All I Ever Wanted To Do Is Work

Follow me on Instagram: @michaeldavidmodern

I love working. I always have. I hated some of the corporate bureaucracy aspects of my jobs, but the work was fun. Smart people, cute girls, some of them lawyers with PhDs (how hot is that!), with usually about a 3-to-1 female to male ratio in the office, and I get to read about scientific discoveries all day—what’s not to like?

I love working so much that I’ll usually do it for free...or way less than my fair market value. I find it almost impossible to look at a problem that needs solving and not try to solve it. 

My greatest goal in life has always been to be one of those people who achieved something that made life on earth better for everyone.  My earliest idols were Albert Einstein, Thomas Edison, the Wright brothers, Henry Ford before I found out he was a raging antisemite...I wanted to leave something IMPORTANT. 

As I got older, my views shifted away from seeing technical gadgets as the most important thing I could leave to seeing better philosophies to allow us to live together in peace and harmony as the most important inventions the world needed...though I still have a penchant for gadgetry.  But this shift could now be seen as foreshadowing my defection to Team Girl. 

My drive to work and contribute even supersedes my drive to find love. I know this is true because I could handle a lonely life with my hands in half a dozen important professional projects, or even one really big one, like small-scale fusion energy, which is the next big thing we really need. 

But I couldn’t handle a lazy life doing nothing, not even with Scarlett Johansson...as if she’d go for any shit like that. I don’t think six months have gone by without her making a movie in the last twenty years!

I feel like I need a months-long vacation in some distant luxurious locale to cleanse my mind and spirit of all the traumas of the past decade...DECADE!  But yet, I think that if I found myself suddenly free, with the financial resources to provide for everything I want, and the opportunity to begin working on the projects that I’ve been dreaming of, I’d go to work tomorrow...I’d go to work TONIGHT!  Being able to work would be the relief I need even more than sitting in a luxury condo on the beach in the south of France with some hot girl. 

I wouldn’t be thinking about Scarlett Johansson except as a business partner. I wouldn’t be thinking about finding a home—I would be worried about finding an OFFICE!  In fact, I’d need more than one, with everything I need to get done. A lot of rich people have seven or eight homes. I would have seven or eight offices. 

But that is all the big dream. I’ve never been anxious to shoot directly to the top, except for a brief period in my mid 30s, and I learned my lesson because I screwed a lot of things up during that time. 

I’ve always been willing to pay my dues. Perhaps too willing—its like the world said, “This guy loves paying dues so much, we’ll just keep charging him more and more so long as he doesn’t complain.”

But I’ve finally established some minimum standards as what I’m willing to accept for my work, and they are not negotiable. I’m one of the smarter and more talented people around and I demand to be compensated and respected as such. On this, I will not compromise anymore, even under penalty of death, or worse, the state of social exile in which I currently exist. But I’m willing to negotiate on other things...

I swore to my parole officer that I would never wear an ankle monitor again, and I’ve said that I would not comply with the rules of sex offender registration or parole anymore. And I meant it as long as my situation remains as it is: lonely, friendless and unemployed. 

But if a publisher came to me and said they wanted to publish my book about my experiences, and they were going to put me up in a nice condo or hotel for up to a year while I write it, but that in the meantime, they needed me to be a good parolee, and they would give me a generous advance and avail me access to a good lawyer to see what could be done about my legal issues, I’d accept that contract. If someone from Hollywood made me the same offer to write a script, I’d take it. 

If the high-powered lawyer who I wrote to ask for help came to me and said, “I believe in you, and I want to fight for you. Here’s what we are going to do...but for now you have to put the ankle monitor back on and follow the law,” I’d comply so long as I was convinced that they would follow through. 

I’m not opposed to allowing San Diego County and the State of California to save face by following the rules, even until my parole time expired, if I had a real support structure in my life and a legal team to see that my rights were protected. In fact, that is exactly what I’ve been trying to give them the opportunity to do these past seven years, but apparently, they believe that trying to keep me down is their best play. Who knows, maybe they are right. They are certainly winning right now. 

Sometimes I feel like I’m in a twisted version of the classic Richard Pryor comedy Brewster’s Millions. But rather than being taught the value of money by being forced to waste it, I’m learning the value of work by being denied the opportunity to do it!  Perhaps if I’d been permitted to start living out my professional dreams twenty years ago, by now I’d be burnt out, like what seemed to happen to a lot of the MAT Girls and Boys of my generation. But now, after what I’ve been through, I can’t foresee myself ever getting tired of working. 

Through all these years, I never blamed anyone for holding me down. I always looked at myself first. I thought, maybe I wasn’t working hard enough, maybe I wasn’t as smart as I thought I was. As more time passed, I thought, maybe it is because I didn’t finish college, even as the billionaires lists were topped by dropouts from elite colleges just like me. 

It wasn’t until my time locked up, and the endless days of reflection therein, that I finally came to the conclusion: It’s not my fault. 

It wasn’t until I got out of prison that I thought about and calculated that my incarceration cost this society well over two million dollars.  At my last full-time job, my time was being billed to clients at $200 per hour. I was working 80 hours a week at that job. More than that, actually, because I was so deeply invested in that company that I was spending nearly every waking moment thinking about how to serve the company and our clients better. 

But even if we say that the company was only billing out 40 hours per week for me, that’s $8,000 a week, $400,000 a year, times five years I was incarcerated—two million bucks in revenue. And that is without assuming as my history suggests that I would have advanced in my skill level and professional value in those five years (plus the two since my release that I’ve been unable to resume my career thanks to my legal issues)

Add to that the cost of my incarceration, which stats place at $81,000 per year in California, that is nearly three million bucks to keep a Stanford alum with an insatiable urge to work off the streets! Some might see that as a triumph for justice. Money makes the world go round, but apparently not in my case. Here is a guy with an elite college pedigree, a semi-famous father with influential connections, powerful friends and high-level corporate connections, mostly lawyers at that, and he didn’t get away with it this time. “Wait, did he actually do it?” OBJECTION! IRRELEVANT! Sustained. 

I have said many times in the last few years, that if I had my life back tomorrow, my reputation restored, the chance to be a full and free citizen, the opportunity to work on the kinds of projects that I would really like to do, I would consider this time trapped in the system as a valuable learning experience that I would be grateful for. I still feel that way even after a traumatic return stint in jail and the apparent loss of everything I own thanks to a crooked landlord. But as I’ve said before, I don’t know that I’ll still feel that way in the morning. I don’t know how much more of life like this I can take intellectually, psychologically and spiritually, but I know it isn’t much. 

I’m starting to feel like something I never thought I’d become: one of those old folks in church “waitin’ on Jesus” to come rescue them, and they think he’s coming any minute, but he never shows up. But I realize that I’m now experiencing something that they are experiencing that I never felt before: the feeling of powerlessness. But I’m not waiting for Jesus, it’s another Jew...and she’s really cute. 

Not just her. I’m waiting for all the women of the world to accept my defection offer and embrace me and put me to work building a better and brighter world for women and girls everywhere (and men who want to get with the program). 

I don’t know if the Tech Boys know about my defection yet. This blog exists on a somewhat hidden corner of the internet because I haven’t advertised it anywhere. I don’t know if anyone is reading it at all, but many of these things I’ve been saying to people for the past year. I’m hardly the first man to join girls. But given my story and all the places I’m networked, I could be an extremely important asset to the girls if they use me properly. 

I can imagine a conversation similar in tone to the one between Tom Dewey and Lucky Luciano at the end of Hoodlum when Lucky realizes that Bumpy Johnson has outmaneuvered him for Tom Dewey’s services...

Telephone rings...

MARK ZUCKERBERG

Hello?

SCARLETT JOHANSSON

We have Michael Boyd. 

MARK ZUCKERBERG

No! Really?  I thought we had that guy in the bag since forever. I wasn’t even paying attention to him. 

SCARLETT JOHANSSON

Shows how much you know. I guess there were no questions about predicting the future on the SAT. *click*

This is the sort of silly shit you think about when you are trapped in the underworld and your life alternates between going nowhere and spiraling downward. I bet those two know each other, being two ambitious Jewish kids of about the same age from the tri-state area, but I’d be shocked to find they had ever talked about me.  But I have no knowledge of what kind of personal relationship they have, if any. It’s just funny to think about what they would think of each other since I like them both, though Mark has really been disappointing lately.  Scarlett doing a dozen Avengers movies is disappointing to me too, but its easier to forgive her because she’s cute. 

I feel this overwhelming sadness and despair not as much because my life didn’t turn out the way I wanted it, but because it is such a tragic waste. I could have done so much for so many people these past seven years, and before. But we are here and now. I just want a chance to be able to make myself useful...to girls...from up close.  There’s work to be done? LET’S GO!

Follow me on Instagram: @michaeldavidmodern