Take Stock Week Day 3: A Great Gig

A Great Gig
Originally uploaded by thegreatplotnik.

October 20-26, 2005, is Take Stock Week at Great Plotnik World Headquarters and Meatball Kitchen. Our subject for Day 3 is: Work.

If you're lucky, you find a job to do that you love. If you're really lucky, you find a job that you love that pays you enough money to stop worrying every month about the rent or the mortgage. If you're really, really lucky, you not only find that job but someone who is willing to hire you to do it, and the jackpot is if they hire you and then disappear to allow you to do what they hired you for.

The older you get, the more you realize most people never even get to step one. They complain about their job, they hate their boss, it takes too long to get to work and even longer to get home and they're sick to death of all the same old jokes and the lunchroom smells and nobody loves them and they're underutilized, overworked and underpaid.

The Great Plotnik is here to tell you loving your job is the key. He has done many things, but never has come close to the charge of finding that last rhyme that turns the Chorus into a piece of art, or discovering that musical phrase that makes the Verse melody memorable.

It ain't easy. It doesn't happen often. When it does, you can't imagine ever wanting to do anything else. That's the place to shoot for.

Plotnik has loved other jobs too. He loved driving a cab nights in NYC. His time was his own, he could work as much or as little as he wished, he could use his wits to figure out how, where and when to discover the best fares, and he could learn everything about the geography of a wonderful town. It was perfect, indeed, until after the third time he got robbed, when the one-legged Dominican felon threw the sledgehammer through the window into the cab's backseat trying to hit the poor man's estranged wife who sat, wide-eyed and paralyzed with fear, surrounded by broken glass. Plotnik decided then and there he'd enough of driving a cab in NYC.

Playing piano in the unemployed miners' bar in Wilkes-Barre had its moments, but in the end it was not a jovial place.

Playing Middle-Eastern music with a band at the Fountainbleu Hotel in Miami Beach had its moments too, until the band got fired on New Year's Eve and had its equipment thrown into the alley. They deserved it. And it was quite an education to work with the five Russian magicians who could steal food from all the hotel dining rooms and make it reappear in their dressing room every night after the show.

The Hollywood songwriter business was not to The Great Plotnik's taste. It took him a long time to figure that out, because he thought he knew what he was doing. But ultimately there were too many unwritten rules, and 'way too many drugs, and you can only bend over so far until your back breaks.

Playing music for corporate parties and fund raisers and dances and fund raisers and barmitzvahs and funerals was OK, but it was always a little weird to realize, from a songwriter's perspective, that the song the people loved best of all was "I Just Called To Say I Love You." Plotnik hated "I Just Called To Say I Love You," but sang it 500 times. He still hates it. He's getting pissed off right now. Whose goddam idea was this Take Stock thing?

Playing for weddings was another story. A wedding is a joyful occasion, when everyone in the room wants to be there. Being a part of a bride's memory album is an honor. There were few weddings that did not have magical moments.

And then, when a curious turn of events led to The Great Plotnik being asked to play for really, really, fancy weddings in really, really fancy hotels in really, really wealthy communities in far away countries on exotic continents -- playing for weddings became even more fun.

Until they didn't. They got boring too.

Which, Plotnik supposes, is the message for today: Work at a job you love, but don't expect to love it forever. People change. Circumstances change. And don't ever do a job only for the money, unless you are honest with yourself that making money is the reason you're doing it. It's a perfectly acceptable reason to do something, as long as you don't lie to yourself about it.

I Just Called To Say I Love You. I Just Called To Say How Much I Care. I Just Called To Say I Love You. And I Mean it From the Bottom of My Heart.

Can you believe this shit?

This serving of bile ends today's sermon. Tomorrow we shall talk about love.