Career Oppurtunities

What age did you really know who you wanted to be? What you wanted to do? Where you wanted to be in this world?

In many ways I am not sure I even know now. I'm thirty (thirty one this year) and I am finally settling into adulthood albeit kicking and screaming.
I have a career now. Thats a strange thought to me. Its not just one more job in an endless succession of shitty jobs that I know I will be getting out of as soon as something better comes along. Its A CAREER.

I am a few years into my career as a musician and record producer/studio manager. And for the first time I can say I work in music professionally. Not in the evenings or at weekends. I'm not still working in a call centre or mailroom trying to fund being in a band. I am now full time.

This obviously is a dream come true and I do count myself lucky every single day that I don't have a job I hate.
I wish it was more secure. There are no guarantees of where the next pay check is coming from but thats fine, scary but fine.
Also being self employed comes with its other downsides such as no holiday pay. I take time off and it costs me lots of money. But hey I could be back selling stuff to people on the phone for minimum wage.

Now I am a full time musician (sort of) then thats it right? Thats what I want to do till the day I die. Like Mick Jagger and Keith Richards I am a musician for life? I am not so sure.

I imagine music will ALWAYS be a massive part of my life and I love the perks of the job but am I now mature enough to have decided this is how I will end my days or do I still want something else?

When you are sixteen or seventeen years old and you are on your way to college you make a decision based on what you "want to be" as to the courses you enrol in. I wonder what the real percentage is of people who now work in the same field they studied for. Fifty percent? Thirty? I would probably guess its around ten percent or am I just a pessimist?

That is because you have no idea what you want when you are a kid. I am thirty and I think I may be slowly on the way to working it out.

I finally have a plan. It's a retirement plan and I am starting to like it. You can tell the sixteen year old me I have a retirement plan and watch him laugh in your face but I am really into it.

I think I will be playing music for the next fifteen to eighteen years and working my arse off at it too but then I have to stop. For a start no one is going to want to see my sad old face on stage at fifty years old singing about the same girl I split up with at college thirty years ago and secondly I am not sure that is the life for me anyway.

Don't get me wrong, there are some exceptional musicians I love still performing at a ripe old age and many more I wish had lived long enough to see it, but that is not me. Maybe they are just more relevant, Neil Young and Tom Waits both certainly have much more to say than me (and infinitely more talent) and I would loved to have seen Frank Zappa writing and performing music forever. But they aren't the usual people I see in the rock clubs and back stage at festivals.

I dont ever want to be the sad old bastard at fifty something years old getting drunk out of their mind, falling over and landing face first in the V.I.P. bar and asking the "young" bands if they know where they can "score some sniff". Its really tragic and they are the only people who don't realise how sad it is.

You have never seen a facial expression quite like the one on an eighteen year old girl being chatted up by a fifty something ex-rockstar.
This weird mixture of disgust, pity and struggling so so hard to be polite because "he was really famous once" is one of the most bizarrely contorted images in my mind. And as the young girl eventually squirms her way out of the grip of the old lecherous bastard you see the glazed eyes of a deluded old fool thinking "she'll be back".

So I am going to put myself out to pasture before I reach the point where it looks pathetic or embarrassing and this week I started on my path way to retirement. I have it all worked out and for the first time I am seeing my later years as a place I am looking forward to visiting some day.
I wont yet tell you how this journey is starting for me, I am sure that I will go into it in more detail as these writings progress but there is a plan.

At the end of it all each and every one of you are welcome to sit with me on my stretch of beach and have a nice cool drink and watch the sun go down over the ocean as I get old and grey. I hope some of you choose to join me some day and those of you who don't............. she hasn't gone to the loo and she definitely isn't coming back, no matter how many laminates are hanging around your neck.