Sunday 11/7/10
I’m sitting in bed with my laptop thinking to myself, “I want to write, I have to write something.”I’ve not written anything significant in a while. I can’t envision a starting point or where I want to go. I’m hoping something pops up soon. I have an idea…

Maybe I’ll start at the beginning. Sometimes it’s just easiest that way. Sometimes, to find inspiration when writing, you have to start at the beginning... trudge through the muck to find your footing. Whether the muck is worth salvaging in the final product is yet to be seen, but it is a means to an end... could it be art imitating life? I guess this isn’t *the* beginning, but it’s the beginning of this story. The time is early 2008, and I beg a couple friends to let me move in with them. At first, I only had a little bit of money saved up and was looking steadily for a job. One place I was looking at was IdleAire, a small corporation that focused on in-cab HVAC and electricity for truckers at various truck stops. I had interviewed with the head of one of the IT departments there just a few months prior and it sounded like a sure thing that I’d get a job at the bottom and move up within 3 months, but more on that later. IdleAire didn’t hire me right away because they were stuck in a hiring freeze, so I was frantically looking for another job. After about a month of dwindling my resources down to pennies, one of my roommates… that happened to be one of the managers at a local Food City supermarket… offered me a job. At that point, I was ready to take on anything. Besides, after three years of doing construction with my dad… happily, I might add… I felt like I could handle anything.

Food City was a sack of shit to begin with. Many of the people I met there were good people. The rest, however, were self-important pricks. Sometimes you just have to shovel the shit until something better comes along. They had me working produce, dairy, frozen… almost anything in the store for cheap, which equated to money in my pocket and much needed food in my belly.

Meanwhile… while I have no personal grudges toward those roommates, I had to get out. My sanity was hitting a reality check nearly every day. I’d work weird hours at work… close one night, open another department not 7 hours later the next morning… rinse… repeat. My roommates didn’t help that they were loud and complained about one another to me, the cleanest and most respectful of them. At least, I’d like to think so.

I started to move my stuff out little by little, and July 2008 I was moved in with a new set of roommates. I finally got a job at IdleAire doing basic customer support. Nothing glorious, but I had a promotion to look forward to in three months, right? Eh, not really. It’s not that they didn’t want to bump me up; it’s that the company didn’t have the money.