Elated to be fired?

August 4, 2019

The first feeling I feel when I get fired is not panic.

That comes later when I try and figure out how the hell I’m going to pay my rent or mortgage.

The first feeling isn’t even negative, although that comes later, too, the unworthiness that makes me unacceptable.

No, the first feeling is always elation, as if the chains have been removed from me and I am able to move about unencumbered by responsibilities that I been forced to endure just to get a paycheck.

After 32 years as a beat reporter – 27 at the Hudson Reporter, the rest elsewhere, and the week in and week out ritual of a meeting deadlines, the elation this time was even more significant than during other terminations, feeling the links of chain drop one by one as I used by 30 minutes to pack up 27 years of accumulated stuff from my desk, putting notebooks and file folders into recycling, things I thought I needed fore to save for unrealized future stories.

I didn’t even hear the ticking clock in my head I had when fired from other jobs, my whole 30 minutes done in deliberate slow-motion since what I needed to take was significantly less than what I would leave behind – and not all of that physical.

To be unbeholden to anyone, returning to that point in life when I lived more or less carefree, assuming life would someone take care of me – the hippie-hobo life Kerouac wrote about in “On the Road.” Someone on the street of Hoboken even called me a “Darma Bum” as if my new-found freedom emanated from me, a radiation glow I could not keep contained had I wanted to.

How long this glow lasts is up to me – perhaps even for the rest of my life.