Just passed the one-year mark

at my job. Which makes this the longest gig I've held down since late 2008. No, I'm not proud of all that turnover - in fact, if I never have to apply for another job again, I'll be extraordinarily happy and grateful - but I did manage to stay more or less continuously employed most of that time, and I also managed to maintain my family's health insurance every step of the way. I am sort of proud of that. (Welcome to early twenty-first century America).

I am knocking on wood with crossed fingers all the while I'm writing this, as I'm sure you can appreciate.

Is my job blissfully perfect? Don't be ridiculous. But here's the deal: after a year, I'm starting to make OK money again, which matters to me not just because it provides the validation salespeople need ("if I'm making sales, I'm doing something right"), but also because maybe I can start sleeping through the night again.

Plus my company does not believe in having salespeople cold-call, or hand out business cards at networking events, or any of the rest of the crap that used to make me feel worse than Willy Loman on a bad day. Hell, I used to feel like Willy Loman on acid sometimes.

No, my company invests heavily in marketing and on-line advertising, because they believe that if we can talk to enough people who've expressed some degree of interest in our services, a reasonable percentage will buy.

And they do. What I had to learn, though - what I am still learning - is that this job is not like farming or hunting (two common and not consistently accurate metaphors for certain types of sales avtivities).

It's like panning for gold. It's EXACTLY like panning for gold. Aside from the fact that we're in an air-conditioned office and we don't have to be afraid of getting robbed and killed by banditos on our way to get our bags of gold dust assayed.

Time.

One of the things that came about as a result of my keeping a journal for all those years - starting at age fourteen - was that I began to brood on the topics of time, memory, and mortality earlier in life than some people. I'll be kind to myself and call it contemplation rather than obsession.

This, ah, contemplation picked up serious intensity after I turned thirty; within the space of about eighteen months, our first child was born and my father died.

Now that my sixtieth birthday is only about sixteen issues of The New Yorker away, I wake up most mornings feeling like I spent the night falling through the floors of a house in slow motion. As I drive to work every weekday, I sometimes have to turn off the radio because the songs unleash too many memories and stir up a fierce longing for the past.

I'm not a complete fool; I get that this is something that's age-appropriate (to use the term my doctor uses to characterize my assorted chronic maladies. Fuck you too, Dr. Lee.).

The thing is, I already know what I need to maintain to keep from getting lost in the shadows: kindness, gratitude, and resilience. But I'd be lying if I told you that I don't lose the thread sometimes.

But then I find it again. Hey, look; resilience.

August 6, 1975 - one in a series of blind leaps

Thirty-seven years ago today, I bought a one-way plane ticket from New York to San Francisco. I got on the plane with my guitar, my sleeping bag, a small backpack with maybe three changes of clothes, and three hundred dollars in travellers' checks, which comprised my entire net worth.

I had no plan, beyond a vague desire to make my way to Oregon, where I imagined myself playing guitar for beautiful long-haired women outside a geodesic dome in a clearing deep in the forest.

It's OK, you can laugh now.

Anyway, that's not what happened. Other things happened, and many of those things were actually a great deal more dramatic and intense than my lazy, fuzzy vision.

But it all started with buying that plane ticket on that one sweltering afternoon in Queens.

GERONIMO!