{"id":1722,"date":"2007-11-30T15:47:57","date_gmt":"2007-11-30T20:47:57","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/?p=1722"},"modified":"2007-11-30T16:13:24","modified_gmt":"2007-11-30T21:13:24","slug":"it-was-twenty-years-ago-today-part-lxi","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/?p=1722","title":{"rendered":"It Was Twenty Years Ago Today – Part LXI"},"content":{"rendered":"

It was Monday, November 30, 1987.\u00a0<\/p>\n

I was going on eight months of…unemployment?<\/p>\n

Well, not really.\u00a0 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.<\/p>\n

But things had been slowing down.\u00a0 It was getting harder to sell newspaper articles; freelancer budgets were tightening up.<\/p>\n

Or so I told myself.\u00a0 I think they were tighter.\u00a0 Who knew?<\/p>\n

Voice-over work had slowed way down, too.\u00a0 Where I used to get a couple of jobs a month – and October had seen three or four (including the best one of all<\/a>), I hadn’t actually gotten a call in a couple of weeks.\u00a0 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…<\/p>\n

“These things happen<\/em>“, I told myself.\u00a0 “The next one’ll be better”.\u00a0<\/p>\n

And it had been.\u00a0 But it was the last one. And it had been a couple of weeks.\u00a0<\/p>\n

And money was getting tight.\u00a0<\/p>\n

Of course I was still talking with radio stations.\u00a0 Some were interested; New Bedford, Fall River, Santa Rosa.\u00a0 But nobody could actually hire me.<\/p>\n

Yet.<\/p>\n

So there was hope.\u00a0 But money was getting tight.<\/p>\n

My other diversion, besides Fridays at Phoenix Games?\u00a0 I dipped my toe back into writing fiction.\u00a0 Or trying to.\u00a0 My efforts usually got 2-3 pages before petering out in ennui.<\/p>\n

The band?\u00a0 We were still playing.\u00a0 I was still writing music.\u00a0 Fairly prolifically, in fact.\u00a0 But rehearsals were becoming a desultory grind through the material.\u00a0 And the gigs were coming slower and slower, and at crappier and crappier bars.\u00a0 We’d played our last gig at – Fernando’s, yet again.\u00a0 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.\u00a0 Depressed?<\/p>\n

For a fleeting moment, life was feeling like a sticky web of frustration.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

It was Monday, November 30, 1987.\u00a0 I was going on eight months of…unemployment? Well, not really.\u00a0 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.\u00a0 It was getting harder to sell newspaper articles; […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[15],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-1722","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-twenty-years-ago-today"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1722","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=1722"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1722\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=1722"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=1722"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=1722"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}