myself, cleaning windows effectively and listening to the Comic Vine podcast.

This being a cardiologist's office, you can imagine that most of the people there were older, men and women who were starting to have real troubles with their hearts, which is pretty much the death knell for people living in the United States these days. I don't say that lightly, I had heart surgery when I was eighteen to fix a problem that would probably have killed me when I was in my 40's. Whether or not the problem was fixed in time or not I suppose I'll know in about 20 years or so.

Anyway, I got started cleaning the windows of this place. The front entrance was the most window-y, with huge glass sections turning the walls around the front door into giant windows. I started there, working from the right to the left side of the building, listening to people talk about comic books, watching the soapy water stream down the glass, just enjoying work as much as anyone can enjoy a job that requires little thought, physical exertion, and has no relation to the things one is passionate about in life.

As I approached the second to last set of the front windows, I noticed a man sitting on the other side of those windows watching me.

He was an old man, his hair had gone well past gray and into white, sweeping back from his skull in desperate strands just a bit too long. He had a sagging face, lined and creased. He was wearing a jacket in spite of the warm afternoon sun and had khaki pants on--but what I remember the most about him were his eyes.

He had blue eyes, faded like old blue jeans and watery, a sort of sheen glinted from them when he twitched them to follow my movements. And they were so, so sad. At first I thought I had just seen him glancing at me as people do, but as I worked closer to where he was I realized he was watching me intently. His sad old eyes would flicker along the arc of my arm as I slid my brush or squeegee along the glass, would look down as I pulled out a towel to wipe up any excess water. He followed my every movement with a longing and sorrow that I could feel through the transparent barrier that separated us.

He never looked at my face, just my hands, my arms, my movements.

I wondered then, and wonder now.

What was he seeing?

Ruminations of a (Beginner) Window Washer

I've been working for a new company over the last few weeks. I won't say the actual name of the company or the people involved, but I am going to talk about it for a bit here because it's my blog and I can talk about whatever the hell I want and there's nothing you can do to stop me except for stop reading this blog right now which you might do but I'd rather you didn't.

So my new job involves me cleaning windows. 

I've thought about writing this blog a few times since I started the job, but have been too tired or lazy to get it done (the Halloween event for Guild Wars 2 and the release of Assassin's Creed 3 didn't make it any easier), but I have now committed to writing about my brief experiences as a window cleaner.

The company I work for cleans many kinds of windows. At first I thought we only did high rise stuff. We do, but that's not all (there's not a ton of sky-scrapers in Baton Rouge anyway,) we also do smaller businesses and a lot of residential stuff.

More on that later.

First of all, allow me to describe the two guys I've worked with so far in this new profession. Note that the entire company is made up for just five people, counting both myself and the owner, who cleans windows himself as well.

The owner, let's call him Mounds, is a tall, slight man in his fifties. He has a low, sort of mumbling voice and a badly dinged up truck. He's also very scatterbrained, it took him over two weeks to actually get me working after he told me he wanted me to work for him. I discovered literally today that he also plays classical guitar and has a side job playing that instrument at things like weddings. He also seems to be some flavor of Christian, although not Catholic, and devout enough to go on missions to places in Africa. Make of that what you will.

While I didn't work with Mounds when I first started, I've spent most of this week and a day or two of last week working with him on a lot of residential work. It seems he's the one doing the residential stuff for now, until he can find some replacement to take over the work for him. He's a good teacher, and a nice enough guy. He often puts me in the awkward position of having to ask him to repeat himself many times because he speaks so quietly, and can be somewhat passive aggressive about certain areas of my window cleaning that may not be up to snuff, but generally he's not too bad to work with.

The other guy whom I have worked with, and 25% of the company before I started, is a guy I'll call Paul. He's a short, stocky man in his late 30's with an impressive beard. He, I have learned, is an amature masked wrestler in his free time and drives all around the state on the weekends with a whole persona, mask, and music to wow fans of underground wrestling and demonstrate his martial prowess. I didn't believe him at first, but he's got tons of pictures and has shown me his wrestling gear.

It smelled of man.

Paul is a veteran of window washing, with over twenty-five years of experience wiping dirt off of glass and he has taught me the basics of the job in an admirable way.

For all the incredibly weird stuff these two dudes do, they both seem decent and kind and I don't really have any problems with them (aside from Paul's seeming racism, but that's another blog.)

So the job. Yeah. We do climb up some pretty high buildings, tie ropes to rickety metal structures held down with heavy weights and then jump off of the building to repel down the sides of the building and clean it. Those jobs are, so far, my favorite, because you're spending time up high above the stuff on the ground with nothing but you and the window (or side of the building, because we've done pressure washing too, although I didn't do that personally.) The biggest problem is sunburn, especially on the building we were working on last week, which had a highly reflective white roof. The sun beats down mercilessly on big buildings like that with very sparse shade to hide you from its cancerous rays.

I've developed a farmer's tan with alarming speed, and started wearing a baseball cap.

Soon I figure I'll be voting Republican and drinking Coors.

Other than the high-rise stuff we also do smaller businesses. Today I cleaned a small art gallery in Baton Rouge (I didn't even know they had art galleries here) that was just sort of built into a strip mall. Those sorts of jobs are fine because there's usually not too many windows and the ones they do have are usually large and without many panes. The art gallery was particularly awesome because it was all like ten foot wide windows with no frames at all.

Then there's the residential jobs.

Those kind of suck.

But they're also kind of awesome.

They suck because of a few reasons. The primary reason is because most of the houses we do have a lot of windows, and they're usually pretty small, pretty segmented  and pretty dirty. Especially on the outside. The next time you're strolling around your house go take a close look at the corners of the exteriors of your windows.

Know what you'll see?

Fucking spiders.

I don't know why, but spiders fucking love nesting in the corners of residential houses, especially the kinds of houses we seem to do, which is to say houses owned by rich old white people with lots of plants that grow right up against the glass and give them happy little spider bridges to come and go whenever they want.

The houses are, as I said earlier, also owned by very wealthy people and so are very large, fancy houses. This is bad because it makes me angry and depressed, knowing I'll never get to live somewhere as nice as the houses I'm seeing.

One weird trend I'm noticing with these houses, though, is that these rich people have surprisingly small TVs, shitty computers, and lots of VHS tapes. I don't know if that's just because they're older or because when you're rich you have better things to do with your time than sit on the couch and watch TV or play videogames.

It's probably the latter.

Also most of these residential jobs involve both cleaning inside as well as the outside of the house. Entirely separate from the angry jealousy I feel being inside of the house is the pain of having to awkwardly walk around a house, moving furniture, squeaking squeegees around and hunting for missed windows while the owners of the said house are reading or cooking or whatever.

The jobs are kind of awesome for only two reasons, but one of them is pretty awesome.

The lesser of the two is that when you're cleaning interiors of houses you at least get the benefit of air conditioning and shelter from the remorseless sun.

The greater one is sometimes the people will tip.

And they tip big.

Just yesterday I got $40 for cleaning a woman's windows, and she, like most of the other residential customers, was very polite the whole time Paul and I were there, giving us water and telling us we were doing a good job and all that. The $40 though, that was pretty awesome. Paul told me I could make $100 or more just from working a few residential jobs in a day with some luck, so it pretty much makes up for all the headaches of prowling around fancy houses with a dripping brush.

The job is not hard, but it can be tough. The physical toll on my body is high, mostly because I'm a saggy, paunchy 26 year old who hasn't been remotely in shape since he was 20, and long hours and weeks kind of blow (I'm going to be working 14 days straight over the course of this and next week,) but the pay is good and the job itself isn't hard to accomplish and, most importantly, I hardly have to talk to customers or teenage assholes at all.

I do worry about how it will impact my writing. I've hardly written anything since starting. When I get home I'm so tired that I just want to sit around and read or play a game for a few hours before sleeping, but I'm hoping that as my body starts to shape up I'll have more energy for writing and other fun things.

And I can at least write shitty blog entries to keep me sharp until then.