July 31st, 2019 note: I seek a regular magazine gig at a rate of pay that I can live on in 90028, where I intend to settle again. Here's a 2,200-word example of what a new column by me, Daniel S. Duvall, might be like tonally. Help me, Suicide Girls!
Cautionary Ravings of a Day-Job Quitter
Written by Daniel S. Duvall
© 2017 through Infinity by Daniel S. Duvall
Preface (written in 2017)
I wrote the following rant in the spring of 2001; at the time, I lived in Hollywood 90028, kept my own hours in a rented one-bedroom second-floor apartment, practiced electric bass guitar by playing along with recordings of music that stirred my soul, and smoked marijuana multiple times per day. I eked out a living as a freelance magazine writer (having penned dozens of pieces for Creative Screenwriting from the fall of 1998 until February of 2001), then plunged into student loan debt to study in the UCLA MFA in Screenwriting Program starting in the fall of 2002. I puttered around that school until 2004 without finishing the degree, then returned to my native Ohio (with two adopted California housecats in tow) in May of 2005.
Spring of 2001
Let my lifestyle serve as a warning for those of you thinking about quitting your jobs and plunging into full-time freelance writing.
The Santa Monica cops will have my soot-encrusted ’87 Ford Escort ticketed or towed unless I feed some coins into the meter at 9 AM, which gives me just over an hour to enjoy my Vanilla Au Lait and scribble in this spiral notebook. I’m in the Novel Café on Main Street. It is the 16th of May, which gives me two weeks to find (and get paid for) a magazine gig so that I can pay my rent. I’ve been coasting on what remains of the three grand that Written By paid for my coverage of the sitcom Titus in their April issue. One quarter of that check went toward the purchase of my used car (which frequently stalls), and another quarter bought me a year’s worth of auto insurance. Before that, I got around L.A. by bus for thirty-one months.
I’m starting to regret paying off the car insurance in one big lump to save a few bucks on interest charges. Freelance writers need to keep a reservoir of cash on hand for dry spells. I shouldn’t be tossing away my last few dollars on coffee and out-of-print William Goldman novels and dime bags of hydroponic weed and bootleg Jethro Tull CDs at eight in the morning. I also most certainly should not be tooling from Hollywood to Santa Monica and back when gasoline costs over two bucks per low-grade gallon. Yet here I sit, hair unwashed, upstairs in a weathered wooden independent coffee house that somehow stays afloat despite the four dozen Starbucks and Coffee Beans within a half-mile radius.
From my table, I watched over the railing as a woman downstairs opened her carryout Styrofoam breakfast container and asked, “This is two eggs?” She left while shaking her head in disbelief. That’s right, ma’am. We live in harsh and barbaric economic times. If the cook gobbled some of your scrambled eggs before he handed over your breakfast, that’s good karma for you. It might be the first solid food he’s had in a fortnight. More likely, you received the full order and have simply forgotten that two eggs don’t go very far. If it is a filling morning meal you seek, I recommend the Omelet Palace up the street, where an hour ago I charged an eleven dollar breakfast to my credit card. Well, why not. Eventually, I’ll sell eleven more words to Written By to pay for it.
This is the life of a freelance writer: spying on coffee shop patrons in the wee hours of the morning after consuming food that the next article will pay for. I better get home and see if any editors have called with assignments.
My Escort sputtered and backfired its way out of the parking lot just as the Meter Enforcer pulled in. Dodged that bullet.
I scraped three dollars worth of dimes and quarters and fuzz-encrusted nickels from out of the car seats as I sat at red lights while en route back to Hollywood, so I have detoured to The Bourgeois Pig on Franklin Avenue for a steaming Earl Grey tea. Well, why not: the day is young, and I didn’t spend my college years building up an elephantine immunity to caffeine for nothing.
The Bourgeois Pig is the only indie coffee shop within walking distance of the crumbling one-bedroom apartment that I share with my shamanic ally (a muscled sandy brown cat who scavenged on the streets before I took him in), so I spend many hours here writing and muttering to myself. I always tip well so that the staff will tolerate me even when I reek of patchouli incense and camp out for hours, taking up a whole table with my notebooks and magazines and backpack full of evidence. You bet: this is practically my office. I can work at home when deadlines are tight and/or there are cops circulating sketches of my likeness down on the street, but I get most of my writing done while I’m out and about. At home, Alley Cat interrupts me for frequent games of Toss The Toy Mouse, and I’m likely to lose several hours online as I follow links off of RAWilson.com to hundreds of pages of anarchist literature.
Here in The Pig, I can focus. Here, I cannot challenge my computer to game after game of Scrabble. Here, I can’t fire up the VCR and watch an episode of Buffy The Vampire Slayer four times in a row, reverse-engineering it scene-by-scene. Here, I cannot search Napster for tracks from the superb “Curious Riff” bootleg (a soundboard recording from Tull’s 1995 “Roots to Branches” tour). Here, I can write and write and write until my fingers are cramped and the metal binding of my notebook has cut open my palm (one of the hazards of being left-handed) and allowed ink to seep in and wreck havoc with my white blood cells.
There are some distractions in The Pig, though. A brace of svelte young women, for example, just walked in. Their midriffs are exposed. They are fawning over the sleek greyhound dog of another patron. My God, those green corduroy pants are tight. (On one of the svelte women, I mean. The greyhound is without pants, as God intended.)
Sure, freelance writing sounds great: plenty of time to gawk at scantily-clad women and naked pets in coffee shops. But you must constantly live with the pressure of lining up gig after gig, and you must pay out of your own pocket when the stress (coupled with whatever experimental military bio-weapons mingle with the Los Angeles smog) renders you ill, as happened to me two weeks ago.
I was nestled on my sofa watching Boston Public and sipping tea when the fever began to take hold. All day Sunday I had been plagued by a nasty allergy attack. By Monday afternoon, my right sinus cavity was noticeably swollen and in intense pain, so I began to wonder if the allergies had weakened my immune system and allowed a virus to take hold. I also began to cough and feel tightness in my chest, which is usually my harbinger of infection. Around 8:30 PM Monday night, I starting burning up with a fever and noticed that my new cough was worsening. I went to a nearby hospital emergency room, where I waited from 10 PM to 11:20 PM before a weary nurse took my temperature and blood pressure. (100 degrees, blood pressure 135/76, pulse 110 bpm.) I was then sent back to the waiting room until 12:30 AM. Other patients included a man whose thumb had nearly been severed by his wife and a woman who had suffered a stroke and kept insisting that she heard three men screaming nearby. "Tell them to shut up," she wailed like a Poe protagonist. "They are screaming and screaming right over there!" (I bear no grudge against these people for eating up valuable time that the doctors could have spent prescribing me an antibiotic. Strokes and severed digits take priority over young men with bad coughs.) Finally, moments before David Letterman waved goodnight on the lobby TV, I was summoned to an examining room. The doctor worked his magic and concluded that I have indeed contracted yet another sinus infection (the bane of my health) that has rapidly migrated to my lungs. He gave me a 10-minute breathing treatment where I inhaled a medicinal mist out of a tube to open my bronchial passages. He also prescribed the antibiotic Biaxin, which I picked up at a 24-hour pharmacy. Oh, that medicinal mist. After five minutes of inhaling it deeply, I began to feel a bit light-headed. It was a pleasant little buzz that reminded me of how I felt after a few sips of Wild Turkey in the Chateau Marmont bar during my old college buddy [redacted]'s winter L.A. visit, but I wasn't sure if it was a sign that something had gone horribly wrong. Perhaps the mist was blocking the flow of oxygen to my brain. When an intern walked by, I called out, "I feel a bit light-headed." (I couldn't resist doing an imitation of Johnny Depp as Hunter S. Thompson in the opening of Gilliam's wonderful cinematic adaptation of Fear and Loathing in Los Vegas.) The intern told me not to worry, so I sucked down that mist and relished the high. Soon my lips, jaw, and cheeks were tingling, and I began to worry if I'd be able to drive home. After another five minutes, the vapor was all gone. Damn! I'd like to keep some on hand for recreational use. The mist also accelerated my heart rate, like caffeine and weed all rolled into one sweet lung-healing shaman's gift.En route to the pharmacy, I was pulled over by a Los Angeles cop. My driving was fine, but I'd turned on the runner lights as I warmed up the car and forgotten to pull the knob all the way out before I left the hospital. I'd also forgotten to have the nurse remove the hospital ID band from around my wrist. "Mighty Bastet," I thought as the pig approached my car. "Here I am high on that eldritch mist, hair all akimbo, unshaved, with an official-looking hospital bracelet around my wrist. This stormtrooper will perceive me as an escaped mental patient and gun me down where I sit before I can explain." Luckily, he believed me when I said I was en route to fill a prescription and had forgotten to turn the lights all the way on. He let me go with only a $40 ticket when he could have cracked my skull open and left me for dead on that lonely stretch of Vermont Avenue, where stray cats would later have feasted on my corpse. I arrived home at 2:30 AM (having left at 9:45 PM) to find Alley Cat looking out the window. He gave a few inquisitive chirps, which I think translated to "What happened? You said you'd be back shortly." I greeted him with our usual ritual of gentle head-butts, purring, and chin-scratches. He then sniffed the bag from the pharmacy and rubbed his cheeks against it, claiming it as his own. What alarms me most about the whole experience is how swiftly this bug got severe: it went from a little tickle in my throat Sunday afternoon to a throbbing sinus cavity, clogged nose, infected lungs, and fever about 16 hours later. I considered waiting until morning to go to the doctor, but then I remembered that Jim Henson was killed by a rapid-onset bronchial infection that was caught late.It's interesting to note that Sunday morning was the first time in a long while that I forced myself awake with an alarm clock for a meeting with some UCLA friends. I suspect that I would've been fine if I'd slept until I woke up naturally. My alarm clock is now in the dumpster, nestled where it belongs among stinky milk cartons. And that, I think, is why I’ll sputter along as a freelance magazine writer for as long as I can, keeping one-quarter step ahead of the wolves at all times. I regard the forty-hour work week as savage and unnatural insofar as someone else dictates when you must wake up and how you must spend vast stretches of your time. Between writing and researching and lining up gigs with editors and interviewing subjects for articles, I probably “work” at least forty hours per week, but I decide which forty. If I write from 5 AM until 1 PM and then drink some prescription cough syrup with codeine (which I saved for recreational use after my bout with bronchitis) and sleep until 10 PM, that’s my business.
I dearly hope that someone will print this cautionary tale. It will warn away security-craving squares from this lifestyle to which I have grown addicted. It may also inspire the right kind of people to take that plunge and quit their jobs. If I liberate even one more soul from the world of alarm clocks, the positive karmic repurcussions will catch up to me in what most call “the future.” I call it elsewhen in the now.