It was the last of the tarot-reading Saturday morning overnight music programs on our local radio station, the last card in the major arcana, The World. And so I tried to catch it all live by getting up at 3:30 and lighting a candle, some incense. You press into the manic realm of the not OK, pre-0400. The DJ is soft spoken and my hearing is not so good but she was saying something about new beginnings that also signify the end.

I never recognized the songs but it was always good. Maybe it was the fact it was dark and Saturday and I was all alone with my music and coffee.

The writer George Saunders writes, “we feel we know a fictional character when that person has revealed some excess to us, which often takes the form of a fear, frustration, a desire, a passion, and so on.

“Once there’s an excess, ‘plot’ will occur naturally, as that person’s excess goes out into the world.”

I had a lot of excesses. Going to the state park every day for one, but now Tiger Mountain too. I did both twice this week, clocking near 15 miles yesterday. Tiger Mountain is just 15 minutes from our house, one of the Cascade foothills or “Issaquah Alps,” named after an adjacent town at the bottom of the plateau.

I thought maybe I could request a song for the first time and wouldn’t that be neat if she played it. But I couldn’t think of any songs with “the world” in the title. And it might break the spell I had with this DJ, to interact with her like that. I didn’t know what she looked like but I knew her voice well. In fact (and this strange) I had turned her into a literary character from one of my favorite books, Infinite Jest.

In Infinite Jest, Joelle van Dyne, also known as Madame Psychosis, is a character known for her beauty, her addiction to crack cocaine, and her mysterious veil. She is also the star of the lethal film, Infinite Jest, and hosts a late-night radio show under the name Madame Psychosis where she explores themes of addiction and recovery.

I imagined DJ Greta was Madame Psychosis in my favorite book and I was one of the lead characters Mario Incandenza, a real kind of excess in my now sobriety.

It was the best of both worlds to get the job I wanted so badly and for them to say the start date was August 1. That would give me the rest of the month off, the nicest time of the year in the Pacific Northwest. With Dawn and Charlotte headed to Germany next week and Lily San Francisco, there was nothing stopping me from a backpacking trip. I texted our strange dog watcher Gail and my friends Brad and Black Diamond Bill. Neither were available and that would leave it all up to me. There was also my friend Loren who wasn’t much of a backpacker, but his father had just died and he was up for a camping trip. Maybe we could go back to the coast.

The sky now had that ribbed look, some gray clouds like the raised ridges on the brain.

I’d had another one of my last-day-at-Starbucks work anxiety dreams this week, replaying how it felt to get squeezed out of a job and a physical place after working there for almost 20 years. But this time it was really nice. I knew I was dreaming and every bit of it felt right and restorative. I wondered if I’d finally come to the end of that sequence, 10 years now, looping through those feelings of leaving, not being able to scan my badge.

Maybe this new job could help me heal all that. Or maybe it was just a job, though it never is to me. Would probably mean the world.

Categories: Addiction, Corporate America, Creative Nonfiction

Tags: Creative Nonfiction, Memoir, pacific northwest