Satan is my Motor

Most writing jobs do not pay well. Particularly when you get down to the level of local alt-weeklies and bar magazines, you're looking at the princely rate of 5 to 15 cents a word for your deathless prose. A large paper like the Washington Post will, on a good day, pay you around $400 for a short feature, closer to $1000 for the longer ones; but the space for freelancers is limited. Then there are the bigger jobs, the feature pieces for the New Yorker or comparable publication, which will pay you thousands - but unless you're Joan Didion, those are often three-times-in-a-lifetime affairs. This is why most of the professional writers I know (myself included) also have day jobs within the publishing industry, be it art direction or as an editor at a custom-publishing house or what-have-you.

And for 99 percent of the time, the assignments your day job or freelancing gigs assign, you are 100 percent A-1 copasetic with. Taking Miss DC bowling. Watching rednecks drive super-reinforced cars off cliffs during ESPN2 tryouts. Faking like you're homeless for a few days. But then there are those assignments, accepted purely for the money, that leave you feeling so evil afterwards you figure the only way to keep the streak going is to go out and stomp some kittens or sell heroin to octogenarians.

Which is precisely the situation I'm in right now. Evil Client, Stupid Article, Ton of Money. In a state of near-constant verbal and electronic bombardment by people whose email addresses read things like 'BILL SMITH - LEGAL' and whose voices carry the brittle desperation of four-pack-a-day smokers caught for 100 billable hours a week on the 99th floor of a non-smoking office building. I even cupped a spider and took the tickling beastie outside last night instead of stomping it because I felt it would give an incremental boost to my karma, which sorely needs it.

My moral ambivalence translates into pumping a lot of weights, watching bad French horror movies, working on the book, and generally remaining as cheerfully acerbic as possible. My office-mate says, "Arik Sharon had a stroke," to which I reply, "I guess that shatters his lifelong dream of ever appearing on Final Jeopardy."

I'll take Inconveniently-Timed Brain Damage for $500, Alex.

Although it looks like the Prime Minister might very well recover. The only thing you can tell about broken-down old men is that they're survivors. The only thing I conclude from the last few days is that, where man used to try and conquer other men by hurling loads of flaming arrows and other large missiles via catapult, now we launch legions of chattering lawyers via Gulfstream IV. Meanwhile, I find myself listening to a lot of Spoon and Joe Strummer. In less than a week I will be on a beach, praise the lord and pass the ammunition.