Match The Famous Writer To Their Humiliating Day Job!

Writing Life

While Substack is exploding thanks to influencers fleeing TikTok and 20-year-olds writing about their sex lives, let’s also, while we’re at it, give a warm Substack welcome to the following losers and misfits.

-Hamish McKenzie

1. I file claims. If you’re working in a factory and you lose a limb to a lathe, take a form. If you’re working in a factory and you lose a limb to a planing machine, take a different form. If you’re working in a factory and you lose a limb to a rotary saw, there’s a different department that you’ll have to see, which will probably, though, send you back to me for the form in the end. If you are a company and believe your premiums are too high, a representative will visit your workplace at some point in the next five to eleven years to inspect. I dream frequently of turning into an insect.

   

   Take a form

2. After the abject failure of my self-published book of poems, I have been working at the Bureau of Indian Affairs — until the discovery of my poems led to my firing. Fortunately, I am now a clerk for the Attorney General where my writing is much appreciated — by which I mean that I have received departmental citations for the clean, crisp quality of my penmanship.

3. There’s a certain amount of excitement about me, both on account of my clean-cut varsity good looks and because I am the American writer who “could go all the way,” but my preference has been to work the night shift at a loony bin where I have become best friends with my patients and drop acid with them as willing guinea pigs in the CIA’s efforts to brainwash the population. My plans for the future are to get ahold of a bus and then, uh, take it from there!

4. I have a twenty-year bit for armed robbery tacked on top of a twenty-year bit for murder tacked on top of a bullshit forgery sentence. I’m not too worried about any of that. My mainest man Norm Mailer is turning me loose. Just wish Norman had the chops to spring me for the dude I murder six weeks after getting out. Writers have only so much pull.

   

   My mainest man

5. The oyster piracy business works by taking a skiff, riding around the oyster beds at night, hauling in as many oysters as you can and selling them in the market the next morning. It puts hair on your chest but not quite as much as clubbing seals to death.

6. My financial plan is to have my wife work as a dancer, and if that doesn’t work to be supported by her lover, who is also my lover, who is a therapy patient and keeps a diary — but whose husband, as best as we can tell, works for a living.

7. Working as a chambermaid is not nearly so bad if you’ve started your day with a fifth of Jack Daniels and you get to pick off a pair of earrings or two. Anyway, it beats the hell out of working sober in the ER.

8. I am very excited by the great and glorious work of my comrades in the Writers’ Union. The assembled talent there will put to shame the Fascists in the Imperialist West! As for me, pay no attention. I am the janitor sweeping up the students’ cigarette butts in the Union’s backyard.

9. I moved to London — one step ahead of the law — to be an actor. I am, by all accounts, quite bad at it — and am best known for playing a ghost killed off in the first act. The entirety of my written records are petty lawsuits except for, uh, the best literature ever written, bitches! By a funny coincidence if you take the second word of the third line of each Third Act of my plays and run it through an enormous cipher wheel found by dredging the Severn River, you get the words “Francis Bacon at your service.”

10. While most of my friends are being (deservedly) hanged, I seem to be doing just fine digging up the gold I buried before the war.

a) Henry Miller b) William Shakespeare c) Lucia Berlin d) Jack London e) Franz Kafka f) Andrei Platonov g) Walt Whitman h) Louis-Ferdinand Céline i) Jack Henry Abbott j) Ken Kesey