doing alright

 Reading Beagles' successful path to the boskydell of his dreams, sent me into the archives where I retrieved my 1963 copy of The EnGager to see if his aim was true on graduation from high school.  Farmer it said next to his photo.  Well I guess that is the closest thing you can put in your yearbook, hunter sounds odd, and living off the land is probably something that the faculty censors of the EnGager would not allow.

Cain the farmer was the murderer of his brother the hunter.  Always seemed to me that it should be the other way around, but outside that unfortunate incident, Abel does seem to have made the better choice because before we discovered agriculture and the rich began to get richer, hunting (and foraging) gave us a much shorter weekday and what appears to have been a better life.

It has always been curious to me why Beagles, with all that land has never put up a truck garden. but I guess that sort of thing does not float his boat, and that there are a lot of varmints around.

As far as jobs I reckon Beagles was always after something that paid well enough, but something he never wanted to occupy his mind too much.  I know he was some kind of union official but I don't think he ever thought of climbing the corporate ladder.

So I guess we, and I assume also Beagles, could say that he has done alright.

My school yearbook says biochemist and that was after my hero at the time, Isaac Asimov, and did not last beyond my first year in college where I discovered that chemistry was just too damned hard. When I graduated my degree was in psychology, and I had vague thoughts of being a public servant with a kind of run-down office where people of little means would drop by and say "Doc, I think I'm crazy," and I would say "Have a seat," and we would chat for an hour, and they would feel a little less crazy.  That would have been okay.

But I had also taken some writing courses and I kind of got that bug, and I did write a little while I was drinking a lot, and looking back I can see where that writing was basically an excuse for not looking for a more responsible job that would get in the way of my drinking.

But Valentines day of 78 I realized that I was going to have to get that more responsible job and I went out to the junior college to get my data processing certificate.  I did kind of like writing code, but it was mostly just something that I could do easily and that would likely bring in some good dough.  

Then I did that thing about trying to become a hotshot bureaucrat which didn't last long and after awhile I quit.

Being a substitute teacher is the only job I ever had where I thought I was doing good, not a great deal of good, but just for those six hours when me and the kids were in that death cage, I worked hard to make it better for them and for me.  I did go to education school with thoughts of becoming a regular teacher, but I could see that the job was too hard and long and I didn't want to make that sacrifice.

And now I am an artist.  Not really of course.  A real artist would probably put in like 80 hours a week and I put in a mere twenty.  But you know, I have my shows.  I do make some sales, which means that some strangers pay me like a hundred bucks for something I made which feeds my ego.  

I have my inspirations and despairs like you see in those overblown movies about famous artists.  I feel that nobody else really understands my work even those who fork over a hunnert bucks, but I have made my peace with that.  I guess that I am doing alright.

I have never seen One Two Three, but I like Billy Wilder well enough.  Double Indemnity and Lost Weekend are crackerjack movies.  Didn't care that much for Some Like It Hot, and my favorite is Ace In The Hole.