cellini's Diaryland Diary ----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- And catching catfish and finding out I'm overqualified EXCEPT If I pull this off, it's going to be one hell of a turn-around. I have literally $11 to my name. Rock bottom. All I've got is one hell of a CV and a lot of ability. Oh, and there's other dumb shit going on. I have a small screening of my film in DC on 8/11 and I'm doing a speaking gig and Q&A with that. $300, which also has to cover my travel expenses. Then I have to cover whatever dumb bullshit happens on the 12th for R3wire. And hopefully that will be my last freelance assignment. And supposedly we're about to sign a deal with Sp1ke Lee's former production partner's new agency to represent my movie. I don't give a shit. I've lost all faith in that whole process. I'm just hoping that this thing happens where he buys in on a share of the film for $50k as part of representing it and I would get $5k of that, which I will immediately use to buy a cheap used car and cover the cost of first month's rent and a deposit for a short-term rental in Gainesville. Supposedly Steve is talking to one of the K0ch Brothers' charities about them paying for a college tour of the movie with me accompanying it as a speaker. I'm done waiting on that shit. He's had since last November to make any one of these things work out and provide me with a salary. I'm not going to pass up a job at UF or NEU in hope of a speaking tour that might never happen. If it doesn't come together in the next week or two, it won't happen at all because I won't be available. All I've done for the last few months is watch baseball games, go fishing, work on assignments for R3wire, and do stuff with my kids. And I read. Almost no socializing at all because I can't afford to go out or even spend the gas on non-essential travel. It's amazing how few people have reached out to ask where I am or how I'm doing. This makes leaving Ch@rlottesville that much easier. Fishing for catfish is free. I'm often out 3 nights in a row til the wee hours when my kids aren't with me. Saturday night, there I am. I was getting hurt a lot for a while. Scrambling up and down steep river banks to get to promising spots. I broke the tip of my right index finger. I'm covered by insect bites, scratches and fresh scars. I've been using my canoe on the reservoir lately, which has resulted in fewer injuries. I'm still not hitting my stride at it. I went out a few nights ago and had to grind on bullheads for hours. I came back with half a dozen eating-size bullheads and a keeper rock bass but that wasn't what I was out for. I would so much rather have one 7 pound channel catfish, which is more food with less work gutting and filleting. What I want to be able to do is go out for 3 hours or so and come back with half a dozen channel cats between 3 and 10 pounds for food. These bullheads and the weekly channel cat aren't cutting it. I don't know what I'm doing wrong. I study the structure and micro-target where to drop my lines. I'm putting out three rods and one hand line at a time from the canoe and always have one of them in my hands feeling for a strike. I'm trying 3 different types of baits at a time to see what they want. Cut bait, hot dogs soaked in garlic powder and whatever, and nighcrawlers. And I'm not getting the results I should have. I'm quiet, minimal light. Fishing from an hour before dusk til 11 pm or as late as 1:30 am. There's been all of this great news for the last week about moving ahead with the University of Florida for this job, and now with Northeastern University, and I don't have anyone to tell about it. I'm completely isolated, aside from doing the radio show every week and whatever shit happens on Twitter. I have nobody to be happy with, which is a solid sign that I need to take one of these jobs and leave this place and start over. It isn't the fault of this place or even these people here that I am alone right now. I've maneuvered into this awful job investigating and reporting on neo-Nazis, and that makes me dangerous to know and generally radioactive in a lot of ways. I get a lot of attention from weirdo political radicals from both ends of the political spectrum, and from crazy people. While the work that I do tends to expose neo-Nazis and police abuses, a lot of the far left doesn't care if you agree with them on 90% of everything. They will spit in their allies' eyes over the remaining 10%, and a lot of the most vocal elements are people who are literally very mentally ill. Oddly, the primary or influential leaders of both the alt-r1ght and Antif@ are both all fine with me. R1chard Sp3ncer and Chr1s C@ntwell know that I don't agree with their politics, but they like the fact that I am fair and truthful and they feel like victims of the police departments that I've investigated just as much as other Ant1fa and resistance groups do. My isolation is also just as much the fault of my poverty as it is any failure of my friends. I'm not there at concerts and bars and cafes and I can't be on Facebook because of my crazy stalkers. Out of sight, out of mind. But there is no solution to this here. I've been trying to get a salaried job here for a very long time and there isn't anything here in any of my fields for me. I can't restart my life here. I have to go where the jobs are. Other cities. I've looked at jobs in NYC that I could get, but I don't have the money to relocate there. Getting decent housing there, with at least one of my kids with me, would be extremely difficult. My CV is probably good enough to get me $70 to $80k in NYC, but on that money in that city I don't know that I can get a decent two bedroom in a neighborhood with ok schools and have enough money left to make the whole thing worth while. Surprisingly, colleges have turned out to be my best job market after six or seven months of trying really hard to figure this whole job searching thing out with no advice. I've learned that I am overqualified for most writing positions at most magazines and newsrooms. My clips are too prestigious (NYT, WP, Slate, Sm1thsonian M@gazine, etc.) My experience is just a little too long, at 6 years of science journalism and one year of civil rights journalism and 3 years writing and promoting books. Also that. Every editor wishes that she (or he) had written a book but most of them haven't. They don't want a published author working under them. And the film-making is also a problem. And the awards and the lectures at Yale and the State Department and so forth. Someone whose resume consists of college, internship, 2 years as an assistant editor at the Peoria Herald or whatever, and then 6 years as a deputy editor at a slightly bigger newspaper or a magazine don't really want someone working under them who they suspect thinks that he is above them. Regardless of how much better their journalism might even be compared with mine. A person with my experience would normally have moved up to an editorial position before doing most of what I have done. But I don't want to be an editor. I'm a writer, and I don't buy into the whole idea that the career goal for a writer or journalist should be to move up and become an editor who only occasionally writes an original piece. Also, I'm not sure how good an editor I would be in terms of the finer points of polishing the English language. I was not an English major nor a journalism major. Technically speaking, I am a high school drop out. I applied for early acceptance to H@ampshire college in my junior year. I was accepted, but then they wanted me to take certain classes at a community college before attending. So I took community college classes during the summer after my junior year, and then more all during what would have been my senior year of high school. I took those classes according to what Hampshire wanted rather than what was required for high school graduation. So ironically I ended up starting at Hampshire no sooner than I would have had I finished HS normally, but with no high school diploma and with a whole lot of college credits. There was a limit on how many credits transferred, so I lost some of them. Then after a year at Hampshire I decided to transfer to a state school close to home. This was for a lot of reasons, including the fact that my fiance hadn't been accepted to Hampshire and I wanted to live with her. So then I lost a bunch more credits that didn't transfer. After 2 years at the state school, I was destitute and sick of it and as my wedding approached I had an opportunity to leave and take a full-time job, so I did it. No diploma for me, although I'm pretty sure that my total credits were enough if they hadn't been slashed on transfers. Oddly, none of that has ever hurt me at all. The fact that I went to college seems to head off any question as to whether I graduated from high school. No outlet I have ever written for has ever asked whether I have a degree. So now another irony is that my best job prospects seem to be at universities. The books and the awards and the films and the lectures seem to be valued in academia in a way that they aren't in newsrooms. The people looking at my CV for those positions have Phds and awards and often books of their own. There's no jealousy or concern that I'm going to be too big for my britches. ...and I just googled the guy from NE University who asked to interview me for a job over the phone tomorrow. He has a Pulitzer. So, no ego threat there. 1:08 a.m. - 2018-07-25 ----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- |
||||||
|
||||||