The River Rolls On and On

Lack of blogging due to a very, very busy week.

I did my first “interview” over my iPhone’s Facetime app. Had to have my eleven-year-old teach me how to do it. It was with an accounting recruiting company. I spoke with them last week, they liked my resume, and they wanted to see me so they could reassure themselves I wasn’t a freak. It was a great twenty minute conversation. Two hours later I received a call from a different recruiter over there wanting to forward my resume to a company five miles from my house. I enthusiastically said yes. That’s a developing lead.

To balance it all out, Monday I had a terrible interview with the owner of a company that received one of the letters I send out. The job wasn’t what I was looking for, and I wasn’t what he was looking for, and it went downhill from there. First he kept me waiting twenty minutes (which is a normal and boring power trip thing). Once in his office, I had to sit and stare while he took two phone calls and finished up a hunt-and-peck email. Then, after allowing me to pitch myself for a few minutes, the gotcha grilling began. My favorite question / accusation was, “If you’re such a great bookkeeper, why haven’t you found work yet?”

How do you answer a question like that? I said that the job market was tight and since there’s more applicants than open positions, companies aren’t taking chances on anyone who doesn’t fit the job description to a tee. But I don’t begrudge him his scrutiny. A self-made man who’s thoroughly used to people saying “How high?” when he says, “Jump!” I respect him for founding a successful company (that he’s now in the process of passing off to his son).

Fought a little depression for 24 or 36 hours after that. If you’ve been there, you know what I’m talking about; if you haven’t, there’s no way I can explain it to you. My morning walk and weight-lifting session helps, and I quickly resumed that. My father-in-law drove up from the Jersey shore for some mutual job hunting and lunch. I applied to payroll positions in a wide variety of places: a Japanese fragrance corporation, a construction company, a well-known watchmaker.  

Yesterday after all my daily tasks were completed and before Patch got out from school (Little One was with the wife for Take Your Daughter to Work Day), I drove out to a secluded lakeside spot. The water flows by very rapidly, and very quickly I drifted off in thought watching the hypnotic play of sunlight off the undulating elastic waves. Before I knew it, dozens of questions emerged from deep within my psyche …

There’s a big analogy hidden in here, of that I was certain. What was it? A metaphor for reality? Perhaps. The river as time. Flowing by eternally, neverending, pitiless. We are not rocks in the water, we are molecules and floating debris in the river, being pulled along relentlessly, towards some point downstream we cannot see. What, then, would the rocks be? What could they be?

And – with my fascination with higher dimensions – would not a river in four dimensions more accurately describe reality? How could that be envisioned? How about taking the surrounding banks, riverbed, and air above that river and move that, too. The river flowing within the surrounding elements flowing. Then, a thought. Some cultures believed in cyclical time (the Mayans, for example, and so to the philosopher Nietzsche). What if instead of having the surrounding banks, riverbed, and air above move in the same direction as the river, we have it circle it? Almost as if it was a garden hose rotating as a stream of water shot through it. Hmmm. Nice.

Oh, to be free of stress and have all the time in the world to work such thoughts out to their logical, illogical conclusions!