For all of my adult life I have considered myself an optimist, someone who who would always respond to misfortune with good cheer and even confront tragedy and heartbreak with a measure of perspective and an eye on the road ahead. And for the most part looking for the sunny-side has worked for me, though in the manner of grasshoppers I had some bumpy landings and uncomfortably early frosts, my optimism, accompanied by a little hard work, has also played out quite well at times.
Unfortunately my campaign activities that splendid season antagonized my employers, rock-ribbed Republicans all, and I was laid off in the Bush Recession, just two weeks before The President's Inauguration. And while that occasioned an excellent opportunity for a Mimosa and Mint Julep Inaugural Party with my campaign compatriots, it had been a good job for this hamlet and I was in my middle fifties. I admit I felt a bit of trepidation at times...
Still, the unemployment sufficed for my meager needs and I made a little on the side selling my pencil portraits:
that have, for the past ten years since I became serious about doing them well, smoothed over more than one grasshopper like butt-bumper and given me great pleasure in their execution.
I finally took a job with the census this past winter, when it became clear to me that I would not be able to find anything nearly as lucrative as my previous position, but now that has ended and my U.I. benefits are extremely limited. The lady at one of our temporary placement agencies has told me that she should be able to keep me busy as hiring are picking up...it's just that employers don't want to commit to hiring people outright. Let us hope she is correct. I don't know if I am up for a descent into the type of menial position that my lack of formal education qualifies me for....
In the meantime I will write a couple of diaries (I vainly think I can sometimes write and noodle about almost as well as I draw.
In the nonce there is a Democratic picnic Thursday night at which a local band with perform a vicious parody song I wrote about our Rethuglican Congressional Candidate who is trying to wedge his fat ass into Roy Blunt's vacated seat. I will enjoy that and try to post the U Tube video of it here over the weekend.
Then we'll see...
I don't enjoy living with fear.