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This article was written in January of 2000. An event in September of 2000 has made some of this obsolete, but the basic feelings I have about working remain pretty much the same.

At the time I write this I am earning my daily bread working for a contractor who builds mostly 3-bedrooms-2-bathrooms-and-a-garage houses in Lawrence, Kansas. I'm in my fourth year of working for him. The company is two people, he and I, and he hires subcontractors to do most of the many separate jobs of building a house - carpenters, electricians, plumbers, roofers, and so on - who all specialize in making a part of the house.

I'm the mortar between these bricks. I clean out the debris left by the previous crew and do odd things that aren't enough for a specialist's time - filling nail holes in woodwork with putty, pouring and finishing a concrete pad at the end of a porch staircase, stripping wooden concrete forms from a driveway, digging holes for deck footings, pumping water out of a foundation hole after a heavy rain, etc. etc.

It is strenuous physical labor at least a third of the week, and sometimes most of it, and I've accepted as a general condition that at any time somewhere on my body I will be feeling lactose muscle stiffness from heavy exertion. But stretching these muscles is a pain that I usually find very pleasurable. It's a life giving feeling, from the same exercise that helps me blow off sickness so quickly.

This is the kind of work that often brings pay at minimum wage, but by some people I can get paid as much as a typical carpenter or plumber who is experienced but not supervising. This is still below what all the magazines say is the median salary. 12 to 14 thousand dollars has been a typical annual income lately.

I furnish my rented house and clothe my body with mostly stuff from Wally Kaymart and the thrift stores. I drive a 15 year old Chevy S-10 pickup that cost me $1300, and do all the repairs myself. I treat myself for illness most of the time, mostly letting my body do its thing with its own immune defenses - doctors and insurance cost too much.

But I currently find what I make adequate to support only myself. I'm typing this on a 1 year old computer that can do all the latest tricks. I eat meat and fresh vegetables every day, shit into a flush toilet and bathe in warm water, and I feel like I'm living in high luxury compared with most of the world's population. The more stuff I have, the more I'll have to maintain and defend - and there are points where the hassle of that is more than the pleasure of owning.

This could all come apart tomorrow. None of my income sources can I really call secure, the only thing that is always here is my ability to live by my wits - and that is what I plan on supporting me for the rest of my life. I've worked on construction sites with people aged in their sixties and even seventies, and I figure if I don't get in a disabling accident, I should be able to continue that far. If I do get in one, I'll have to find a new racket to get into, but I'm pretty sure I eventually will. I don't think I will ever really retire, I will always be hustling some money somehow until the day I die.

I've been doing work like this for the last 21 years, odd construction jobs, day labor, sometimes by myself, sometimes with a few others - and I haven't felt any strong desire to change. I occasionally have people seeing me on the job and asking me if I would like to come work for them and learn a trade and get out of having to do heavy manual labor, but I turn them down. I tell them that what I'm doing IS my trade - there are thousands of assholes trying to be carpenters, but few people willing to sweep the floors and keep coming back to do more. Such willingness is rare and in demand.

My father was a Doctor of Medicine, and my mother had two master's degrees before getting her doctorate, and they started preparing me from early age to go to college and join the academic class - to be a brahmin in American society. But I rejected it all and chose to be a shudra (and sometimes even an untouchable). I have been asked many times why I don't use all my alleged brains and talent to get a "good" job with high pay and prestige. This essay is an attempt to explain more fully why.

I started on the road that eventually led me to my career when I was 31. It was literally just that - the road. I took off from Albuquerque in a Volkswagen squareback, not really sure where I was going, but sure that it was far away from where I had been.

I had spent ten years going to the university off and on, with no real goal and a general studies degree in the end. I spent GI Bill money when going to school and worked in a succession restaurants when I wasn't, always having at least the partial support of my parents for housing and car repairs.

My first job had been the Navy. I got to be an Aviation Electronics Technician, Third Class - same pay grade as a corporal. I got many compliments for my troubleshooting skills the last year I was in, but I went around looking for civilian electronics work after I got out and got no offers. Nobody valued my military experience at all, they wanted someone with two years experience in exactly what they had in their shop. Nobody acted like I was capable of learning anything new, and none of them were willing to train anybody by themselves, they all wanted someone else to have done it for them. Lots of them wanted degrees from a civilian school; Navy A school wasn't good enough.

This frustration continued even when I had managed by accident or personal contacts to get some other jobs where I could supposedly learn a marketable skill. On one job that I'd gotten thru my brother I learned how to run an offset printing press and do all the photographic preliminaries to it. I applied for numerous other printing jobs after leaving the first one, and still nobody was convinced I had enough experience. One place wanted me to list the last six employers I had and give them permission to contact all of them. Another place had a blueprint machine and told me they wanted to find someone who had run the particular brand of machine that they had.

I had people tell me that they kept applications on file and might call me later, but I never had this actually done to me. I soon concluded that if they didn't offer me a job when I was in the office the first time, then saying, "We'll give you a call", was a euphemistic way of saying, "We don't want you, get lost".

I read advice about job hunting in magazines, and couldn't get over the absurdity of much of what was said. Play up your achievements and cover over your failures - but be honest. If you are unemployed try to hide it because they want to hire people who are already working. Don't fill out your application in pencil because that shows bad character. Make your résumé outstanding because a person looking at it will spend an average of ten seconds before making a decision. Write them a letter thanking them for the interview, even when they gave you the runaround.

I managed to get a job delivering for a pizzeria. This was the second of only two times in my life that someone who said in an interview they would give me a call actually did, and I was later to learn that the place had such high turnover that practically everybody was called back. I moved into the kitchen and started learning to cook, but ran into the reasons for the turnover, the owner's confrontational personality, and left him. I got hired at another restaurant, the first one I had applied to. For a while I thought I was in a new career.

I worked there for 11 months, but got into some romantic entanglements and frustrations with some of the waitresses there and left. Then I spent six months going from one restaurant to another, filling out applications to no avail, hearing people offering near minimum wage while wanting years of experience.

I started at the local public vocational school, thinking I was going to become an architectural draftsman. While doing that I landed a part time job in a vegetarian restaurant, a co-op, full of hippies, another place that would take almost anybody. There I started to meet lots of traveling people who showed me some possibilities.

When the restaurant finally went belly up financially, and I hadn't completed the course at the school because I got so involved in trying to save it, I was at the end of my rope and my parents were at the end of theirs with me. I had to do something fast. A woman I had met at a regional conference for co-ops invited me to come to her place in Las Cruces, where she was "looking for another communard". I got rid of most of what I owned, left the rest in a storage shed at my parents house, and took off with the VW only half full.

The relationship with this woman lasted ten days, more than just wanting a communard she had really been romantically interested in me, and she had gotten disappointed. I spent a week in Silver City where a hitchhiker I had picked up on the way there ultimately introduced me to a woman who needed somebody for a few hours a week running a small printing press. Then ran into another woman I’d known in Albuquerque whom I’d also had a frustrated romance with.

There was an incident where she blew up at me for trying to give her a hug, and I fled to Tucson, where there was a co-op warehouse I'd dealt with when working in the restaurant, that offered the faint hope of work. I arrived in that city about 2 in the morning, all alone, low on money, low on gas, and with no friends or contacts of any kind.

I slept in my car for the first time in my life parked off the interstate in the desert east of town, scared and not knowing what to expect. But I survived to see the sunrise and at about 8 went to the co-op. They greeted me very coldly there, and after calling some numbers for social service agencies that were in the phone book, I wound up at the Arizona state employment office – and found a savior: a Chicano man about 40, who listened to my story and said, “We’ll try to get you set up, but first let me give you something where you can get some money right now.”

There was an old wood and brick dormitory that had been part of a nun's convent behind a big Catholic hospital, and a crew was demolishing it to make way for a new hospital annex. They hired me immediately, no interview, no résumé, and I went right to work. I stayed a week, decided the work was too dangerous and thanked them and left, then went for the first time to what they hadn't had in Albuquerque - a state run casual labor pool, a day labor office.

To get work from there, and the many other such places in other cities that followed, I would go to the office in the morning and get in the line forming by the front door. When the doors opened at 7 o'clock, I would sit while the man behind the desk waited for employers to call on the phone, or show up personally to say they needed help for that day. The first man in line that morning would be offered the first job that came in, the ones after the next ones according to their place in line. The services of the state office were offered free to both me and the person hiring. (It was financed by our taxes). I was paid for my work by the person who hired me, and I made all arrangements directly with him. The words we all liked to hear were "cash at the end of the day".

Not everyone who showed up would get out, as we called it, and I had to show up early enough to get a good chance. Sometimes people would come down in the extreme early hours to be first in line, but there was a point of diminishing returns at about quarter after 6. A man driving his own car or truck had an advantage that would get him out ahead of others on foot, and he was often expected to give other people rides to the same job he was sent to.

I didn't have to go down to the office every day, sometimes I would get a "come back", and I'd work two or several days for the same person until the job was finished. Sometimes I would be hired on steady and spend several months with someone.

For the first time in my life I didn't have to call people on the phone and go to job interviews where they would finally ask me if this was a phone number where I could be reached and then tell me they'd give me a call. My new employers would ask me back on the basis of actually observing me working, and if they didn't, I'd at least have some idea of why and be able to know what to do differently with the next guy.

I was able to evaluate them too, and decide if I wanted to stay. I'd find out if he got easily angered and yelled at me a lot, whether I had to wait until he was gone to take a rest or get a drink of water, how dangerous or boring the work was, whether or not I had to punch a time clock, whether or not there were any of the other annoyances that I so frequently encountered while working - things I never felt really allowed to ask about at job interviews. Here was an honest evaluation process, based on observing what really did happen, instead of what we were afraid would happen. Here was a game I could win at.

Finding at least one greener pasture in Tucson made me wonder if it was the greenest. Having discovered I could use my car as a dormitory, eat at restaurants, and bathe at YMCA's or public park gymnasiums, I went traveling. It got to where the test of a new town was whether or not I could score work the first day. There were many where I could.

I got as far as Seattle before turning around and eventually winding up in Austin, Texas - where I was to stay for eight years. When the economy went to hell there in 1987 I went off searching again. I went to the library and found Employment and Earnings, a Department of Labor publication that showed unemployment rates for all the cities in the country. It told me that things were going well in the Atlantic coast states, and after trying Nashville, Asheville, and Raleigh, I found a job with a company that made signs in Charlottesville, Va. that lasted 4 and a half years - starting as day labor gig cleaning out an attic room where pigeons had been coming in and shitting for a year. When the economy turned downward in Virginia 4 years later and I got laid off, I went traveling again and landed in Lawrence, Ks., my current home.

I've lived in a house for only about 7 of the last 21 years, the other times I've resided in a succession of vans and trucks that I fitted out as campers - but preserved the exteriors of so that if necessary they could look like an ordinary vehicle parked on the street.

Over the years I worked for possibly 300 different employers, doing many things I never thought I would be doing.

I carted back hot aluminum ingots that had fallen on the floor in front of an aluminum extruding furnace. I went to their sister factory that riveted together the aluminum flashings into roof vents. I installed about 200 doorknobs in a new state office building. I helped them dismantle and move a huge steam heating boiler, big as a locomotive, out of the ground floor of another state office building that was skyscraper height. I helped spray fireproofing foam on the steel girders of another skyscraper under construction. I wrestled the hose while they were spraying polyurethane over the roof of a large officer's club on an army base.

I swept the floors and emptied the trashcans while snooping all over the main floor of a huge computer assembly factory. I was at a single table of men in landscaping clothes in the cafeteria of an IBM assembly plant, surrounded by other tables of people in immaculate white shirts, blue or black suits, and ties. I helped rearrange the desks in big 1040 processing office of the IRS, according to a blueprint that showed their positions relative to the light fixtures above (And the subcontractors I did this for didn't withhold any taxes from my pay).

I helped take out of boxes and put on shelves all of the inventory of new stores that were opening up - one time kitchen utensils, another time frat style clothes. I also set up two motels. A few times I held up oriental rugs to be viewed by the buyers at an auction. I almost walked around a supermarket dressed as a Twinkie passing out samples (but that one canceled at the last minute).

These were the unusual jobs. A more common one was working in a warehouse, moving boxes or bags from one place to another all day - or related to that, loading or unloading a semitrailer truck. Often the driver would call the office himself and pay me out of his own pocket. Moving vans were also common

There was lots of yard work -, mowing lawns, raking leaves, and weeding gardens by suburban houses, clearing brush out of ranches in the country. Work on farms sometimes came in, I picked tomatoes and melons. There was lots of work with landscaping contractors. Many people talk about being a ditchdigger, I've really been one many times, either by hand or chasing after a backhoe.

But a majority of the work was in building construction. The way into almost every one of the trades was to start out as a helper, and learn from working alongside the experienced. You were shown things and told things, and almost never looked in a book. You'd start out pulling nails, handing up boards, stripping wires, pulling the concrete off the chute with a shovel, stacking bricks on the scaffold and bringing up buckets of mortar.

I was frequently called the first time to clean up a site after some other workers were done doing something. They didn’t clean up after themselves because the contractors would rather pay laborer wages to people like me than skilled wages to the tradesmen. If a contractor liked me, he would start having me do work helping the tradesmen, or give me small skilled jobs to do myself.

But I always wound up going back to odd jobber. Every one of the trades was a drag to do week in and week out. Every one of them gave me some kind of ailment when I did them for too long – be it splinters from carpentry, dry chapped hands from working with concrete, phlegm all over my lungs from finishing drywall, or buildup of deposits under my fingernails from painting. If I moved around, part of my body could be recovering while I was straining another. If I did a bit of everything, not only was there variety, but I frequently got to see projects go all the way from beginning to completion, rather than just the same segment over and over again.

I had had a bit of a head start. My father had a home workshop with a Shop Smith, and I was messing with hammers and screwdrivers starting at elementary school age. He started letting me use his power tools when I reached high school. I am perhaps one of the few people still around who started learning his job by his father’s side.

But I always wound up going back to odd jobber. Every one of the trades was a drag to do week in and week out. Every one of them gave me some kind of ailment when I did them for too long - be it splinters from carpentry, dry chapped hands from working with concrete, phlegm all over my lungs from finishing drywall, or buildup of deposits under my fingernails from painting. If I moved around, part of my body could be recovering while I was straining another. If I did a bit of everything, not only was there variety, but I frequently got to see projects go all the way from beginning to completion, rather than just seeing a series of segments.

Doing all this I succeeded and I failed. More than once I had a boss fire me because every time he came in he saw me "just sitting around fucking off " (he had come in maybe two times the whole day). I watched other people working on a job with me get chosen to come back instead of me, because they had been more talkative and friendly. There were other times where I genuinely couldn't cut it - I didn't know enough, I made klutzy mistakes, I didn't do a good job.

But mostly I succeeded. I started getting lots of come backs, and people calling on the phone and asking for me personally. I got gigs that lasted several weeks or even months.

I learned how to stay on the ball the first day, to listen and get instructions right the first time and do them without fucking up - even when the work was going fast and changing unexpectedly, even when there were emotional outbursts from the boss that I had to just let slide over me while I kept my mind on what I was doing. I learned that the vibes in a place might go from boot camp to family reunion in Monday to Friday of the first week, so I shouldn't start judging too fast.

I stopped taking my failures so personally. I learned how succeeding was a function of two people, I and the person supervising me - and sometimes our personalities jelled and we went well together, and sometimes they didn't. Some places I was treated like a lazy slacker, other places I was a model worker. I didn't change, the places did.

I was impressed over the years by how much basic moral qualities were in demand - having some kind of work ethic, showing up every day on time, and not hung over or still drunk. Coming back until a job was done, rather than earning enough for a new bottle and then splitting. Spending all the time you're on the hourly pay clock doing something resembling productive work. Listening to what he tells you to do and then doing it. I had to hear many a story from employers about how they just can't find good help these days, they remembered when people had some pride in what they were doing, they just didn't know, these kids today just don't have any idea of ... and so on and so on.

Often I found out that the problems weren't with the help. These guys were hard to please and easy to anger, or made unreasonable demands, or did bad and dishonest work that I didn't want to be associated with - and these guys didn't want to admit it to themselves. They'd turn into assholes as soon as they get around money and its pressures and lose their objectivity and their compassion. One situation I started to be very suspicious of was when a new boss would find some excuse to get me alone at about 10 o'clock on the first morning and ask if I was looking for steady work - because he had been looking for good reliable help and just couldn't find anybody. If he was that eager, I would soon find out the reasons for his difficulties.

But largely they were right. Many, many people I worked with didn't know how to work. They'd work for a few days and quit for no observable reason. They'd call in sick all the time. They'd do sloppy disinterested work. They'd piss off customers. They put in the minimum amount of effort to get by. They'd look at work as an adversarial thing where each is just trying to get as much money as he can out of the other. The frustration of these employers wasn't paranoid, it was based on experiences that were very real.

I grew to dislike jobs the office would send 5 or 10 people at a time to. There the better worker would often get mocked down, and things would descend to the lowest common denominator. I preferred to go to jobs solo, or with only one other person whom I had worked with before and at least somewhat trusted.

I preferred to work for individuals or small companies of only a few people, rather than large ones. The larger ones had a heritage of workers trying to take advantage of them, and had more restrictive rules as a result. There I would have to punch time clocks and wait until certain clock times before I could take a break. I would be less likely to be given raises and special days off. I especially rejected jobs where I would have had to join a union. There the petty regulations were supreme, with hourly wages ending in strange numbers like .21 or .73, and rules saying I can't do this or that because that job is the domain of some other union.

I tried some of the private employment agencies dealing with temporary labor, but always wound up going back to the state run ones. I got the best capitalistic deal out of the socialist state agency. I could arrange things directly with the employer and often get better pay, in cash at the end of the first day, and sometimes even free meals and places to sleep - while the private ones restricted me to their set wages and only paid me by check at the end of the week. I could hire on steady with someone who liked me with no problems, while private agencies sometimes didn't allow this.

I also felt the other people sent with me to jobs from the state place were a better class of workers than those from the private ones. Somebody who would get his ass down to the office early in the morning worked better than someone who lay in bed waiting for the phone call. And an employer who would take his chances with the state agency was easier to please than someone who went to the private one in the hopes that they would be sent only screened and approved candidates.

In the early days of doing day labor I continued to try to get some jobs by going thru interviews. I applied for several drafting jobs, trying to use the things I had drawn in the vocational school as samples. But I continued to be asked for my résumé or told I would be given a call that never came. For a while I did have the use of the phone in a house I was working on, and I could have received one. When I didn’t have a phone (the usual condition), nobody would believe I would actually call them back.

I tried getting restaurant jobs and got sometimes outright hostility. Many wanted short hair and cleanshaven, even when I would have come in no contact with customers. The height of absurdity was the place that wanted me to shave off my beard -located a block from the University in Berkeley, California. I tried supposedly alternative businesses like food co-ops and natural food restaurants and got perhaps the most snobbery of any of the places I approached. There the burnout symptoms were most evident. Many of them wanted me "to sign a one year commitment".

On one side I had people rejecting me, on another I had people sometimes begging me to work for them. One October I had the luxury of turning down 7 job offers because there was something wrong with each of them. I was often getting wages on day labor construction jobs that were more than those of the supposedly skilled draftsman jobs I was applying for. I decided that I could not only make more money doing it than drawing pictures of it, but I could actually get hired. I finally totally abandoned the idea of working as a draftsman, and after that of doing any job I had to go thru an office interview to get.

My way of looking for a job for the last 15 years has been to do temporary labor until I find somebody who is good and wants me. Sometimes I have to spend months going thru a long chain of assholes, but eventually I find someone, in probably less time than I would if I were filling out applications. I can't understand how anyone thinks they can truly find out about someone beforehand just from résumés and interviews, where you know they're trying to put forth their best image and hide their defects, sometimes to the point of outright lying. The only way you're really going to find out anything real is give that person a chance and observe him doing some actual work.

I can now express clearly and briefly the reasons I continue to write "construction laborer" as my "occupation" on my 1040EZ income tax form. The first one is the already described ease of finding new jobs and the coinciding freedom to walk off of bad ones. For the last twenty years I have never really had to worry about being unemployed. I can get work honestly, without having to tell a lot of advertisements. I can start over again without having to carry on the burden of my past. I can change things for the better.

In a busy week I am exercising 40 hours a week or more, in slow one I'll only exercise 15 or 20, and most of this outdoors. I'm 52 and started to get my first gray hairs only a year ago. I blow off any virus in about 24 hours, and haven't felt like I needed to see a doctor in many years.

The stress that comes to me on the job is usually dealt with in a few hours by arriving at simple concrete solutions, on the order of get this made, get this moved, get this covered - doing actions that I know clearly. The adrenaline that flows into my blood is used the way that way evolution intended it, for muscular exertion and quick actions. If frustrations come up, I'm free to express emotion and let loose with loud cussing if I want. I can even get away with yelling at other people, and not have it taken as insults, but as reactions to the present situation. If I have to start smiling on the outside and saying "yes sir" too much, I can just walk away from the job and find another. I never have to worry for months on end if an elaborate proposal will get a contract. I never have to stew in stagefright before making a presentation. I never get called in to the office for a performance evaluation.

The work is intimately connected with the weather, and rainy days and cold days are often days off and breaks in the routine. There are also breaks between when one job ends and another begins. It doesn't have to be a week to week 8 to 5 grind if I don't want it to. I can have on and off relations with employers and other workers that I can keep coming back to. I can get a month off every summer to go to the Rainbow Gathering.

Since I'm always working with things that get me dirty, nobody expects me to maintain a clean cut corporate image. My clothes can be stained and my hair mussed up. There are no grooming standards or dress codes, other than sometimes safety equipment. I can fart any time I need to if move myself downwind. I take a shower at the end of the working day, not before.

There is little feeling of competition with the other people I work with. Nobody on the jobsite really cares who is the best carpenter or whatever. They just care whether you're good enough to carry your part of it and not make fuckups they'll have to fix. One guy is the boss, not because he won out in a promotion competition, but because he was the one willing to put his ass in hock to the bank to get the contract and buy the materials. If somebody else is the supervisor, it's usually because he has been working there the longest and really does know the most. Other workers don't resent your successes because it means they're losing. They like it when you do well, because it means their part of the job will be easier. This is conducive to a lot of feelings of camaraderie on the job. The boss will bring around a cooler full of beer on Friday afternoon and have discussions full of cuss words with the crew.

Nobody signs their work with their name, and nobody expects celebrity from their achievements. There are no world class plumbers or award winning electricians. Nobody tells you about how they laid brick with Steve Kalinczynsky himself in New York City. People will work with you even if you ain't got a name, and will let you take part in the work without acting like you're corrupting their masterpiece.

Since much construction work is work other people don't want to do - because it's tiring, dirty, dangerous, or whatever - it is a gathering place for people whom other people don't want. Like me, they were able to get into it because there weren't scads of others trying to do the same. On the jobsite I work with bikers, tramps, winos, hippies, skinheads, hillbillies, homeboys, and wetbacks. I can listen on the job to stories about how to survive in prison. Everybody else is weird, and I can be too. I don't have to hide that I smoke marijuana and run around naked at Rainbow Gatherings. My pants on the jobsite are often pink.

The only thing in my job that is a real annoyance is often having to work with people who have to have a radio blasting all the time they are there - tuned to a station that plays Classic Rock. (Even Billy Joel or the Beatles are too wimpy for them.) If I never ever hear "two tickets to paradise" or "blinded by the light" again, it will be too soon. It gets to the point where I breathe a sigh of relief when someone puts on the country station.

This is another reason I don't work as a specialist for a larger company. You're always having to work with several other people, at least one of whom is somebody who has to have the radio going 8 hours, 5 days. Working in the cracks as I do, I am able to move around and avoid radios much of the time.

I haven't had very much ambition toward leaving hourly wages behind and becoming a contractor. Doing that I would have to give up a lot of the casualness of my jobs. I would have to start making commitments based on estimations that might come short of reality, and risk losing lots of money in unforeseen happenings. I would have to be a hardass with customers who didn't pay their bills. I would have to start dressing more neatly and try to please customers who often have little appreciation of the real problems of construction work and have expectations that are sometimes hard to fill. At the other end of the construction game is the real estate business, where you have to wear a suit and tie most severely.

I've refused to specialize, to learn a specific trade and do only that. I specialize in stuff others don't want to do. This path has led me to the most acceptance and success. Back in high school my teachers and counselors all told me to ask myself: "What do I like doing the most?" "What do I really want to do?" The answers to these questions are what I should make my career.

I think now that all that was a big lie. The question is, what are the things that I can stand doing that others don't want to do bad enough that they will pay me money for doing it for them? There are lots of things I would like to do, but lots of others like doing them to, and unless I'm lucky I will probably have to bullshit my way around all of them in order to do them myself.

The reasons others will pay me instead of doing them themselves can be any or all of the following:

Because of this, it's a given that any job I have will have some part that isn't the most pleasant. Any job I do will bring me in contact with the reasons others don't want to do it. The ability to endure these unpleasantnesses, and even find pride in that ability, is what I have to sell to others.

Do I have ambitions beyond sweeping floors? Of course I do, but most of them I choose not to connect with making money. If I want to do what I really love, I'll be more able to do it if I do it only for the love. Any business means compromises and sacrifices, and I'd rather not make these with what I love. What I do for money I want to be able to do without lying (and there are not many jobs like that right now). I'll obtain money by doing things that may tire my body, but don't exhaust my spirit.

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