So here I was, thirty years old, unemployed, broke but happy. It all happened two years ago as I am typing this. November 2017 was a motherfucker of a month for me. I remember waking up the next day and having no early morning alarms set up, not rushing to get anywhere, no turnpikes, no traffics, no more frustrations, no more anxiety, no more work. I was jobless and free. I woke up, got my shower, got my breakfast, and thought about what should I be doing now since I have all the time in the world to myself.

I’ve decided to wash my laundry. I was so excited that I forgot to check my pockets, and washed my “ChapStick” along with my jeans and dress shirts, fucking them all up with greasy stains. Next, I’ve decided to clean my house. I’ve got plenty of time so I’ve decided to go deep and wash everything well, reach all the hard-to-reach places and make my house shine. Everything took me about half of the day. When the afternoon came around, I’ve decided that I need to get some air. I got into my car and drove to Wawa to get some coffee and smoked a cigarette. While smoking outside I was thinking about it all. What’s next for me? The house is clean and the laundry is done. What should I be doing? When should I start looking for new jobs? Not now, for sure. Fuck that. I’ve had enough. I needed some time to clear my head. I needed some time to recover. I’ll go home and write something, I thought. Plenty of time for writing now. I should put it all in on writing. Why not? This is a great opportunity now since I have no agenda anymore.

I went for a ride around the neighborhood and to do some more thinking. I always had my best ideas while driving in a car. I drove, played some music but no resolution came to me. It was hard to focus and hard to come up with any good ideas. Everything felt strange now. It was the time in the day when I was supposed to be working, but now I am driving around with no purpose and no direction. I wasn’t worried about the job, I wasn’t worried about the money just now. I knew that I still will be paid for the next month plus two more weekly paychecks as part of my severance agreement. In the meantime, I can relax. I was looking to find my next purpose. Set up some goals. Do something that I always wanted to do. Something out of the contest, something spontaneous, something that I have never had time for. Starting tomorrow I’ll do some writing for sure. And I did. I wrote “My Shit’s out of luck or the stories of my life. Part I.” Which wasn’t really a short story it was more like a stream of consciousness, my internal rant. I never thought anything would come out of it but two months later a lady from “New London Writers” reach out to me saying she wanted to publish that piece. I was happy beyond belief. That was it. My writing got a green light. But that all happened much later. Driving around for a couple of hours I watched that the time was getting late. My wife will be coming home soon. I went back to cook dinner.

I woke up the next morning with nothing to do. I reached out for my laptop and started to go through my files. My writing bits and pieces from the past which needed to get polished and, of course, finished. Amongst quite a few files I found a novel which was about ten pages long at the time. Reading through it I just couldn’t stop thinking about it. There was never enough time to really sit down and write more and finish any other writing what was already half baked. I started working on that novel right away. The more I thought about it the more I was able to put on the page. Just in the first two hours, I was able to add eight more pages to it and the whole new idea about the plot expansion. The novel was originally set up to show the life of a broke, ambitious young man, who was trying to make it on his own as a salesman without proper education. Johnny worked at a furniture store at the beginning and was meant to move over into a finance company. I used to be employed by a finance company which I hated and I wanted to show how fucking pathetic the whole corporate culture was and how rediculous the old-school sales mindset worked. As I was going through the novel again I’ve decided to change things around and added a girl to the plot and changed it to evolve more against his personality and his personal struggles. At the moment of this writing, the novel is still not finished.

The next day nothing much really happened as well. I’ve decided to expand my creative horizons, literary and moved over to write at the coffee shop. My house was empty but I needed something more, some more fresh and unique background variables to influence my thinking and my writing. The coffee shop didn’t work. There were just too many people and everyone walking back and forth and I was even embarrassed to pull out my laptop and write. Good for me that I had Bukowski’s short-story collection with me. I was just sitting there with my coffee reading “the master of the misery and the short-story writing”. The experience of venturing out went nowhere with zero productivity almost every time. I was staying home to write after all. I wasn’t worried about finances just yet even though I knew I need to start working soon because there was a bill every day that I needed to pay.

Signing up for Uber account didn’t take too long and I was up and running in about a couple of hours. I woke up one day and just did it. I still have a new leased car which required to make payments and now it was time to put that car to real use. I woke up at seven, got a shower, got my breakfast, and drove to the City. The City had plenty of people who needed ridesharing much more and more often than anybody here in the North East Philly or the suburbs. I went online via the Uber app and kept on driving. The Uber app made a noise to which I wasn’t quite accustomed yet but later it sounded like the money to be made. I’ve picked up my first passenger, said “Hi, how are you?” and moved on. The first time I drove for Uber felt strange. I was driving around town with a stranger or a bunch of strangers all day long back and forth. The small commissions that I made, a few bucks here and there, did add up over time. However, it required to drive a lot to make a least somewhat decent paycheck. I was my own boss, I didn’t need anybody advising or approvals, no meetings, no bullshit. I was able to make a living without a corporate gig and I was free at once.

Until the end of December, I was driving for Uber randomly, just for my own amusement. I have discovered parts of the City that I’ve never been too. I always loved Philly. Philadelphia has its own look and environment, an attitude, and culture or multiple cultures for that matter, and there is not a city like it anywhere in the world. It was interesting for me to see all those random people I would pick up and drive them to their destination. Some people were nice, curious, some people were weird and smelled funny, some were just quiet, some just didn’t give two fucks about anything. I picked up customers at their homes or apartments and drove them to their jobs. (At least they had a job to pay for their ride and my wages). I’ve picked up customers from restaurants and drove them home, and from the City, I drove them to the suburbs or airport or over to Jersey in some cases. I felt shy and uncomfortable among other people while driving. I was so not a people’s person and now I was making my living driving some strangers around. I knew I just can’t escape people anywhere, I had to deal with them.

The beginning of the new 2018 year meant the beginning of the major struggles and frustrations for me. My health insurance was expired as of January first, my last severance paycheck was due soon and there would be nothing else coming in my way. The bills for the month ate most of my checking account and the driving that I’ve done so far didn’t really help much. There were no jobs on the horizon, no interviews. I wasn’t even looking. Embarrassed as I felt initially about losing a job now made me feel super proud of myself about the fact that I am making it without a proper job. I just didn’t give a fuck about joining the “proper” workforce and enslaving myself to another fucking corporate gig.

2018 was a bad year. The worst year in my life as I can remember. Things did straighten themselves up in the end, however, but it took too much pain in the ass, frustration, misery, hardships to get there. At the beginning of the year, I didn’t know that I will not find a job until late June that year. The job I eventually would find will require about four hours of commute every day. I didn’t know yet that all the interviews and phone calls and job arrangements that I was trying to make will never come to fruition until late June. I never knew that I could be driving for sixteen hours a day every day to cover my expenses. I never knew that I would exhaust myself to the point where I would be seeing things, hallucinating behind the wheel. I didn’t know that few months into 2018 my best friend who was always healthy and in good spirits will discover five tumors in his body and his head. I never knew that with all that shit going on I will hardly find any time to write. I needed to make a living for my family first, I needed to support my friend, I needed to find that god damned job for fuck’s sake so I can organize my life and ensure a stable paycheck for my family. I knew the price of normal, boring, stable everyday living with your fucking long-ass commutes, boring meetings, healthcare, 401K, regular bi-weekly paychecks, and everything else that goes along with it. I needed all that.