It’s Time For a Change.

It’s Friday.

Friday, for a lot of people, means the weekend. It means looking forward to a couple of days of rest, maybe doing the shopping and other errands, possibly catching a movie with the family or a football game.

For me, Friday means it’s time to switch my brain from high-level concepts like writing and podcasting and cultural commentary over to organ grinder monkey mode.

It means driving down the road, sitting in the parking garage in the perfect spot so my GPS puts me just between Wegmans and Costco, staring at a little app on my phone waiting for grocery orders to come in.

It means accepting jobs that pay very little, require many hours of time, cost me a bunch of money in gas and wear and tear on my car, and send me home at night to an empty apartment, dissatisfied, tired, and bored out of my mind, knowing I’ve got to do it again for the rest of the weekend until my scheduled days for writing and podcast work come again.

It literally means pushing a cart around a store, scanning barcodes as I do a paint-by-numbers scavenger hunt for cilantro and crackers and yogurt and chicken breasts, driving them around town to drop in front of someone’s closed door, taking a photo, and doing it all over again.

A very good day grosses me about $150 before tax and expenses.

A fairly good day is about $100.

On too many days I only bring home about $60.

It’s the luck of the draw. It has nothing to do with intelligence or effort.

There has not been one month this year where I’ve come out ahead because of this work. It’s desperation effort. It’s work I do because I’ve had no luck finding anything better, and because it fills in the gaps left by this Substack and the MTS Podcast until I can fully live on what they bring in. It worked for quite a while to fuel Notes From the Road, but every month that passes, that’s feeling like thinner and thinner gruel.

My life is not where I wanted it to be by any stretch of the imagination, but despite my growing awareness that it’s time to change, it has nevertheless been stuck in stagnation and atrophy. I was made for more than this, and I know it. I survived this year of unwanted separation doing what I had to do to get by, but that’s not enough of a reason to get out of bed in the morning anymore — even if I still force myself to do it.

Yesterday I said I was going to find a way to make time to write more here. nancyv humorously asked me what the recipe is for making time. I told her I didn’t know but I was hoping to figure it out.

Today, I decided that the recipe was turning around, driving home from that damn parking garage and working on actively putting in the effort, rather than letting the guilt of “I need to be out there doing what puts cash in my pocket today” steal time from building the things I love to do that I know have real value. That trap has been keeping me from tackling the task of nourishing those things (despite the fear) head on.

My short-term goal for myself was simple: find a way to go make the $100 I would have made delivering groceries today doing something that actually matters and builds towards the future.

My medium-term goal is equally modest: build enough revenue streams that I’m making $5,000 a month.

There was a time in my life when I made multiple times that, doing the same kind of work that seems revenue-resistant now. Maybe someday I’ll get back there, but for now I just need breathing room. It’s not that these efforts can’t work, it’s that they stopped working for various reasons that need to be examined and adjusted to compensate for. And I’ve been so lost in grief and the seemingly endless battle against despair that I haven’t been able to put in the effort necessary to figure out how to fix what’s broken.

Yeah, I may still need to go do the dumb thing sometimes to pay the bills, but I can’t let it keep stealing the time from the smart thing that will actually provide a living if I just nourish it with time and effort. I’m not looking to get rich. I’m looking to live simply but sufficiently off of the gifts I’ve been given and the skills I have honed for over 20 years.

My audience has changed a lot since I started TSF back in 2020. Things that didn’t click with readers a few years ago get more traction now. Several of you made clear in the comments that you’re interested in seeing me write more about the weird topics Kale Zelden and I cover on our show. I’m happy to do that if there’s an audience for it. Perhaps that’s the audience I should have been cultivating all along.

The deep, memoir-style personal essays will continue, but I can’t keep cranking out one of those a week under the current circumstances. My life has become too small to write those the way I want. It has become a real challenge to capture the experiences and observations that fuel them walking the same stores, driving the same roads, seeing the same sights day after day. I have to broaden my horizons. I have to get out of town. I am a memoirist and travel writer who can’t afford to leave home, and that’s got to change. But I can fill in with commentary on other topics that don’t require as much personal bloodletting to produce.

In any case, none of this is possible without all of you. Although I leave most posts free for now, every person who has a paid subscription to The Skojec File is a vital contributor to my ability to do that work. I need to collaborate with you to ensure I’m holding up my end of the bargain to provide real value in exchange for your hard-earned money.

That starts with writing more.

So I’m working on a new plan to do just that. I need structure, and I’m bad at creating it, so I’m working with my little menagerie of helper bots to audit this Substack, look for the things that are working and not working, develop a cadence (and maybe a loose editorial calendar that leaves room for spontaneity), and tweak all the backend stuff that needs TLC.

And I have to start looking for small-scale adventures to give the deeper essays new life. Little forays into the wider world, and the lessons it holds in store.

I have been cooped up too long, only leaving to go do work I hate, coming home to a place I don’t want to be, staring into screens to make up for the silence and the loss of human presence. That is a death sentence in slow motion, and if I’m going to survive this awful thing I’ve been forced to endure, I have to rage against the dying of the light, not just whinge about how dark it’s gotten.

And I’m not going to lie to you: I’m scared.

Scared that this momentary burst of agency will fade the next time a surge of grief rises up to consume it. Scared that I’ll panic and go back to the familiar but too-small habits that barely keep my head above water because I’m afraid that I’ll drown if I don’t. Scared that I’ll disappoint those of you who are rooting for me to turn this sinking ship around. Scared that I’ll let myself down and start fading away because I never found a good enough reason not to.

As I sat in that damn parking garage today, engine idling, staring at my cracked phone screen I can’t afford to get fixed, watching lowball orders come in so slowly it was like watching my life tick away one minute at a time, I felt this overwhelming surge of realization that it is time to change this mothereffing situation, right freaking now.

So here I am. Back at the keyboard, burning to find something worth swimming upstream for so I stop being swept away by the current.

And in this spirit, I’ve decided to offer a discount, just for this weekend. From now until Sunday night, annual subscriptions to The Skojec File are 25% off. $60 instead of $80.

If I get just two annual subscriptions today, that will justify my decision to come home and focus on this change of course. If I get more, it might buy back my weekend so I can work on more. I’ve got ideas, I just need the time and focus to execute.

I’m not averse to hard work. I love hard work when it gets somewhere. What I can’t stand is the feeling that I’m just running to stand still doing tasks that could be assigned to a mindless automaton. I put in a marathon session from 10AM on Wednesday until 5AM on Thursday working on our latest show, not because I’m getting a paycheck yet, but because it matters and I care about getting it right — and if I keep getting it right, maybe it will help Kale and me keep the lights on and put food on the table somewhere down the road.

Many of you have also acted as patrons, generously supporting the man behind the work as he stumbles through catastrophe in the hopes that I will find my way out of the darkness and back into the light. There is no way to overstate how much this has helped me, and I’m not above saying I need the help. When I lost my faith years ago, I began to believe I just had to go it alone. This past year has taught me just how much I need a community. Other people. And hopefully, assistance from the same God from whom I found myself so estranged. My struggles with the specifics of faith have not resolved, but my prayers have grown deeper through this crisis and much more simple. I fell asleep last night repeating the phrase, “God, help me” again and again. I don’t know what I need, but if he’s listening, he does.

If you feel moved to patronize this work, you can do so in the usual ways. Venmo/Paypal/Stripe/Buy Me a Coffee remain the best options for patronage. If you prefer Zelle or X money or anything else, let me know and I can give you the details.

It’s time to stop hanging by my fingernails off the edge of this cliff. I know that I’m going to have bad days again. Probably even bad weeks. But it’s time to start clawing my way back. As the character Andy Dufresne famously said in The Shawshank Redemption:

“I guess it comes down to a simple choice, really. Get busy living, or get busy dying.”

Thank you all so much for being here. For your readership, for your prayers, for your encouragement and well-wishes and material support.

I may be alone in this city, but you have stood with me from afar.