Status Anxiety
If I try to take Manhattan again, I’ll fail completely. Perfect!
Well, my wife had the baby. I am now a father of four and, as such, have been doing some thinking about how I am going to support them all in the years to come. My problem is, I do not really have a profession. Or, rather, my chronic inability to shimmy up the greasy pole has become a kind of career in itself. I make my money from being a loser.
The trouble with being a professional failure is that my livelihood is dependent on not being able to earn a living. The moment I am perceived to be a success — even if it is just a successful failure — I can no longer plough this furrow. I have chosen a career in which I cannot, by definition, do well. In order to pay the mortgage, I have to remain unemployed.
The only solution is to keep setting myself more and more outlandish goals. For instance, I could write a book about my efforts to represent my country at the 2012 Olympics. Even if I chose a sport in which there are virtually no English competitors — softball, for instance — I would still fail. That way, in the unlikely event of the book becoming a bestseller I could still claim to be a Big Fat Loser.
In this vein, I have decided that my next big project will be to try and take Manhattan. I had a go at this in the mid-1990s when I went over there to work for Vanity Fair and was such an abysmal failure that I actually did get a bestselling book out of it. This time round, I will try to do it as a stand-up comedian. My plan is to mount an off-Broadway production of a one-man show in which I instruct audiences in the mysterious art of failing upwards.
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Alex-The-Almost
June 20th, 2008 12:20pmDear Toby - Here's an idea... do what I did 35 years ago after some unsustainable success as a record producer-cum-junky-jailbird. Really fail. Drop out to a derelict in Wales - rent at thirty-bob a week forever, get a job with BT but be hopeless at everything: so convincingly you get made unemployable and labeled a long-term sick depressive, which'll give you time to restore the derelict and culminate in your living in a comfy country cottage for life as a sitting tenant, 'til you're a pensioner; then lean on the gate and watch the cows in the field - occasionally writing silly comments to newspaper columnists. It's a hell of a life, and there's even a book in it (don't forget to document it with photos); I'd write it myself but I know it'd be a failure.
Kind regards,
Alex