Profunksticated

Sorry I’ve been away so long.

I forgot to mention that I currently reside among the ranks of the jobless, if you want to define a job as 40-hours away from home each week with 15-20 hours of commuting thrown in.

Yes, I was shown the door this spring along with several hundred others by my last company after 6 years of service. So I’m getting state-paid retraining in web design and development and marketing management from a local college. The end result will be the award of two "certificates," the newest craze in low-cost credentialism. I’ll need them, ‘cause it seems that glorified liberal arts Bachelor’s Degree I earned 26 years ago from the Big State School in the South ain’t worth squat today.

They say the definition of insanity is to keep doing the same thing while expecting a different result. This is why I don’t want do go back into a corporate job on a full time basis. For what? So I can get my hopes up that this could be THE JOB and possibly be downsized once more? Look, I’ve been downsized and/or otherwise forced out - oh, who am I kidding? I was fucking fired — from three positions in the last decade.

I’m collecting unemployment for the third time in my life and it’s about to run out. I’m hoping to go a freelance/consulting life by working through a corporate entity I created a few years back.

I really don’t care what the employees of the client firms will think. Why is this black man here? Yeah, I’m here temporarily. You got a problem with that?  Oh, I’m undercutting your precious position?  Take it up with your fucking management. Get out of my face.

It’s time to face facts — these white-run corporate entities you all work for don’t want to hire anyone full time anymore, and that’s fine with me. I’m just here rolling with the flow. And it’s a well known fact that black men don’t do well as employees in white-run companies.

I think I’d like the idea of working on one project for one client firm and following the project straight out the door once it’s done. Collect my cash, take a few days off, go to the next gig, whatever it may be. Benefits? The Spouse is a teacher, one of the few public sector jobs still offering good benefits, including health insurance, so we’ve got that covered.

My thinking shouldn’t come off as all that strange. We African Americans were entrepreneurs by necessity back in those bad old Jim Crow days. Today, most of us believe we have to have biweekly checks from the white man in order to keep up our showy, highly leveraged lifestyles.

This mindset is an unfortunate outgrowth of our unique history in this "great" country of ours. Other immigrant groups come here of their own volitions and seek economic freedom. We native-born descendants of kidnapped Africans-turned-slaves, on the other hand, have instead sought political power, but much to the detriment, I believe, of our ability to attain some measure of economic parity.

Anyhow, this consulting firm I signed with earlier this year following my layoff called just before the holiday weekend about a one-month opportunity with a client. It’s in the DC area. I’ll find out more later today.

Peace out.