bad vibes

Early on, I knew it was going to be a weird day. I sat in front of Stumptown on a cold, windblown morning that felt more like early November than late August, steeling myself for a hard day of delivering stuff by bike. It was early still, when I took the first sip of the essential triple-iced americano. Even though the air was crisp and the sky was overcast, I ordered my caffeine on the rocks, anticipating the arrival of the summer sun. It was an uneasy wait, made harder to bear by grey-skinned street urchins milling about.

The presence of these sleestack-like raggamuffins gave the cold wind and grey sky an ominous quality. It also made me think of something that Anne said at the flower cart late last week. She'd claimed that all of the psychics were leaving town because they could sense that something terrible was about to happen. At the very least, something was creating some very bad vibes.
At the time I thought nothing of it, but now I reallized that her fear was becoming an acute reality. A chill rattled my spine as a group of the walking corpses shuffled by. Their heads oscilated back and forth, one cyclopitic evil eye surveying the landscape, looking for something that only they could detect. They could smell it like the musty smell of a flophouse mattress or a dirty Raiders coat.
It was not the first or the fifteenth day of the month, but somehow they knew that it would be a good day to be downtown.

It was during the downtime between my calisthenics regimen and the mid-morning shower when the phone rang. It was approaching 10am, and NPR was taking its toll on my fragile psyche. Even though the outside world was doing quite poorly, I picked up the phone and looked at the incoming number. How was I to know that a simple phone call would turn into a full blown attack on my dedication to leisure.

The number didn't look like that of the collections agents or their machines that frequently hound me. It was just a 503 number. A friend? Not likely. My old friends are most likely at work at that time. My new friends, those who have chosen to ride out the summer months on the dole as I have, are just waking up. Still others, like myself, are locked in a desperate battle against the clock. Iced Americanos don't make themselves, and the woman that gets her double iced latte (with soy, please) at about, oh, say 11:13am? She doesn't know that I exist, so the onus of our relationship has fallen upon my shoulders.

She'll come around, just you....wait. What the fuck was I talking about? The phone call. Thank God I'd just finished my morning work-out and gotten the blood back into my brain again. I answered the phone.
"Hey, this is so-and-so from unemployment something-or-other and we've found a position that we think you're qualified to fill."
There must be some mistake. My work experience has been painstakingly tooled to repel potential employers like a healthy shot of bear mace straight to the mug. How could this be happening?
This is one of the unpleasant aspect of being unemployed. At a certain point you stop worrying, learn how to live within your meager means and begin to enjoy your free time. So when someone calls you and informs you that they've done you a favor by finding some kind of gainful employment, you may not be as enthusiastic as the squares would like. But you've got to play ball with these employment accountants or facilitators or whatever they say they are when you're trying to not listen.

So, the guy says some more specific ramblings about the requirements and qualifications of the position that at least one of us is interested in. At this point, I'm fully puckered, with "yes" and "you bet" and "that sounds great," flying out of my mouth like I mean them. The feeling was not unlike that which one gets when tucking a golf shirt into a pair of Dockers.

So when it came time to tell me what my future employment could possibly be, things got a little strange. "Well, it says editor-T.O.C.," the guy said.
"Uh, what's that," I replied, adding that I'd had editorial experience and I'd never heard of that job title.
"Let's see," now we were on common ground, "editor, table of contents."
Was this some kind of joke? It wasn't, and, well, how hard could that be?
Things were looking up, I thought. Maybe it was time to re-enter the workforce?
It was then that things took a turn for the worst.

"It's in Lake Oswego, is that a problem?"
Before I knew how to react I heard a cheesy and insincerely enthusiastic voice say, "Not a problem."