Richard was up early the next morning. After a shower and a cinnamon-raisin bagel, he was online, scouring CareerBuilders, Monster, Bookbuilders of Boston, corporate job postings, industry blogs, and the Human Resources Web sites of local publishers. In four hours, he found three leads, none of them promising. Positions in publishing were scarce, particularly in editorial and production. Here was clear evidence that the industry had become moribund—or perhaps it was already dead but had yet to emit the telltale stench. He spent the afternoon tweaking his résumé, composing mock cover letters, and compiling lists of potential references, a few of which stretched back to his college days, professors and summer-internship supervisors he hadn’t spoken to, much less thought of, in over fifteen years. The application process was disheartening, demeaning. For the past twelve years he had avoided the indignities of the job search whirligig, and now his spleen oozed pitch-black bile as he sat at his desk in his underwear, compartmentalizing his accomplishments.

Was it really worth it to crawl back into the arms of corporate America just to be swaddled in mediocrity again? Would it not be more sensible to chuck it all and begin anew? He could move to Alaska, or the Cascades, or the Yukon, adopting the life of a poet-eremite with a one-room cabin nestled among lush green foothills on the bank of an unpolluted river. People had done this. He’d read about them, seen the news features and documentaries. Overworked and underappreciated cube moles deciding they couldn’t take it anymore; newly bushy-bearded ex-strivers relating tales, with condescending self-satisfaction, of how they had quit their jobs, sold their houses, cars, boats, and decamped from their condos and high-rise pads because the demands of modern life were killing them inside. Richard chuckled, a rueful little chuckle that tripped a bomb, and suddenly his own demands of mortgage and car payments, cable/phone/water and now health insurance bills collapsed his levees. His flyaway fantasies perished, and he was again awash in the reality of his diminishing prospects.

Later that evening, Richard was still job-searching, plugging in keywords and skill sets, parsing pages of results, forwarding copies of his résumé and boilerplate introductions to publishers willy-nilly, regardless of whether positions were posted on their sites. A long, empty, potholed road of disappointment stretched out before him. Still, he was able to marvel at how he had successfully managed to condense his education, experiences, merits, and viability—from UMass up to yesterday’s fiasco—into four hundred seventy-seven words. He inspected his résumé for the umpteenth time, name at the top, center-aligned in 14-point boldfaced Garamond. Prominent, assertive, poised. The properly formatted Word document had reached the inboxes of dozens of prospective employers from across Massachusetts, New Hampshire, and Rhode Island, and Richard was just now noticing that it contained three typos, one of which was in his email address.

Next Chapter: Part Three: Diversions, Digressions, Discoveries, Chapter II