Chad Oliveiri interviews Irwin Chusid: the full transcript

Chusid: Are you tape recording
this? Can you hear me OK?

            City:Yeah, I’m taping this. I was actually
thinking of recording you and releasing the recording somewhere as a form of
outsider music.

            Chusid: Go ahead. Just include me in the royalty streams.

            City:There’ll be plenty of those, I’m sure.

            Chusid: Oh yeah. I bet. There’s a record out there that somebody made of my voice maybe
27 years ago. But no one knows where it is.

            City:Who did it?

            Chusid: I’m not even saying. Don’t go looking. Ha ha.

            City:Do you find yourself still having to
defend your notion of outsider music? I know it’s ruffled some feathers.

            Chusid: No, absolutely not. I mean, occasionally. But not in a confrontational way. If
you’re speaking specifically about the Village
Voice encounter, that was as rough as it ever got. And I completely batted
their softballs out of the park. They wouldn’t print my response. So I ran it
at keyofz.com. But I make it clear to anyone who asks that outsider music, the
genre, it’s a journalistic convenience and it’s a marketing convenience. I’m
not going around saying “This is outsider and if you don’t agree with me you’re
wrong and I’ll battle you to the death.” No. It’s something to write about.
It’s something to be interested in. But if somebody says there’s no such thing
as outsider music, that’s fine with me.

            City:I wonder though, particularly when you
talk about folks like Jandek… I think back to when I was going to college in
the mid-90s. Finding a record by Jandek was like finding a hidden treasure for
a lot of kids I knew. So there’s certainly a larger audience for these things
than people might expect.

            Chusid: No one aspires to be an outsider musician. If anyone said they aspired to be an
outsider musician, I’d be very suspicious. It’s a big red flag. In fact I get
on occasion, not that often, things submitted to me by people who say “I’ve
read your book and I think I’m an outsider musician. Here’s my CD.” Or, better
yet: “Here’s my cassette.” Generally I listen to it and it’s just some indie
rocker or some guy who has a weird predilection lyrically or even has a kind of
sick sense of humor and his friends think he’s untalented. Well, in fact, he
may simply be untalented.

            People who I consider outsiders,
and, again, it’s a label that I apply, it’s not a label they embrace, in most
cases it’s not even a label they’ve ever asked me about… these people consider
themselves musicians, entertainers, composers. And that’s what they are. That’s
one way of looking at them.

            You could say the same thing about
Miles Davis. He was a musician, a composer, a trumpeter, a bandleader,
whatever. Well, most people would also say he was a jazz musician. If Miles
Davis never uttered the word “jazz” in a self-referential way, it makes no
difference to anyone. It’s music. And in the case of outsider music, it’s
music. But like any category — rock, folk, how do you define folk music?
People do define it.

            City: You attempt to in the book.

            Chusid:I do attempt it. And I try to distinguish folk music from
outsider music for the very reason that folk music already has a conventionally
accepted set of qualifications. Folk art tends to refer to the kinds of things
that are outsider art, the visual manifestations of outsider art.

            City: It’s an important distinction. Because one
of the arguments you’ll hear revolves around, say, the suburban housewife who
likes to paint watercolors in her spare time even though she’s had no formal
training. Should she be considered an outsider?

            Chusid: There really isn’t a hard and fast rule. I included Harry Partch, Joe Meek,
Robert Graettinger, and Captain Beefheart. Some people say they aren’t
outsiders. In the book, I make a distinction between outsider musicians and
musical outsiders. I had my reasons for doing so. In each case, there was a
number of specific reasons why they were in the book. Would I argue that Harry
Partch is an outsider musician? No. I wouldn’t argue it. I make a case for it
in the book. But in the case of Partch, I love his music. I always have. And it
seemed like a great opportunity to include him in a broadened definition of the
category and get more people interested in his music.

            City:With Partch and Beefheart, their music
has this sort of alien language. But within that language, there’s a virtuosity
there.

            Chusid: I’m gonna use that: “alien language.” I like that. I’m gonna use that in my
next interview. I’ll attribute it to you. And I promise I won’t use it with the
other guy in Rochester. I like it, though. And
you’re right. There is an alien language. There’s an idiosyncratic language.
And that’s not easy to create.

            Sometimes it’s a byproduct of a
mentality. In the case of Beefheart, look, no one really knows what goes on
inside that guy’s head. By all accounts, his behavior was not conventional. His
approach to music was extremely unconventional. To this day, I have great
difficulty with Trout Mask Replica.

            City:But you’ve got to admit that once you get
into the flow of that record, or a lot of the Beefheart records, you become
attuned to that alien language and you grow to understand it. You appreciate
its own unique riffs and hooks.

            Chusid: That happened to me with Beefheart, who I didn’t like when I first started
writing the book. I didn’t want to include him and wouldn’t have. Not to
dismiss him as a composer, or to say his music didn’t have any value. It just
didn’t appeal to me. But I had to admit I wasn’t familiar with a lot of it.

            City: Was it the Zappa connection that turned you
off?

            Chusid: Oh, no. If anything, Zappa to me is a seal of approval. Because Zappa is a man
who recognized the value of Wild Man Fisher and the GTOs and Beefheart when
other people were probably thinking these people were just crazy. My brother
was into Trout Mask when I was
growing up. We shared a room together and he used to play it. And it just gave
me a headache. From that point on, I didn’t want to hear any more Beefheart.

            My editor at A Cappella, Paul
Taylor, suggested that we needed some names with marquee value for this book,
because no one’s gonna buy a book about BJ Snowden and Jandek, these complete,
remote characters. BJ Snowden had sold 100 albums at that point. And he gave me
a list of people like Lee “Scratch” Perry, Brian Wilson, Syd Barrett,
Beefheart. And for my own personal reasons, I settled on Beefheart and Barrett.

            Barrett I love. So it wasn’t a
problem including him. He’s in the first rank. Brian Wilson, look, I love Brian
Wilson. And you could easily make the case that Brian Wilson’s an outsider.
Talk about someone with a very intuitive approach to music that broke so many
rules but didn’t do so willfully. And Lee “Scratch” Perry — I’m just not a
fan of reggae. It just didn’t interest me. From what I’ve read about Lee “Scratch”
Perry, yeah, you could make a case for him. So I settled on Beefheart, and the
more I listened to it, the more I began to understand it. Some of it — the
later stuff — I really began to like. And I’m not talking about those two
Mercury records, which I don’t like. But anything from the third album on, it’s
more accessible. So I managed to include him.

            Over the course of doing my research
on Beefheart, I confessed to a certain ambivalence about how much self
awareness there was in Beefheart. I just don’t know. You can only speculate.
And for the sake of the book, I think I make that clear. This is a guy who some
people have suspicions about. And I could be one of those people.

City: Do you think your book argues for a greater acceptance of
outsider music, for people to not view this material from the perspective of
what’s “right” musically — verse chorus verse, western tunings?

            Chusid: Absolutely. That’s one of the philosophical angles in the book. I speak from
experience, because I was collecting this music before it even had a name. And
when I first started collecting it, I was fascinated by it, but at the same
time, it sounded ludicrous.

            I mean, I laughed and would say to
people “Listen to this, how awful this is.” I first heard The Shaggs in 1978,
before the first reissue. I had a friend who had an original copy. His uncle
knew them and had seen them. We’d listen to The Shaggs and we would just roll
on the floor laughing. At the same time, we recognized there was something
special about it. But it wasn’t just bad. It wasn’t mediocre. There was some
sort of gene structure there. And we recognized that and were fascinated by it.

            Then I started collecting records
the music director at WFMU was throwing away because he thought they were too
awful to put in the library. I would occasionally grab these things out of the
dumpster — I’m speaking metaphorically — and listen to some of the stuff
and go, wow. Often these were records where one person played all the
instruments in a very disjointed fashion, but in an exceptionally disjointed
fashion. I would save the stuff and I started doing a feature on WFMU in the
80s called Atrocious Music. And it
was really kind of a forerunner to the whole outsider music thing. But at the
time I was doing it more for the laughs. At the same time, I was not playing
comedy records. Never.

            City:
How was it being received?

            Chusid:
It was adored. Nobody ever accused me of making fun of people or being
cruel. In some cases, there were some artists, like a Lucia Pamela, who I was
featuring, who you didn’t want to be cruel about, because there was something
charming, something childlike and playful, about her efforts.

            Then of course, back then, you had
the singing celebrities. It was a broad universe. If you ever went back and
listened to those shows — the tapes don’t exist — you’d realize it’s not an
outsider music show at all. That’s when William Shatner was first discovered as
a pop singer, and Leonard Nimoy, and Phyllis Diller, and Joey Bishop, and Jack
Webb; the whole Golden Throats thing. There were also religious zealots,
singing children, über patriots… Anyone who was just over the edge or over the
top, whether they were an outsider or a wayward celebrity or just some kids who
went before a microphone because their parents thought they had talent. That
was part of the universe of Atrocious
Music.

            City:So they’re fully invested in whatever it
is they’re doing.

            Chusid:
It was sincere. Anything that was too arch, that had its tongue in its
cheek, I wasn’t interested in; unless it had its tongue in its cheek in an
exceptionally clumsy way.

            So after about eight years of doing
that show, two things happened: It really became difficult listening to all the
mediocre material I had to sort through to find something that was worthy of
the show. We’re talking about one tune out of 20. People were sending me cassettes. And fast-forwarding through a
cassette is not the same as fast-forwarding through a CD. I’d be going through
a 90-minute cassette and nothing on it would interest me. Partly it’s me becoming
jaded. And partly it’s me realizing “I don’t have the time for this anymore.”

            The other thing that happened was
that I met Lucia Pamela. She was in her ’90s then, and she was the sweetest
woman. I was in LA and her grandson arranged a meeting at a restaurant. And I
came away feeling a bit sheepish.

            City:I imagine that’s a probably an important
component of this — actually being able to meet some of these folks to see
where they’re coming from.

            Chusid: Yeah. I had to reconsider my own views on this music. She was sincere. She did
this music out of the goodness of her heart, out of a sense of self-expression
and to entertain people. She entertained in orphanages and nursing homes and
schools. I thought, “What a sweet woman. And here I’ve been including her on a
show called Atrocious Music.”

            It was shortly thereafter that, for
those two reasons, I stopped doing the show. At that point, people were livid
because they wanted me to continue. They were loving it. But I just couldn’t go
on with it.

            I’d always been doing freeform
radio. Since 1975. In fact, my 30th anniversary will be in about a week and a
half. And I can play anything I want. Most of my radio is freeform. So,
whatever you do, don’t say I’m an outsider music DJ. I’m not. I include
outsider music in it, but I don’t even refer to it as outsider music.

            City:
I noticed you were playing U2’s “Vertigo”
in December.

            Chusid:
I love it. It’s a great tune. I usually hate U2. But that song is just
incredible. The first time I heard it, I didn’t know who it was. But I heard it
while listening to a commercial radio station, which I rarely do. I thought, “Wow!
What is this?” I found out it was U2 and thought, “OK, I’ll download that.” I’m
not gonna buy the album.

            So my programming has always been
freeform. And in the late 90s, I started a show called Incorrect Music. It was similar to Atrocious Music, but with a name that I felt was a little more
complimentary. You can be musically incorrect and there’s not a sense that
you’re a bad person, even though it’s something that most people consider
wrong. There was a good outsider component to some of the music, but at that
point I was approaching it from a more gentle, more understanding standpoint.

            Granted, my partner, Michelle, was
in it strictly for the laughs. I was in it from a musicological and
anthropological standpoint. We were kinda foils for each other in that regard.
I was the one programming the music for the show. She was there more as ear
candy. She’s very clever on mic, so she’d come in and hadn’t even heard half
the things we were playing. She’d hear them on the air and make wisecracks. And
I would often respond by explaining, maybe, the more informational side.

            But incorrect music is not synonymous
with outsider music. And I’ve had to make that distinction. Finally, when the
book came out, it was causing me problems. They were hearing the Incorrect Music show and thinking, “Oh,
this guy is making fun of retards.” And I said, “Well, no. I’m not.” These are
distinct categories. Outsider music is a small subset of the incorrect music
universe. And I have to keep explaining this to people. So finally I stopped
doing the show. And there were other reasons, too. Michelle had to get a job.
She was becoming a lifer, she was 35 years old and still in school, and needed
to pay the rent. So we discontinued the show.

            I subsequently took down the Incorrect Music website after an
incident in Boston. I was doing an outsider music
show in Cambridge. Someone at the Boston Globe did a long interview with
me and then he titled the article “The worst of Irwin Chusid.” And half the
music focused on the Incorrect Music hour, which was off the air but available on archive. And I was kinda livid
because I thought I made it clear I didn’t want the “incorrect” angle to be
played up in a story about outsider music. And here I am making the same
distinction to you, and for all I know your whole article will go on to talk
about how Irwin Chusid was defensive about the “Incorrect Music” hour, which,
to me, is beside the point. It’s only relevant in the sense that the same
person was involved in both. But I do draw distinctions.

            The book makes it clear that, with a
few exceptions, I do take these people seriously. You know, I can poke a little
fun at them. But I’m a journalist. I’m not writing the book for the artists.
I’m not their publicist. I’m not writing their biographies. I have to be
honest. I’m trying to explain this for people who would come at it from the
standpoint of “I don’t understand this. What’s the value in it?” And that
requires colorful language. If these people who I’ve written about call and ask
“Why did you say this about me?” I’ll tell them why. They’re grateful for the
exposure.

            City:
I know BJ Snowden was somewhat
reluctant.

            Chusid:
Where did you hear that?

            City:
Her website.

            Chusid:
I can explain what that was all about. A friend of mine, a filmmaker named
Doug Stone, was doing a movie about her. At one point she said off camera that
she was upset about her song being on the Songs
in the Key of Z CD. But, look, she gave me permission. She was paid. In
advance! And she got a lot of exposure.

            So Doug asked her why she was so
upset about being on it. And she said “Because everybody else on it is so
terrible.” She was thinking that she was the best thing on there. Well, Alvin
Dahn, from the second Key of Z CD,
his wife had a very similar reaction. Her reaction was: “Are these people
walking on two legs or four?” She said no one on that CD is up to Alvin’s standards. That Alvin was basically the only
musician on that album. Even among outsiders there’s disagreement over the
value of each other’s music.

            And I make it clear I’m no fan of
Jandek. I’m a fan of Jandek as a phenomenon, but I can’t listen to his music.

            City:I think that’s amazing given the
correspondence you’ve maintained with the man.

            Chusid:
To this day. He continues to send me every new CD. I save the padded
envelopes, because they’re hand-addressed to me. At some point, a friend of
mine’s going to put them all on eBay.

            City:
I just looked Jandek up on eBay. His
recordings are selling.

            Chusid:
Oh the vinyl goes for, what, $40-$60? Again, I can’t listen to it. But do I
think it’s a waste of time what he’s doing? No. I’m not like Kurt Cobain, who
said Jandek’s not pretentious but people who listen to him are. I don’t feel
that way. If people can find value in Jandek’s music, great. Some people can’t
find value in BJ Snowden’s music, and I do. I think if other people recorded
her songs, people would be surprised at how good they are, the structure of
them, the chord changes, the melodies. They really come from the heart. I think
she’s the poster girl for outsider music having value.

            City:
That’s where the whole talent idea
comes in, because here she is with these great concepts but people put a lot of
weight on things like talent. But when it comes to this music, talent’s irrelevant.

            Chusid:
That’s exactly what I say in the book. Talent is irrelevant. And it really
is the basis for the whole notion of outsider art. These forms of art were
discovered in mental institutions, where nobody would ever go to discover art.
You discover crazy people. And some people a century ago were noticing — whether
these were done for therapeutic reasons or whether they were done for
compulsive reasons — that some of it’s pretty remarkable. And then they dug
further and discovered that there was an overlooked universe of art that had
great value.

            You take it for granted, people like
Sister Gertrude and Henry Darger and Howard Finster. Millions of people, well,
thousands of people, recognize what they do. But at the same time, people
thought they were just nuts, crazy.

City:Society has really changed in its acceptance of cultural outsiders. I
think back to the violent reactions Steve Reich got to his premier of Four
Organs.

            Chusid: People had the same
reaction to The Rites of Spring.
There are many examples: Charles Ives, Monk. They thought Monk was an idiot.
That he couldn’t play piano.

            City:
People felt offended by that sort of
thing.

            Chusid:
You know, I may have been offended if it was 1943 and I heard something of
Monk, because it depends on what your frames of reference are before you hear
it. There are many things we can hear now and put in a different context. Now
the notion of outsider music is accepted, certainly in critical quarters, most
critical quarters. And people have been opened up to a broader range of music.

            Think about what happened right
after World War II, when you suddenly had this explosion of world music being
interpreted by ex-GIs who spent time in the South Pacific or running around Europe defending liberty.
Musicians and bandleaders in the service came back after World War II and
brought with them influences from all over the globe and started incorporating
them into what later became known as the lounge music or easy listening or
instrumental pop of the ’50s. Bringing along the interesting percussion they
discovered in the South Pacific.

            Guys like Martin Denny and Les
Baxter and Arthur Lymon. You suddenly had all these influences from all over
the world being brought back by GIs. It’s very different from what was around
before the war, the Big Band music. Orchestral pop music changed a lot because
suddenly people were introduced to new instruments and arrangements and
settings, and they gradually accepted it.

            So you’ve got people now who are
more inclined to be receptive to something that’s exotic, even something that
may seem exotically wrong or exotically incompetent. I had to make the
adjustment over 30 years that this stuff isn’t bad and unintentionally comedic.
I’m not saying it’s genius either. But I’m saying, “Let me listen a little
closer and see what’s going on here.” It took me decades to reconsider. And it
was through meeting these people and listening closer.

            City:
Is there a danger that outsider music
will run its course?

            Chusid: No. It’ll never happen. By
its very definition it’s marginal. It’s outside mainstream culture. It always
will be.

            There may be a movie about The
Shaggs. The rights have been optioned and someone’s working on the script. But
even if the movie is made and it’s a hit, The Shaggs will never go platinum.
Most people will still treat them as a joke.

            It’s become more popular as a result
of the book. But it’s always gonna be a small percentage of the listening
population that will listen to it and understand it.

            City:
You spend some time in your book detailing how you’ve made musical
connections over the years. How you’d come to learn about, say, Joe Meek
through listening to the Tornadoes. Has your exposure to all this material
changed the way you make connections?

            Chusid: The technology has changed.
Sometimes, because of the radio program and the book, I’m overwhelmed by
material, which leaves me less time to listen. I never have time to listen to
all of it. Sometimes I’m less patient.

City: Do you sometimes wish you could go back to those days when
you were just a kid with a transistor radio under his pillow at night?

            Chusid:
It’s not even tempting to say yes. The Internet is great. Someone can just
send me a link. Within a minute, I know if I want to continue listening. And I
also know if I need to put something down and come back to it later.

            Someone just sent me a CD by a guy
named Bill. And they sent it to me because, they said, “We’re proud to have
bill on our label, we think he’s great.”

            I read the press kit and realized
Bill might be Down Syndrome. Just looking at him, yeah, there a mental illness
there. And he looks like a really sweet little kid. I listened to the CD and
thought, “If I didn’t know anything about it, it sounds like a rock band with a
guy who really has no concept of being a vocalist at all.” You might think it’s
a joke. But I made an adjustment and really concluded that I just didn’t find
the music interesting. I understand if you know this kid and you think he’s
really sweet and what he’s doing is unusual, you go and make a record.

            It takes effort to make a record.
Even now, it still requires effort to make a record and to circulate it. That’s
one reason why I think Jandek believes in what he’s doing. It’s not some
elaborate hoax.

            City:
And Jandek puts such little effort
into disseminating his music.

            Chusid:
You’re right. Which is what makes him so unusual in that regard. He just
doesn’t care.

            City:
Which in itself can be seen as an
aesthetic.

            Chusid:
It’s his own little non-marketing philosophy. And I don’t know why anyone
would do that. But if it’s a hoax, it’s a hoax that’s been going on for 27
years and 40 records. Even to the extent of taking his vinyl and repackaging it
as CDs. Did you know that Jandek will be 60 this year? He’ll be 60. When he’s
65, do you think he’s suddenly going to turn around and say “Ha! I’ve done this
to fool the critics!” That would actually be quite an artistic statement.

            City:
Have you ever managed to talk to
Jandek about why you don’t find his music engaging?

            Chusid:
No. He never asks. He doesn’t seem the least bit concerned. I respect that.
When I wrote an article for WFMU publications, which later became the basis for
the chapter on Jandek, he said, “You have a really interesting writing style.”
And he thanked me. But he wasn’t thanking me for the exposure or for explaining
his art. And I never felt he was offended. I think he’s amused. Who know what
goes on in his head.

City: You’ve been working for so many years at WFMU, this sort of
oasis for free expression on the radio. Do you think the opportunities to do
that sort of thing are disappearing with the FCC’s crackdowns and corporate
consolidation?

            Chusid:
There are actually more opportunities these days, because you’ve got
satellite and internet.

            I don’t get paid for my radio work.
It’s a creative indulgence. I love doing it, and I love doing it at WFMU. I
don’t think there’s another radio station I’d want to work for. FMU has
developed this collective identity, and a very self-referential sense of humor,
which is rare in media.

            I found a radio station called
erika.net, from Ann Arbor. Not only is it completely
freeform, it’s good freeform. Someone there’s got a great aesthetic. But
there’s no DJ. And some people prefer to have a host. There’s a little more
warmth in that. I understand that. Commercial radio has ceased to interest me
from a musical standpoint for the past 30 years. But it hasn’t caused me any
problems because there is plenty of music out there, and there are more ways
than ever to find it.

            Some people don’t even think of
radio. I don’t think of TV. It’s not my medium. For a lot of people, radio is
not their medium. And now you have satellite radio or CDs or iPods in the car. You
don’t need FM or AM. I think there’s going to be a tremendous drop-off in radio
listenership. And it’s going to have to make adjustments to survive. It did. AM
radio adjusted when FM came along. It became talk radio. Maybe radio in general
is going to go thru another shaking out period as people load up their iTunes
at home and put them on shuffle.

            I find myself doing that. I bought a
G5 recently, which is such a more powerful machine. I’ve got 1,700 songs in
there. I put it on random shuffle and I’ve got a radio station now coming out
of my computer that’s only playing songs I like.

            City:
But don’t you think that tendency is
going to eliminate opportunities for people to get exposed to unfamiliar music?

            Chusid:
I do buy a lot of records still. I force myself to do it, because I don’t
want to be a guy who assumes that all music has to come to me for free. I go to
Amazon or CD Baby. I never go to record stores. I may go into one while
traveling. If I find a cool shop and I want the place to stay in business, I’ll
buy some records.

            City:
You’re a great example of someone who’s
been able to cobble together his odd passions into a career.

            Chusid: I’ve had to define what I did for a career that was never easy. I was fumbling
around… “I’m a record producer, a radio host, a historian.” It’s so many things,
I’ve finally realized I could encapsulate my career in two words: “landmark
preservationist.” I find things on the scrapheap of musical history that I know
don’t belong there, and I salvage them.

            In the course of doing that, if
there’s a way to make a buck, that helps. Often it’s a primary consideration if
there’s a way to help exploit something. But in every such case, I only make
money if the person who makes the music, or their heirs, make money. So I look
for ways to become a representative or to consult or to be a music publisher or
producer and get a stake in the commercial exploitation of something. I make a
living primarily through royalty streams on non-outsider music: Raymond Scott,
Esquivel.

            But I was broke at 40. I had no
career. I was going nowhere. I was a three-time college drop-out. I was a
career hobbyist. And it wasn’t until after the age of 40 that I finally found a
way to make a living with this. And even then it was a struggle for a number of
years.

            I was depressed. I was a mess. I had
a live-in girlfriend who broke up with me in a very, very ugly way. Oh man. It
was one of the worst days of my life. There I am at 40, I was just starting to
get the whole Raymond Scott thing underway with no guarantee it would lead to
anything. It was just another hunch I had. I had many hunches before then that
didn’t pan out.

            Here I was without a girlfriend. I
had practically no money. No day job. No career. No career prospects. I was
sitting in my kitchen after she broke up with my crying, thinking “I’m a loser.
I’m a total fucking loser.”

            Do I go back to school? Get a degree?
Look for a job? What do I do?

            Well, I continued with my hobbies
with the same passion I always had. I got a couple of breaks. But, of course,
luck is the residue of design, as they say. I was hungry for knowledge. And I
had some skills from things I’d done over the years that suddenly began to
serve me. You know, me being the one-man office.

            I don’t have co-workers. I can’t
hire anybody. I can never explain to someone how to do things I want done. I’m
accounts payable and accounts receivable. I’ve been able to make a living with
this because I persisted and I didn’t know what other alternatives were
available. I think I would have rather died than get a fulltime desk job.

            I’d visit people in Columbia Records
during the early ’90s, when I was doing the Raymond Scott thing. I’d be in
their office and they’d close the door and just tell me how miserable they
were. How they hated the company where they worked and envied me because I had
freedom. I didn’t have money or benefits, but they envied me because I could
come and go while they were stuck in this cubicle or corner office.

            Now they’re all long gone. They’ve
been with other companies they’ve been laid off by. I never wanted their jobs.
I wanted their pay packages and their benefits. But I didn’t want their jobs. I
don’t like going into meetings and punching time clocks.

This article appears in Feb 16-22, 2005.