...Or I Could Just Rehearse The Phrase, "Welcome, Do You Need A Cart?"

I know no one's reading this just yet, it's probably me, maybe Scott the Reader every couple of days, maybe someone from Blogger scanning through recently-started blogs to make sure I haven't torn up the carpet, but in case you read yesterday's puzzling post and are thinking, "A year? This guy won't last the month," I hear you. The last few days have been a bit of an eye-opener for me with what could be a huge impact to my screenwriting efforts.

Long story short, I have a daygig, an actual career, that I sort of fell into. My nature in the past has been following this same tack, trying to cross a river and getting swept off into another direction. While I enjoy the company I work for, I wasn't aiming for the job I have now, and I've been getting progressively more uncomfortable with myself as I perform each day.

A few days ago, after crunching some numbers, the wife and I found that maybe with the cost of the commute and the babysitter, it might be more logical to find some way to work from home, something that would pick up about 40% of what I'm making now. My wife, to my surprise, is not only open to the idea, but encouraging me to find out how to do it.

You might as well have told me to set my workplace on fire. I went to work yesterday and was fighting the urge to be a jerk all day, to speak out when I didn't agree with something I'd normally be a professional about and compromise, to take out my frustration on people who wouldn't deserve such treatment. It was a week before summer vacation and I wanted to pull the fire alarm and skip class to get some pizza and catch a matinee.

There are things about this job that thwart my concentration and tire me out mentally daily, yet there are good things about it as well, but my family comes first. I would just have to line up the mystical stay-at-home tasks that will make that 40 percent.

All of this means I'd be home with The Prince and able to have writing time where I used to have commuting time. I could make dinner for the family, be home on weekends, get to know my wife again.

So what's my problem?

My old man. My father left school in the eighth grade to go to work. Most of the time our lives crossed, he had more than one job. When he was a firefighter in Harlem, he would work three days on and three days off. The days off he'd work as a furniture mover. Those jobs put clothes on our backs, literally: All five kids at some point wore one of the Compass Van t-shirts Dad had brought home, dark blue with yellow screenprinting across the back. When I was twelve, a wall collapsed during a fire and he came home with a broken wrist and a disability check.

He was miserable. He didn't know what to do with himself, or with us. We puzzled him, these five personalities he'd known as much as he could, but seemingly not at all now that he saw us almost every hour of every day. All he knew for sure was that he was not like us at our age and wanted to fix the problem if he could.

Eventually he bought a business, did all right for a few years, then became a fire safety consultant for companies in the city. He was on his way to work for a big construction firm in Manhattan, happy with his work* and having been talking to me about getting a job there on a crew during the summer home from school, when he had chest pains. My mother got him to the doctor just in time for him to go into arrest in the exam room. A successful bypass surgery followed, but a loose clot from his leg hit his heart in the middle of the night a few days later and he was gone.

I just think about him whenever I think about work, and I've never had much in common with him in the types of work I've done, but his unspoken ethic of always working as well as you can, as much as you can, always sticks with me. Sure, I've faltered, but when I'm at my best, it's in line with how he'd behave.

My concern is whether he'd approve of this move, should it happen. I suppose the way to beat down that concern is to succeed.

* - I remember I'd once asked him at the dinner table if he liked his new job with the construction firm. He looked at me as though trying to see through my forehead and into the unused goo behind it. What could I mean, like his job? The very idea that such a thing would matter was almost insulting to him.