Notes From the Road: Fighting for $41

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On Saturday night, after a day spent cleaning and organizing the garage, I headed out to do more food deliveries.

My family wanted me to stay home, but every night I go out is another $100. Day by day, that adds up to something that helps get all these bills paid.

My routine these days is simple: work on content from 9AM-4PM (or thereabouts) and then switch to food delivery from 4-10PM. The hope is that the content will start bearing financial fruit, the food delivery is the stopgap to help pay for the bills we have right now.

Applying for professional jobs has thus far produced zero results. As I suspected, I’m eminently cancellable. I can only imagine prospective employers looking at my social media, seeing that I’m conservative and anti-woke, and filing my application in the special bin.

So I am left, at the not-very-spry age of 47, to jobs that require more hustle than I have, at a pace that is difficult to sustain, for significantly less money than I need.

On Saturday, I was so tired, my body aching so much, that I thought I was getting sick. I was so desperate to stay awake and moving that I actually bought a coffee from Starbucks while I was out. I did my best to ignore the LGBTQ flag hanging from the wall, the masked up lesbian at the counter, and the fat bearded dude with a handful of face piercings making my drink. I just needed to stay focused.

There were moments, as there are every time I go out, of beauty and wonder. Like this incredible sunset over a pond that I stopped on the side of the road to grab a photo of:

Or the very photogenic and increasingly Christmas-themed downtown scenes in Raleigh:

I’m not going to lie. I needed some feel-good music, so I fired up Michael Bublé’s Christmas album and listened to it the whole way through.

By 8PM, I’d made about $70. My personally-imposed daily quota is $100, so when an order came in at 8:08PM that would pay me $41, I accepted it without even looking closely at the details. Most of my incoming orders look more like the following — not even 50 cents a mile — which made this unusually high offer a truly rare unicorn:

My 11 year old son had been texting me all night, wanting to have a movie night, asking me if I could bring home some caramel M&M’s so we could have “movie candy.”

I thought, “Man, if I take this I can be finished early tonight. How perfect would that be?”

The pickup was only a mile away from where I was. I was fighting weekend holiday shopping traffic, but I was going to get to the damn location and put a nail in the coffin of my evening’s work. I battled my way through parking lots. I sat behind people who don’t know how to drive through parking garages. I finally found a spot outside after discovering everything else in the shopping center was full.

I hoofed it over to the deli I was supposed to pick up from, only to find it dark, the doors locked.

Several teenage girls were sitting outside, and it took me a second to realize that they worked in the place I was trying to get to.

“Did you guys have an Uber Eats order that never got picked up?” I asked.

“Yeah, but we closed at 8PM, so we had to throw it out.”

“Oh that sucks,” I said. “This was my best order of the night. But the order came in after 8PM, and you were already closed, so that’s weird.”

“I’m so sorry,” one of the girls said. She sounded like she actually meant it.

I got back in the Jeep, and started cursing. I texted my wife to dump about how freaking idiotic this situation was. But sitting there sulking over an order I spent 30 minutes trying to get, only to have to cancel and get NOTHING, wasn’t doing me any good.

So I started driving again.

I got a few more orders, none of which were very good. But they brought me in the direction of home, which I decided was for the best.

As I drove, something in me shifted. I was angry. Not in the way I more commonly get angry — hot tempered, yelling and hitting my steering wheel in pure frustration — but in that cold, calculating way that sometimes scares even me. I’m a big, loud, passionate guy. I bluster a lot. But if I’m yelling, you can still reach me.

When my anger gets quiet, it’s way more dangerous.