When Can I Start?: How to Lose a Job and Gain a Personality

As Joseph Lezza awoke one morning to a round of layoffs he found himself transformed into Corporate Logo Hoodie; just another piece on the board game of late stage capitalism.

With no job and no name, he had nowhere to go but back to start. Again and again, it would seem. As what followed would be years of applications and cold calls, of form rejections and false hopes. Years of penny-pinching, and networking, and free coffees, and freelancing, and unpaid projects, and second, third, and fourth round interviews, and almost making it, but never quite just, in a seemingly endless campaign devised by the other Parker Brother. The one who was convicted of war crimes.

But the beauty in losing a turn-in losing your mind-so many times, is that it brings one to wonder if it was ever worth having in the first place.

That's where the fun begins.

When Can I Start? How to Lose a Job and Gain a Personality is a memoir-in-essays that seeks to unravel our uniquely American impulse to surrender so much of who we are to what we do; a queer millennial folk tale of side gigs and side quests from the bowels of the job market.

Here there are jungle rendezvous, exotic maladies, ghost stories, and a touch of human smuggling. Here there are voices in the walls, the community chest is full of guilt, and a Cobb salad could actually save your life. Here there are chapters are spaces, characters are nameless pieces, and "going to jail" means attending a two-hour seminar at the Staten Island unemployment office.

Here you may plan and strategize, but no one's immune from being sacrificed in the name of shareholder value.

Pull up a chair, player. Advantage comes only at the benevolence of a pair of dice.

And everyone gets a roll.