Incognito In Plain Sight

It looms on, seemingly standard, uneventful. Days filled with sleeping late and laziness.

Sprinkled in fun hither and yon, like a trip to the lake for 3 days. Complete with quintessential boat rides, tubing, jet skiing. Beach days and BBQ's.


A random Tuesday at a water park for a friends son's birthday. Sounds idyllic on paper really.

Summer of fun and sun, right?

One would think.

I'm plagued by a job market that doesn't seem to be improving, amidst media rumors to the contrary.

I find myself a beggar of sorts, sans tattered clothes and street side, but reaching for handouts nonetheless. Scouring the land of government and charitable assistance just trying to get by.

I feel like less of a person, a degenerate. TV, internet and phone off now for close to a month if not more (hence the lack in blog posting). My 5 year old asking daily if we can have TV back yet. Heartbreaking to keep telling him mama has no money.

I had to get help to keep my gas from getting shut off, to get my rent (well half) paid this month. Unemployment is a joke. 60% of what I used to make my ass. It's closer to less than half, and that's including the oh-so-generous $25 they give me for having a child.

I'm working with four staffing companies, if you can even call it that. Three of them are essentially useless. Only one of them actually keeps in touch with me reguarly and seems to have leads to anything. The others don't even like to return phone calls, let alone seem to be helping me find work.

My resume' is on every job site known to me. I get the same lame updates daily. I apply and send away like a Spam robot programmed to pimp myself by email to prospective employers.

It's become a game to them. The news just last night (according to my mother, since I sadly don't have access to such current events) said employers are now basing their hiring choices on credit checks.

Well that's just fucking stellar if that's true. I may never work again.

Like every 18 year old back in the day, I jacked my credit up pretty damn good. I also however, did a good job paying off all of them, B.D. (Before Dylan) With the exception of one that decided to be sheisty after my "settlement", but I digress...

Of course, in the A.D. (After Dylan) and short time I was still caught up in the wake of the tsunami that was his father, my past due's mounted ever higher, due to his taking all my money from working 3 jobs and nursing an infant to buy heroin, but again, a story for another day.

But now, all these years later, after having had a great job with great pay, even then just barely getting by, to lose that to a failed economy makes trying to get back on your feet as impossible as a turtle overturned righting itself.

The mountain insurmountable, as it were. Bouncing back like throwing a ball of glass against a brick wall and having it shatter, mockingly in front of you, in a million little pieces.

Those pieces, your life. Each myriad section an aspect fallen in different directions, all at once, and all apart. And you, now, a collector. Trying to not only find them all, but somehow piece it all back together.

And so, as in those chiched applications of essay topics from yesteryear of "How I Spent My Summer Vacation", I am spending mine behind an air of carelessness, a facade of carefree whistfulness, when really I am sad, I am scared and alone.

I am hurting and hiding, in plain sight. Undercover incognito, just hoping for my ship to come in.