The only thing that’s worse than getting fired from a job is not getting fired.

That isn’t to say that getting fired doesn’t suck. It does. And unless you go out with middle fingers raised to the sky, giving that final speech where you tell everyone exactly what you think of them – the speech we all rehearse every morning on the drive in. The one where you finally get to tell Betty down in HR just what you think of her cubical full of cat pictures and her fucking email memos about copier etiquette – getting fired is the ultimate walk of shame.

But getting fired isn’t the worst thing that can happen. Say you get caught masturbating. I’d happily clear out my desk if it meant that I’d never have to look those people in the eye again. And we’ve all done it. You can’t stick the average twenty-something anywhere for eight to ten hours without them sneaking off to rub one out. I know a girl who came during a funeral. It’s not something she’s proud of. It’s not a war story she passes around but to hear her tell it, surrounded with that much grief and sadness the only thing she could do to stay sane was force herself to feel something else. And pleasuring one’s self in the bathroom is less intrusive than say, sparking a joint or diving head first into a flask of whiskey.

And if she’s running off during the funeral service, what hope do the rest of us have, stuck at a desk?

But it’s one of those things that you absolutely can’t get caught doing. Once you’ve been caught, the whole house of cards comes down. This fiction that we’re at work for anything other than a paycheck – that we’re not just killing time until we can go home and get loaded – is over.

And that fiction is important because it allows us to dress like assholes and spend all day surrounded by people we actively dislike. It lets us pretend that we find the work stimulating, engaging, fulfilling. Because we don’t want to be in it just for the money, whoring ourselves out to the highest bidder. We want to believe in what we’re doing, that at the end of the day we didn’t just make a living but maybe made the world a little better.

But sadly that isn’t the case.

I knew a guy who got caught. But Jim didn’t get caught just rubbing one out. He wasn’t sprawled out on the toilet with his pants around his ankles thinking about the cute temp in reception. He was standing. One hand wrapped around himself and with the other, he’d stuffed his thumb in his own asshole. Lost somewhere in his inbox was a memo from Betty that the bathroom door latch was sticking and that maintenance would at one that afternoon to fix it. If he’d waited forty-five minutes I wouldn’t be telling you this story.

Jim didn’t get fired. He got a note in his HR file for ‘Inappropriate Workplace Behavior’. He attended six one hour sessions of required counseling and spent two more in a sexual misconduct seminar. Eight hours of trying to explain why he felt the need to touch himself at work.

Those are the types of conversations no one wants to have. You can’t say that you masturbate at work precisely because it is inappropriate. Because while you might be willing to trade away slices of your life for a shitty paycheck, you’re not willing to trade in your very soul.

Alcoholics have it easier. Everybody understands that alcohol deadens the pain enough to make it in by eight every morning. As a culture we’ve created entire systems, entire classifications of disease to explain our need to bury and burn away those parts of ourselves that can’t handle so called modern living.

But no one wants to talk about those acts of rebellion that make us feel alive. That allow us to turn the middle finger outward, back on our employer. Fucking at work is so common that it should be an Olympic sport. It’s an act of rebellion that allows us to connect with another person, to do something life affirming and honest

And masturbation is just the fiction that we’re fucking. Masturbation at work is just a lie buried within a lie.

For poor Jim there are no lies left. He’s a constant reminder that we’re all fucking ourselves behind closed doors. He might as well be invisible at work. No one can stand to look him in the eye. He’s become the white elephant in the room reminding us that even unspoken, we all know that we’re all just faking our way through the day.

All that’s left for Jim is to sit at his desk for eight hours a day not daring to move. Because the moment he stands up the question will hang over the whole office ‘what new perversion is Jim into?’

Sometimes Lefsetz’s writing just kills me dead.

The question is, are you working with your head or heart? At some point you’ve got to stop being who your parents want you to be and start being who you are.

…

Would you rap if there was no Biggie, no Jay-Z?

Would you play the guitar if there was no Eddie Van Halen?

Would you be in the music business if David Geffen hadn’t made all that money?

If not, give up. Please. You’re hurting yourself. And you’ll leave no lasting mark.

But if you need to play, don’t lament that you’re not a millionaire. The music should be enough. If you’ve got a roof over your head, if you can pay the bills, you’re on the map. Affecting a coterie deeply is more important than being a momentary comet, burning brightly and then flaming out.

I read something like that and I get a little shaky because it hits so close to home, like he knows a secret about me that I don’t want anyone to know. It’s easy to be snarky, cynical, to be in it for the money, to be ironic. It’s hard to believe in something.

People ask me all the time, where is this going? What’s your goal? What’s the end game? I tell them I want to be a writer.

But that’s the simple, reductionist answer. The truth is I need to write. And I can only hope that someday someone will give me money to do it. It’s not the greatest business plan but it’s the truth.

See, I’ve tried to quit writing. I’ve tried a lot. From twenty to twenty six I tried to quit writing every six months. I’d start a blog and I’d just write the shit out of it. Words would pour out of me. I’d post twice a day like I had to hit some magic number before they turned the Internet off.

Then something would happen. I’d realize that I didn’t have an audience. Or the wrong person would find it, a family member, a friend. I’d get nervous because my rough edges were showing, and I’d wonder what was going to happen when people knew things about me. Because my words weren’t professional. I wasn’t writing about a cool subject like marketing, or a hip subject like social networking. I wasn’t writing about writing or making money on the Internet. I wasn’t dispensing advice to those in my generation. I was just writing the kind of things I wanted to read and I wasn’t strong enough to stand on that. Something would spook me, I’d drop the writing, walk away from it, and find something new to be interested in.

But a few months later, I’d start again. There’d be a new service. Diaryland or Livejournal or Blogger. I’d bounce between, torn between wanting to have someone read my words and afraid to be judged by them.

We love to scream about the narcissist. We love to tell those around us that we don’t twitter and we don’t read status updates on facebook. We love to surround ourselves with people so we can tell them how much we don’t give a shit about what other people are doing.

But is it narcissistic to just want to connect? To put yourself out there and say “this is what I’m about, what are you about?” I don’t know. I’ve read so many snarky condemnations of the narcissist that I couldn’t recognize one if I was holding up their mirror for them.

At some point you’re going to have to decide if you’re afraid of what other people are going to say about you. And if you are, then you’re never going to step out and do something great. Because if you do, if you step out, you’re going to attract haters. And you’re most likely going to fail in the attempt, and still, you’re going to attract mountains of criticism. It’s not fair but it happens and most of it, the worst of it, is going to come from your own brain.

And so for years I fought that battle. The first thing I ever put on the internet was a zine called NaCL. Salt. I wanted to write a monthly newsletter. Silly stupid shit. I had it online for about twelve hours, submitted it to search engines. This was in the days when Yahoo mattered and before anyone had googled anything. This was back when if you built something, the internet was small enough that other people would find it. The first email I got was one telling me that my writing sucked and that I should quit. And to a 19 year old me, that mattered. I tore the whole site down – a site that had taken me weeks to hand code – the next day.

So I wrote in secret after that. Wrote short stories, essays. I’d just write to write, because it was fucking awesome and I liked doing it. Every once in a while, like a build up of pressure, I’d crack. We used to all hang out on this mailing list and some nights I’d pound out a short story and send it to the whole list. Just because I wanted to know that it was in front of someone. And I could lie to myself and say that at least someone was reading it.

There’s this scene in Almost Famous:

I used to do speed. You know, and sometimes a little cough syrup? I’d stay up all night, just writing and writing. I mean, like pages of dribble — You know, about the faces of Coltrane. You know, just to fucking write.

I love that scene. I love that scene because I’ve written and deleted more in the last ten years than I’ll probably write in the next ten.

I didn’t find writing. I didn’t say, I’m going to be a writer. Writing was just the thing I did when I burned out everything else in my life. Writing was the one thing I came back to time and time again in all those quiet moments when I wanted to understand the world around me. Everyone who talks about finding their passion has it backwards. You don’t find your passion, it’s not hiding under a rock, waiting to be picked up and taken home. Your passion is already there; it’s the thing you’re doing every day. It’s the thing you do when you need a break, when it you need to blow off steam. And if there’s nothing there yet, there will be, just give it time. It took me ten years to finally attach my name to my writing. You’ve got time. Don’t panic.

This ritual of trying to process our own grief by making media out of it.

~ Jay Smooth

My grandmother died over the July 4th weekend.

Before you get all ZOMG, she was 92. She had health problems, she suffered from dementia. Her quality of life wasn’t all that great at the end so while it was a shock to hear, it wasn’t unexpected.

But it was a hard phone call to get on July 4th. I had planned on spending the holiday at home, maybe with a case of beer and some barbeque but at the last minute I got the chance to fly to San Francisco and see some close friends I hadn’t seen in too long. And since I’m just stupid for any chance to get out of LA, I took the first flight I could book myself on.

Had I been at home, I imagine that I would have taken the phone call, hung up and spent a quiet day trying to figure out exactly what I was feeling. Maybe I would have focused on the beer more than the barbeque but all in all I would just watched some TV, maybe caught some fireworks over the city and gone to bed.

As it happened I was standing in the dining room of a friend’s apartment, probably in my boxers and a dirty t-shirt, probably smelling like something that had just crawled itself out of the bottom of a whiskey bottle. I had one of those hangovers that makes it hard to look directly at people. The kind that leaves you feeling anxious for no reason, like you owe the world an apology but you can’t figure out what you’ve done wrong. I kept tripping over my words, barely able to complete a sentence, and just holding a conversation was leaving me out of breath. When my cell phone rang and I saw it was my dad, I assumed he was calling to wish me a happy fourth. I had to stop and ask myself if I could make it through the conversation without bursting into a nervous verbal diarrhea.

Twenty-four hours earlier, we’d wandered into a tourist bar on the edge of Union Square to grab a drink and see where the day would take us. With no definite plans, I should have known that we were headed nowhere good. Instead I let myself get caught up in the flow of things. A few drinks here, a six pack at someone’s house down by the stadium, then a quick ride over to a club where we drank until close and then piled into cabs to head to an after hours spot. It was one of those nights where I’d lost all sense of time. One moment I was sipping a whiskey coke with the whole night in front of me and the next, as if by magic, I was sitting on the back deck of this bar, watching the sun slowly come up over the city and thinking “fuck me, it can’t be dawn. I’m not in any kind of shape to face a new day.”

If you’ve never stayed out drinking until sunrise, it’s an awful feeling. There’s nothing in this world that can make you feel like more of a degenerate than watching the sun come up and being hit with the realization that you’ve got nothing but a long, painful day ahead while your liver and kidneys try and undo whatever damage you inflicted the night before.

It was just a few sweat soaked hours after catching a cab back to my friend’s place that my phone rang. I found myself yelling “Hey Dad! Happy Fourth!” into the phone in an attempt to keep ahead of the conversation. I hoped to hell that he wouldn’t ask why I was shouting like a lunatic. As it turned out, he wasn’t calling to wish me a happy fourth.

No matter how expected, no matter what kind of forewarning, that phone call is always a shock.

It was six years ago, this month I think, my grandmother on my mom’s side died.

That was the year that a friend and I packed up my Honda civic and with no clear plan or idea of what we were getting ourselves into, moved from east coast to west. The trip across the country had been successful in that we’d made it to Idaho where he was staying with, ironically, the same friend whose living room I’d be standing in six years later when I got the call from my dad. And while he was in Idaho, I was staying with my aunt in again, somewhat ironically, San Francisco and looking for an apartment so that I could get the three of us out of Idaho and to Santa Cruz.

I was just pulling up after another unsuccessful day of apartment hunting when my mom called to tell me that her mother had had a stroke. I must have been just getting out of my car when I answered the phone because all I remember is standing barefoot on my aunt’s front lawn as my mom told me. I’m not sure why, but for years I’d feel like a real asshole for not taking that call inside where the neighbors couldn’t watch me pacing back and forth, kicking at the grass underfoot.

Because my mom’s side of the family is Jewish, the funeral had to be held within forty-eight hours. And so what followed was the sort of logistical action that usually accompanies proclamations of war. Flights had to be booked, bags had to be packed, houses had to be sat, pets had to be looked after. For my part, I had to dig my suit out of the trunk of my car from where I had carefully wrapped it into a ball and wedged it half under my spare tire.

This need for hasty action left little time for thinking. All I had to do was stuff some sort-of-clean clothes into a backpack, lock my car and get on a plane. By the time I slowed down enough to take a sort of internal inventory I was three thousand miles away from my aunt’s front lawn and sitting in my grandparent’s house in Northeast Philadelphia surrounded by a family whom, having arraigned this complex movement of people around the country, were left with no good outlet for all the emotion and nervous, anxious energy that had been fueling them for 48 hours.

Six years later, my dad would give me the news calmly. My grandmother had died, there would be a memorial service at the end July or the beginning of August. We’d talk again later in the week when he knew more of the specifics. His calm smashed through my hangover and left me stupidly repeating “I’m really sorry” over and over again, not knowing what to say, what I wanted to say or if I had to say anything at all. He assured me that he was doing ok and hung up.

In that moment I wished I was home on my couch, door locked, no one around. I didn’t know what to feel and I really just needed ten minutes to figure out what was going on in my own head. I could see my friends in the dining room, talking as they waited for the first pot of coffee to finish brewing. I didn’t want to have to tell them. I didn’t want to be the asshole who ruined what was shaping up to be a great weekend with this news. I didn’t want to deal with the sudden flood of memories that I had to push as far out of my head as possible. I wished I had let the phone call go to voicemail.

As I walked back into the dining room, trying to paste something approximating a smile onto my face, I wondered if I even had to tell them. It was my pain right? My life and my family and maybe they didn’t need to know. Maybe all I needed were a few beers and a few laughs and I could essentially just push pause on the portion of my brain that knew – hold it suspended until the weekend was over and I was back in Los Angeles.

But I must have brought it up because the next thing I remember, I was being handed a tall boy from the fridge and asked “were you two close?” I shrugged off the question, not really knowing where to start.

The whole processing thing was easier when my mom’s mom died. That felt like a proper death. Like an emergency. There were a lot of people asking each other how they were doing. A lot of very serious phone calls made where nothing of consequence was said. I knew what was expected of me: drop everything and get on the plane. In its own way that was comforting. I didn’t have to think about my feelings because my job, along with my step dad, was simply to be there for my mom.

This time, there was no sense of emergency. Just the news of what happened and instructions to wait for the next phone call. With no one telling me what to do, I found myself confused. Did I fly back to Los Angeles early? And what would that accomplish? Did I gut it out in San Francisco?

So I did what I thought I was supposed to do. I slipped two fingers of rum into my coffee to help with the hangover, finished my eggs and toast and got ready to head out to the barbecue like we’d planned.

In a way of I was proud of myself. I kept thinking on the drive over to the barbeque, “this is what you’re supposed to do. You deal with it and you get on with your day.” Like it was a simple inconvenience but nothing that should actually interfere with my day.

And that feeling lasted about ten minutes. I wasn’t through my first serving of potato salad before I had a giddy, almost unstoppable need to laugh. I couldn’t stop thinking, “this is really how you’re going to spend your afternoon? You really think you can just turn yourself off like this? You’ve lost your goddamn mind.” Luckily, I don’t think anyone noticed when I slipped out and walked back to the apartment.

On that walk back I was angry. Angry that I’d get something like this dropped on me without anyone telling me what I should fucking do about it. Angry that I couldn’t seem to nail down what I was feeling. Angry that one moment I was praising myself for “handling shit” – that’s how I’d thought about it in the car, as “handling shit” – and the next moment I was sneaking out of barbecues because I thought I was about to crack.

I wanted the memorial service to be that day, not a month away. I wanted someone else to tell me “ok, be sad now and when this service is over you can go back to your life.” I wanted someone else to feel what I was feeling, so I wouldn’t feel so goddamn alone.

That week in Philadelphia six years earlier was so charged with tension and anger and sadness and hurt that by the time I boarded the plane to return to California, I was exhausted by the intensity of what my mom and her siblings were going through. Boarding that plane was an escape, like I’d been standing too close to a fire for too long and even though the soles of my shoes had melted, I could finally move away and find some relief. And it provided its own sense of closure. By the time the plane had hit cruising altitude I had put the whole week behind me.

This time, I found myself buying a six-pack of beer and a microwave pizza at five in the afternoon on July 4th. Even the guy working the counter must have seen something in my face because he took one look at me and asked “Hey man, you doing alright?” with a concern that went beyond simple politeness.

Now that I’ve been back in Los Angeles for a few weeks, I’m not sure how necessary the memorial service is. I’ve had enough time to find my own sense of closure. I’ve had enough time to deal with the shock and with the flood of memories and with everything else that comes with losing a family member.

I’m still going to the memorial service. For one, I bought the tickets back when I was looking for someone to tell me how to feel and what to do and I figure that getting on the plane is probably easier than trying to explain this to a Southwest representative and get a refund.

But I’m also going because it’ll be nice to see my dad’s side of the family. And without needing them to tell me what I’m feeling, maybe this trip can be about more than just losing a grandparent.