>when I was eighteen, I got a summer job as a playground attendant—a parkie. And I was told to wear a white T-shirt and brown pants and brown shoes and a whistle around my neck—which they provided, the whistle. But I never acquired the rest of the outfit. I wore blue jeans and checkered shirts and kept the whistle in my pocket and just sat on a park bench disguised as an ordinary citizen. And this is where I read Faulkner, As I Lay Dying and Light in August. And got paid for it. And then James Joyce, and it was through Joyce that I learned to see something in language that carried a radiance, something that made me feel the beauty and fervor of words, the sense that a word has a life and a history. And I’d look at a sentence in Ulysses or in Moby-Dick or in Hemingway—maybe I hadn’t gotten to Ulysses at that point, it was Portrait of the Artist—but certainly Hemingway and the water that was clear and swiftly moving and the way the troops went marching down the road and raised dust that powdered the leaves of the trees. All this in a playground in the Bronx.
That story about Dellilo is always my go-to thought when I think how different it must have been holding down a job while writing/reading in the old days compared to now. Literally no job is this cushy unless your daddy owns the company. I worked at an independent cinema for a while and would have times where I'd just sit for an hour twiddling my thumbs - no books allowed though.
Christian Nguyen
From hearsay, night security at a warehouse/office/mall seems to have a lot of sitting down time - just doing a round of the premises every hour or so.
Parker Lee
nightjob at hotel or similar. Almost no guest (intereferance) and you can do what you what really and will get paied. As long as you are okay changing your live to be a night person. I did this for a semester break job once and it actually was enjoyable. Free newspapers. I was allowed to help myself a little from the bar and the kitchen. The guest who I deal with where always calm since they were tired or funny and interesting because they were drunk. Getting into and out of the rythem of being a wake all night and sleep during the day though was difficult.
Jacob White
I love delillo but this is peak boomer posting.
Trying to even sit on a park bench in the Bronx is already unreasonable let alone getting such a job at that age, let alone not getting micromanaged.
Austin Garcia
boomer privilege
Jayden Ross
Use the notepad on your cellphone if u wanna write. Read while unemployed.
Kayden Harris
I'm a nurse but only work part-time nowadays, with most of my shifts being graveyard ones, and I do a fair amount of reading when things quiet down.
Aaron Williams
What makes you love Delillo so much?
Landon Rodriguez
His ability to write things like the baseball stadium opening to underworld
Nathan Jenkins
try working as a receptionist in an old people's home. i did this for 3 years some years ago, shit was so cash. my second job now is as a receptionist in a small branch office of an adult education centre. tey pay me 13€ an hour for just sitting there and reading books, but sadly I'm doing this only 1-2 times a month.
Jordan Bailey
i have a job like this it's awesome. and i get paid a lot too, lost in the corporate shuffle.
Andrew Russell
i have a colleague who's doing this as his second job. he only uses it to watch tv, though.
Isaiah Peterson
Raymond Carver had a school janitor job. On night shifts, he would get all his work done in 3 or 4 hours and then write for the rest of his shift.
Faulkner had a night shift job for the University of Mississippi's power plant. He said he did all of his work in 2 hours and wrote As I Lay Dying in 6 weeks during the other 6 hours.
Nathan Carter
Get a gig as security in a hotel. Unless something happens, which it might, you're generally doing 12 hour shifts and other than making rounds a couple times a shift, it's usually fairly quiet and there's plenty of downtime to read. That said your colleagues will all be meatheads who might not give you the kind of time to really dig into something.
Bentley Campbell
>tfw used to have a job like this but mom made you quit because you have to be doing "real work"
Ian Jenkins
I "work" 58 hours a week. I program and operate a lathe. Small runs of prototype parts. I read nearly the entire time and am making 50k+ a year after taxes.
Ayden Turner
Try reading interesting works that make you contemplate interesting subjects, then save the contemplation for when you're doing repetitive tasks at work. When I was a lab assistant I would wash dishes while high for like 4 hours a day and just think about Plato and the universe while listening to classical music
Grayson Jackson
>mom made you quit
fuck is wrong with you do what you like
Blake Ross
>fags complaining they've never had a job this easy >literally a summer job for teenagers >implying there's anything holding you back other than your own mediocrity
John Stewart
Are there common-place university jobs like this? I want an easy job while I go to school.
Josiah Robinson
College Campuses exist for exactly this purpose - unfortunately the University has been proselytized into a chesspiece of class warfare and rarely serves its intended purpose
David Perry
sometimes if i get the slow shift at my pub i can read but the old men grump
>go to public library >basically 90% of the people that work there just sit all day reading sitting in a table in the sector of the library they are "responsible" for >their only job is to help some occasional person that need help to find a book my afternoons are all busy, but as soon as I can I will apply for this shit
Gabriel Ward
it just depends on how chill your boss is. these jobs definitely exist, i've had them.
Henry Perez
you could do what i did as a young twenty something and just stay homeless, live in your car, and go through your reading list at some fancy schmancy public library
it's not a GREAT living but it's doable if you grind at some bullshit job for a while
Grayson Morris
why did you want to stay homeless?
Asher Nelson
at the time literally all i wanted to do was read and write at the expense of pretty much everything else. i'd basically just read, write, and, travel. i definitely don't regret it but i'm too old to do that kinda stuff now without physically wrecking myself
Leo Scott
who are your favorite writers?
Andrew Davis
you know when i first started it was the more obscure stuff but i've gotten increasingly basic with age. dostoevsky, bulgakov, borges, calvino, etc.
i'm not trying to sound super old by the way i'm, like, in my mid-thirties lmao
Bentley Green
It's called a playground associate now. If you live in nyc they will pay you 15 an hour to maintain a single park and engage children in activities. They will randomly sneak up on you though so you need to be crafty.
Andrew Scott
My experiences in New York City make me painfully aware of how crafty and sneaky a city it is. It's full of Jews, true, but the actual Jewish people aren't even the biggest Jews. That would be the landlords and bureaucrats and union bosses, all of whom are looking to swindle people at the easiest possible opportunity. They out-Jew actual Jews, even if they're Anglo-Saxon.
Josiah Walker
They don't actually. Maybe they fucked you over but you really have no idea how deep that shit can go. And generally speaking, landlords aren't anglosaxon; it depends on the neighborhood though.
Ayden Jenkins
look for jobs in the bureaucracy. i worked in an office for the state government and had long periods where i could read by myself
Jackson Wright
I live in the area DeLillo used to live in and visits occasionally. Pretty sure the park in question is Vincent Ciccarone Park, which I occasionally visit with my quasi-girlfriend. It's not so bad but there's no park attendant there and sometimes the niggers post up their """"churches"""" on the corner and scream into megaphones. It's not as bad as you might think though.
Christian Davis
I had one of those jobs, I used to work as a projectionist. As long as I got all my stuff done in the first break(10ish-12), the rest of the day was mine to read
Ryder Jackson
>with my quasi-girlfriend
It enrages me to imagine you, a fit white tall American, wearing shirt and sunglasses, hair perfect, a little wavy and brushed back from the face, having A FUCKING GIRLFRIEND and being able to PENETRATE HER AT WILL and having OTHER GIRLS (!!!) that you could penetrate and kiss and hug and make laugh whenever you like. I could literally walk over to the wall in my shitty rented room right fucking now and smash my skull open at the INJUSTICE of this decrepit world. To think that right now you are literally breathing and digesting and thinking and that a girl exists on this planet whose subconscious is thinking about you and perhaps even feeling excited right now to meet up with you again, maybe even involved at this very second in a phone conversation with you. You KISS her? You PENETRATE her? You hold hands and hug her? Lay down with her? Make her laugh? TICKLE? Do you tickle her? Fucking hell. It drives me insane. Holy fuck.
Jonathan Ramirez
My 72 year old grandpa is a fucking security guard, and your description is accurate.
What's more, he recently got himself an iPhone. What this means is that during his night shifts (he normally works nights), he sets an alarm and sleeps for 50 minutes per hour. Then he wakes up and does a 10 minute round of the premises before going to sleep again.
Not only does this mean that he's getting a good amount of sleep (not REM, granted, but hardly deprived/suffering either), but that when work finishes he has his own day to himself.
