This is week 121 of The Life of Riley, a weekly post detailing my activities since I ended a thirteen year career as a corporate drone. These posts are usually long, personal, and geared more for my own memory than the reader’s entertainment.

Sunday (Day 840): The Avalanche

The first thing I did in the morning was to spill a full bowl of Cheerios all over the kitchen floor. The room looked as if someone had placed a tiny charge at the bottom of my bowl and set it off as I walked across the kitchen. I shook my head and surveyed the havoc for a second before #1GF! walked in. “Don’t come in here,” I said, holding up a hand. “It’s a mess.”

She surveyed the room, lifted an eyebrow and smirked, waiting for the explanation of why the floor looked like a birds eye view of the sinking of the titanic.

“I have no idea what happened,” I said. “I couldn’t repeat it if I wanted to.”

#1GF! shook her head and walked away to tend to the baby.

Once I got the kitchen cleaned up, that minor incident was enough to tilt my mood into a general malaise. I walked into the other room with #1GF!.

“Hey, what’s the matter with you?” #1GF! asked. “They’re just Cheerios. You’ve got twelve cubic feet of them in the cabinet.”

“It’s not the Cheerios. I guess I’m starting to wonder if I’m really going to be able to sell this book. Or any book. I’m trying to stay positive, but the rejections are piling up. I have that same sinking feeling that I had when I finally figured out that blogging wasn’t going to work out as a career choice. I’m doing something that I love to do, but how do you keep investing all of your spare time into something when you have no idea if you suck or not? I don’t know whether this is all just a pipe dream.”

#1GF! silently looked on like she was scanning the mountain for signs of an avalanche. We had company coming over, and it was written all over my face that I wasn’t happy. I knew I shouldn’t have opened my mouth. “Don’t worry. I’ll be fine once everyone gets here. Maybe I’m just sick of the waiting. Waiting for guests, waiting for agents, waiting for the baby to stop screaming. But that’s what life is, right? Long stretches of waiting punctuated by short periods of activity. Right?” There was a loud crack, and I roared down the mountain taking out every minor issue in my path, and #1GF! let me wind myself down. When I heard myself complain that all contact with my friends had been reduced to virtual status updates, I knew that I needed to stop. “Look,” I said. “I’m sorry for complaining. I’ll be fine.”

“Yes, you will,” said a reassuring #1GF!, who was smart enough to wait for the avalanche to stop before pulling out any survivors.

The baby fell asleep, so #1GF! went out to the store. I estimated that I had an hour to accomplish whatever I wanted, and there were no potential roadblocks in sight. I kicked off the hour by eating some expired lunch meat because I was paying more attention to my writing than to tiny computer-printed dates. I was still chewing when I sat down at the PC. I stared at my list of agents for a couple of minutes and wondered where to begin.

I thought about writing, but I was already six weeks behind on the Life of Riley series and I wasn’t looking forward to chewing through the backlog. As much as like writing those posts, they don’t pay the bills, so I let them slide once again.

I contemplated sending out more agent queries, because even though my manuscript wasn’t paying the bills either, the income generating potential was higher for a book than a series of posts that I’ve been writing for free for eight years. Then again, the agent queries were starting to feel like an exercise in futility.

I stared at the screen. I felt like I should be writing my next book already, but I didn’t have any ideas for a new book yet. I stared at a blank file for a couple of minutes before opening a flash game and wasting the hour on that. My wasted time is my own damned fault.

By the time our guests showed up, the mindless entertainment of the flash game had me feeling better. Having a few people over to eat, talk, and stare at the baby for a while felt like a party instead of an obligation inserted into a schedule that was increasingly booked with blocks of screaming.

While we were sitting at our kitchen table, we mentioned that people in the neighborhood are very friendly. Sometimes, they even break that imaginary curtain and wave to us when we’re inside our house. Thinking that this was funny, #1GF!’s mother kept waving to anyone who walked by the window. None of them were our neighbors, and just about all of them gave a small, bewildered, self conscious wave to the woman vigorously waving at them from our kitchen table.

Everyone left by 6PM, and we prepped to give the baby a bath. Unfortunately, the baby fell asleep. There was no way that we were going to wake her during the prime screaming hours just to pursue proper hygiene, so we put her tub and towels away.

To keep us from being bad parents, the baby woke up ten minutes later, screaming at full volume. We pulled all the bath stuff out again and put her in the tub to see if it would calm her down. She was quiet and relaxed through the bath, and then returned to screaming as I wrestled her damp arms into the sleeves of her onsie.

When we finally got her to bed, I turned on my PC with the intention of digging through the trash for some of the productivity I had thrown away earlier. I ended up looking up Rubik’s cube solutions that I wasn’t interested in spending my limited energy and brain capacity on memorizing. I opened Facebook because that’s the place to go when you have a scorched Earth policy toward your productivity.

As I read through the list of clever, single serving bullshit, I realized that I have virtualized most of my friends like an offshore friend farm. I also realized that even though friend virtualization is cost effective, it doesn’t offer the power that I need. I was feeling the same toward the internet as a whole.

The internet, although we hoped it would grow up to be Cambridge, has turned out to be Hollywood. And like Hollywood, there are several good reasons to burn it to the ground before it infects everyone it touches with its bastardized version of reality.

The virtual world is slowly plodding down the path that television blazed years before, and everything is being trampled into a reality show, with an emphasis that’s quickly shifting from “reality” to “show”. We’re packaging our friendships and wrapping them in a fake smile or a quick joke to ensure that everything stays fresh and light. Meanwhile, we’re all chattering at once, and clapping each other on the back for how fucking clever we’ve become. And under the layers of plastic, real communication sputters and suffocates. Like Hollywood, you can’t see the problem until you’ve been cut off from it for a while.

Monday (Day 841): A Printed Manuscript

I finished Shining City by Seth Greenland. It’s an oddball book about a guy who takes over a prostitution ring after his estranged brother dies. I found it pretty entertaining in both subject matter and style.

The baby fell asleep at 8AM, and was still sleeping two hours later when I got out of the shower. The house was dead quiet. Instead of doing something useful, I started remixing The Ting Tings and Rolling Stones into something called “Sympathy For What’s Her Name”. I always get enthused about remixing songs until I’m two hours into a project and obsessing over two seconds of audio that don’t match up properly.

#1GF! left to go to another doctor’s appointment, and the baby must’ve known that she was gone because she woke up screaming. She stayed in that auditory state for a solid half hour. I laid her down, picked her up, walked her around, and took her outside. She finally stopped, possibly because she sensed that I was running out of places that I could take her. She was soon sleeping again.

I started reading a new book and #1GF! came home. She took over the baby, and I went back to remixing because wasting time on idiocy has always been a hobby of mine. I eventually got bored and checked my e-mail. No agent replies cluttered up my inbox.

My parents came over around 3PM, and I gave them the first three chapters of my book to read. They each sat at the table and read them, and then offered some mild criticisms. They seemed to like it, but what are parents really going to say about their son’s first novel? I printed out the rest of the novel for them, and convinced them to stay for dinner.

I gave my parents the full manuscript, and it was sort of cool to see it all printed out and sitting on the counter. A completed book, even if later found to be a hot pile of shit, is still a completed book. And all those pages made it really look like something to be proud of. Seeing those stack of papers felt like concrete proof that, although unpublished, I am a writer.

My parents left after dinner, and the neighbors showed up with a piece of ice cream cake from one of the kids’ birthdays. I love living in a real neighborhood in a small town. The mother and three kids stayed for a few minutes while the scream bomb peacefully slept nearby.

Tuesday (Day 842): He Likes To Lick Babies?

I woke up to the baby screaming. I should correct that. When I got up, the #1GF! and the baby were fine on the couch. My insistence that #1GF! go to bed and get some sleep somehow tripped the scream bomb’s timer. Whoops. Once we finally got the baby back to the happy state she had been in before I butted in, I took a shower, and then sent #1GF! off to bed.

I sat on the couch and read a book, and #1GF! slept until noon. She had been up all night. I picked up a message that a job that I interviewed for in May was getting close to hiring. They wanted to know if I was still interested in the the job.

Once #1GF! was awake, we determined what I’d have to earn for it to be logical for me to take the job. We figured out the number and I decided that if they hit it, I might as well give up on writing and go back to the corporate world. The moment was a shrug short of depressing.

I wanted to be on the way to being published by now, but I wasn’t making time to write and it was only going to get worse as time went on. At least taking the job would give #1GF! the chance to experience the health-giving effects of a lengthy sabbatical from corporate America. I left a message for the H.R. rep telling her that I was still interested.

Instead of writing, I looked up Verizon deals to use as leverage against Comcast. Within twenty minutes of searching, I wasn’t sure that there was even a deal to be had from either company. No matter what I did online, I kept ending at a final price that was much higher than the advertised price.

The H.R. rep called me back looking for my salary history over the last couple of years. How do you answer that question as an unpublished author? You know that the real question that they’re asking is “Do you have proof that someone else thinks you’re as valuable as you do?” Unpublished authors returning to tech don’t have that proof. I explained that to the woman, but she said that without a history, the job would dry up. I wasn’t sure if that was a bluff, but what could I do? As a writer, unless you have a book contract, you don’t have a salary history. I told the woman that I couldn’t provide a salary history beyond what I was telling her. It was the best that I could do, and she seemed to understand.

Because the neighbors brought us cake the night before, I wanted to make them a batch of double chocolate cookies. Unfortunately, I didn’t have any bittersweet chocolate on hand. #1GF! and I took the baby for a walk to the local market in search of some. I walked out of the market empty handed.

#1GF! seemed surprised. “Nothing?”

“Nope. I should’ve known. They don’t carry white chocolate chips, so what were the odds that they’d carry bittersweet? I’ll have to go to the supermarket.”

“You want to go back now, or go for a walk?”

I shrugged. “Eh. Let’s walk. We’re already out.”

#1GF! seemed pleased that I chose the correct answer on my own. As we passed the bakery, we walked by a woman sitting at a table opposite a small dog. They seemed to be sharing a pizza, and were possibly getting ready to reenact a scene from Lady and the Tramp. The dog was definitely sitting on a chair, he was definitely wearing a little sweater, and he was definitely licking the fucking pizza on the table while the lady ate her slice and smiled at him. He didn’t look like he had pockets in his sweater to hold any cash, so I can only assume that the dog would be putting out later.

The woman looked up from her date and into our carriage. “Oh look at the baby!” she said between bites. “Mr. Bojangles loves to lick babies, too!”

I wasn’t about to get into a “dog mouths are cleaner than human mouths” discussion with her, so I just sort of smiled and tried to keep one of my eyebrows from touching my scalp.

#1GF! smiled and waited until we were barely out of earshot before mumbling, “Just send him over if you want to see him to get punted.”

It was a very non-#1GF! thing to say, so I burst out laughing. She didn’t think that it was so funny. I’m seeing a new, protective side of #1GF!.

The baby was awake during the whole walk, and wasn’t freaking out. We walked down to the beach from the town center, and then back home on the sand. There was no traffic on the streets, and no one but dog walkers and old people dotted the sand. The sound of surf filled our ears. The summer was over, and the locals had reclaimed the shore.

Once we got home, the baby played the “payback is a bitch” game and screamed from 6 to 8PM. I handled a good portion of it without incident, but it ground me down. It’s hard on the upper back and the nerves. Both will toughen up eventually.

#1GF! put the baby to bed, and we started watching The Soloist.

“That takes a lot out of you,” I said as I flopped on the couch.

“What does?” asked #1GF!

I rubbed my face and pointed a thumb toward the hallway because my brain was slow on supplying the proper words. “That whole thing,” I said. “The screaming.”

#1GF! nodded. The screaming was hard on both of us.

Wednesday (Day 843): It’s All About The Cookies

I got up at 6AM to screaming and sent #1GF! off to bed. I got the baby quiet, and then enjoyed an hour or two of silence before she popped again. #1GF! got up and took over.

I went out and dropped off a library book, picked up a water filter for the refrigerator, and did the food shopping. When I got home, it was already 4:30PM. I unpacked the groceries and taped some quarters to the hands of the clock in the hopes of gaining a few extra minutes before the baby started her nightly sonic assault.

I made a batch of cookies for the neighbors, and put four Oreos on the top of the pile for one of the kids who mentioned that Oreos were her favorite cookie. I sent #1GF! across the street with the tray while the cookies were still warm. Sure, I baked them, but I’m not prancing across the street with them. Send the lady of the house out to be neighborly. Let me maintain a little bit of macho, you know what I’m saying?

#1GF! left, and I started making the broccoli alfredo. When dinner was ready and #1GF! was back safe and sound, the baby freaked out again. She screamed for a couple of hours, right on schedule.

I planned to drop some cookies off to my parents before they went on a road trip because I thought homemade cookies would provide a little relief as the miles piled up. Once the baby was finally calm, I was tired enough that I started having second thoughts about making the trip. #1GF! pushed me to go and said that it would a nice thing to do. She even offered to come along. She’s always trying to make people think I’m nicer than I really am.

We had never taken the baby out in the car at night, and we were going to have to do it at some point, so I warily agreed. We packed the baby into the car, and popped into my parents’ house at around 9PM. I ran in to drop off the cookies, and whipped through the house in under two minutes.

“I like your book,” my mom said as I was heading out the door.

“What book?” I asked, thinking I had lent her a book.

“Your book.”

It took me a second. “Oh. Good. Thanks.” Babies eat brain cells.

The baby was perfect the whole ride to my parents’ house, so on the ride home, she completely lost her mind. I twisted my arm over the seat to hold her hand, and she eventually calmed down.

We went home, fed the baby, and sat there in front of the TV like vegetables, putting the last hour of the day out of its misery.

Thursday (Day 844): A Job Offer? Well, Dunk My Bag

#1GF! and the baby were sleeping on the couch, so I ate breakfast, brushed my teeth, and read a book. When they woke up, the baby was all smiles. #1GF! and I sat there laughing with her. Those are the moments: kissing her arms and making sounds to get her to smile, and then watching her smile for what seems like no reason.

#1GF! fed her, I burped her, and everything felt storybook smooth. The weather was great. The sun created bright window patterns all over the hardwood floor. I opened the windows to let some air in, and finished The Wake Up by Robert Ferrigno. It was my second book completed this week and it was only 10:30AM on a Thursday morning.

To make the day a little more complicated, the H.R. rep called back with a certified job offer. It was pretty much an offer to resume where I left off at my old company. It was a different job, but the same salary, same title, and my two year sabbatical written of as a midlife crisis.

During the phone call, I tried to point out my value to the organization after working there for thirteen years, but apologized for being crude because getting me to return boiled down to money and title. The woman wasn’t surprised. “It always does,” she said. I countered with more money and a promotion. The woman said that she’d check on it and get back to me.

#1GF! and I mulled the offer over. On the one hand, it was an interesting job. On the other hand, it was like going back to an ex-girlfriend, but having a sneaking feeling that you’ll remember the reason you broke up in about four months time.

“You don’t have to go back,” #1GF! said.

“I don’t mind. It’s a good job…as long as the money is right.”

#1GF! nodded and we wondered what new path our lives were about to take.

I was in a negotiating mood, so I called Comcast’s retention department because Verizon was offering an identical service bundle for $30 less. I explained my situation to the woman on the phone, and she offered to bump up my services to match Verizon…and add another $15 to my bill. I said that her offer made Comcast $45 more expensive per month than Verizon for the same service. The woman countered that Verizon had limited business hours. That was the best that she could do. If I had problems after 8PM, I was out of luck. It was probably the lamest counter I had heard. I asked what more she could do, and she told me nothing. I hung up and shook my head. I’m a great negotiator. Take me with you to the car dealer. I’ll get you MSRP plus $15.

I called my barber for the fourth time this week and got his answering machine again. I’ve been going to the same place for twenty years, and the guy is always working. I started to get worried.

I checked my e-mail and had another agent rejection waiting. I left the rejection machine behind and went out to the couch to start reading another book. It was already 3PM, so I sent #1GF! and the baby in for a nap. They both slept, while I read and guarded the house from any deals that might be lurking in our mailbox.

At 5PM, I started dinner and made myself a cup of tea. I’d drink coffee, but you can’t grind coffee beans while a baby is sleeping. Plus, I’m getting lazier. Pushing a button on a grinder and pouring water into a holding tank had somehow become too much fucking work for me.

I made tea because if you don’t have the energy to grind your beans, just dunk your bag (why does this sentence make me want to add “if you know what I mean” or “that’s what she said” to the end?). Laziness does not pay.

Compared to coffee, tea just sucks. It’s not bitter. It’s not a pick-me-up. It’s something that ladies drink out of silver pots while wearing white gloves and nibbling on shortbread cookies. Tea is for when people come over to talk about what the hell is wrong with you, and I think drinking it alone offends some old Irish gene. I pounded the tea down and moved on.

I tried to look up a nickname that my grandmother used to call my sister because I had somehow started using it on the baby. I wondered where it came from. It seems to be made up, or so old that neither Google nor its inhabitants have ever heard of it.

When #1GF! woke up, I gathered her up in my arms. “It’s a good life, isn’t it?” I said as positively as I could. “No matter if I have to work or write, it’s a pretty good life.”

“It is,” she said. “It really is.”

Friday (Day 845): The Cookie Wizard

I read a book until noon. Actually, both #1GF! and I did. Then, we went for a walk until 4PM. The sea was talking over us, and the wind turned my hair into a tall, feathered mass on the top of my head. I needed a haircut. I ended up looking like a combination of George Michael and Flock of Seagulls, minus the pleated pants and skinny belt.

When we got home, the neighbors told us that they loved the cookies we sent over. Her daughter dubbed me “The Cookie Wizard” which I thought would make a good name for a cartoon or stoner band. Not bad. I’ll take it. The mom had the same look in her eye that #1GF!, my sister, and every other woman I’ve met gets when they eat those special-batch chocolate cookies. It’s funny the relationship women have with chocolate.

#1GF! and I took the baby inside the house, and she started crying around 5:30PM and didn’t stop until I was done making a batch of chocolate chip cookies for any company that might show up. I think the mixer might’ve set her off. Vacuuming a couch right next to her earlier in the day didn’t bother her, but a mixer with half the volume did. Go figure.

I checked my mail and had no new rejections. I also sent out zero queries during the week. I didn’t know if I should. Thirty queries seemed like a lot of potential rejection floating around New York City. I wondered how many rejections I would need to rack up before I gave up. What would I do then? Rewrite? Start another book? Pursue other writing credits? It didn’t matter. I had to shut down the PC at 8:15PM so that the baby could go to bed. It’s not like I would’ve gotten anything done anyway. Without the PC, potential was eradicated. I shut the PC down and read a book until bed.

Saturday (Day 846): Because Writing Feels Like Failure

#1GF! went to visit her mother and go shopping for girl stuff. I don’t know if they were really shopping for girl stuff, but it was enough to get me to throw up my hands and stay home with the baby without further explanation.

It was just me and the baby with no one to tag in if the baby got me on the ropes. Here’s where you’d expect some crazy story where #1GF! would come home to find the baby and me sitting in the middle of the kitchen floor coated in flour, but nothing happened. The baby was surprisingly quiet all day.

I finished The Spellman Files by Lisa Lutz, which meant that I had finished three books in a week. I didn’t think that could be right. I had never read that fast. I was out of books to read only a few days after going to the library.

I set up the baby monitor and sorted through all the agents waiting to represent my manuscript. It didn’t take long, because there weren’t any.

I remixed some songs for fun, and worked on them until it wasn’t. Like I’ve mentioned before, my mashups start out as good ideas, but never come out that well. It’s just a way to channel creative energy when I don’t want to write. And at that time, I really didn’t want to write because writing felt like failure.

When #1GF! got home, we sat down and watched Clint Eastwood in Gran Torino. It was full of racial stereotypes and really bad acting. The writing wasn’t all that great, either. I wondered how a character could afford to have not one, but two uzis sitting on the front seat of their primer-patchworked $200 car. I went to bed wishing that recent Clint Eastwood movies would stop sucking.

What I Learned

• If you’re not paying attention, you can end up eating expired lunch meat.
• Virtualizing means efficiency gains at the expense of power.
• Being away from the web makes me need it less.
• My reading speed went up. Three books in under a week? What?
• Seeing your printed manuscript sitting on the counter for the first time makes a book feel real.
• Comcast doesn’t really care about competing with Verizon on a case to case basis.
• You can’t find bittersweet chocolate in this small town.
• #1GF! doesn’t accept offers for dogs to lick her baby.
• Compared to coffee, tea just sucks.
• If you don’t have the energy to grind your beans, just dunk your bag.
• Women have a funny relationship with chocolate.
• Sending out zero queries gets you zero rejections.

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