As promised, here's my brother's story.

Out of Work with Only Option 3 to Save Me
January 26, 2003
By Jay Sullivan

Monday morning 10 a.m. my first day of unemployment...

As promised, I am already looking back at last semester. The onset of Nostalgia for a fucking month ago usually finds me when I'm feeling lonely. Odd that I immediately think of Prague, where I was the loneliest and most removed (no friends, no language, etc).

Returning to School: Some notes

1) I have forgotten how to care about college things. The other day I walked into a crowded dining hall and as I entered, the facing tables glanced at me, some smirking at others. I forgot to hate these people.

2) Dear friend/complete asshole who had my bed in apartment last semester didn't move out of it until friday. I came the saturday before. Great to see him before he went abroad/ he didn't even take his fucking posters down before he left. I had to move his fucking shit out of bed area and bookshelves before he got here on sunday/ will miss him this semester.

3) My copy of Lolita, for English class was pre-owned by obvious statement girl. (Book=300 beautiful pages about a french pedophile visiting post war america, who is in love with Lolita.) She coated each margin with notes such as "has preoccupation with little girls." "is waiting for Lolita", "bed rumpled b/c of sex." Narrator will go on for six pages about the banalities of post war America and the generic and substandard nature of the roadside accomodations and she'll scribble "is picky about hotel rooms."

4) There's 70 people in my Dante class. This is not why people go to a small, fancy pants school. It's like highschool, someone will say the stupidest fucking joke, but in a crowd that size, at least three people will laugh, causing laugh waves. There actually are highschool Jock-types who do things like say "yo!" instead of raising their hands when the teacher takes attendence.

5) If you've read the euro travels sections of the weblog, you should understand that I don't have the money for books anymore.The most expensive one was one for $45 for sociology. It was about white collar crime. I don't even beleive in irony anymore.

So I brought my brother in to my old office at the Hartford Courant last week before I left for school (I'm getting to that--hold on). Honestly, I was hoping some editor would ask me to do a travel story or a book reveiw (oh yes, I sometimes miss the days when things like this happened to me).

They all said pretty much the same thing to me, "__" Followed by, "So you're Brendan's brother Jay, we heard you on the radio yesterday, did you ever get to file unemployment? Or are you still on hold?"

Long story short: he walks out of there with a commission to do a magazine piece ($$) about unemployment. He spent the first part of the week writing it and yesterday they called to say that they want it to run this sunday and then they mailed him the contract.

When I got fired, went on the radio, and did a magazine piece for them four years ago, I got airfare and a scholarship to a fancy pants private college. I can't wait to see what this kid gets.

My brother got laid off last week, in the worst way. He broke his hand about a month ago and couldn't fix cars anymore, so they had him driving the parts truck for a while before they filled his old spot and gave him the old heave ho.

While driving the truck he spent alot of time listening to talk radio, hearing the hosts talk about those goddam welfare mothers and the like. Sometimes its was investments, or just Rush Limbaugh oiling his erect ego. (I love Rush only because he always does commercial tie-ins, "You know, when I'm burning crosses, there's nothing I like more to spark that doobie than the cool flavor of Chesterfeilds cigarrettes.")

The result is that he's become very opinionated and grossly uninformed. "Clonaid, ha, of course they're French, that's my take on the French--no back bone." Now he's spent the week on the phone trying to collect his unemployment and listening to more of his precious talk radio.

This week I got invited back to a radio show Ben and I were on in highschool. So of course I brought my brother. It's drive time from 3-6, which means that in light traffic, no one will hear you for more than half an hour. They brought Jay in with me and gave him a mic and headphones and had him talk about his unemployment, getting fired. "They didn't even gimme a pink slip," he said, "Just a packet of white paper." Callers clogged the lines with their own woes, and their own experiences with white paper.

The financial advisor radio reporter-guy called in to say how, "We are all better journalists for what you guys did in your highschool paper. And Brendan's right, it's now about football, it's about free speech." I never know what to say then, Ben and I became freedome fighters the way Lydon Johnson became president--we woke up one day the same, and before dinner we got called down to an office and endured a lot of screaming.

At the break everyone talked about how great Jay's voice was and how they wanted him to come back tomorrow. Ever since then, he's been reading the paper everyday and looking into living off his unemployment and taking classes at Connecticut School of Broadcasting. I used to go over to his house and hear, "Ok, so a chick walks into a gynocologists office and..." but now it's, "Can you beleive that editorial today?"

Maybe I complain a little too much, but I've been really excited for the past few days because I finally found an event that I like. New Years.

Of course I hate Thanksgiving because it's a holiday to celebrate genocide, gluttony, and football. Christmas is the time to remember that you are not good enough to buy things.

But New Years is wonderful, I think. For starters, the entire holiday is for sleeping and watching the best television they provide all year. When you're a shallow person like me, you could really care less what other people find exciting or stimulating to listen to. New year's sticks to Best Of and All Time Greatest. The radio only plays songs you already know. Somehow they always manage to show Back to the Future.

The night before you don't even have to be social until 11. Then the day of, you can read the books that people have provided for you the previous week. Everything is closed New Year's day. But the few stores that do open are full of headachey, dry tongued suckers, whose lives I can mismanage for a few minutes or so. It fills me with holiday cheer.