Overview...

What started as an awareness raising and ethnographic styled walk through Sierra Leone, this site now details the encounters of a not so academic academic who spends more time occupying Wall Street and squats than a university...

Wednesday, September 5, 2012

I give up.

[warning parental guidance: explicit language]  At the depths of despair - even if just for a moment - words fly like the wind, and they shouldn't be tempered.  This post will probably prove to be my most blatantly raw, controversial, and even aggressive.  Never mind angry.  But this is real.  This is real emotion, and this is the world we live in.  People feel these things every day.  We just chose not to cover it, express it, or engage with it.  We pretend it does not exist.  Well it does, and on that day, and at that moment, this is the way I expressed how I felt about life, society, and the pursuit of 'happiness'.


Fuck it.  How long can I do the exact same things over and over again and expect different results?  I have been looking for work for over three years.  I have virtually nothing to show for it.  The only thing I can is when I left this country and went someplace else.  It's a disaster.  I have put in application after application and have gotten nothing.  Now today, I just got official word that I did not get the job at this second hiking store which shall now be named:  REI.  I mean REALLY!?!?!?  Read through this blog.  I am a former two sport division I athlete, I played professionally in Europe, I've hiked all over the Appalachian trail, central Europe and Italy, not to mention Sierra Leone in Africa, and bike the city over.  I also have three years of athletic retail experience with running specialty stores.... and I can't get a job at REI!?!?!  WHAT THE FUCK.  This is unimaginable.  I go into that store and I have conversations with the people working there where I end up teaching them about their gear.  Camping, footwear (which I interviewed for), biking, whatever.  I know this stuff, I am completely and totally personable, I've got retail experience, yet I still can't get this job.  They are hiring 14 people for their store right now.  14 people, and I am not good enough to be one of them!?  There is no way that the people that they are interviewing and have hired have the knowledge and skill set that I do - especially if the people in the store already don't.  I am livid.  I've had enough.

I just want to yell and scream at everyone on of those people that thinks this shit is all simple and that the world somehow is easy.  That the unemployed are that only because of themselves.  That they should have no help.  That there should be no unemployment, no social safety nets.  That everyone should just be on their own and work hard.  Fuck you.  I've worked my ass off.  School, graduate school, two years working for a later to be known criminal that trapped me in a position to work endlessly for him while he did nothing, withheld pay, stalled my visa, etc.  I lost twenty pounds because I paid an organization in Prague I was managing first before I paid myself.  I did it again at Occupy when I went all in to try to raise awareness of the plight of so many people struggling.  I sold running shoes, officiated girls lacrosse, volunteered in local government, tried to fundraise for a political party, worked at a hiking store that is still yet to pay me.  I tried to start internet businesses, retail business, a non-profit - all require money and financing I can't seem to get.  I've worked 101 hour weeks at one time doing two jobs, I've burned the candle at both ends working and reading to get better.  I've done school after school, applied to PhD programs to no avail, traipsed all over the world trying to make myself a more marketable job candidate, lay alone nearly dead in a hospital bed with malaria just because I needed to have Africa experience on my resume to be marketable.  None of it has worked.

I have no permanent place to live, am living week to week and no money to find something.  I am stuck with a car I can't sell because when I had to buy it for a job, unbeknownst to me it needed a new transmission.  So now I owe $4500 on it and its worth $5000 minus a new transmission.  I'm behind on payments, but can't sell it, it could get towed any day for a couple of parking tickets.  I have student loans that I haven't paid in years.  When is it all going to end?  For how long do I keep doing the same thing and expecting it to be different.  I have no help, only no prospects.

To say, "I've made choices, I've put myself here".  Bull shit.  That is true on so many levels, but not even remotely all of them.  Yeah, I chose to go abroad when I was 24.  I chose to follow an atypical path, but I've had good jobs since then, but now there is nothing.  What's different.  The economy, the country.  And yet here we are whining about taxes and entitlement programs.  You know what.  How many people out there are like me?  Desperate, at the end of the rope.  How many people that can't stand are you willing to look in the eye and say, pull up your boot straps and work harder.  You tell me that to my face right now and I swear I'll tear every piece of that bull shit rhetoric apart.  That unemployment, food stamps, welfare, and the such are just a bunch of people looking for hand outs.  FUCK YOU.  I need help.  And we live in the only industrialized society of any merit that doesn't offer its citizens that.  A civilized society cares for itself and its community.  The United States of America is failing its citizens.  I can't get any help.  I applied for food stamps but need proof of address.  So if you're homeless you can't get them?  And they need a place to mail the forms to, whoops I can't get that because to get a PO box you have to be legal a resident somewhere and show them a lease or something official.  I don't have that.  I can't get mail, I can't get help, and I can't get a job.  I've put in over 500 job applications which I am apparently overqualified, underqualified, or differently qualified for.  But I'm sorry this is the last straw.  REI?!!?  I'm perfectly qualified for this job in every way except what?  YOU think I may not stay?  Huh, no one thinks I'll stay, yet I'm not qualified for any jobs that think I would stay.  My experience is specific and maybe not focused on the local issues other people might have experience in.  But I can't get a job.  I can't get an entry level job.  It's been so long.  I just can't keep doing this.

What do I have to offer to the world right now?  I'm an intelligent, educated and motivated man with sooo much to offer.  I just want to settle down and find a steady career, find someone special to share my life with and maybe have a family.  But what do I have to offer them?  Sorry, honey, I'm chronically unemployed, at the end of my tether, and about to lose it and go live in the woods.  I don't have the stability I need and want to offer the world.  How do I get it?  Everyone else has a solution, but no one an answer.  I can't change my resume or my history.  I won't lie.  And if this is my crime then our society is truly lost.

I don't know where else to turn.  I don't have the skills to be employed here it seems.  Entry level and retail won't hire me because they don't think I'll stay, yet I don't have the specific skills to get work I'm on a level to do.  Basically, I'm fucked.  It's been happening for three years and I can't take it anymore.  I need help.  I need something to stabilize me while I keep trying.  And for all of you libertarians and keep your hands of my money, don't tax me, figure your own shit on your own, I only care about myself people out there:  Fuck You.  I need help and I'm not too ashamed to admit it.  To bad you don't care about people in my situation.  You only care about yourselves.  After all, you were good enough to make it happen, to make yourself successful.  Well you know what?  We're not all as good as you.  We're not all as capable of doing the things you've been able to do.  I'm not good enough.  And apparently, given my experience and the job market, it looks like it's a little bit too late.  I can't start over and all of a sudden have those other things - whatever they are - that I apparently don't have right now.  So I'm the guy that falls through the cracks.  I'm the guy that our system - you - don't care to help.  It's not that usual one 13 baby having welfare mom that lives somewhere in the midwest that people always point to, it's the army of people like me that are dieing to just get some meaningful work.  I've pieced together a life for years now.  I can't do it anymore.    

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