I, Day Laborer

Okay.

I guess you could call this "bouncing back."

Tomorrow morning, I'm going to get up early, put on my Carhartts and boots, bring along two forms of ID and work gloves, and head down to the offices of this place that provides day laborers for construction, demolition, light manufacturing, and the like.

As is typical with me, my head is full of romantic notions of spending tomorrow working up a sweat sorting scrap metal or placing rebar or something, along side a passel of men whose first language is something other than English--¿Que paso, campadre? Kok dyela, Tovarishche? Comment ça va, mon frère?--and coming home with $50 or so in my pocket. But just maybe, someone will take note of strapping, hard-working, convivial, quick-on-the-uptake me and within no time at all (by Christmas) I'll be commanding something more than minimum wage.

Leave it to me to glamorize manual labor, huh?

I just hope I don't pull a landscaping job. Awful buggy work. I sure wish I had more aggressively pursued promised lessons in operating a forklift when I worked at Wuperior Soodcraft.

I also sent out a couple of resumes today for some jobs I found on craigslist. So even though I'm tossing and turning a bit when I go to bed at night, I have to admit that the future isn't entirely bleak.

But I am really Really REALLY looking forward to just being Back At Work. Doing anything.

Well, not anything. It took me forty years, but I discovered that the kind of work I really enjoy is man's work. The heavy-lifting, job-well-done, show-us-what-you got kind of work. No more being a desk jockey, this I pray.

So we'll see.