Twenty-Nine

Hola, Chicos:

Today is my twenty-ninth work anniversary, which means that today is the last day of year 29….or the first year of my thirtieth? I dunno.

I was 29 when I started working at this law firm, which means there is a certain queasy equilibrium that will shift after today. Every day from here on out that I work at the firm will be one day longer than my entire life put together before I started. It would not be unreasonable to assume working in this one place might be considered the place that will define me for the rest of my life, and likely for the few years after I pass.

I mean…I’d like to think that’s wrong? Edi and I will celebrate twenty years of marriage next year (four months after I my thirtieth work anniversary) and that is, both qualitatively and quantitatively, many more hours together than was spent at work. (Thank goodness for, essentially, twenty years of a three day, thirty hour workweek.) Graeme and I did the podcast for thirteen years, and I wrote for the Savage Critic and the Comics Experience newsletter for years before that, and…and…and…

And yet. It would be foolishness to pretend grinding away for twenty-nine years won’t leave an impression of the whetting stone.

One of the things I cherish about taking over as the manager of my department is the departing supervisor, under whom I had worked for ten years, helped give me plenty of pointers, advice, gimlet-eyed observations. And early on, when I told her I was going to take the job, she said: “oh, good. Being a manager will make you a better person. It’ll make you a stronger person. It’s going to make you a more generous person.”

Maybe it was just her own genius for supervision in telling me that when she did, but god damn if I don’t feel like she was right. (Most days, anyway.)

Don’t get me wrong. I took the manager job so I could leave it. All of my married bougeois dreams—a house, a dog, retirement—hinged on me taking all the conceptions of myself forged the first twenty-nine years of my life, covering them in gasoline, and setting them on fire.

There’s still a bit of that ash mixed in with whatever I am, it’s true, but I’m mostly someone else now.

Someone I’m proud of, but not sure I necessarily recognize.

And I worry that maybe I’m too much of each thing, not enough of just one thing, to be happy in retirement…nor happy working. (Proud is a lot of things, but proud isn’t happy. Sometimes it feels unbelievably fucking close, but it’s not.)

The next few years at the job are going to be hard ones—a lot of the people in my department that have been at the firm just as long, or even longer, have left or leaving or worse. (Don’t get me started on the health of one of my favorite people to work with but it’s just the saddest fucking thing.)

And it’s less than no consolation that the next few years at the world are likely going to be even worse than hard.

Twenty-nine and twenty-nine is fifty-eight. And twenty-nine again is eighty-seven. What a shame to think about what the world will be in twenty-nine years and to be filled with dread! I can’t help but laugh as I imagine myself at eighty-seven, at best one of those slaves yoked to the wagons that pull the warlords around in post-apocalyptic misery (although really isn’t that just the surreal—that is, the super-real, the leg become wheel—version of what I do now? Walking millionaires through being able to save email attachments to their desktop?)

(Even though that fantasy itself is some kind of fucking panacea—I couldn’t even pull a wagon around now, the shape I’m in!—compared to the likely truth of it: wiped out in the first or second or third wave of whatever will come, one of many millions of unmarked dead, soon to be eaten by the wind and transformed into the sand upon which the descendants of oil tycoons and tech billionaires will scramble and play.)

And yet, believe it or not, the part of me that’s ashes now still dreams of the easy way, the golden sunset, the happy ending. Edi and I alive and on the beach ourselves, the sibilant shush of the world’s misery as easily drowned out by the crash of waves as it is now. (Mostly.) Who will I be then? Will I be as proud of myself as I am now?

(“But are you proud, Jeff,” you may well ask yourself, “or just maybe a bit erratically manic-depressive?”)

I can genuinely say I don’t know. I just know I feel more like a genuine god-damn adult after this twenty-nine year cycle, than I did after the first one?

Fair enough. I’ll fucking take it.

Cheers,

-Jeff