Sound Advice
- The DIY Scholar
- 2 days ago
- 7 min read
“Don’t quit your day job, kid.”
The overeducated janitor kept notebooks when he was younger. In his past life, his punk past life, he kept one on him at all times. At the merch table at shows, in the loft of the van on tour, on the porch of the flophouse, in the breakroom of any number of menial jobs, on the rooftops of the industrial corridor, down by the sulphur-soaked riverbanks, on rickety park benches, on public transportation, or wherever he happened to be when the words came, whenever they ambushed him, that turn of the phrase that had been eluding him, at those moments he would take out the notebook and ink up the pages. He would crowd the margins with fragments of images, scenes, dialogues, sequences, all of them unpolished, misshapen, without ever forming part of a whole, without going anywhere, without becoming sturdy, something seaworthy.
He wrote innumerable zines, none of which ever made it past the first issue. That was his trick, his signature move, to write the first issue of the zine and then never write the second one. Despite the changes in title and typesetting, despite all the high-sounding proclamations of starting a new project, the content of each new zine was the same as all the previous ones, that is, the same as his notebooks, an odd assemblage of descriptions, impressions, commentary, diffuse and barely intelligible, disintegrating at the reader’s approach.
He handed them out for free at shows, convinced he was on to something, secretly longing to become the next Cometbus. His high hopes were invariably disappointed when his efforts were met with the same response, time and time again, the same silence, the same indifference.
Occasionally he would rip out of a page from his notebook and show it to somebody outside the punk community, a co-worker, a distant relative, a neighbor, the person on the barstool next to him at the local watering hole, a friend of a friend who studied at the university, an aspiring writer, or other fellow travellers. The response was always similar, that is, forced smiles, platitudes, feigned enthusiasm, pained feedback. “Yeah, well, I think there might be something in this.” “It is rather… How can I put this? …original. It’s original, I’ll give you that.” “Keep it up. With a little more practice, you can maybe become something someday, someone who writes some type of texts, a writer, I guess, or something like that.” Variations on a theme, the feedback gravitated towards the same inevitable conclusion. “Let’s be sure to not get ahead of ourselves here, kid. For the time being, you’re probably not going to want to quit your day job. Yeah, just don’t quit your day job, you know, for the time being.”
Yep, there’s no doubt about it. The overeducated janitor was a bad poet. And there is nothing more insufferable than a bad poet, nothing worse than someone with a medium amount of talent, enough to feel the pull, the itch, the calling, the need to keep writing, but not enough to turn that writing into something other than a bad habit, a compulsion, to turn it into something sturdy, an edifice, or something seaworthy, a vessel, something that other people find value in or comfort maybe.
It wasn’t until The Punk University. It wasn’t until the onset of A New Obsession. It wasn’t until the overeducated janitor embarked on The All-Consuming Project that would stretch across a decade and a half and nearly crush him, his small frame, under its weight, its impossible dimensions. It wasn’t until then that he finally managed to pull it off, to rid himself of the habit. Before the end of that first semester, the overeducated janitor did what had to be done. He packed his notebooks in milkcrates and dispatched them to the bottom of the ocean, unceremoniously, without the slight trace of chagrin.
This isn’t to say that he stopped writing altogether but, rather, that it was transformed into something different, nearly unrecognized, archival almost, firmly bound to social and historical realities. His pen was put to the service of The Project, subordinated to the demands of The Cause. A new type of notebook lined his shelves in The Shoebox Apartment above the motorcycle repair shop on 68th street. The pages of these notebooks were filled with summaries, outlines, definitions, statistics, graphs, and explanations. Together they would form the basis of his research.
Much to his surprise, his writing went over well this time. It took shape. It produced results. It set sail and braved the waves without capsizing. At the helm, a periscope held to his eye, the overeducated janitor felt the sunlight on his skin and the wind in his hair. It was entirely new, the feeling. He was at the right place at the right time with the right combination of skills and talents. He didn’t think twice. He didn’t look back. He didn’t relapse. He let go of The Old Habits, the old way of writing. Day by day, the milkcrates sunk deeper into the sand of the ocean floor.
Years later, lifetimes really, when the overeducated janitor walked across the stage of The Almost Ivy League University, after the defense of his dissertation, he was convinced that he was doing so as a professional, convinced that he had indeed acquired a profession, a profession built upon his foundation as a writer, his compulsion to put everything into words, to get it right, to represent in language aspects of the world and our experiences in it.
Convincing other people of his profession, however, would prove to be another matter altogether.
In the first months after graduation, he sent more than eighty applications to jobs in his field. He didn't receive one single response. Every week he sent more applications off into the world, more shots in the dark, so many that he lost track of them. He checked his email seventeen times per day, with breath abated, hands trembling, possessed by the hope, the desire, the delusion that he would receive a response, that one email, that one shot at an interview, which, he was convinced, was all that he needed. It never came.
His savings dwindled and he moved into The Halfway House to save money, which helped a little but, in itself, wasn’t quite enough to stop the bleeding, the hemorrhaging of his funds. “It’s time to throw in the towel,” Mendi said. The words were hard to hear, as hard to hear as they were to deny. So, he agreed to replace Mendi as the janitor of The Community Center, identical, in so many ways to the jobs he used to have back in his punk past life, back before The All-Consuming Project that nearly crushed him under its weight, its impossible dimensions.
On that first day on the job, on his break, sitting in the supply closet, on the lip of the floor drain, he felt the pull once again. It had been years. At The Punk University and The Almost Ivy League University, he had gotten in the habit of jotting down hypotheses in a little notepad, arguments that he would later try to falsify. He would assemble his premises, order them towards a conclusion, careful to seal all the openings, the gaps, careful to prevent the edifice from toppling. Sometimes he would outline an upcoming class or a publication or a presentation at a conference. But this was something altogether different.
His fingers trembled slightly as he unzipped his hip-pack and extracted the notepad and mechanical pencil. There was something there in the way that he related to Arturo, the head janitor, a continuity, a filiation, a tradition of struggle and defeat perhaps. Starting with the details, the minutiae, the overeducated janitor set to the task of sketching Arturo, of tracing the overlap, of capturing whatever it was that they shared. He wrote until the end of his break and then, later, on the bus ride home. Of course he didn’t get it right, he didn’t find the right words, the exact fit, but he was determined to keep trying.
It didn’t take long for him to fill the pages of a notebook. And then another. Just like the old days.
A year has passed since that first day in the supply closet. Once a week he sends off applications. The rest of the time is divided between cleaning toilets, his research, and writing in his notebooks. His manuscript, product of five years of research, has been sent to the publishers. Currently it enjoys the same fate as the job applications, the same silence, the same indifference. Once a week, he rips a tattered page from his notebooks, The Journals, and publishes it online in all its coarseness and imperfection, all its impossibility. It’s his message in a bottle, his lifeline. And he is never quite sure whose shore it washes up upon or if it is just more digital debris, floating in the backwaters of cyberspace. His only hope is that it makes sense to someone somewhere, that it helps in some small way.
For months now, he has been playing the scene over and over again in his thoughts, the scene where he barges into The Big Boss’s office in his Sketchers waterproof steel-toed slip-on work boots and submit his two-weeks’ notice. Convinced that he does indeed has a profession, convinced that he is indeed capable of exercising it, he is determined to do it, determined to produce what a little talent and a lot of training enables him to produce, determined to take the leap. It is enough, he tells himself, it has to be.
Yet, back at The Halfway House, when all the other noises die down, when the research high subsides, he can still hear the voice, from so many years ago, lifetimes it seems, the one that whispers, “whatever you do, don’t quit your day job, kid.”
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