December 4, 1985. A Wednesday.<\/p>\n
I was closing in on two months in the Twin Cities. No job yet – no real nibbles, really.<\/p>\n
A job as a technical writer at a local defense-related contractor flared briefly in November – and flamed out as the company imposed a hiring freeze that lasted the better part of a decade. I ended up working in tech writing – starting in 1993. But that would wait.<\/p>\n
And wait.<\/p>\n
And wait.<\/p>\n
I’d been to a bunch of band auditions. I figured the best way to get into the music scene was to get into a band that was sort of, kind of, like what I wanted to do.<\/p>\n
My first audition was sometime in mid-November, after I’d moved into my apartment in South Minneapolis. It was in a warehouse on and Washington Avenue North. I parked my car in a trash-strewn dirt lot abutting a railroad track, and hauled my gear – my guitar and amp – up a cement stairway onto a ratty loading dock that smelled of grease and urine. A bum was passed out in a neighboring doorway. I took a ricket freight elevator up to a drafty room that smelled like rodent droppings with a couple of hanging 110 volt outlets and fist holes in the wallboard, in a warren of similar little spaces housing small bands and wheezing artists. The audition? A couple of synth-pop dweebs from Woodbury-via-The Wedge. Dreadful music, worse “audition”. Hated it. I only bring it up, really, as a way of noting that I walked by that same building about a year ago. It’s been renovated into lofts that start around $375,000; the building next door where the drunk was passed out is a chi-chi office block. I barely recognized the place.<\/p>\n
The other event was “Today”, Wednesday. After a bunch of tries, I got a hold of Rob Pendelton at KSTP-AM. “Sorry, I’ve been so busy – but we have a job working as a screener for the…” I didn’t catch the host’s name. “We’d like you to come in for an interview next Wednesday”.<\/p>\n
I accepted, naturally. The bank account was in free fall. My goal; if I didn’t have a job I actually wanted<\/em> by New Years, I was going to take the first security job that I could get.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" December 4, 1985. A Wednesday. I was closing in on two months in the Twin Cities. No job yet – no real nibbles, really. A job as a technical writer at a local defense-related contractor flared briefly in November – and flamed out as the company imposed a hiring freeze that lasted the better part […]<\/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-48500","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\/48500","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=48500"}],"version-history":[{"count":3,"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/48500\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":48506,"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/48500\/revisions\/48506"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=48500"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=48500"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=48500"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}