Mike Needs a Life Blog Reposts – Part 14

June 1, 2009
Woah, alot has happened.. let me fill you in.

OK.. where to start. My last post I talked about halloween coming up, the back porch, an impending trip to St Thomas, lack of job opportunities, and fixing my clutch. I don’t know how I managed to come so far without adding stuff to this blog, I guess I just got caught up in the daily grind again. I’ll start from the beginning…

I find Work:

Jeff League was over one night some time in early November, and we were sitting around the back porch drinking a bit and burning some wood in the firepit. He mentioned that he was having a hard time finding reliable people to help him out at the art gallery he works at. I of course was like.. “dude.. I have no job!” So the next week, I started going in to help him out with framing, building boxes and crates, and just generally being the guy who would do anything. It was contract work, and not very much pay, but it was money coming in. I guess that’s about the time I stopped writing this blog. I think I just slipped back into that routine of getting up, going to work, coming home, and wishing for something more. In the beginning it was only supposed to be a temporary thing.. a few weeks tops, but I wound up being there six months. Now oddly enough, I’m no longer there and feel the need to write again.. Coincidence?? Who knows.

Anyway, it was nice to be the cheap labor in the back after 15 years of being in a ‘professional’ office. I enjoyed the mindlessness of the work.. building frames, framing art, lighting the gallery, moving art around.. you know, monkeys could do it. After a while though, the old familiar annoyances began creeping in.. annoying co-workers who would stand around and watch Jeff and I work all day, because they themselves had nothing to do, and super-time crunch emergencies: “Crate this 500 lb Albert Paley Sculpture by this afternoon! It has to ship TOOOODAY!!!” “Frame these 50 pieces by tomorrow morning!, they have to be in New York by Tuesday Morning!!!!” OY, I mean really… it’s ART people, let’s get some perspective here, we’re not shipping the polio vaccine to Botswana or Finding a new heart for little Timmy.

I had a bit of a revelation at some point along this journey, that no matter what kind of work you’re doing, and no matter what type of office you’re in, there are all the same issues. Someone is bangin’ that chick in accounting, and everyone knows it, but no one talks about it.. and of course they are both married. The boss is an emotionally distant, dysfunctional workaholic who never stops workin’ the deal long enough to realize his employees (and his family) need him to pay attention to them. The middle-management wanna-bees don’t really actually DO ANYTHING but sit behind their desks and conceive ways to look busy. And everyone on down the line looks the other way as long as his or her paycheck keeps coming in. I was really kind of blown away by all this. I mean, going into this I was thinking.. wow, cool… art… should be a nice calm diversion from all the corporate sycophantry. Is sycophantry even a word? Well, I was disillusioned. People are people everywhere you go, and most of them are lazy.

I won’t say everyone there was bad, there were a couple folks that really were good, honest art people. At some point in the last few years though, someone left the door open at night, and the infidels slithered in and took hold. I don’t think they will be around much longer, but then what do I know about such things. I’m just the dude in the back.

I really don’t want to sound like the guy who automatically despises the people he works for, because I honestly don’t think that’s true. What I expect though, is that people be honest and hard-working. Maybe that’s too much to ask in this day and age. It just eventually begins to eat away at my patience to be working for and with people I don’t trust. I’ve definitely made my mistakes in my day and probably treated people unfairly for my own personal agenda, but I try to grow as a person and not do things that are unfair or ethically wrong, and I do always try to give people the benefit of the doubt and understand that they are fallible and sometimes scared, so they make mistakes. But good grief… ok.. enough of that. Off the soap-box, Mike.

The work at the gallery dried up pretty quickly in May, and there wasn’t anything left for me to do there, so I said my adieus and bowed out. Jeff is still there, although he doesn’t seem to have much to do either, so who knows how long that will last before he finds himself something more stimulating. A sign of the times I suppose. Or maybe just bad business. Probably both. At any rate, I hope it picks up for them, and they straighten things out, because it really is a cool place, and they have a lot of cool art there.