Where Y'At?
Here's A Vignette, Posted: April 1, 2025. A Soul-Shaker of a Story from The NYT. A Declaration, or Three. A Long Walk. A Life Update.
Over the course of life, I developed a real love of April Fool’s Day and became a decent practitioner of pranks. Pulled off a few good ones over the years! But I took a pass in 2020, due to the pandemic and the last few pranks haven’t seemed to land in the same way and this year… well, I’m not sure how the news is treating your brain, but I’m not feeling all chipper and such. You?
Over the past 24 hours, I feel as if some things have come into a certain clarity and my first Substack post in a minute is the ultimate April Fool’s Day prank, in that I’m approaching it with complete sincerity. Weird. But this feels right. Might even hit “publish.” And to repeat: all of the following is true. Happy April 1st!
Yesterday, I read a piece in The New York Times that I’d been putting off for a few days: “The Gen X Career Meltdown” by Steven Kurutz. Started it. Stopped after a few ’graphs, knowing that the piece might knock me off the rails. Started it again and even finished it. Predictably, got knocked off the rails. Sharing it here and hoping that it’s just a good read for you, not a snapshot of how your own life’s gone.
The piece is filled with passages like this: If you entered media or image-making in the ’90s — magazine publishing, newspaper journalism, photography, graphic design, advertising, music, film, TV — there’s a good chance that you are now doing something else for work. That’s because those industries have shrunk or transformed themselves radically, shutting out those whose skills were once in high demand.
I last published a piece for money three months ago; it earned a check of $75. I last published a Substack about the same time, long having abandoned a pay model on the platform. My last few pitches for larger-scope projects have gone unanswered. While the piece above gave me the sense of deep relatability, I also found myself surprised by some lines, like the one suggesting that freelance writers have averaged .50 cents to a dollar a word. Over the past few years, my assignments have been more inclined to come in at a dime a word, some even sold on the spec scale of a $20 placement. As in: if no placements were made for a piece, no income. Not really a career, working on that model.
Other lines in the piece made a lot of sense, though. Like this one: Aside from lost income, there is the emotional toll — feelings of grief and loss — experienced by those whose careers are short-circuited. Some may say that the Gen X-ers in publishing, music, advertising and entertainment were lucky to have such jobs at all, that they stayed too long at the party. But it’s hard to leave a vocation that provided fulfillment and a sense of identity. And it isn’t easy to reinvent yourself in your 50s, especially in industries that put a premium on youth culture.
I’m not a journalist these days. Not really. And I’m not interested in competing with the kids. I’m not a journalist.
Sometimes, it’s important to just say it, make it public. So there’s my declaration of what I’m not.
Today, I’m writing this on the quick, as I’ve got a catering gig from 12:30-9 pm at a hotel in New Orleans’ Central Business District. I’m not sure what I’ll be doing, as this company, one of two that I work for regularly, doesn’t provide any pre-shift info. I imagine that I’ll be serving and that it’ll be a corporate event, as it’s in a hotel, mid-week, held over a several-day period. Tomorrow, I’ll go back to that hotel from 6am-1pm, then will cook for a different company at another venue from 5-10:30 pm. So, a long day’s a’comin’.
Cooking’s something that I’ve taken on as a side skill since moving here. Really, it’s only been a thing that’s come about in the last few months, as I’ve approached my favorite of my two side gigs with the sort of relentless cheerfulness and “I’d love to learn that” enthusiasm that’s borne of need. Thanks to my ability to serve, to cook and to occasionally bartend, I’m a more useful human for both companies and I’m currently in a stretch in which I’ll work 15 shifts in 19 days, including three rounds of oyster shucking, a skill I didn’t have until a week ago. And it’s not as if I’m “skillful” at it, but it’s a line item that I can check off now, as I work my way through every job I can in New Orleans.
And if this sounds as if I’m busy, sure, I am. For now.
For now, I am busy. But I track all of my hours and dollars earned and since it’s the first of month, I can tell you that I only worked about 50-hours in March, total, including a period of about 10 straight days during which I didn’t work a single shift, due to the service industry’s lengthy snooze after Mardi Gras. Existing here as a gig worker necessitates an ability to negotiate these feast/famine rounds and, even as I’m working the kind of run that’s already got my panic impulses firing, I’ve only got one shift on my calendar after April 13th.
This kind of calendar does not a pocketbook make.
But I moved to New Orleans for experiences, and the other day I was working at a historic home in the French Quarter that makes its bones through wedding rentals. Near the courtyard at dusk, frogs from the pond began to sing (loudly! Very loudly!) and the Kinfolk Brass Band was working a wedding just down the street, actually playing with enough volume to be heard over the actual “do you take this human” ceremony that I was working. Across the street there’s a “haunted” convent, and literal dozens of ghost tours wandered by the building over the course of our six hours at the mansion and, I have to say, there were moments within the experience that made this whole challenging move seem worth it.
And yet…
As I said above, I keep better notes than I ever have as an adult, which means compiling monthly notes about finances. This month, I had that super lack of work but had to pay my taxes and tax preparer. And there’s something about this presidential administration that wants to push my modest-for-my-age investment down by a goodly bit, thanks to its oligarchic lens. And there’s also this sense of paying an ever-present, off-the-books New Orleans Tax: extra money for house insurance and car insurance and termite insurance and flat tires and a new back wall for the guest house thanks to water damage and… well, you just somehow shell out a bit extra for the privilege of the New Orleans Experience. It happens over and over, through a variety of charges. It never stops.
Through a variety of factors (from national politics down to personal micro-choices), I was down $7,000-plus from March 1.
Unacceptable.
Last night, during a long walk through the neighborhood next to ours, I floated an idea. Despite my own wish to levitate on outta here at the earliest possible opportunity, I convinced someone to move here largely due to my want (no: all-encompassing neeeeeeeed!) to live in New Orleans. While I could impose a selfish wish to leave NOLA at the end of 2025, meaning a remote-work last semester of schooling, it seems the more-decent, human approach is to stay through her whole program, allowing my solid-plus-plus partner a chance to finish this program (and many other poetry-positive situations) in May of 2026.
That means some added stress for me, for sure. It also means one more Halloween season here, one more Mardi Gras, one more full-calendar-year-and-change of the seasonal variance that makes New Orleans unique. While I don’t look forward to the soul-wearying crush of summer heat, I can’t not smile at a spring 2026 crawfish season, one that I’d all but talked myself out of before yesterday.
Not sure if you’ve ever had a New York Times story kinda change your life. I have. Probably gonna have to send the writer a link to this. If I hit publish, that is. I might.
As for now, I have to run out to serve boudin balls and gumbo to tourists. That’s what I do.
For now, at least. That’s what I do.
-30-
My brother, this was the yat I was anticipating with you on the 9th of April.
Your conscious flow hits all realities that I have heard from locals and transplants — then add on the local and national politics.
I am channeling the tough ‘Killer Crone’ in your career in Hoosierweight boxing. You got this - just keep shaking the bush boss!
So much resonance here! Thank you for this. I did read that article. I actually commented on it—giving thanks for having been born Gen X—and to my delight my comment is in the top five. I think that sounds like bragging. Maybe. Anyway, it’s a good article. And I was remembering my glory days of $2 per word contracts from Condé Nast and other big magazine companies. I’m really glad I found a way to switch gears to lucrative work when the writing work dried up—presiding over weddings and funerals—but even still, as you note, there are ups and downs when one goes the self-employed route, including, yes, the taxes and the tax preparer. I wonder if growing up poor/blue collar has allowed me to make shifts more easily than some—as in, when I was growing up, no work (or hardly any work) was ever “beneath” me. I just got in there and did it. I mostly still have that attitude. So I’m not bitter about not being a journalist anymore, I’m just grateful I still know how to hustle and that, at least for now, my physical body is cooperating. Great hearing from you.