The Sweetest Thing – Part 4
I have a job now.
For those who’ve been following along, you know how big a deal that is, and how long I’ve been looking.
More than that though, the job I have will force me to do several very important things that I’ve been putting off or otherwise neglecting.
First, and most importantly, I haven’t been taking care of my health. Maybe it’s a factor of having been employed full time for so long, but since I’ve been at home all the time, I’ve really let myself go.
You’d think with infinite time and the availability of a gym in my apartment complex, I would look like Arnold on his good days. You’d be wrong. Reality has been quite the opposite. Left to my own devices, forced to create my own schedule, I have done nothing short of terrible at managing myself.
I can’t quite say for sure what it is about being my own boss that makes me a terrible boss, but there you have it. Perhaps, just possibly perhaps, when I start losing weight and getting back in shape I can form constructive habits. Maybe that will help for when my writing career becomes my only career.
That’s years and years away, but I think I can manage to remain focused during that time. It’s been several years already, and I haven’t lost my way despite all the things that have been going on.
The second thing that this new job will force me to do is to become a more focused writer. The job isn’t going to magically make me into F. Scott Fitzgerald, but what it will do is throw my time into stark relief. Working four ten hour days, then having three days off, is the best thing I could hope for out of any job. I had that when I was a state employee, and I can tell you that a three day weekend every week makes for some impressive and enjoyable time off. You take less sick days that way, less vacation days. Your work days are a bit longer, but not so much as to be unbearable.
All in all, this job affords me a lot of things. It lets me afford anything, which is a marked improvement over being jobless. And as much as I hem and haw, scoff and protest, I think my wife is right when she claims that I am a creature which operates best under a structure not of my own making. It’s a disheartening thing to realize, but I’m far from alone for functioning best in that scenario.
So, up until I start on Monday, my days will consist of me attempting to prepare my body for the rigors to come. I will also be taking steps to pare down what it is that I do, and don’t do, with my free time.
I’ve tried, very very hard, to make streaming a thing that I can do for both fun and profit. It’s not happening. I’m either not good enough, not in the correct time slot, not doing something fundamentally important, whatever it may be, I’m not making any headway. After six months of trying and trying and trying with no one watching and no one caring, I’m pretty much done. Maybe one day when I have more money and time I can revisit that aspect of my life.
Maybe it never happens. That may not be a bad thing.
One aspect of this is that I’ve also discovered something else that I can do with the equipment I purchased to do streaming with: I can do podcasts. Podcasts are about as hard to break into as streaming, but podcasts will allow me to expand both my writing methods and quality. It’s also another way to diversify my career. Making sure to pursue multiple lines of career growth is essential. Maybe the writing takes off first, maybe the podcasts will. Maybe both, who knows.
The most important thing that you can do is make sure that you continue trying to take bites at the apple. You can’t have a chance to win if you don’t stay in the game. The pay might suck, and it may always suck, but it’s worth it. So I just have to keep on keeping on.
The Sweetest Thing – Part 4
The launch platform stank, filled with the charnel house stench of the dead and the dying. Blood and viscera rinsed off the easily cleaned floor of troop transports and combat drops, off the easily cleaned floors of the medivacs. Humans, dead and dying, washed away with the water to be processed and reclaimed. They pass into oblivion, their names unsung and unremarked. They will be replaced by men and women equally unloved, equally unmourned.
Every day the war grinds on. Each day the fighting continues, and endless rain of blood that threatens to wash away all of humanity in a tide of crimson. I gagged, the sights and smells lashing into me as they always did. I didn’t throw up though, and that meant today I wouldn’t risk passing out from the lack of breakfast.
Agnes was beside me, as usual. I could hear her heart beating, a steady cadence marking time. It never changed, that pulse. Not under stress, not wounded, gripped by the Hunger, starving in our bunks, it never changed. Most days, it was the only sound that kept me sane. I leaned on that sound, as I had leaned on her arm. Braced, I marched up to play roulette one more time.
Captain Dunbar was waiting, hunched over a map with the rest of the forward command team in a tarp covered tent so that troops could move in and out without too much fuss. McDowell called a halt, and the six sensiopaths in the battalion marched into the tent without being asked. We knew the drill.
Dunbar looked up at us, sneering as he took the unlit cigar out of his mouth. “Well, look what the cat dragged in. You worthless maggots ready to die for your country? No? Too bad.”
He pointed down at the map, his pudgy fingers nearly knocking over the models set carefully around the map. “I need you three” he waved absentmindedly at the first three of us “to carry an assault wagon to the western bulwarks. You’re to drop the troops off, and then return for a second load each. If you survive the second load, and it looks like our boys might pull through, come back for a third load. If it looks like we’re losing, then make sure you protect the wagons.”
He laughed, the edges of it as cruel and vicious as any knife. “The wagons are more valuable than the troops anyway. We can always get more of those.”
I ground my molars, hating the man, hating McDowell, hating the war, hating myself for doing this over and over. Mostly though, I hated the shamans. It was their fault things had gotten this way. Their fault all this madness and death was happening every day. Their fault the world burned with power and ambition and greed. It was they who burned brightest of all.
Dunbar looked at the remaining three pilots, and this time he wore an expression that was almost smug. “You three are lucky. You’re to run interference. I want each of you to man a podrunner to the western bulwarks. Much as I hate to risk the suits, we need to take that bulwark today if we’ve any hope of winning this damned stalemate.”
He harumphed at the map then, dismissing us as he wound into his own mind and the battle at hand. The three of us assigned to podrunning blanched, and looked at each other like sailors stranded on a life-raft in the middle of the ocean. There was a good chance we wouldn’t see the others again by days end. It had been months since the last podrunning mission.
There were ten of us when it had started.
Dunbar motioned for us to be dismissed, and the pair of muscular MP’s opened the flaps as we gave our salutes to the man no longer paying attention to us. We marched out, and I’m amazed I managed to fall in line. My knees had turned to liquid, and my mouth was full of bile. My only choices were to go mad to the Hunger as the world stayed a washed out wasteland or die running a suicide mission. Again, tears were all I had, and they would never be enough.
Agnes saw, even though she barely turned her head as I took my place beside her. Her jaw clenched, cheek muscles taut as her teeth clamped hard enough to chew steel. A single tear fell down her perfect cheek, the sun reflecting off her tears and her skin in a way that made her look like a diamond. Even then, angry and sad and frustrated as I was, I never wanted to stop soaking her in. I only hoped that McDowell wouldn’t be cruel enough to put her in the pods I would be running. There was a limit to the torture I could withstand.
To be continued…
Podfully,
Justin
