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STOP THE RIDE, I WANT TO GET OFF Published December 29, 1997 Previous columns by Harry Goldstein

If I've learned anything while writing this column for the last couple of years, it's that I don't know anything much at all. Feel free to browse through my old columns here if you don't believe me. I wrote about how to look for a job online; yet the only job I've ever found online was the worst job I ever had, the only one I've ever been fired from. I prattled on about networking; yet I've only ever found jobs through the classifieds. I lah-dee-dahed about trying to get a job promotion when I felt like I deserved one; but I've only ever gotten promotions when I did little or nothing to earn them. I've talked about finding my dream job; yet I'm only ever more disappointed, and more disillusioned, with each successive gig. When I started writing this column 20 months ago, I wasn't sure what I was going write about. So I looked at my life and wrote about how hard it is to reconcile my vocation and my occupation and maintained that I was mining my work experience to feed my fiction. But instead of doing just that, I kept grubbing after money, penning a monthly how-not column in the guise of a how-to. Instead of whining about how soul-destroying it was working for ACME, I should have taken advantage of the time I had to pursue my fiction writing. Diseased with greed, I chased money like a gerbil on a wheel, never really getting anywhere, but satisfied with the illusion of having traveled very far. This will be my final regular column for Tripod. No longer satisfied with illusion, I'm stopping the wheel tonight, escaping from the cage and lighting out for the path I'd only talked about taking but had passed by many months ago. Don't misunderstand me: I've thoroughly enjoyed writing for Tripod. Best of all has been the good friendship that has grown up between me and editor Randy Williams, the man responsible for many of the best features on Tripod. But, as the clichés go, enough is enough and all good things must come to an end. Any final pearls of wisdom that I could cast before I go escaped me right about the time I realized exactly how many light years from wise I actually am. Of course, I could yammer on about how greedy corporations are and how they run our lives and how we are pacified with nice products to buy and fun things to watch on TV and at the movies; about how we're working so hard to attain "the good" life as advertised, that we don't see or care what we're doing to the environment and each other and ourselves. But you already know all that. Enough of you have actually taken the time to send me e-mail to convince me that the work and career issues I've tried to tackle and the wrongs I've tried to write about are things you already struggle with yourselves. I think that I've validated some of your beliefs, and I hope I've challenged others. I've even appreciated being called on the carpet by intrepid 'Pod readers, because, well, I like carpets. I especially like finding change in carpet, 'cause now that I'm not freelancing anymore, I'm going to have to be very frugal. I've also learned enough writing the Working Life to know that I need a transition here and that a kind of meta-comment about needing a transition is itself a transition, a segueway and a tangent all at the same time. At the end of Woody Allen's film Crimes and Misdemeanors, Alan Alda's character disparages Allen's quixotic film director character who Alda believes has failed to live up to his potential: "They don't pay off on high aspirations; you have to deliver." In my book, that's more than just fatalistic; it falsely presumes that no action is "worth" the effort unless you "get" something for it — if you do it well enough to suit someone else. It's the kind of commodity thinking that stops people from doing what they know is right and/or difficult and encourages them instead to do what they can do easily, for whatever monetary reward or ego gratification that comes to them at the end, like a rat tapping that button for the cocaine it has come to crave. To continue or rather to backtrack and then continue: At the beginning, I said that I know enough now to know that I don't know very much at all. That was a bit disingenuous. Not to mention callow, simpering, and falsely modest. But a nice, self-deprecating, slightly dramatic, mellifluous lead. I know enough now to appreciate what I have. That's why, after I write this thing up tonight, I'm going to stop selling my life and start living it instead. I know enough now to know that I don't know very much at all — except: Life is flux. Choices we make now will affect us later. That we are often told that the choice is not for us to make. That you must learn enough to demand the right to choose for yourself. Then you must understand enough to make a wise choice. I know enough now to stop tapping that button. I know when to shut up. Harry Harry Goldstein is a writer and editor living in Brooklyn. His work has appeared in Utne Reader, American Book Review, Promethean, AltX, word.com, and other periodicals. ©; 1997 Harry Goldstein, All Rights Reserved.

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