?? You're Gonna Have Trouble ?? Volume #6 ?? in the Chance "Cash" Register Working Stiff Series . . .

I fixed it so I'd get fired. Don't mean it didn't hurt any less. The crazy schedule they had me on driving the hotel van (picking up flight crews 6-days a week), left no time for the one thing that mattered: the writing. So I got pink-slipped; kicked to the curb, as thy say. One problem solved??that created another: how to earn money to buy groceries, put gas in the used bucket, pay bills.

So it starts: another series of blue-collar, back-breaking/soul-crushing gigs: at a plant nursery, meat-packing facility, warehouse, striping company as jackhammer operator and ditch-digger. We do what we gotta. It's like this for the average person. No biggie. Nothing to it but to do it. Folks in other countries might think we're all a bunch of millionaires here in the grand and prosperous US of A. Guess what, peeps? Here's the truth. We're toilers. Most of us.

Some of us working stiffs, like me, might even be into the arts: appreciate the great painters, awesome writers and jazz & blues artists. What keeps us going. But yes, we're 9-to-5-ers. Do it to get by. My favorite books have always been Tom Kromer's Waiting for Nothing, Jack Black's Nobody Wins, Bukowski's Post Office, George Orwell's Down and Out in Paris and London, Jack London's Martin Eden; and of course Knut Hamsun's unforgettable Hunger. This is my way of honoring those great scribes who wrote tomes about stuff that actually matters. K.A.