SOC #4: A wasting talent

Now the main reason of moving to Santa Barbara was the job my friend was able to get me into. Oh, and by the way, that two pounds of marijuana that was in my trunk had to do with my job. No, nothing illegal...well, by States rights anyway. I needed higher income and the job I had in my hometown was total cheap bullshit. I was trying to pay an independent publishing company to publish my first novel. And the fastest way to get it done was the medicinal marijuana business. For me, anyway. I dropped out of college years earlier - my first semester - to the shock of people that knew me. I just didn't care for the academics I could've achieved, all I could think about was that story in my head, and my eagerness of writing it down and submitting it to anyone who'd take it. After a few months of queries and submissions of the first ten pages of my first completed novel to agents, and small publishers, the first that showed interest was a publishing company that required me to pay for some of the cost of publication. A lot of established writers, and struggling ones, hate the idea of the writer suffering the burden of paying for ones own publication, but I cared not. My story most likely was never going to find interest from a literary agent, let alone any mainstream publisher; it was simply just too extreme for most people. By the time I went to work for the medicinal marijuana dispensary, I was 40 percent away from finishing payments, the publishing company didn't mind my payments were going to be late, so my novel was still safe, lying in wait to open up to the reading world. The job was hell of easy at first, so fucking simple. At first I spent about a week on a farm about 40 minutes outside of Santa Barbra, got up around 7 in the morning, got a silver bag full of untrimmed bud from a room full of silver bags(let me tell you, dear reader, it was a shitload, like a silver lake), then went outside to a tent where tables and chairs were set up. While my friend and I walked to the tent, he stopped, looking up the hill to the road behind bushes and shrubbery, his eyes wide, paranoid. "Dude, don't," he said to me. "Come, move." I looked up the hill and saw just bushes, trees, and shrubbery. "What?" I asked. He shushed me, beckoning me onward to the tent. "The fuck is wrong with you?" I said. He shushed me again. He told me later that pigs were parked on the road near the entrance to the farm, watching whoever entered. See, the Sheriff of the county where that particular farm was located liked to be informed if there was medicinal marijuana being grown in his area, even if it was not required of the owner of the farm to do so. My boss, who didn't own the land, but was leasing it, did not inform the Sheriff, because my boss was a clandestine type with delusions of superiority over authority, he didn't feel it was the Sheriff's business to know. Before I started working for him, my boss grew too many damn marijuana plants, over 3 motherfuckin' thousand, and the neighboring farms smelled it and called the Sheriff. That was the only day I worked on that farm, the owner wanted my boss' business off his property, he got his money, and a week later we were working at a house owned by my boss in Santa Barbara and trimmed the buds their. That first day was interesting though, being in the tent, I trimmed with Mexicans who came from the deep south of Mexico. They spoke Spanish to my friend, and my coworker, but amongst themselves they spoke in a Mayan dialect. We didn't know what they were saying, but it was cool to hear. Not only did I work for the business for the extra cash to pay for the publication for my novel, but also write, which I seldom did to my disappointment. I lacked discipline the entire time: if I wasn't getting stoned on weed and watching movies after work, I was going out drinking, getting wasted, wasting away my talent. Seriously, the 6 or 7 months I was there, I wrote only 8 pages of a second novel I was writing, a novel I scrapped due to the fact it was going nowhere, it had no purpose. When I came back to my hometown, I e-mailed the publishing company and told them my payments were not going to be sent for a while longer. They replied that they would amend my contract with them, and change the publication of my novel to On-Demand printing, which just meant that if someone would want a copy of my book, rather than downloading it, it would take a little longer to be delivered to them. My first novel was on its way to publication, and I didn't go back to Santa Barbara and work for that fucking idiot asshole of a boss. He couldn't run a hot dog stand in New York City if God helped him.