This American's life

5:30AM EST. I hit the alarm snooze for the seventh time, ending all hope of arriving at work anywhere near my goal of the night before we open. Rough night last night, had to hang around campus much longer than I planned due to a last-minute change of instructors in my most recent class.

Glasses: grabbed. Survey of situation: workable. With a whore's bath and a brief brushing out, I should be thru the door at the copy shop by 6:05. Thank God I thought to take some snackables to work or else it'd be more mall food for lunch.

To my left I see my wife, although I won't really see her until the weekend. She's not invisible, mind you, but her second shift work schedule and my first and second life aren't meshing well currently. We're sleeping on each other's time, I'm in bed long before she gets home and she's unconscious when I wake up. With luck, this will be one of those weekends where my days off will intersect with her days off and we can collapse together.

Got to get moving. Fifteen minutes later, I'm husling down the stairs three at a time to beat out an notoriously slow elevator. Out the door, into the car and on thru the predawn murk of extreme suburban Atlanta, on my way to the practice Purgatory: American retail employment.

"Who am I? Why am I here?"


Unlike well-read, intellectually savvy and politically well-connected Internet pioneers like Publius at The Third Estate, buying into the blogosphere was an impulse purchase. The proximate cause of this blog's foundation is the new "no anonymous comments" policy over at What The Hell Is Wrong With You?

If published accounts are to be believed, the blog phenomena began around 1997. In 1997, I was spending my valuable free time living off ill-gotten student aid, having taken a semester off from college by dropping all my classes well after the checks had cleared.

If anything, that would have been the time to log on and start yakking, with all the fire of idiot youth and a federally subsidised license to waste my time. Why now, when I'm three months from thirty?

I'm no everyman, but I do feel like where I'm at in the world is where more Americans are finding themselves these days, with a feeling like you're wading thru mud and if you don't sacrifice everything to the Big Push, you're going to drown in the muck, pulled under with the riptide on your way to an ignominious end.

So what do I do about it? I'm locked in, I'm committed, I'm on a course of action, a throw of the career and education dice that may (MUST) pay off. In the meantime, all I can do is something I never used to do: talk about it.