It was Monday, November 30, 1987. 

I was going on eight months of…unemployment?

Well, not really.  Since I’d gotten whacked at KSTP in April, I’d had one contracting job, sold a bunch of newspaper articles, done a bunch of voice-over work.

But things had been slowing down.  It was getting harder to sell newspaper articles; freelancer budgets were tightening up.

Or so I told myself.  I think they were tighter.  Who knew?

Voice-over work had slowed way down, too.  Where I used to get a couple of jobs a month – and October had seen three or four (including the best one of all), I hadn’t actually gotten a call in a couple of weeks.  There’d been one really rough job at a studio in Bloomington – my voice wasn’t in shape, it took fifteen takes to get a spot right, the director was getting audibly frustrated…

“These things happen“, I told myself.  “The next one’ll be better”. 

And it had been.  But it was the last one. And it had been a couple of weeks. 

And money was getting tight. 

Of course I was still talking with radio stations.  Some were interested; New Bedford, Fall River, Santa Rosa.  But nobody could actually hire me.

Yet.

So there was hope.  But money was getting tight.

My other diversion, besides Fridays at Phoenix Games?  I dipped my toe back into writing fiction.  Or trying to.  My efforts usually got 2-3 pages before petering out in ennui.

The band?  We were still playing.  I was still writing music.  Fairly prolifically, in fact.  But rehearsals were becoming a desultory grind through the material.  And the gigs were coming slower and slower, and at crappier and crappier bars.  We’d played our last gig at – Fernando’s, yet again.  Mark and Bill and Casey weren’t getting along all that well – Casey was chafing at the fact that nobody liked his music; Mark was getting tired of my flitting between styles; Bill was getting…hard to say.  Depressed?

For a fleeting moment, life was feeling like a sticky web of frustration.