Slumped in a chair in the room with the nuclear button and its 3 anxious wannabe pushers, I'd look up out of my permanent funk every few hours and say casually but with authority to the others, "OK, MY turn!"

But MY turn at the nuclear button never came. It rightfully went to someone else, someone who had it in his blood and had spent his entire childhood doing whatever a child could do to prepare for growing up to be the kind of person who's either pushing or not pushing the nuclear button every second he's on the job.

I, on the other hand, had spent my childhood assuming that, when the time came, I'd just develop a whole new breakthrough product that would either be a drug or a cell phone.

The basic idea was that if the world had "talking in tongues", then why shouldn't it also have "talking in toes", or -- more to the point -- "talking in genitalia"?

And once there was talking in genitalia (say), in the world, then immediately there'd have to be a drug that allowed the average man to do it, and/or a specialized cell phone he could do it over in order to reach the greatest number with his unique incomprehensible message of deep divine mystical revelation and everyday pure common ejaculatory horse sense.

By the time I was a full-blown adult I was part of a large commercial effort (Grupo de whatever) working on this product. And though we still didn't have the least fucking idea what it was, we figured we'd better hold a big meeting of investors to finalize its design anyway.

Everybody who came was genuinely excited about its prospects -- talking ceaselessly about the string of opportunities and doors and spaces that would readily and gladly open themselves up to our crack team of developers.

"I think we've got a winner here," smiling executives said to each other and to underlings with conviction, following or preceding or simultaneous with the obligatory bear hug, or back or shoulder pat.

For the first time, someone at the meeting was taking notes. He had a brand new yellow notepad and had left the first page blank and folded it over so the 2nd clean page was now up and ready to record design specs.

He wrote down the number "1" followed by a period to indicate its status as the first item in a list.

Then somebody said something and he wrote down a word after the 1.

Quickly people gathered around to see what he'd written.

Then they returned slowly painfully to their seats, making sounds most often associated with advancing age and declining health.

In a fast and rare mutual moment, it had become clear to everyone that this fucking product, whatever the fuck it was, would easily rival the most stupid product in all human history.

So, with the first third of my life wasted on a dream that turned out to just be a dream, I vowed to not be fooled again during the next third of my life and so chose to waste it on the absolute most real aspect of reality.

And since there is nothing more real than someone setting off a nuclear bomb in your face, and since I'd rather be the someone setting it off than the someone whose face it's set off in, I applied for and landed this job, whose many subtle and delicate checks and balances should assuage all your possible fears that one day one of my many psychotic episodes will end with me lunging for the nuclear button and depressing it firmly with both hands so the hold cannot be broken, in much the same way that the nuclear family and society in general has seen fit to so firmly and eternally depress the living fuck out of ME.

And that's really all I ask of a career path. Cold, hard, immutable substance -- and protection from the possibility of taking revenge against high-level, abstract social forces selected for long ago in the structure of mind completely without reference to how uncool they'd be when I got here.

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