Walden on Wheels: On the Open Road from Debt to Freedom by Ken Ilgunas Read Free Book Online Page A

a fast-food cook, and a landscaper. Between my liberal arts degree and my history of crappy jobs, I’d somehow made it through the first twenty-two years of my life without learning a useful skill.
    I could, however, write reasonably well. I was a film reviewer for UB’s student-run newspaper and, later, its Arts editor. Because of my experience with newspapers, I figured the print industry might be a good place for me to find my ideal job. So I applied to twenty-five paid internships (at $10 an hour) at newspapers across the country with dreams of becoming the next Bob Woodward, picturing myself as some investigative journalist working in a sweltering newsroom, bringing down corrupt politicians, and exposing the squalid working conditions of the city’s immigrant community.
    In due time, though, all twenty-five of my applications were rejected. And when the last rejection letter came in, I was only a couple of months away from graduating. I had no other job prospects except for mending the rip in my orange apron and heading back to the Home Depot, where, at best, I might someday be promoted to a department managerial position.
    Somehow my brilliant friend Josh (my freshman roommate at Alfred) found himself in a similar situation. We’d kept in close contact over the years, sending e-mails to each other on an almost daily basis.
    To: Ken Ilgunas
    From: Josh Pruyn
    Date: April 30, 2006
    Subject: FUCKING JOB SITUATION
    At the moment, my job search is the inescapable kismet of my existence. I heard back from both my interviews—both the predicted response. I probably sent out 5–7 apps in the past week, and have a total of 10 out right now. I wouldnt be surprised if I heard back from none of them. My ideal coaching/teaching job in Connecticut filled without even a word back from them. On my knees with my lips puckered, I sent another email asking to be reconsidered for the position. I’ve considered doing AmeriCorps, which after a term includes an educational award, but unfortunately I’d be unable to live on that sort of money due to my debt. Thats fucking pathetic. But I’ll manage to pay my student debt one way or another.
    Josh and I had known each other since we were six. We became best friends in the eighth grade for no better reason than our mutual interest in street hockey and video games. Our friendship began to develop at the age of seventeen, when we started e-mailing each other practically every day, using the recently discovered Internet to trade pictures of nude women. But over time, our e-mails became more intimate and substantive. Our subject matter expanded to politics, religion, worries, dreams, anything and everything. We didn’t hold back. The more embarrassing, the more personal, the more self-admonishing—the stuff that a person feels most inclined to bottle up—was the very stuff we were most eager to share. Our e-mail correspondence was an interactive diary of sorts, a free therapy session, a cleanly scrubbed window through which we could view another human’s soul.
    Except for Josh’s sometimes volatile temper and my tendency to revel in delusions of grandeur, we were incredibly similar, even more so now because the e-mails had a conforming effect. We were both liberals, shamelessly self-deprecating, and disdainful of school. In high school, we were losers, but becausewe were such boring losers, we were unworthy of the ridicule with which our betters honored our fellow, but more colorful, social outcasts. On weekend nights, we’d play computer games on the Internet together, commanding bit-sized armies till dawn while the rest of our classmates got high, drunk, and laid.
    While we wanted girlfriends throughout our adolescence, we were both held back by several debilitating flaws. I was so awkward with girls you’d think I had spent my childhood locked in a damp basement; so unassertive that, on my high school football team, I let another player take my starting position as a defensive end