Dxx Abroad

It's late fall 2005. I'm stuck at a job that makes me alternately suicidal and homicidal. I've just graduated law school, a lifelong goal slightly marred by the fact that I am barely making enough to pay my rent, much less enjoy life in New York.  My job at a small downtown law firm consists mainly of my running personal errands for a nasty, impotent little man who has made it his life's work to rob me of what scant self-confidence and -worth I have left. The firm operates from the 7th floor of an old building in the Financial District. Our office is the only feature of the structure more depressing than its facade. Despite having been granted the title of Associate I have no office. I sit at a cube in the bullpen, a sad collection of desks populated by a small community of young women who lack university degrees and for whom English is a second language.

As the days grow darker and the year stretches toward Christmas I fall into a deep depression. What my job lacks in terms of monetary compensation (I make $35,000 per year, a far cry from the $125,000 my law school classmates are making, and not remotely close to an amount sufficient to pay my $1,200 per month student loans) it also lacks in terms of marketable experience; my time is spent delivering mail to my boss' mother, rearranging his traffic court dates and arguing on the phone with customer service representatives at various lending institutions that I should, for some reason, be allowed to order consolidation of his wife's student loans without her written or verbal consent that I act in such capacity.  I want nothing more at the end of each day than to crawl into bed and be held by the man I think I love and have him tell me it will all work out, somehow. Unfortunately he lives some 2,400 miles to the West in Los Angeles.

I pass the time firing my resume into the abyss, submitting my qualifications to law firms that I know would never consider hiring me - I lack the requisite experience that my contemporaries gained working law school summers with their now-employers - and avoiding contact with my boss, Lewis, a middle-aged prick with power issues whose demeanor and aresenal of blunt insults have reduced me to tears on more than one occasion. Yesterday he threw a paperweight across his office at me because I failed to submit some masturbatory write up he drafted about his last settlement to the New York Law Journal. I held it together until I got to the men's room, where I mourned the future I had spent so much effort and money building by sobbing into the crook of my arm for exactly three minutes before wiping my nose and returning to the bullpen. I have never felt lower in my 25 years; in that moment I am as useless as Lewis tells me I am, dejected to the point of inertia. I contemplate giving up completely. I write a short story, never to see the light of day, in which the protagonist seals his iPod in a plastic bag, turns up the volume as he is walking out his front door just after midnight and heads due South on 9th Avenue, not stopping from 52nd second street until he reaches Battery Park and launches himself into the water, quietly drowning in the dark to the tune of "All You Need is Love" by the Beatles.

The summer just past saw the rise of the blog. I don't read blogs. I read the news. I play on Friendster. I chat with my friends on AIM. I read employment ads and attempt to network. I devise new ways to utilize my spice rack to make the popcorn I'll be eating for dinner more appetizing. I read. I attempt to learn Spanish. I write twenty-odd pages of a thinly veiled autobiography. It's not very good, but it's not bad either.

One day the results of a Google search lead me to the first blog I actually read in earnest, a day-to-day account of the life of a self-proclaimed narcissistic gay man whose grasp of minimalist prose and dark humor inspire me within an hour to start my own blog.

Writing is like being recalled to life. Having strangers read and respond is an embarassment of riches. Things begin to change. 

By Christmas I am fed up with my boss, who has earned the alias "Soulless Fuckwad" on my blog. I give my notice on December 26th and walk out the door on January 6th, 2006 with neither a new job waiting for me nor the funds to survive beyond March. The autobiography grows to over sixty pages, much of it now fictional. By February I've secured a contract job at a top 10 firm making upwards of $80,000. Before 2006 is over I've been hired for six figures as an associate in the corporate department of a mid-size firm. Things have, as so many will promise gay men and women a generation younger than I some 5 years later, gotten better.

Eventually I stop blogging; I have neither the time nor the need for creative outlet. The novel returns to the bowels of my computer's hard drive, occasionally opened and spot edited; copies emailed to myself so that it will not be lost in the event of a computer crash. The blog is taken down, its contents visible only to me. The Writer goes on extended hiatus. Desperation fuels the fire of creativity; contentment forces the storyteller into hibernation. I enjoy 4 years of middle class dissatisfaction: my holidays aren't long enough. I'm not getting laid enough. My law firm expects me to actually work for my obscene salary and bonus. Life is good.

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It's mid-fall 2011.  I'm stuck at a job that makes me alternately suicidal and homicidal. I've just moved to London, a lifelong goal slightly marred by the fact that I am barely making enough to pay my rent, much less enjoy life in Europe.  My job at a small conference production company consists mainly of my calling professionals who were my equals and colleagues in my former life as a practising corporate lawyer to ask them about topics in which they are experts and, as instructed, disengage myself from active thought. I sit at a cube in the bullpen, a sad collection of desks largely populated by women for whom English is a second language. The company operates from the 6th floor of a run down building above Old Street station. It occurs to me as I'm staring at the elevator buttons one morning that the 6th floor in London would be the 7th in New York; all buildings in Europe have a ground floor, and start counting floors with '1' on what is the American second floor. The revelation sends a chill up my spine, the type you sometimes get when you pee. 

I'm at dead end job making barely-subsistence-level wages from inside a cube in a bullpen on the 7th floor of a decaying building. Again. 

My life is repeating itself and its giving me the piss shivers. 

As the days grow darker and the year stretches toward Christmas I fall into a deep depression. What my job lacks in terms of monetary compensation (I'm making £34,000 per year, a far cry from the $180,000 I was making before I lost my job and from the $150,000 my friends are making in their new in-house roles, not remotely close to an amount sufficient to pay my $1,200 per month student loans) it also lacks in terms of marketable experience; my time is spent talking to more successful people about the interesting and viable work they do as opposed to actually doing it myself.  I want nothing more at the end of each day than to crawl into bed and be held by the man I am falling for and have him tell me it will all work out, somehow. Unfortunately he lives some 3,400 miles to the West in New York.

I pass the time firing my CV into the abyss, submitting my qualifications to law firms that I know would never consider hiring me - I lack the requisite experience practising in the UK that my contemporaries and lawyers five years my junior are using to leverage their way into roles for which I am infinitely more qualified - and avoiding contact with Ben, the head of Sponsorship, a middle-aged prick with power issues whose treatment of me has led to my daily fantasizing about interesting and violent ways of shuffling him loose this mortal coil. Today he condescended to me about my law degree and insinuated that I was illiterate. I only heard half of what he was saying because mentally I was strangling him with the USB cable from my computer. In my mind his eyes make a satisfying pop just as the last of his gurgling has stopped. I can feel his windpipe giving way under the cord, buckling in the middle like a bent drinking straw.

The summer just past saw the rise of Twitter and iBooks. Everyone has abandoned long-form blogging for 140-characters-or-less dispatches. I don't tweet. I don't own a TV. I read. I attempt to teach myself Italian. I job hunt. I keep detailed spreadsheets of jobs for which I've applied and the recruiters to whom I've spoken. I used to be on Facebook all day long, but it is blocked in my office. I had a music blog on Facebook, where I wrote about my favorite songs and remixes, but I ran out of things to say, which is odd considering I have over 6,000 songs in my iTunes library.

While out at a nightclub I randomly meet the man who writes the blog that first inspired me to start my own some 5 years ago.  I've been kind of blogging since I moved, writing open letters to friends on Facebook. I can't ignore the significance, in a city of 9 million people, of meeting this person who played an unwittingly pivotal role in my life. Before the following week is out I have assumed a new pseudonym, DxxAbroad, and started a new blog. The first full entry is a vignette of the darkest order, in which I color in the deeper shades of my despair. There was a moment, the night after the events detailed in that first post, which I count among the lowest in my 31 years. I lay in bed in my apartment in South London and sobbed heavily into the dark, mourning the comfort I've lost, the future I've spent so much time and money and effort trying to build and the life in London that I can't have. 

Writing begins to take up the time I spent learning Italian. It creeps into the time at work I would usually spend job hunting or, God forbid, doing my actual job. The novel has been subject to a writ of habeas corpus, called forth from its digital cell in the prison of my external hard drive. It's still not great. But it's still not bad, either. 

The Writer is rubbing his eyes and trying to figure out where the hell it is that he's woken up. He knows he's been here before. It all looks the same in so many ways, feels so familiar. The Writer knows the road ahead. He's been semi-conscious, if not fully aware, for a while now, recognizing every signpost these last few months, preparing for the tasks at hand, gradually warmed by the fires of Despair and calling out from his slumber as if having a bad dream that there is no stopping, no forfeit, no surrender. 

That's the thing about the Writer; he takes the advice, proffered in so many different ways recently by all the people who care for him, that can be distilled to a simple instruction: Get Back Up.

The Writer Gets Back Up.

Things have not begun to change. Not yet.