from Piecemeal/Daymeal
Day 1 – Austin, TX
“Today is your last day.”
It was Jimmy Chen who called me with the news.
“Belan wanted me to call you,” he said.
“We’re being forced to make some tough expense decisions. And I’m sorry to say that you’re one
of the ones being affected. Gloria from HR is also on the call, by the way.”
“Fine with me,” I said.
“There’s a two-month notice period, so you’ll get full pay and benefits until the end of the period
but won’t be required to come into the office or do any work.”
“OK.”
“After the separation date, you’ll have nine months of accrued severance, per the policy, and the
option for COBRA for up to ten months. We’ll subsidize-match you for six months of COBRA.
Aetna dental and Hyatt legal benefits continue through the notice period. You can refer to the
handbook for all this. But your email and server access will be removed today, immediately
following this call. You’ll get a UPS return box for your laptop, phone, and badge. Your accrued
vacation time will be paid in full after the notice period. All unvested RSUs and options vest
today. Shira from Gloria’s team will email you the full details, to your personal email, in the next
hour but Belan wanted me to call you and say thanks for everything and wish you good luck in
the future. Gloria, anything to add?”
“These decisions are incredibly difficult and deeply personal, but they are unfortunately
necessary given the go-forward needs of our team as we support the reorganization. We hope
you’ll utilize the resources in the Employee Action Center to find the help you—”
“—I’m sure this had nothing to do with the deck he wanted or the Board meeting—”
“As Gloria mentioned…”
“Or how I told him to fuck off with his stupid AI project, in front of the Board—”
“… we’re making some difficult decisions around expense targets and realizing some
synergies—” Jimmy was clearly reading from a script or maybe he’d memorized the talking
points already.
“…”
“And yeah, I’m sorry that you’re one of the ones being affected. The EAC has virtual counselors
avail—”
Jimmy was an especially brainless automaton. I recalled him wearing slightly different shades of
the same style and brand of plaid, button-down shirts and khakis every single day. The same
shoes. Or maybe one pair of loafers mixed into the rotation of lace-up wingtips. The same vacant
smile and dead eyes. The same glasses. He seemed to truly enjoy the “team-building” activities
and the launch of a new professional development program.
I stared at the static phone screen in silence and sat alone in my home office for a minute.
A text appeared, on my personal cell, from Jimmy: “Sorry again about this. Hope you’re OK.”
Swipe to ignore.
My main concern now was how to tell my wife and kids.
I needed a story.
I had no concerns about my ability to find another job or how to survive on severance. Or so I
began to tell myself.
We’ll be OK.
I tested it out as a mantra.
We’ll be OK.
It’s fine. Don’t worry.
I debated not telling anyone for a day or two but quickly realized that was stupid and opted
instead to reveal everything right away. I had warned them this might be coming anyway.
And the whole thing was less dramatic than I’d expected. Maybe if I’d been called into an actual
board room or came home from the office during the middle of the day, maybe then the emotions
would have surged, but, like everything in the virtual office world, it was more muted and
mundane and anticlimactic.
No company in the United States is legally required to offer severance.
But the WARN Act does require employers to give employees 60 days’ notice before a plant
closing or mass layoff. So, that’s hardly charity.
After comforting my wife and working out a script to tell the kids, I assured her I’d start looking
for a new job tomorrow.
I needed another story. One just for myself.
And so I resolved to start a diary to track my job hunt, my thoughts on what had brought me to
this point in life, and to maybe also work on several projects I had not had time for when I was
working for Belan.
The severance agreement I signed and returned via DocuSign did not prohibit me from filing for unemployment, so I submitted a claim on my state’s recalcitrant “Workforce Support” website.
Unemployment benefits are paid weekly. Plus full pay for the next two months.
I resolved to enjoy myself.
Time to do nothing for once. Time to write every day.
I resolved to go for a walk.
Day 2 – Austin, TX
Summer in Texas is a pitiless bitch.
The kids have been out of school for three days. Rather than building the day around a pre-dawn
walk on the trails behind our house, the excursion of the day will be to the neighborhood
swimming pool.
I’ve always loved summer more than anyone I know but hated having to work: schlepping to the
office in long sleeves and long pants, waiting for the car’s AC to cool down, wishing I could go
to the pool. Now I’m being paid to do nothing. I know I should be out job hunting but that can
wait, and it does not take the full day.
I’ve already narrativized the story, made it tellable. Yes, I was laid off, I’ll be fine, just going to
take some time off and get back out there. I have lots of prospects, the severance is great, no
rush.
The narrative makes it easier on everyone. It’s compact, memorable, fits into a recognizable
pattern, and provides some comfort.
Is that all there is? Say many tourists who make the drive out to West Texas.
We’ll be OK. Everything’s fine.
I’ll become the flâneur of the suburbs, the poet of the pool.
“Have a great summer.”
The sometimes weekly cycle of rain and sun during summer produces an immense growth strain
on the St. Augustine grass, grass named for the Florida city and, one supposes indirectly then, for
the confessional saint.
The patron saint of suburban lawn care.
Besides the daily documentary diary, sections written toward other ideas, ideas that must be
organized.
One project: complete my notes for a genealogical project centered around my eight biological
great-grandparents. But really, the main character of that story is my great-grandfather Belan. I
can’t let go of his story.
Another: organize and transcribe several thousand notecards of coincidences, facts, and trivia I
had collected for Belan’s AI engine.
And approximately sixty-six other projects I’ve had on the back burner these past three decades.
No Belan or Belan Corp to reject them now.
No schedule per se but can’t get stuck in too many side projects if I am to actually finish one thing.
Always in search of a fertile, productive spell of time.
Well, here you go.
Millard Kaufman was 90 years old when his debut novel was published by McSweeney’s.
A diary written down as remarks to one’s self: a private audience for short paragraphs, of which
there are sometimes a fairly long chain about the same subject while at other times, as in one’s
own mind, there is a sudden change, a jumping from one topic to another.
Arthur Miller said he wanted to write a play “without any transitions at all” when he wrote Death
of a Salesman.
Day 3 – Austin, TX
No one wants to work anymore.
I’d overheard Belan say that to one of his VPs, Ray, about a week before he laid off me—and
Ray and a hundred others. Maybe 200? I don’t know. They don’t publish box scores of layoffs.
Stolen time, borrowed time, a refusal to return to time. The back pages give the score.
I’ve succumbed to the layoff.
Being laid off feels like succumbing to the inherent unfairness of aging.
Being laid off feels like all your worst fears coming true.
Being laid off feels like you are truly a wisp of a weed at the mercy of macroeconomic forces
outside anyone’s control.
Being laid off feels like you have to fake a sense of shame to certain people who truly believe it
could never happen to them.
Walk to the library every day. Read one page every day. Take a book to the pool.
Casey Kasem died of Lewy Body Dementia.
You don’t have to leave your room.
In an age of speed, I began to think, nothing could be more invigorating than going slow. In an
age of distraction, nothing can feel more luxurious than paying attention. And in an age of
constant movement, nothing is more urgent than sitting still. Said Pico Iyer.
Scroll down to the death.
On every Wikipedia entry I read about a person, I am always tempted to scroll down to the Death
section first.
Just tell me how it ends.
Day 4 – Austin, TX
Hot as fuck. No need to step outdoors.
A job wherein one simply reads books all day.
I’ve had a job with roughly that job description. A couple of times. After a while, it’s the same as
any other job.
I need it to not be a job.
I wanted to grow up and just be a reader, just someone who reads. Even then I knew that wasn’t
a job. Said Lydia Davis.
We are what we walk between.
I resolve to watch one movie per day.
I’ve already failed.
I listen to the radio instead. I have no control over what is played on the radio.
To take a messy life and make it messier, to eschew order beyond the march of days. We mark
time regardless.
Meaning is overrated, unmeaning is an overgrown garden.
Was there any meaningful work that paid well? It’s a fool’s errand to pursue it. And yet, work has
always felt like more than a simple paycheck.
Settling into a rhythm now. Sleeping later, coffee and a book in bed, write a little, off to the pool
by 11, home at 2 for a nap, maybe watch TV or go to the store to buy dinner, grill, cook, write in
the diary again, watch two movies, read more.
Day 5 – Austin, TX
The unrelenting sun. The constant, ever-present, death-banishing sun.
Reality is under no obligation to be interesting. Wrote Borges.
Watching Time Bandits last night and considering that the sun in the sky during the Minotaur
scene is, in fact, the same sun in all the scenes, in all time-travel movies, the same sun in the sky
I can see today.
The same sun Caesar saw still sets every day.
A sundial is one order less abstract than a clock. Rather than representing time through numbers,
a sundial reveals the rotation of the earth itself, the true motion of how we experience time.
Lisa Marie Presley died of a bowel obstruction resulting from scar tissue from an old bariatric
surgery.
Le Latin Mystique was dedicated to J.K. Huysmans.
Nietzsche said there are no facts, only interpretations.
Thumbing back through the notebook and looking for blank spaces so I can fill them with lines
I overhear, things that seem important in some way.
In my culture, we use every part of the notebook.
Day 6 – Austin, TX
No more job. No more alarm. No deadlines. Kids are out of school—no need to wake up early to
make lunches, no bus stops.
Too hot to go for a walk, but I do it anyway. The scorching takes us out of reality and blurs the
edges of our senses.
Still some primal instinct to lash out at the injustice of having been laid off when one knows so
many more incompetent people remain on the same corporation’s payroll, seagulls behind the
trawler.
I rehash the details: eight months of severance at full pay, plus the two month notice period, plus
a month of accrued vacation, plus those now-approved weekly unemployment benefits. Three
more months of full medical and dental before subsidized COBRA.
And there is the consulting gig with Dignowity if I want to do anything besides go to the
neighborhood pool and putter around the house for a while.
The few times I have tried to freelance felt like unemployment to me anyway.
I had resolved on a voyage around the world, wrote Joshua Slocum.
Summer is perhaps not the best time to grow a beard, but I’ve resolved to quit shaving as of
today.
Over it.
In some industries, being laid off is practically a badge of honor. It means you’ve been around
the block a time or two. You’ve been in the trenches and seen some shit. If you’re just a number,
well, stick around long enough and it’s inevitable.
When we moved to Austin, I did have about two months to get settled before my new job with
the agency started. And it was one of the best times of my life. It was also summer then. We
spent days sleeping late, slowly emerging into the heat of the day with iced coffee and a book,
then taking our lunch over to the pool, reading some more, going out to a different restaurant
almost every night, oblivious to the days of the week.
Aiming for stasis this summer. Anti-work, non-productive, downright lazy.
I am being paid to do nothing.
Or perhaps these are two separate, interrelated things: I am being paid. And I intend to do
nothing.
Summer in the Suburbs.
OOO. Out of Office. For a long while. Auto-respond.
Odilon Redon’s brother Gaston was friends with Claude Debussy.
Day 7 – Austin, TX
At home, in Austin, in the summer, there is rarely a need to wear socks.
The years and decades of writing in bullet points for memos, PowerPoint presentations, and
emails have infected even my private journals, turning them away from traditional paragraphs
and, I notice, altered my reading preferences toward the shorter, fragmentary novels.
Day-by-day. Piecemeal.
Piece-by-piece, fragmentary, noncontinuous, but not necessarily unsystematic.
Haibun prosimetry.
“Meal” in Old English was more of a measurement, a quality of a thing taken one-at-a-time.
Inchmeal.
Phonemeal. Footmeal. Weekmeal. Blinkmeal.
Piecemeal, daymeal.
Diarymeal. Line-meal.
Wordmeal.
Unemployment benefits dampen the effects of recession and help consumers retain purchasing
power.
I pause a DVD and open the Wikipedia app.
I can’t make sense of it.
Wes Anderson said he took the title sequence for Asteroid City directly from the opening
sequence of Bad Day at Black Rock.
The morning that Robert Mapplethorpe died, Patti Smith was reading a book about Odilon
Redon.
A life lived for art, and other people.
John Dos Passos and Ernest Hemingway were nearly killed in a car accident just outside
Yellowstone National Park.
Of course, all work is coarse and unsophisticated. It requires none of the vocabulary or
complexity of the reading I do for “pleasure.”
We played hide and seek among the gravestones.
I.M. Pei died at 102. Tony Bennett made it to 96.
Sinead O’Connor died on Mick Jagger’s 80th birthday.
Too much suicide, self-ruin, hard to accept as facts.
Nature is gone; culture is our second nature.
Infinite suburbs, eternal exurbs. Super-Cannes. What’s beyond the post-postmodern exurb?
From old notebooks.
From old Field Notes.
The literature of exhaustion.
Who will stick around to document what has changed?
Day 87 – Austin, TX
Either/or you make a diary or tell a story and make a narrative.
I’ve always kept a diary. At least since high school. A depressant for a depressive, for years.
How does one give up the attachment to the self?
David Markson had no problem dropping the reader straight into the facts. Dispatch the
traditional story structure. He was too old and fed up to bother. No more I.
The best books, for me = impossible to summarize.
If you have the guts to be yourself, other people will pay your price. Wrote John Updike.
But what if they don’t?
Love of idleness? No, love from idleness.
The inertia effect, so easy to do nothing, deceptively easy. Status quo bias.
I resolve not to experience the stereotypical midlife crisis.
Movies that just end at a random spot. The end credits play the role of spoiler.
Please, please, please, please, please let me get what I want, just this one time.
I put up the hammock today.
Paul Thomas Anderson took a class with David Foster Wallace at Emerson College and wrote a
paper on White Noise.
An early memory: seeing a punk wearing a t-shirt proclaiming “Kill ‘em all & let God sort ‘em
out” and thinking “he doesn’t really believe that.”
Paint a little, garden a little, cook something, read something, listen intently with headphones on,
watch a movie, write in a journal, read some more.
During COVID, working from home saved many lives. You can see why people would be
reluctant to give it up.
I worked from home off and on, for the past five years and, at times, it’s similar to the freedom of unemployment. At times. For some people.
Recall meeting a friend from the Netherlands who mentioned that it’s common for young people
there to go through extended bouts of unemployment (thanks to a strong social safety net)
without the sort of stigma attached to the word “unemployed” in the US.
Martin Amis and Kingsley Amis both died at 73.
Martin Amis and Christopher Hitchens both died of esophageal cancer, in the US.
Birth and death are the two essential facts of life and we all must confront them head on.
Eight hours for our usual vocation, eight hours for rest and refreshment, eight hours for service to
humanity.
Slackerism, established in Austin, Texas.
There is a reason why the elderly tend to migrate away from the cold and the snow and toward
warmer climates, the beaches, Florida.
Mervyn Peake died of Lewy Body Dementia.
Don’t just do something. Stand there. Said John Green.
Close the book on it.
Occasionally remembering those who have dropped out, deleted social media, those who refuse
to post or like. Know that you are missed. We think of you. And wonder.
Miles Davis would walk out on stage and just start playing.
John Lennon signed the paperwork dissolving the Beatles at DisneyWorld’s Polynesian resort.
Richard Nixon gave his “I’m not a crook” speech at DisneyWorld.
Wallace Stevens wrote that Florida “is not really amazing in itself but in what it becomes under
cultivation.”
There is not really a world except for the one we make.
Someday technology may unite us all again, in a non-shitty way.
Until then, I retreat to a paper journal.
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A Moment with Matt Bucher
PDS: Tell us a little about your process writing this excerpt and the larger body of work it comes from.
MB: In some ways, this new book is a sequel to my first book, The Belan Deck. But you don't need to know anything about that one to understand this one. The whole book is 99 days of a diary. There is a lot of wish fulfillment in trying to imagine the scenario: what if you got laid off but had really good severance? What if you didn't have to do anything for a few months? What if you got paid to do nothing? But there is tension between the idea of doing nothing productively and feeling like a lazy sloth. Some days seem longer than others. Some days there isn't much to report and so the existence of reality must be sought in facts/reality outside of one's self. My process is that I write a lot by hand and then transcribe some of that into a Word document, and then revise it again and again.
PDS: Who do you seek to represent or speak to in your work? In other words, what communities & people inspire you to write?
MB: I guess I speak for and represent a bunch of creative people who are working in cubicle jobs. I'm inspired by thousands of people, millions of people, all smarter and more articulate than me, who have written and published books for the past 500 years. The words "Austin, TX" are repeated throughout the book and I do love the community of Austin, the neighborhood where I live, and so I am inspired by anyone who is an activist for their local community.
PDS: I noticed there were a lot of mentions of death and was intrigued by this line: "On every Wikipedia entry I read about a person, I am always tempted to scroll down to the Death section first. Just tell me how it ends." Can you speak more about the way aging and mortality inspired this piece?
MB: I think we all realize our time here is limited. There is a beginning and an end: it's fundamental to existence. You can see it pretty acutely in the Stoics, Romeo & Juliet, Dead Poets Society, etc. Steve Jobs said death is the greatest motivator. No one can escape it. Even after 50,000 years of human development, we still struggle with talking about it, facing the inevitable. And mine is a bit of a midlife crisis book so it's part of that stage in life where we grapple with watching others die—and with catching a glimpse of ourselves in the mirror.
PDS: What are some books and writers that have influenced your writing style?
MB: David Markson's books for sure. But Markson died in 2010. No more Markson books! What a loss! I'm a big believer in something Austin Kleon said which is "write the book you want to read." And I suppose I wanted to read more Markson books. But stylistically there are a lot of writers and books and movies I admire and try to steal from: Sarah Manguso's Ongoingness, Kathryn Scanlan's Aug 9 Fog, anything described as a "weird little book," Nicholson Baker, Evan S. Connell, It's a Wonderful Life, Before Sunset, anonymous people who contribute to Wikipedia, David Shields, pretty much all diaries or fake diaries, Jenny Odell's How to Do Nothing, and many more. Piecemeal/Daymeal is also born out of my interest in sundials, clocks, and watchmakers.
PDS: Do you have any tips or words-to-live-by that keep you motivated as a writer in this day and age?
MB: I'm not the wise old fish, I have no great lessons to teach. I still consider myself a beginner in many ways. I still have so much to learn. Here's a tip I try to teach my kids: don't show up to a party empty handed. Here's another: don't argue about politics on Facebook. As far as what keeps me motivated, well, I struggle with that, too. But if you want to write and you want to finish a project, just remember that you are running out of time.
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Matt Bucher is the author of The Belan Deck. His work has appeared in Life Writing, Publishers Weekly, Electric Literature, The Dublin Review of Books, and other places. He is the co-host of the Concavity Show podcast. He lives in Austin, Texas.
Find Matt Bucher at mattbucher.com and on Instagram and X (formerly Twitter) @mattbucher
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