A guy has to do what a guy has to do.

byrocr7

2.6K followers

Updated 9 years ago

I'm sitting in a hotel room in a small town just outside of Seattle WA. Like most of the Washington inhabitants, I'm in a somber mood and a little angry... but it's not because of the way the super bowl ended. Instead, I'm irritated with my ability to perform, or rather the lack of it.

If you've followed any of my posts at WA, you know I'm in a tough spot. My life of affluence and comfort recently came to a screeching halt and I'm desperately struggling to keep my head above water. I'm currently surviving off odd jobs, when I can find them while I continue to educate myself and slowly morph into an internet entrepreneur.

Over the past few months, I've mowed lawns, cleaned shops, repaired toilets, hung drywall, painted rooms, treated roofs, pressure washed houses and a plethora of other menial jobs. I hunt Craigs List gigs, buy and sell stuff on eBay and contact friends hoping to find enough work to keep a roof over my head and food on the table. If it pays money and it's within my ability or even close to it, I'm all over it. I'm in that spot in life where a guy has to do what a guy has to do.

My buddy Neal is in underground construction. His company drills lateral holes in the ground and installs conduit that houses fiber optics and power cables. It's very physically demanding work, that requires a lot of travel and is fraught with tedious detail, bureaucracy, regulation and strict time constraints.

One of Neal's employees quit a couple of weeks ago leaving him shorthanded with a good sized job in front of him. Neal knows my plight and called me and asked me if I could give him a hand until he could get another qualified employee hired. I was eager to go to work. I've helped Neal out a little the past but mostly just moving a bit of equipment, completing paperwork and painting out bores... not very strenuous work. That was about to change.

I woke up at 5:30 Monday morning, which is pretty typical for me. I like to go through my email, have a cup of coffee and finish the waking up process a little before jumping out of bed. Later that morning, I hopped in a service truck with the guys and drove four hours to the job site.

This particular job required that we close some lanes of traffic to accommodate a road crossing and that we completed that part of the job after 7:00 PM as not to impede daytime traffic. If the job went well, we should have it wrapped up by midnight, a long day for sure, but doable. The job did not go well.

As it ended up, we worked through the night and I got to bed at 6:00 AM the following morning, having put in a 24 plus hour day. I was so exhausted I could hardly function. We had to be back at the yard by noon, which meant getting up at 10:30, having slept a little over 4 hours, and put in another day.

Today seemed even more brutal to me in that we had to hand-dig a trench about 24 inches wide, 36 inches deep and 40 feet in length in root infested cobble in a bit of a downpour. We worked until midnight... a 12-hour shift. My hands, which are already pretty messed up from a previous accident, are cracked, blistered and bleeding. My level of exhaustion reached a new high.

The next day started at 7:00 AM. The yard is a beehive of activity in the morning, filled with twenty-something-year-old construction workers in hard hats and bright colored shirts, jockeying trucks around, fueling, watering and chaining equipment down. Diesel exhaust and the sound of backup beepers filled the morning air.

The guys I work with are great and they are an interesting lot. They eat corn dogs from a local convenience store for breakfast and slam a burger for lunch almost always without taking a break. They work very hard, stripping pipe, digging trenches, vaccing potholes, loading sacks of mud, hand compacting pavement and the like.

At the end of the day, they return to the hotel, shower and we all meet for dinner around 8 or 9:00 PM at a pizza joint, Mexican restaurant or the little place next to our hotel. They (we) drink beer, sometimes a lot of beer. Then they get up in the morning, load a generous pinch of tobacco between their lip and gum, and do it all over again. They are a tough bunch. Long hours of physical labor and a horrible diet doesn't seem to phase them... it phased me.

So I sit in my hotel room, exhausted as I ever remember being, trying to psych myself up for another day of construction work. It's funny. I've never perceived myself as a quitter or as one to shy from a challenge, but tonight I'm close. I'm even a little emotional, although I think it's just from the lack of sleep. My peril just seems to weigh more tonight than usual.

I think aging is difficult... at least it is for me. I mean I stay active and I'm in decent shape, but it seems my mind is always in a fist fight with my body over the subject of aging lately. My mind (ego) is always saying yes, but my body fights back with a big no. In fact, every muscle in my body is screaming NOOOoooo as I type this. I just don't have the juice I use to have and it's a little sad to me. It's a loss of sorts on some kind of level.

I have to do this though... to continue to work this gig while I reinvent myself. My back is tight against the wall and I need the money, but, to be honest, it's more than that for me. I want my son to know he can get through the tough spots in his life when they hit. I want him to know he can do it because his old man did it. I want him to understand that when his life gets tough, and it will at some point in time, that a guy has to do what a guy has to do, and he can make it. I want you to know it too... that you can do what you have to do.

I must sleep...

Rico

Post Script... I know this type of material isn't really related to all things Wealthy Affiliate, but I'm trying to develop my writing style before creating content for my website. Any observations, criticisms or coaching with that in mind would be appreciated.