New journey

Sometimes you plan your next stop on life's journey, and sometimes you get booted off the train and have to experience your next location with no prior planning. This, alas, is what happened to me yesterday. The gigantic corporate entity I was employed with told me that my services were no longer needed after four short months. For fear of litigation, I won't mention their name, I'll just content myself with describing this entity as the largest retail purveyor of a brown caffeinated liquid in the known world.

I experienced all of the usual emotions associated with involuntary ejection from the career locomotive, like righteous indignation, wrath, worry, panic and dejection. I had been cast aside in a backwater town known as unemployment and had no bearings or direction. What in the hell am I gonna do now? Mrs. Vagabond does like to eat now and again and the owner of our shanty town does prefer to be paid for letting us pitch our tent there. Since this great country of ours hasn't been on the barter system for 400 years or so, we do need some scratch, a few ducats or some such coin of the realm in order to keep the journey moving forward.

I will also freely admit to some very unhealthy, non-productive hate and loathing for the ginormous, outwardly benevolent, seemingly caring, self-righteously green, sanctimoniously community friendly corporation full of rat-bastard pricks who had just canned me. I felt like one of the barnyard brethren in Orwell's "Animal farm" who had just caught the porcine leaders of utopia drinking from the old farmer's beer barrel and sleeping in his bed. All of the propaganda and slogans that had been bleated into my brain during recruitment and training were now bubbling to the surface of my thoughts and making me wonder how I was ever naive enough to buy into the whole "four legs good, two legs bad" type of corporate gobbledygook. In retrospect, I realized that I had been asked to do the impossible and given no time to retrieve the disastrous situation that had been the long term creation of others. I had responded by throwing myself headlong into the task, giving it my all and neglecting the other areas of my life in the misguided belief that I would be supported and developed. I had forgotten the first rule of corporate life: If your superior can cover up their own incompetence and save their skin by sacrificing you, they will.

Never fear, fellow travelers, never fear. Such counterproductive, backward looking thinking is not a normal, every day feature of this vagabond's mindset. I soon realized that this event, however traumatic at the time, is just another turn in the wonderful, meandering journey that is the vagabond way. As my own journey takes an unexpected turn, I will approach this new direction with an open minded curiosity and an anticipation for the experience. Time to reinvent this vagabond once again and who knows where that process will lead. All I know now is that I will enjoy the journey . . .