More than sixteen years on I have opened an old journal and upon paging through the tattered black book, it astounds me that the muses of self-destruction had not seduced me.
Summer of 2004: over a year passed since I’d slunk back home to Southern California after an eight-year sojourn in San Francisco. Living in Babylon by the Bay was my coming-of-age experience if there was one to be had for me.
I did make the best of living in San Francisco during the dot com boom and bust — for an individual of my middling ambition; which glosses over the reason why I ultimately had to move out of the city.
Leaving San Francisco also accounts for what felt like a humiliating return to the Inland Empire, where I grew up. Having relocated to the condominium where my grandmother spent the last years of her life. The thought of dying there as well, haunted me from a dark corner of my mind.
Remaining employed was never a problem for me while living in San Francisco. However, in Southern California, jobs were as diffuse and far in between as the municipalities that populated the region.
The first permanent job that I hired onto was for an investment bank in West Los Angeles. My shift started at 4:45 a.m., which required me to set my alarm at 3:30 a.m. I lost count of all the occasions I passed out from exhaustion while driving home from work.
The workplace politics at Jeffreys scored higher on my personal corruption index than at any other employer I had experienced before or since. My own manager was a sociopath who would straight out lie to journalists and stake claim to office real estate she wasn’t entitled to. My attempt to make a lateral move to a job opening at another office was inexplicably snuffed out by unseen, unknown interests.
Ultimately, my manager got us all fired after inciting a workplace harassment suit. Her screaming assault of a colleague from another nearby department prompted executive management to eliminate our team entirely.
Because I had few friends while growing up, there was no cluster of companions I could bond with upon my return home.
To ease the crucible of my solitude, I sought social interaction online. Looking back at the time, the explosion of social media platforms that would rock contemporary culture, had ignited just then.
I found that I was especially bereft of female companionship. Given my severely limited set of skills, I plied what meager literary aptitude I possessed to the instant message.
Through domains like AOL and Yahoo and dating sites such as Lava Life, I crafted phrases of a striking yet thoughtful quality that compelled the attention I sought.
Having dated and slept with an older woman just before my departure from San Francisco, I fixated on seducing and bedding as many attractive and willing divorcees as I could source.
There are a number of standout encounters that I think fondly of to this day. There also remain a few embarrassing occasions cauterized in my memory. Instances that illustrated my desperation to fuse a crude alchemy with another equally lonely soul.
As I had entertained the idea of writing for a living, I submitted my work to numerous emerging online publications and literary journals. As a writer I now see how underdeveloped and lacking my style read. Just as damning of my chances for success was what little conviction I held as an artist.
Pile up enough rejections and one begins to doubt any inherent talent, if any had been present to begin with. At best, my effort struck me as a saddening act of self-delusion.
My failure to get published, factored together with my sleep-thieving work hours and a deeply humbling social life — a gauntlet of torments that so ground my inner life to powder.
One morning, it was still dark as I drove to work when the radio played a song I had been vaguely familiar with, but never associated with Bob Marley. “Redemption Song” opened with the reggae legend’s plaintive but defiant vocals. I broke down and my eyes overran with tears. At that moment it was a salve for my battered soul.
In my journey I was so very far from where I wanted to be. I had allowed happenstance and my self-inflicted doubt guide me: financially exiled from San Francisco; skirt chasing instead of seeking the counterpart to my soul; a glorified paper shuffler doing the bidding of a morally imploding investment bank.
As much as I would like to claim credit for walking away on that very same day, it realistically took some years to extricate myself. I did finally leave the Inland Empire and had the astounding fortune to meet, court and marry an amazing woman. As far as a career is concerned, my goal is to achieve a kind of transparency — where my work is equal to my being: that remains out of reach, but not for much longer.
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Previously Published on Medium
Photo by Ozan Safak on Unsplash
