Its 9:30 am on Monday December 29th 2008. Christmas Day was on Wednesday this year so today is in the midst of those undefined days before the New Year begins with all its promise.

Except. Except. I have been unemployed now for almost three months. (Well actually unemployed in name only as I am not even eligible for unemployment benefits.) The gardening business my wife Debbie and I began in 2007 evaporated with the economic meltdown and since then the economy has deteriorated to a degree unseen since the 1930s. But I don't need to tell you that.

I read in today's paper that a journalist for NPR, Ketzel Levine, has been laid off. She was producing a series of stories about people who had been laid off and what they were going to do next when she was informed that she was to share their fate. To her credit her last story was on herself. The irony of her predicament was compounded for me when I read that she too lives in Portland, Oregon.

Today is a typical winter day in Portland. A uniformly grey sky with intense bursts of rain. Yesterday was the first day in two weeks that we were able to get our car out and make it to the store. Patches of snow from the worst storm of the last forty years still linger but are being rapidly washed away.

So if that's all the good news, here's rest of the bad. I'm forty-five, a balding white male who drinks and smokes more that is good for him. I had a reasonably successful career as a manager for a uniform company for more than a decade before at age 37, shortly before 9/11, resigning unable to conform any longer to the 'corporate environment'. In the intervening seven years I have acted, coached, consulted, gardened, taught, mentored, written, and ventured back, unsuccessfully, into the uniform business for a year before realizing that we were no longer a fit for one another. My wife and I are reasonably well educated, I have an MBA and she is a recovering Dentist, also unemployed, who feels the same sense of dread at re-entering dentistry that I do at the prospect of shaving, squeezing into a suit, tie, and dress shoes and reporting for duty at an office.

To say that I have no career prospects is a mis-characterization. It implies that I have some idea of what my career is meant to resemble and merely need to comb the help-wanted ads in search of the perfect opportunity. So, dear, reader, I have decided to write my way out of, or perhaps through, my current predicament.

I have recently re-started an exercise called "morning pages" from Julia Camerons' book "The Artist's Way - rediscovering your creative spirit." Morning pages are three pages to be written every morning come what may. Indeed 'come what may' is what it is all about. I am to write whatever comes into my head and put it down on paper. Even if all I can write is how stupid it feels to be writing this in an old spiral notebook using a light blue Bic pen then that is what is it. I have decided however to use this time and these three handwritten (the pages must be handwritten) pages to document the coming year and hopefully find some sense in my life.

At Christmas my Mother sent a replica of a WWII era poster issued by the British Government. On a bright red background reversed-out white capital letters admonish "Keep Calm and Carry On". Portland Oregon in 2008 is hardly London during the blitz but the advice seems as relevant today as it was then.