The Patch

For a while I’ve told the universe I’d be willing to write anything for a living.

I really don’t care what I write, so long as I can make a living off it. That’s been my attitude for a couple years now. Clearly, it’s the dream. And I am the dreaming fool.

In my mind, I was thinking I’d be willing to write fiction or non-fiction books. Turns out, the universe heard me say exactly what I said, which the universe has an annoying habit of doing. I said: I’d write anything.

So the universe dropped my old job back in my lap, the one I happily left six years, and that is community journalism.

I’ve been looking for a job since January. I’ve inquired about work at Cosco and coffee shops, and even hit up a very successful high school classmate for a job at my 20^th reunion earlier this summer. No luck anywhere. The census wouldn’t even hire me, and I got a 26 out of 28 on their silly screening test. There’s not much out there for anybody in this economy, and there’s less out there for someone who has a giant gap in his resume from quitting his full time reporting job six years ago to write a few books on his own.

So while I was in Chicago for my high school reunion, I had lunch with a former reporter colleague and she told me that a former editor was working for something called Patch.com.

Patch is basically local community news websites.

Most importantly, Patch was hiring.

So I dropped that former editor an email and he recommended me to the regional editor here in Southern California and she offered me a job, which I took with some conditions.

One of the conditions was that I would do the job temporarily, for about a month. I was balking at taking the local editor position permanently because of the demands of the job. By working the position for a month, I would give my boss more time to find another qualified candidate, and I could also decide to take the job permanently if I wanted. 

It was a sweet deal. I was grateful, largely because I was broke. I ran out of money in January, and had to move back in with family. I’ve been living between my sister’s family’s house and my mother’s condo in Torrance, Calif. The job at Patch would provide a paycheck that would allow me to be financially independent again-- the sweetest of all dreams. The cost: No time for anything else.