Don't ever let the ghost of working stiff mediocrity sneak in and steal your soul!

That's what my very good friend, Levi, told me in a much needed email last week. While most of the time, I feel pretty good about what's going on here, the whole unemployment thing is starting to kill me. I'll probably take the first job that I can get, just to stop feeling worthless. Keeping my head up, but it is getting heavier. I think that I have been doing a good bit of soul searching, as of late. When you aren't in the middle of the social scene, it gives you a lot of time to step back and introspect. Or alternately, when you party hard seeing three nights of Sound Tribe Sector 9 at the Fillmore or even just one night of Medeski, Martin, & Wood at the Grand, gives you a lot of downtime getting through the hangover. Such downtime allows the wheels to turn at an insurmountable rate. Here is how I described it to my friend Maggie in an email:

"Sometimes, you need to be turned upside-down andshaken vigorously to learn about who you are. I know this sounds arrogant and self-absorbed, but living in Chapel Hill I feel like I developed this persona of this hot-shot bartender who was nice to everybody and was sort of this popular man about town. But that really wasn't me---I'm not really that outgoing and Ihonestly didn't like having to be nice to everybody all the fucking time. And everytime I met somebody, they already had an idea of who I was from whoever introduced me (i.e. - "That's DK, the bartender from Linda's, he's {insert description here}") And here in SF, I'm nobody. No one gives a fuck about who I was in Chapel Hill. Its both the most liberating and the most harrowing thing I've experienced. I had thislong talk with my Mom before I left and told her how scared I was of having to start this whole new life, and she said 'David, your problem is that you don't see in yourself the wonderful person that everyone else sees. And when you go to California, you aren't going to have the advantage of everyone already knowing you. You are, for the first time since you moved to Chapel Hill, going to have to learn to project that wonderful person that you are.' Easier said than done, though, right?"

I think that that really sums it up. And once I get a job, I'm sure that I'll look at things differently. But, that's where I'm at right now. And, you know, I'm thinking that maybe its not a completely bad thing. It makes me want to write about it. It makes me want to inject what I feel into the characters of the next batch of stories. I think that it would be perfect for them. So, hopefully something good will come out of it. I'm just ready for my career to get going. I feel like I've worked hard, and I deserve it.