You're Gonna Have Trouble

<p><strong> You're Gonna Have Trouble -- Volume #6 -- in the Chance Cash Register Working Stiff Series . . .</strong></p><p> </p><p>I fixed it so I'd get fired. Don't mean it didn't hurt any less. The crazy schedule they had me on driving the hotel van (picking up flight crews 6-days a week) left no time for the one thing that mattered: the writing. So I got pink-slipped; kicked to the curb as thy say. One problem solved--that created another: how to earn money to buy groceries put gas in the used bucket pay bills.</p><p>So it starts: another series of blue-collar back-breaking/soul-crushing gigs: at a plant nursery meat-packing facility warehouse striping company as jackhammer operator and ditch-digger. We do what we gotta. It's like this for the average person. No biggie. Nothing to it but to do it. Folks in other countries might think we're all a bunch of millionaires here in the grand and prosperous US of A. Guess what peeps? Here's the truth. We're toilers. Most of us.</p><p>Some of us working stiffs might even be into the arts: appreciate the great painters awesome writers and jazz & blues artists. What keeps us going. But yes we're 9-to-5-ers. Do it to get by. My favorite books have always been Tom Kromer's <strong>Waiting for Nothing</strong> Jack Black's <strong>Nobody Wins</strong> Bukowski's <strong>Post Office</strong> George Orwell's <strong>Down and Out in Paris and London</strong> Jack London's <strong>Martin Eden</strong>; and of course Knut Hamsun's unforgettable <strong>Hunger.</strong> This is my way of honoring those great scribes who wrote tomes about stuff that actually matters. K.A.</p>