The bum in me

I am a lazy man. Whether it be about working for a living or laboring around the house, nothing pleases me more than sitting in my chair, wondering if and when anything will get accomplished.

Given the chance for a day off from work, I will take it. The men and women around me in the workplace will work like animals, many welcoming the frequent opportunities to work overtime. Not so with me. My goal at the beginning of the workday is a get back home and into my chair.

My friends and family will not say I’m lazy. They have seen me work and work hard. I’ve been in the working world for 46 years. My jobs, for the most part, required me to stretch myself. Such is the state of the low-wage worker. If one chooses to work, these jobs demand the utmost of effort. There is no room for slack. The competition for jobs is too great, the demands of the jobs back- and soul breaking.

The jobs I really liked, I made extra effort. Sometimes. These were not the minimum-wage type. They were professional jobs, most of which I’ve found easy, and finding them easy, I have just gotten by and been celebrated for my wits and slyness. I worked as a journalist for four years. It was an interesting job, each new story a master class in a new subject. Even here, however, I was prone often to do what I needed to to fill the pages of the paper and that was all. When I latched onto a difficult project, however, I’d shine. A new inquiry into something I knew nothing about, dealing with people much different than me led me to go out of my way to use brains and talents to produce interesting and insightful articles.

That sustained me until a large corporation bought the paper. After that purchase, the demands of the job diminished. The articles and stories they wanted were too easy to write. No longer was I called on to make complex and intricate subjects digestible to the reader. Instead, the work became personality stories or articles that had a spectacular edge to them. These were no trick, as anything or almost everything can be made provocative with a little cleverness and sharp language.

I left that for a job that was challenging as a book editor. The work asked me to use my head. When I began, I labored under a mercurial editor-in-chief who headed an imprint for the publisher. He bought book ideas more than finished manuscripts. This demanded that I write books that the authors could not deliver or edit difficult and incomprehensible manuscripts. But after my editor-in-chief left the company, I joined the general book group. Here, the books were simple, easy, and catchy. The job, in short, became easy. I took to the habit of putting off doing the job until Friday, when I would complete my work for the week and even had time to goof off and tend to my own writing.

It boils down to the easier the job, the less interest I have in putting in the labor to do it well or to exceed that minimum effort. When I started Ph.D. studies, things got better for me. Laziness was easily detected and A grades was the expectation. I excelled at the work, even if I wasn’t the brightest of students.

When I completed the coursework, I fell into the hard work of the dissertation. It was slow, very slow, as the subject I chose didn’t come easily to me and I wonder still if I ever found the key to opening the door to my thesis.

The down time of working on my dissertation led me to join the ironworkers union. The work sated the need I have for physical exertion. It was hard on the body and there was a mind component to the work that drew me to it. I had to be clever, learn to work on my own in a strange trade, and I welcomed the challenge.

That, unfortunately, didn’t last. The work dried up and this led me to teaching, of which I’d had a taste when I was a grad student and Ph.D. candidate. Teaching demanded my mind and my wits. Students presented all kinds of challenges, as each student learns differently. This goes on even to today. I have moved from the classroom to online teaching. But it’s teaching all the same.

Being a letter carrier is the only job I ever had the demanded complete presence of mind every working minute. Either my head’s in the mail or the mail gets the best of me. Making mistakes takes time and everything at the Post Office is measured in minutes and seconds. The physical demand is also great. Fourteen miles a day is quite something, and to do it five days a week is a real challenge.

But, still, underneath is the fact that deep inside, I’m profoundly lazy. If I didn’t have to work, I wouldn’t. Work is something that’s been forced upon me. Certainly, there was a choice, and if I’d lived a different, more unconventional life, I’d have chosen being a bum. Maybe not one in the street but a bum all the same.

I look back now and understand that I should have followed a childhood impulse of traveling. I have lived abroad and traveled Europe, particularly Germany and France, pretty extensively. Whenever I have a chance to travel, I bemoan the choices I made earlier in my young adulthood that led me to where I am now.

Let me stop a minute and say that I have a good life. My wife loves me. My kids are turning out to be people with their own lives. I don’t regret them. I just wish I could have an existence that drew me to new and different places, that showed broad new horizons all the time.

That, I could do. But for now, I just get by. I do what’s required of me. I cut corners when I can. I sate my laziness by getting out of as much as I can. Left to my own devices, I would write, goof off, read, and sleep. That time, I suppose, will come soon enough. For the meantime, I sigh, put my shoulder to the wheel, and dream of doing as little as possible.