Spencer Lund

Figurative Onanism

After Getting Declined for $40 at the Automated Teller Machine

I once did a post about how I’m poor but not impoverished. I stand by that assessment of my life because I have things, and right now I even have an apartment. With my final paycheck absent from my account, my former employer unresponsive to emails, and unemployment benefits crawling along at a political pace tied up in forms and screens that I can’t access after 7:30 pm, I’m flat broke.

Broke broke. Broke enough that the peanut butter which resided in my cabinet for a few months and gradually coalesced into a watered-down putty with hints of green and grey swirling amongst the regular color of peanut butter, now becomes an option for dinner. There’s a bacteria growing in there (I’m sure of it), and it’s a fungal moss that I’m going to try and digest regardless of safety. The petri dish peanut butter aside, I have health insurance throughout August, so I’ll rely on that if I get really sick. For now, I just want to eat.

I’m not sure why I’m writing this. I don’t like the idea of people worrying about my state of affairs. I’ve been broke before, and I’ll be broke again (tomorrow for instance), but it’s really the lack of agency that I’m freaked out by. I have very little choice in the matter.

I’m poor, and I’ll continue to be poor because I stuck with a job that wasn’t teaching me anything or paying me anything because I was so scared of being jobless again. I looked for other jobs, just like I’ll look for other jobs right now, but there isn’t very much out there for entry-level editorial work.

Entry level! I’m 2_ and about to be 3_. I’m a college graduate, but so is the 22 year-old that just graduated from Columbia and is applying for the same jobs. This 22 year-old competition for positions also edited their schools website, and they’re fluent in CSS, html, photoshop, and FCP. They’ve owned and operated a Mac laptop for years, and they’re almost tired of their 2-year-old iPhone. They actually go to club/art gallery openings and wrote restaurant reviews for New York Magazine in college. They write blog ledes in their sleep, and munch on their ever-expanding RSS feeds like they’re Cinnamon Toast Crunch.

I could go back to sales and be miserable, but I’d rather be poor and have a shiny beacon of success dwindling at the edge of the horizon. The only thing I’m trying to figure out is when that blinking light (it’s green for the Bankers that actually read Fitzgerald, and red for underachievers like me) goes black, what then?

Go back to school? Try teaching? Become a vagabond? Break up with the lady and move to California to pick grapes for $5 an hour? It’s a romantic notion, but I like my lady, and $5 an hour for an educated Caucasian on the outskirts of Fresno would make any vineyard owner suspicious of a possible labor agitator. Plus, if they find out I’m sober, they’ll be doubly doubtful of my benign intentions.

“I just want to read and pick grapes all day sir.”

“Get the hell outta here.”

  1. spencerlund posted this