The 23 year old neighbor kid comes over to smoke pot in our car port. No big deal, I told him it’s fine, just don’t offer me any and he never has. My last roommate told me the guy is trouble but so far he has not done anything to bother me and we talk sometimes and everything’s cool.
But it was kind of amusing the other day when I got home from work and he was there. We started talking about working and he told me that he is a security guard somewhere. Then he started telling me how easy it is because he goofs off and he doesn’t try to do good work, and he generally didn’t care about his job. And I was smiling and being friendly but I was thinking to myself that he is clueless and doesn’t even know how irresponsible he sounds, and he doesn’t realize how bad this all sounds to me.
And I was still thinking about it when I got inside my apartment and I was fixing myself a snack. I thought, “How can someone be like that and sound like that and not even care?”
And then it dawned on me and I answered my own question. That was exactly how I sounded when I was in my twenties. That was a long time ago because I’m 58 now. Even going back to when I was 17 and I got my first job and by the time I was 19 I had about fifteen different jobs and I didn’t care about most of them.
I just wanted pot and beer money and gas for my car so I got job after job and never lasting at any of them longer then 3 months and only tried hard at about half of them. And even well into my twenties in the 1980’s after I had been diagnosed, I still switched jobs a lot though I tried my best at some of them but I was addicted to crack and it affected my job performance.
It wasn’t until I got clean in 1990 when I was in my thirties that I started really taking my jobs seriously and I went into each job with the goal of doing the best I can and putting out extra effort to be a hard worker and a good employee. And that takes me up to my current job which I’ve been at for 5 years. So yeah, I’ve matured in a lot of ways and talking to that kid that reminds me how far I’ve come.