I second the recommendation on Carver. Richard Yates is another one like that for me-he peels back your skull and looks into your brain.

Catfish-Keep fouling pitches off, man. You’ll get one in the wheelhouse soon.

As for me? My son (he’s 11) recently noted to me that he couldn’t decide what he wanted to be when he grew up. I said that I didn’t know what I wanted to be either. “But you’re already a pharmacist!” he complained.

I usually tell people that I don’t know what I want to do, but I am pretty sure what I will be doing-the same shit I’m doing now.

For a brief spell one summer, I had a gig for the “All-American Office Supply Company,” commision only (no salary), where we sat sweltering in cubicles for 8 hours cold-calling offices around the country selling obsolete typewriter ribbons.

The goal was to find an easily flustered office-temp subbing for a vacationing secretary, quick-talk them into believing that they were due for a new order, then pass the call to our quicker-talking supervisor who would slickly “close” the deal.

I am still nauseous.

Spurred by E.W. Keeler’s vacuum cleaner salesman tale in 2 , I wanted to recommend Raymond Carver’s story “Collectors” (it’s got a vacuum cleaner salesman in it). Actually, I strongly recommend any and all Raymond Carver you can get your hands on, especially in light of all these tales of dumb work and painful breakups. He’s been there.

There’s an echo or an homage or an outright ripoff (depending on your view of such things) of a key line in Carver’s masterpiece “Cathedral” in the Burgmeier yarn above. Any Carver fans out there want to take a stab at what it is? (Hint: it’s a line of dialogue, both here and in “Cathedral.”) If you feel like reading “Cathedral,” the whole thing seems to be at the following link:

http://www.ndsu.nodak.edu/instruct/cinichol/GovSchool/Cathedral2.htm

If you could know today what will be important in five years, you have incredible self-knowledge. I did that once. While I was happy in my work, I saw that if I kept on doing that job, I would be unhappy later. Four years later, I realized that I had been right, but it didn’t actually help me much in getting to that next job.

Another four or five years have passed, and I’m while I’m not exactly where I thought I wanted to be, I’m not exactly unhappy with where I am. So what good is the five year plan doing me? It doesn’t seem to be guiding me towards goal accomplishment, and instead, it seems to be a yardstick of how naive I was or how disappointed in myself I should be. WHO NEEDS THAT?

Perhaps it is better just to be conceptually adrift, but making the most of that. Perhaps chanting and meditation is the right way to be.

5 My heart’s breakin’ for Catfish these days. It is sounding really bad now!

I suck at selling stuff. I mean, I couldn’t sell a beer to a thirsty frat boy at Shea Stadium. But my job that summer was to visit dozens of gas stations on Long Island and sell them on buying their tires from my uncle.

Many days, I would just drive to the local record store and see what had just come in instead of making the actual stops I was supposed to. Other days, my uncle’s best repair guy, a crazy tattooed biker, would ask me to join him as he parked by the high school and whistled at the girls while we smoked a doobie. Fortunately, my uncle didn’t really check up on me too much.

He especially wanted me to sell to Getty Eddy, one of the biggest stations around. Every week I’d go to Getty Eddy, and every week he’d turn me down.

But one day I showed up and it was like he was waiting for me.

“My supplier screwed up,” he told me. “If you can get me eight 185-R14s by five o’clock, you’re my new tire guy.”

I raced back, thrilled that I might actually be selling something, even though it was really just fate. I ran over to my uncle all excited, and we quickly closed the deal.

“How the hell did you get Getty Eddy anyway? I’ve been after him for years,” my uncle asked.

It certainly wasn’t because I was a born salesman.

I’ve been having increasing thoughts of quitting my job and starting something new, but I really haven’t gotten much past the quitting part.

but similarly, throughout my childhood and adolescence, i was entirely unable to visualize any future whatsoever. i refused to formally choose a major in college until about 3 weeks before graduation, tho’ I sort of off-handedly fulfilled the requirements for classics/art history. i wanted no part of post-college planning, no grad school, no on-campus interviews, no plan for anything.

I had no conception of what kind of job, life, place to live, etc. would possibly follow. Ever. even now. I just did, and do, whatever showed up next, basically.

it took me a hell of a long time to figure out what the diff tween living in the moment and not conceiving of a future in a good way and a bad way is.

it was finally looking at causes and effects – i.e. right view, or karma “actions have results,” in all those buddhist books that helped. a little. what i do now has some effect. I guess.

i still am not good at any kind of 5-year plan. in fact, i run screaming from them. Stalin ruined all that.

btw: this is a great, great format.