Free The Financial Lives of the Poets by Jess Walter

began augmenting my salary freelancing stories to various national business magazines, and more significantly, I applied what I learned as a reporter to my own investing. And, Mexican shipping bonds aside, I did pretty well for a while. In my best move, I managed a nice pivot from technology stocks to financials and media before tech blew up. In some years, I made nearly as much investing in the markets as I did writing about them. I even had a popular investing column for a couple of years, although, in the interest of full disclosure, this was during the late 1990s, when you could’ve trained a puppy on the newspaper stock section and made twenty percent a year investing where his turds fell.
    It was also during this late ’90s entrepreneurial euphoria that my tumor of discontentment first began to replicate cells, as I sat chained to my desk and watched various friends and colleagues slip into phone booths and emerge as dot.com superheroes. It’s the devil’s taunt—watching people stupider than oneself making fortunes. Even when that bubble burst, I still told myself that my lack of ambition and imagination had cost me a chance at…I don’t know…wealth? Happiness? Some fulfillment of earlier promise?
    Over the years, this tumor grew and metastasized until, by 2006, with my mother gone and my dad smoking his life away on a ranch in Oregon somewhere, with my own mortality throbbing, with the Dow climbing to its peak, with our house assessed at fifty percent more than we owed on it and my financials-heavy retirement account looking like an act of genius, with my marriage seemingly steady, the thing broke within me…and…
    …I jumped. And landed. On poetfolio.com. It wasn’t that I believed I had some great talent as a poet. I knew my poetry was pedestrian and sentimental when I tried, silly and sophomoric when I didn’t. In fact, on top of the FAQ page of my prototype website was this little self-directed zinger by Alexander Pope:
    Sir, I admit your general rule,
    That every poet is a fool,
    But you yourself may serve to show it,
    That every fool is not a poet.
     
    But I jumped anyway. I walked into my evil editor’s office (imagining the zingers I would deliver) and said simply that I was giving my two-week notice. Every working person fantasizes this moment, but it’s ultimately unsatisfying. I packed my desk into two boxes, took some files and…I jumped.
    Splat.
    Parked in front of the newspaper now, I wonder what would have happened had I not quit two years ago. I likely wouldn’t have been laid off, for one thing. My newspaper had a vague seniority-by-department layoff rule (which the evil editor took joy in manipulating and subverting, by transferring his enemies to departments he would then gut)— last one in, first one out —so while I had a total of eighteen years at the place, when the last round of layoffs came, they only counted the four months since I’d come back. But I’m not sure staying would have been much better; those four months were an anxiety-dream version of my old job: there was real fear in the air, a sense that this was more than some kind of business trend, that it was the end. Four years earlier we had complained about too many ads in the paper (less room for our brilliance) and competed for designer beats (cultural trends reporter); now we sighed with relief when the slender paper had any ads at all and eagerly accepted pay cuts and broad, hyphenated jobs created by the loss of our colleagues (courts-cops-schools…).
    No, it was clear. The newspaper was sick. Dying. And when the next round of inevitable layoffs came, there I was, at the top of the to-go list, the company not at all unhappy to lose my top-scale salary and four weeks of vacation, my three-plus benefits package. My demise represented a nice chunk of savings. And when they cut me a little fourteen-week pity severance check, the sweet Human Resources minx Amber Philips pointed out with no sense of irony that I