Latest music article

For a while I was a Contributing Editor with a local nightlife monthly, focusing on small-club music. My column, Mr. Joel's Music Picks, ran for three years. I still contribute pieces occasionally. This one covers the latest manifestation of one of my favorite local bands.

THE MUSEUM OF NOW: Musical History in the Making with Beauty Pill

Fish Story

I just brushed off this nice little piece I wrote for the Onion A/V Club before they gave up on DC as a city without a sense of humor. It was fun to taste raw fish with Chef Barton Seaver, who later that year was named Top Chef by DC Style Magazine. I wrote that piece too.

Fish Story (PDF)

Recent Work: Talking up a music documentary

A handful of local DC musicians with day jobs in media have been working on the story of the Bayou, a legendary Georgetown joint that boomed back when DC was fun. I wrote up the club and their film for area nightlife tabloid On Tap.

Bringing Back the Bayou

JOBS I HAVE DONE #9: Conference Guy

I had this job for years and it was the making of me as a professional. As usual, I started out learning the computer systems, then improving them. At that time, the company consisted of the president, me, and a manager. The manager and I worked in the president's garage; he had a loft above us. We lived in fear of him overhearing anything we said on the phone. He was a brilliant salesman and business strategist with a truly vile temper. The slightest mistake, or something he would have done differently, sent him into violent rages, yelling, slamming doors, and all that good stuff. Nonetheless, he respected my intelligence, and rewarded me with ever-increasing responsibilities, until I found myself supervising a staff in a large office suite in Bethesda, Maryland. Other managers came and went, but I had learned to work with the president, insulating him from others when he was angry and supporting his best ideas. It's not too much to say that I handled everything, from buying new computers and maintaining the network to editing dozens of annual print documents and shepherding them from concept to shipping. Eventually we found other employees to handle the details, and I managed the employees. We grew the company's flagship conference into three annual events, with up to 10,000 international attendees, an exhibit hall with hundreds of companies and huge booths from major tech players, and a week of seminars and events. I dealt directly with the registrants while the president was free to network, give speeches, and make deals. In time, I helped the president sell the company to a giant conglomerate, close to the peak of the tech bubble. I received a payout from that sale and took the opportunity to start my own business, writing from home and watching my kids. With only a few months here and there for longer term gigs, freelancing dad has been my job ever since.

Skills Acquired:

• Management of professionals, temporary workers, and contractors
• Accounting and budgeting, monitoring trends, projecting revenues and expenses
• Speech writing
• Editing multiple authors and incorporating client ads and copy
• Layout and design with Adobe Photoshop and Quark Express; full-color print production; large and small document design
• Custom database design in Filemaker Pro
• Dealing with the public
• Defusing office conflict
• Growing up

JOBS I HAVE DONE #8: Attorney

The hardest I ever studied in my life was for the bar exam, which I passed on the first try. However, my interest in the law was always about research and writing, and I didn't do a good job of making connections with hiring firms while still in school. Instead, I got a job in the Commissioner's Office at the Food and Drug Administration. I had drug companies call me every day asking whether a certain patent would be extended, thinking perhaps that the rookie lawyer would let it slip. Nope, they had to wait for my Federal Register article like everyone else. We were also involved in a peculiar pseudo-trial situation. The FDA includes many doctors in the human efficacy testing phase of various drugs. Some of those doctors, instead of recruiting volunteers for experiments, just sell the medicine to their patients as if it’s already approved. When the FDA finds out, those guys get disqualified from future tests, among other punishments. So we had an MD panel of judges, piles of evidence to process, and a kind of courtroom hearing. Odd. I got to do a lot of project management and work with some highly-placed executives. Also, at one point, I had a breast implant for a paperweight. 

Skills Acquired:

• Handling confidential information.
• Supporting the organization during conflict and controversy.
• Preferring the human body in its natural form.

JOBS I HAVE DONE #7: DC Temp

As a guy who, perhaps, should have already settled on a full-time job instead, I literally tested off the charts in the temp agencies' evaluations for language use, organization, computer literacy, and so on. Among other gigs, I helped various government contractors get proposals together. There's a whole world of these continuing and rebid contracts, especially in the DC area, and I saw a lot of it. It's amazing how rarely anyone on the team can write clearly, and how much better the proposals are when they can actually be read by a human and make sense. Perhaps years of daily government jargon can pound the clarity out of you. 

Skills Acquired:

• Conforming to vague, abstruse, and contradictory official requirements.
• Presenting the company's capabilities in the best light.
• Avoiding buzz-words, acronyms, and insider jargon whenever possible.

JOBS I HAVE DONE #6: Law library

One summer, my college administration found me full-time work assisting in the library of the law school. I learned my way around journals and case histories, more computer work, LEXIS/NEXIS and WESTLAW, plus a little about book binding, which was interesting. Apart from the book binding, everything else came in very handy when I later became a student at the same law school. 

Skills Acquired:

• Electronic research.
• Organizing very large amounts of incoming information.
• How to recognize bindings made right in the library.

JOBS I HAVE DONE #5: Biohazards!

For two summers during college, I worked with a few other students at a big government medical research facility as a "Biohazard Monitor." That may not have been the exact title; I misremember. Our office was in a kind of multi-story stack of trailers held up with concrete slab floors and a scaffolding of girders and chain link. Somehow we were part of the security office, and we had a list of all the many, many rooms in this huge complex that contained radioactive isotopes, carcinogens, and vials of dangerous germs like smallpox and the AIDS virus. At times we had to suit up and crawl through the insulation between a lab and the roof, looking for leaks in the air ducts. I grabbed time on the computers, taught myself to program databases, and cleaned up their information systems. I figured the happier I made them with my computer work, the less often I'd have to poke into disused closets and mark the probable locations of flaking asbestos paint, holding my breath the whole time. 

Skills Acquired:

• Customizing databases (Software: dBase III).
• Surprising executives with things they didn't know they wanted.
• Avoiding poisonous chemicals, killer germs, and death rays.

JOBS I HAVE DONE #4: Kitchen help

Needing work to help pay for college, I applied to the administration's work-study program, and they placed me in the kitchen of the main student dining hall. I mopped and prepped baked potatoes and crashed trays of dishes around. I suppose it should have been awkward when a fellow student, a scholar and Southern WASP, came up to the counter and was highly startled to see me on the other side in my scrubs. He was more embarrassed than I was. Nonetheless, the college soon transferred me to computer work in the library system. Managing research requests and interlibrary loans, I learned online searches and messaging long before my peers. 

Skills Acquired: 

• Getting to the job where I can do the most good for the organization.
• Working online.
• Brazening it out.

JOBS I HAVE DONE #3: Stockboy

For a short time, I worked in a warehouse full of returned Japanese electronics. I never did figure out the business model. I worked with a young black man who had two other jobs, which I found incredible. He explained that if he wasn't working, he'd just be drinking, which was expensive and led to bad decisions, or asking his girlfriend for sex, which she would refuse. Therefore he had decided to just make as much money as possible and do nothing else.

We counted boxes of adding machines and speakers. They soon found out I was better suited to updating the computer inventories. There was quite a backlog of paperwork and a big database that needed help. I worked too fast and put myself out of a job.

Skills Acquired: Database maintenance.

JOBS I HAVE DONE #2: Bulk food clerk

One summer, I worked as a bulk food clerk at a big grocery chain. I joined the union for this one and wore a green apron. The bulk food section was an aisle of big fake barrels, each seemingly filled with unpackaged staples like pretzels, candy, or dog treat. In reality, most of them had a shallow plastic bin in the top so they only held ten or twenty pounds of product. My co-workers were older than me: thieves, drug users, and a slightly scary guy obsessed with martial arts. I learned what neighborhood was good to score drugs in, and avoided it. One co-worker had the "Highly Effective Habit" of repeating your name four or five times when you met her. She shook my hand and said, "Pleased to meet you, Joel. How's it been going, Joel? Do you live nearby, Joel? OK, Joel, I'll see you later, Joel." She stared at me the whole time, committing my name and face to memory, I suppose in case this young clerk could help her professionally some day.

Every day on break, I walked to Baskin Robbins and tried a different kind of chocolate ice cream. I'd have an Orangina with lunch, which was probably a sandwich from home. Sometimes I'd buy candy from our aisle of phony barrels. Another co-worker would do the same, and then help herself to a little bag of whatever she wanted at any time for the rest of the day, "Cause I'm like, look, boss, here's my receipt!"

I secretly enjoyed it when I had to heft the 50 and 100 pound bags of dog kibble and flour around, because it let me feel strong. One time, arms loaded with product, I kicked open the door to the back room. Turned out I left a dirty footprint on the door, and the martial artist confronted me. He thought I'd kicked the door so management would blame him, the known high-kicker. I managed to reassure him of my innocent intentions. 

Skills Acquired: Avoiding crazy people.

JOBS I HAVE DONE #1: Fry cook

For ten weeks after high school, I hauled tables and cooked french fries at a magician-themed restaurant called the Great Foodini. That place was ridiculous. You'd wander in to get a burger and find a labyrinth: a fast food counter out front, then a big video arcade, then a bar, then a "fine dining" room with a stage for magic acts. Mr. Foodini made himself disappear pretty quickly: one day the door was just locked. I made a story out of it.



Skills Acquired: When the company closes, cash your latest check fast.

Being a writer

Now, I did my time in the salt mines. I worked some crap jobs when I was younger. Later I made a lot of money by busting my arse in a difficult work environment. Then I got the chance to do what I'm really quite good at: writing.

I know: Everyone thinks he's a writer. Anyone who can read thinks she can write, just like everyone who can talk thinks she could be a singer, and everyone who likes the Beatles thinks he could be a rock star, and every high school boy with a little hustle thinks he's heading for the NBA. So let me blow my own horn a little. I've put in thousands of hours and hundreds of thousands of words over forty years of writing. I get paid to write. I have many magazine and newspaper articles to my name, plus a lot of marketing, public relations, and advertising work that appeared without my name on it. I write fast and clean. I rewrite. I cut. I can take editing without getting my hanky wet, even when it's a brutal and wrongheaded chop job. I don't care; I'm a pro. Just sign the check so I can go write something I enjoy.

Because I do enjoy writing. Doesn’t everyone enjoy what they're good at?

Here's where the snag surfaces. After ten years or so of freelancing and doing gigs of various sizes, I want to step up to serious work. I want to give more time to it, find something that gives me a purpose and rewards me well.

It's proving pretty hard to find.

ECCE HOMO: Behold the man

A lot of people might envy my life.

I'm an educated, white American in pretty good health. I have a beautiful family. We own a nice house in a nice neighborhood. We have money in the bank and no car loans or credit card debt. And I haven't worked a day job in years.

I can take a nap in the middle of the day, and usually do. I don't have a boss or co-workers or a commute. My wife's job provides good benefits and just about enough money to get by.

I spend plenty of time with my young children. I work on my various writing projects, most of which bring in a couple dollars. I do a little light housework but hardly a maid's job. I shop for food and cook, which I enjoy, but we also eat out frequently. I take a night or two, or three, each week to go out and do my own thing with my friends. I don't even mow the lawn.

And I'm going nuts.

It turns out that I need to do more with my life and talents than take it easy. Who knew?