Ten Years ago

Earlier today on Twitter, a lot of us writer types (and a ton of non writer types) were reflecting on what we were up to at the beginning of the decade when 1999 turned into the shit storm of the year 2000.

Mine was this:

"Ten years ago, I was working graveyard shift at a gas station and spending my nights reading James Ellroy and Vladimir Nabokov."

A lot of people would say working graveyard shift at a gas station is a shit job, and God knows I got a ton of grief from customers, acquaintances, and family members who made sure to tell me whenever the subject of what I did for a living came up what a garbage job they thought it was.

Needless to say I'd want to smack them in the gob whenever their narrow little opinions came slipping off their tongues.

Because you know what, it wasn't a shit job. In fact, in a lot of ways, it was one of the best jobs I've ever worked.

And it wasn't because I found the position interesting or engaging. I mean, all I did was sit in front of a cash register and sell the barflys cigarettes and bottles of coke and pepsi as they filled up their tanks before they drunkenly endangered their lives and the other drunks on the road. (And let me tell you this, when you work graveyard shift, it completely fucks with your sleep pattern. To this day I still can't get more than six hours of sleep at night, and I still feel far more comfortable sleeping in the middle of the day.)

It could've been a downright boring job, too, because after 1:30 in the morning, the city of Mesa, AZ became a literal ghost town. But for me, it wasn't a boring job, largely because of the mountain of books I'd bring with me each night and the people who I met after the drunks went home.

Yeah, I had my fair share of tweakers and cokeheads who'd wander in and chew my ear off for ten or fifteen minutes and then run off to whatever past midnight hell-hole they crawled out of. (The most interesting weird-o I encountered was a guy who thought he was a wizard and claimed to have castrated himself and had then grown his junk back with the dark arts.)

But then there were the folks who were simply night owls and would stop by for a cup of coffee and intelligent conversation. Guys like Mike Benner (who later became the best man at my wedding.) who happened to stop by one night and noticed me reading Ulysses and we struck up an ongoing conversation that lasted nearly two years.

And then there was my friend Ed Besinger (who was also a member of my wedding party.) who would stop by once or twice a week and we'd talk for hours about music, movies and computers.

Both Ed and Mike are great guys and I still count them as friends even though we no longer live in the same city.

The other great thing about that job was that in a lot of ways, working at that gas station I believe saved my life. You see, in the ten years leading up to that job, I'd been living in a cloud of blacker than black depression and I self medicated with whatever substance that would cross my path, and when I started working at the now defunct Dobson Ranch Mobil, I threw all of the garbage from the previous decade down the shitter and decided to simply move forward.

Of course, the future Mrs. Rawson had a lot to with the whole moving forward thing as well.
(Nobody tell her, but she's pretty much the best thing that ever happened to me.)

There have been a lot of jobs since the gas station: Manager of a rehab center for disabled adults and children, tech support for a medical software company, and now the current job. But that gas station and those long nights with a cup coffee in one hand and a open book in the other. . .that job was my education.

And now as far as the past decade is concerned, in a lot of ways the first ten years of the new millennium was beyond shitty: War, the collapse of the world economy, etc.,but for me, they've been the best ten years of my life. . .especially the last three years with the birth of my daughter, and, of course, this whole writing thing.
And if things keep going the way they have been, I'm anticipating that the next ten years will be just as good as the previous ten.

Happy new years, folks.