Day 2: Take this job and love it

You can call me Steve because I’ve had so many jobs

NOTE: Everyday during the Devil’s Advocates membership drive for The Devil Strip, I’m going to write something — a mix of things, but at the end, there’ll always be an update on the campaign, the magazine, etc. If you have questions, post them in the comments and I’ll answer them in a subsequent post.

My second favorite Frank Sinatra song is “That’s Life” and my second favorite part of that song is when admits he’d been a puppet, a pauper, a pirate, a poet, a pawn and a king. I’m a sucker for lists. I have one too.

That’s not Frank Sinatra. That’s Toby Huss, an excellent character actor who I loved most as Artie — The Strongest Man …in the World! — on “The Adventures of Pete and Pete.”

I’ve been a writer, a waiter, a preacher, a carpenter, a literacy tutor, a freelancer, an editor, a stockboy, a delivery boy, a marketing manager, a bank teller, a camp counselor and an after-school director. I’ve sold ads, pest control and men’s clothing — but I walked out of an interview for a gig selling meat out the back of a truck. I’ve worked in a call center, a sporting goods store, a movie theatre, a video store, a clothing store, an alt, a daily paper, two TV stations, a coffee shop and four restaurants, if you count the week I was a Waffle House server. I went to two colleges and dropped out three times. I’ve had lots of what the kids call “side hustles” too.

Once, I was given an enormous vacuum and lowered by wire rope into a giant machine that makes diapers.

The job I wanted most that I didn’t get: Route sales restocking cassette tapes at truck stops. Four days on the road, three days at home. A per diem. Freedom. Adventure. Motels.

This, by the way, is what the cover of the April edition of The Devil Strip looks like. There’s a lot of good stuff inside, including a piece about Jennifer Worden whose art is featured on the cover.

The only gig I’ve held as long as my unpaid internship at The Devil Strip was as a writer/salesman/editor/emcee at The 11th Hour, the alt-mag where I got my start.

What I’m trying to say is that it took a while — and a lot of trying, a lot of denial, a lot of failure — to figure out what I didn’t want to do. I know what I want to do now. It’s this.

As if I didn’t want to throw my arms around Akron already, then yesterday we launched the Devil’s Advocates membership drive and my hope was rekindled that I’ll get to keep doing this.

This, by the way, isn’t necessarily publishing. That seems too narrow. What I love about our magazine is that it’s not just a magazine. It wouldn’t interest me (or you, probably) if we were limited to a few bound pages every month.

The Devil Strip is a vehicle for civic engagement, for art and literature, for creating connections — and not just for our readers. I mean for me. I love problem solving. (Not math. Like, don’t send me word problems and stuff.) Because we have the magazine and are connected to some incredible humans, we can run up on problems in our community and affect change. It’s not limited to writing stories, whether advocating for good things or reporting on the bad stuff holding us back. We can get our people together to take action in real life. Some of it you may never see. Sometimes, we’re just a conduit.

Three and a half years ago, I didn’t have that. I do now and if I’m going to keep doing it, that’ll be because of the people of Akron and it’ll be for them I keep going. That’s a virtuous circle, which is the best kind.

Housekeeping:

• Day one, we had 80 members sign up — 50 of whom are Rogues, which was my goal for the entire month. Thank you!
• My hope is for 500 by the end of the month, which would be 15 people a day. That figure would cover our printing costs, design/layout expenses and office rent. More on our goals in a future post.
• Good news: More people (136) from our newsletter clicked on the link for the Merch Store than on memberships.
• Bad news: The merch store isn’t working properly. Fixing that is one of my big goals for the day.
• My favorite Sinatra song is “Learning the Blues” which is haunted, lonely and gorgeous. You can listen to it here. Tell me what you think.
• My favorite thing about “That’s Life” is the interplay between the reality that we all get knocked flat on our asses and the hopeful message that we can get back up again, in fact that getting back up is what life’s about. That he ends darkly, contrary to the big loungy-sounding finish, puts a fitting cap on the brutality of the song.