About three years ago, during my last year at the bar, I started to go through a crisis. It was similar to that of a middle-aged man who buys the red convertible, get a young girlfriend and skinny jeans but I was in my mid-twenties. I was at this point where I didn’t know what I was doing with my life. While my true passion was watching crap-TV, smoking pot, and eating enough to feed a small family in one sitting. I never could never find a job utilizing those skills, I’ve looked. After I graduated college I had several career jobs where I used my degree doing advertising, PR, marketing and was pretty successful at it. I did this while keeping the bar job on the side. Ironically, at the bar I made more money than at any of these career jobs. About three years ago I was also laid off from my last day job, which was relevant to my college education with the 401K and the stuff you’re told you’re supposed to want. This would be the second day job since graduating college, which I was laid off from. Near the end of that job, on a daily basis, I wanted to stab myself in the eye working there (metaphorically and not literally). I would spend half my workday watching Tracy Ulman, Joan River’s, cat videos, and porn when I wasn’t staring at spreadsheets. Let me explain. I worked as an Account Manager for a company that specialized in SEM (Search Engine Management) for various companies and their products (many of which were porn). Lets say you went onto Yahoo and searched “big boobs and daddy issues,” the ad that would pop up on the search page saying stuff like “3 girls with big boobs and daddies all just for $1 click here.” While glamorous, the job got old fast. I was hoping they would add the shotgun or knife to my stock options. That never happened, which was good because while I love a good suicide joke, that was not what I wanted. I was feeling numb to working there and not sure how other people did this and found happiness. I would come home while financially successful, buying stuff, helping my mother, father and anyone who needed it when I could, I would cry almost every night and not know why. I was making enough money to be happy. I grew up poor so anything above the poverty line was rich to me. It was at this moment I learned that the more you have, the more you need, the more people expect from you.
After a year at a good company, working 40 hours a week for good people, daily pushing papers I was laid off. The day I was laid off, it happened in the middle of the day. It was after lunch oddly, 2:30pm Pacific Standard time to be exact. I skipped lunch and had a martini at a bar around the corner. When I was asked to clean up my things and not come back I was sad but not lost like I should have been. I went to a happy hour that day and drank more. It was a relief similar to the feeling of a good shit. After an evening of drinking sorrows away, I went home drunk, alone, a bit teary, but not sad and wrote. I wrote about my life. I wrote about the awkward experiences my early twenties brought me. I realized that all the books I had read about San Francisco talked about an idealistic world that may or may not have existed in the 60s or 70s but nothing like what I had seen there. I wrote until I couldn’t write anymore. This was about a 4-day period. I didn’t really shower much during that time. I just wrote, went to work at the bar and back home to write (and eat lots of ice cream). I ate 2 gallons of ice cream during this 4-day period along with at least 4 boxes of cookies, 20 bagels and 4 cans of whip cream and some strawberries cause I was feeling health conscious.
I went back to the bar full-time, which was nice but felt like a vacation. Being in a shitty economy and liking the cash I was making again I was on auto-mode there. After a few months at the bar and entered crisis mode again. I don’t know what I am doing and wonder if my life is in dead-end mode or what it was that I was lacking. I go through one of these every 3 or 4 years depending on the economy of course. I decided to go see a therapist after having a moderately unsuccessful time with one on campus during my last semester of school; I decided to give it a go.
This time around the question I focused on with my therapist was “what now?”
He asked me one of those hippy, therapist, granola, I shop at Whole Foods and sold out years ago questions. “Yuri, in an ideal world, what would you be doing with your life?”
My first response was, “I would like to sit on my couch smoking pot all day and have hot Israeli men cleaning my mansion while I get rich on some online biz.”
He then asked me for a real answer. I told him that I want write, but there is no money in that so how would I live? He pried more. I then told him I would like to be a comedian, but wasn’t funny.
He suggested I start a blog and post some stories. This way I could see people’s reaction to my writing and see if anyone even likes it. I asked him if he thought that would get me in trouble at the bar. He didn’t think it would, maybe he thought no one would read it. The following week I enrolled in a comedy class. The same place a friend of mine had gone years earlier and now he’s touring and actually making a successful living as a professional standup!
That week I started a blog where I posted stories about my life in San Francisco and the bar I had known as home for 5 years. The stories, while based on truth were what I created blending different experiences together to create a good story. It was my story through my big eyes. I instantly got good traffic to the blog and people were emailing me all the time trying to figure out what was real from the stories and what wasn’t. If my grammar were better I would have figured out a way to finish a book from the stories right then.
The first open mic was like the first time having sex. I got lots more laughs than expected and after kind of wanted to do it again but waited. After the first laugh I had the courage to keep going. It was the first time I felt at home. It was like the way the junkies on Intervention made heroin sound, but without the track marks.
After a few months of both the standup and the writing, there was a buzz around the bar apparently about my blog. People would ask me, “Does Charlie know? He won’t like it”
I didn’t see the big deal. What was Charlie-Big Brother? It was like they thought he was a part of the mafia. I have been raised with that mindset so wasn’t phased by it. I was raised by Russian people and a father who wished he was a part of the mob. Second, I never really talked negatively about the bar. The stories while based in truth were about my life, my experiences that happened at a bar I happen to work at. It was and is my story and no one else’s.
Ironically I was “let go” from the bar that I worked at five years to the day I was hired. I was sat down by Charlie himself and told that while I was “an amazing bartender” that they were making changes and my services wouldn’t be needed anymore. I was laid off with a severance from the Labyrinth. It would take six months before I heard a rumor that my blog had to do with my dismissal. I didn’t think it did, couldn’t care less, but would like to entertain that idea. In my mind it would just add another layer to the story.
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