Australian Atheists Forum

It started for me when I got back from Iraq. I went there three times as a journalist. I got shot at, bombed, and watched a lot of people die. And then I was back at the office, writing about an infestation of woodpeckers at a local retirement village. The disconnect was severe. The alienation was setting in. But at least I was compensated well.

Maybe too well, my bosses thought. After working as a journalist for 25 years, I was laid off from the paper. I had no other work experience, no other skills, and the industry was beginning its death throes, making jobs scarce. Worse, I had a bad attitude—I’d never been good at pretending to like people I didn’t, so networking didn’t exactly come naturally to me. My job prospects were limited. That’s an understatement; they were nonexistent. Soon, depression set in.

But depression or not, eventually the bills had to be paid. I spotted an ad looking for people to manage some of the strip clubs in town. I had some familiarity with that world, having covered San Francisco’s underground sex scene for a while. While not always a particularly pleasant milieu, it was at least a vibrant one. I figured that if getting paid decently for boring work was out of the question, my best option was getting paid poorly to do interesting work.