Success

I’m a success today for many reasons, one of which is I’m gonna make my deadline, which hasn’t been happening much lately. On the other hand, my net worth is negative, and my life insurance was cancelled, so I’m worth even less dead than I am alive, which is negative to begin with.

I succeeded again when my sons and I recently replaced our driveway’s gate from hell, after much thought and a committee review, and after my buying the kits last year and dragging them around until a couple of weeks ago. So the new gate makes me resoundingly successful, since I was the one charged with the responsibility by virtue of gender and choice. I sit and stare at that new gate, examine it like I examined my new sons, memorizing them.

Since that last paragraph, I’ve succeeded again, being summarily canned from my job last Friday morning. It was wonderful.

Wham! I felt powerful waves of relief and well-being wash over me. I was happy. I was never going to have to do that again. Thank you, Jesus! Even after I found out that they’d paid me only through that day, I was still happy. My friends say I haven’t stopped smiling since.

Some situations aren’t worth the trouble. Once a crazy man who happened to be a good manager fired me for disagreeing with him—not for disobeying him or disrespecting him or smacking him on his head, all of which I considered, but for saying that my thoughts were different than his. I don’t mean to imply that a person would have to be crazy to fire me, or that I didn’t know he was crazy until he fired me. I had realized it by then. Still, under several circumstances, I would fire me, too. This guy was later confirmed crazy by others who knew him well and were shocked that I would even get near him, and that was before I told them that he’d fired me. Apparently everybody had known all along.

As soon as he told me to clean out my desk, I breathed easier, which for me is a big deal. I was physically—I’d say viscerally, but that could be misleading—relieved that I not only didn’t have to go back—because, of course, I didn’t really—I couldn’t go back, breaking a bad habit for me that I hadn’t sense enough to break myself. I was sooo glad. I didn’t have two nickels to rub together, and it did not matter.

I’ve been a wage slave for a long time, and that ineffable joy that suffused my body those times when I got canned, especially this last time, is what I think it would feel like to be freed after a long confinement. Free at last.