When I was in my early 20s I was in an interesting predicament. I had acquired a job as a tattoo artist, and became bored with the work. Really bored, most people wanted extremely popular tattoos and it gets old really fast.  I was also in the height of my Christian beliefs, and I had intended to start a Christian half-way house for punkrock kids that had been couch surfing or straight up living on the street. I tried to do this in my one-bedroom apartment.

The name of the project was “The House of Calvary,” which was bullshit because it was just my one bedroom apartment with a bunch of kids living in it at any given time. I could tell some stories about all that, and maybe I will so can read about how many blood, sweat and tears I spent trying to do things right by my beliefs.

Let it suffice to say that I took in a lot of homeless kids into my shitty little apartment over the course of a year in order to try to live my beliefs.

I bring this up because two of the people living with me would just not get a job. They would stay at home all day and would not make a move to get going.

I had already quit tattooing at this point, and had a decent job as an information operator. That’s right, if you called 411 during the early 2000s I may have given you your number.

I set up a job working as an orderly at the Lubbock State School.

The Lubbock State School is an institution which houses and cares for the mentally retarded.

I got the job in part, because I told the guy in HR that I felt like the Lord had led me to this job.

Of course it may had something with the fact that the job paid only a little less than tattooing, and came with great benefits.

But even once hired, it took a month or so to get into the schedule because you had to start once a training class was available.

So to try to help my roommates get jobs I quit my operator job and got a job washing cars so that I could make them go with me to get hired, a carwash will literally hire anyone . Our co-workers were all deadbeats, drug dealers, or kids. They hired me and my friends, and I went from being a tattoo artist to being a car washer.

It was humiliating.

Then I started my job at the Lubbock State School, stay tuned and I’ll tell you about my work with the mentally retarded.