Day 14

Last Monday, Candice and I were getting a quick and quiet breakfast. It was 9:30 or 10, no, later, 10:45 or so. I couldn't remember the last time I'd been outside on a sunny morning when it wasn't Saturday or Sunday. I was sipping coffee and eating a bagel. I had a weird feeling in my stomach which I thought was just hunger, and I just ignored it. I felt like I could do pretty much anything I set my mind to. I'd just started again on an old story - I wrote the first draft of the first page two years ago. I was writing emails to people in The Business. Everything was coming up with my name.

Cue forward 24 hours, and I'm doubled over with agony while lying on my bed, feeling simultaneously like I had to vomit, burp, eat something, and never eat anything but applesauce and vitamins ever again. The pain was in my stomach, except then it was in my chest, except then my throat hurt like burning, except then it disappeared for just long enough to stand up, have some water, and then go back to bed doubled over in pain.

I'm a hypochondriac, so mysterious ailments generally lead me in two directions: 1) moaning impotently in bed thinking I'm going to die; 2) typing all my symptoms into Google, searching through every medical site I can find, deciding I have some mixture of cholera, heart murmur, appendicitis, pancreatitis, and diabetes, before laying back in bed to moan impotently.

Candice thinks that my body is just readjusting itself to a non-scheduled week. After all, I spent over a year doing exactly the same thing five days a week - waking up, going to the office, eating at the same 4 or 5 tiny restaurants each week, then going home. Personally, I suspect that my own body is rebelling against me. I spent my sickness watching NBC's "Kings" and not cleaning up my shithouse of a room.

Day 2

In September 2007, all of my old college friends were doing one of two things: working for JP Morgan, or working for Google. Okay, untrue: some people were working for Bain, and some people were working for Facebook. Details, details. That was the split - tech sector or financial sector. Both sorts of people were drowning in cash, but more, I could see in their faces a sense of self-wonder, of entitlement wholly justified.

No one had bigger or more-oft-sucked dicks than bankers; you could smell the money, and the power, and the moral indecency that Big Money people wear so much more impeccably than mere criminals, like their drug dealers or their illegal maids. With the tech people, there was maybe less money, but more attitude - there companies were in the headlines, and they were at the center of a boomtown atmosphere, and whether they were at a major social network or at a tiny start-up, they could tell themselves and you could believe that their company was redefining the internet, the economy, the whole human condition.

Both groups of people worked round the clock, which seemed to only enhance the awesome grandeur of their being. First-year bankers sharing shots of tequila at 11:30 on Saturday night, still wearing their work clothes, laughing about all the work they'd be doing tomorrow morning while slum people and suburbia went to church. Start-up people shaking their head and grinning about mountains of code still left to do, as they packed the joint just a little bit more. You heard how Google had a gym, spa, massage parlor, Happy Hour; how Facebook has those epic parties with professional photographers and college-style drinking with grown-up liquor; Silicon Valley seemed like some kind of neo-Communist dream-utopia, where work blended seamlessly with play.

In September 2007, I was three months out of college, living at home in the South Bay. I'd spent the summer reading Dave Sim's 6000-page comic book "Cerebus" and, less successfully,, trying to make a bad relationship work. I knew that I was a parasite. I have very old-fashioned ideas about the economy, about working for a living. In August, a friend mentioned she might have a job for me at her non-profit in Chicago. I flew out for a visit, loved the town, flew home, and the non-profit folded. Two weeks later, the terrible relationship ended. Scrambling, disoriented, awaking from some weird summer daydream, I found an internship in San Francisco, and made The Company my whole life. I ended up working two jobs there, met a new and wonderful girl there, began an actual career there.

February, 2009. Everything is different. The US economy has been trampled and mangled and elbow-raped and serial-killed and left on the side of the road in the desert in a thunderstorm on Mars. My banker friends aren't bankers anymore. New career opportunities have been sought, by force. The few still working at banks and insurance firms with now-infamous names are still working round-the-clock but without the glamour, without the old bravado. You see them, and it's like some noble rowdy WWII soldiers woke up one day thirty years later in Vietnam.

Friends in the tech trade still have jobs, but there's the same sense of energy sapped, of some kryptonite explosion. Facebook is suffering from Twitter, and Google's massive hiring spree now looks as insane as it actually was (while its once-cute expenditures - gyms, massage parlors, catered food, jet planes - now look like pure Felliniesque decadence), and all my friends with the big start-up ideas are wishing they'd monetized back when money was still money, not pretty retro wallpaper for the Chinese. Grad school applications are leaper percentage-wise, and Peace Corps/TfA volunteership is experiencing a jump in applications, and everyone is left trying to figure out how to weather this massive shitstorm called History.

Day 1

I wake up on my first day without a job in 13 months (19 months if you count the unpaid internship that magically metastized into lightly-paid-yet-actual employment) much earlier than I ever did when I had a job. My previous employer was a company that, like lots of companies in the Bay Area, was casual in its particulars - employees trickled in slowly between 9:30 and 10, wore whatever clothes 5 days a week, kept a ping-pong table in the basement. Usually, I'd set my alarm for 8:30 but play the snooze-alarm game for half an hour before hopping two buses to work.

Today, April 1, I wake up at 8 AM, and realize: 1, I'm the kind of awake that won't get back to sleep so any time spent in bed will be a waste. 2, I no longer have a job, so my old concepts of wasting time no longer have any meaning. 3, I have alot to do, but no one around to force me to do it.

These last two should give me feelings of freedom. Instead, my chest clenches and the room spins. I decide to spend the day being as busy as possible. I ride buses back and forth down Union Street, paying off medical bills - if you can believe it, my dentist and my allergy doctor both have offices on Union Street, about thirteen blocks and one hill away from each other. And, if you can believe it, I have outstanding bills with both of them. In my last couple months of employment, I'd tried to fit in as many medical visits as possible, basking in my health coverage. I'd forgotten all about COBRA.

There are different sorts of people outside on a week day. More old people, and children. I barely ever see children in San Francisco. Another revelation - apparently, there's a bus line that runs up Union Street to Coit Tower that I've never seen or heard of in almost a year and a half living here. It must only run between 9:30 and 7 PM.

Other observations:

1: On weekdays, there's never a wait for anything. At my gym, I'm one of maybe twenty people, and the other 19 have kindly decided to do nothing with their triceps or chest today, leaving me free to enjoy the equipment without being pestered. I overcompensate and make everything ache. I spend 20 minutes on an elliptical without having to avoid eye contact with people waiting for their chance who curse me for going too slow. On the downside, the people are much uglier.

At Safeway, two open lanes are empty as I walk up to checkout. Buses run up and down my street every two minutes - no waiting. There's no one in line at The Coffee Bean, or Starbuck's, or Peet's Coffee.

2: I see groups of young moms hanging out all over town. My girlfriend believes that our generation will experience a boom in stay-at-home Dad-dom. I can suddenly see the appeal. Obviously, child-rearing is work, but you're outside in the fresh air, and you're practically required to stay in motion. I imagine us - kids and a group of Dads - going to museums, zoos, playgrounds, shoe shops every six months as their little feet grow, video arcades for birthdays. We play catch or hoops and let the kids win.

3: On weekdays, the sun seems much brighter. I can remember being in Moscow with my brother years ago, and thinking that, somehow, the sun seemed to be imperceptibly closer to the earth. It has something to do with the curvature, earth spinning on its axis, something something. It feels the same way Wednesday afternoon walking down Fillmore street.

I spend the afternoon cleaning my bathroom. I eradicate mildew and change out old magazines and organize my mirror drawer so that my toothpaste is not right next to my face cream. I'm worried that this is all a distraction. I'm aware I need to find at least some way of making money fast. But cleaning, for the first time ever, feels less like a chore than like an essential meditation, a Zen meta-treatment of my own life. For 18 months work was my life. 18 months without a vacation, often leaving the office in darkness, with spreadsheets carved into my eyeballs, answering something like a hundred or so emails each day. I ignored all non-essential parts of life. My stomach and back suffered from bad food and poor posture. My shoulders slumped. I let laundry collect all across the floor of my room, and filled my desk with random things that disappeared into drawers never to emerge, and never even put anything up on the walls of my room.

With one exception. Next to my head hangs a weird colored-pencil drawing of Lake Tahoe. Some lady with a first-floor apartment was sitting in her window while I passed by one day. She handed me the drawing. This was about two blocks from work.