Today was my last day at work...

...or at least my last day working at my old job. My 6-person work group had already had a teambuilding event planned at San Diego's Wild Animal Park, and the event became a kind of a send-off for me. It was nice. At a monkey enclosure, I snapped the shot at left, where one monkey seems to be taking a time-out as the rest of the crew carries on with the hunting and gathering or whatever. "I know what you're feeling, buddy," I thought. "I'm ready for a time-out myself."

I made the decision to leave several months ago, and I have watched excitedly as April 29 has drawn closer and closer on the calendar. In the preceding year, I have grown increasingly dissatisfied with my job, both because of changes in it and changes in me. Overall, however, my 5 years with this firm have been good ones.

With pleasure, I bid farewell to certain aspects of the job I had come to despise. With sincerity, I bid farewell to my co-workers. With some trepidation, I bid farewell to paychecks, which arrived twice monthly with a consistency that one could build his or her life around.

I began researching the logistics...

of putting my anti-Bush designs on t-shirts. Over the course of a few months, I checked out everything from website fees and t-shirt printing costs to copyright laws and first amendment rights.

I learned that a basic web storefront, which I planned on designing myself, would cost me about $50 a month, while the cost of printing shirts could vary from $5 to $15 per shirt depending on how many I would order at a time. Some Internet research helped me confirm that the first amendment protects my right to criticize the U.S. president and his supporting cast. From what I read of copyright law on sites like www.copyright.gov, I realized that I would not be able to simply alter photographs of Bush and re-distribute them; instead, I would need to create my own illustrations of Bush from scratch. This was a setback, but not a deal-breaker, as I had some experience with computer-assisted illustration and knew I could produce what I would need.

The last leg of my research focused on the basic steps involved in starting a small business. With the help of a great book - Nolo's Small Business Start-Up Kit for California - I figured out how to register with the city, county, state, and federal governments, and how to pick a proper name for my company as well.

Bush's re-election in late 2004...

...was quite a stunner to me. I looked at the vote as a referendum on the Iraq war, which was Bush's baby, and which seemed more and more like a bad idea every day. But alas, I misjudged my fellow citizens, or at least those in many of the smaller cities and the towns and the rural areas, and Bush squeaked out another very close (and very shady) victory. For a few days there in mid-November, I was really bummed out.

In the months that followed, I became increasingly exasperated with Bush’s policies and proclamations. News of continuing death and misery in Iraq continued to flow, and on the homefront, Bush trumpeted his plan for "saving" our Social Security program - a plan that breathed new life into the old metaphor about throwing the baby out with the bath water. Behind both of these issues lurked Bush's budget deficits...thoughts of my share of the expanding federal debt began to chafe me like thoughts of my credit card balances used to before I paid them off.

Anyway, this anti-Bush angst led me to create a few twisted images of Bush on my PC using a common photo-editing program. I thought the images were pretty funny, and I thought they criticized Bush in a simple and straightforward way that might appeal to a lot of people. I started to wonder how I circulate the images and get my criticisms of Bush out there in the real world. It wasn't too long before I hit on the t-shirt as an ideal means of distribution.

In the beginning...

...I was an employee on the 6th floor of the building at right. I worked at a San Diego-based financial services company with about 500 other employees. 90% of the company was owned by the founder, who had started the place 30 years earlier, as a one-man operation in an office behind a Chinese restaurant. These days, he is in his early 60s and is a billionaire who owns the largest piece of property in San Diego's richest neighborhood - which is also one of the richest neighborhoods in all of the United States.

Now, not too long ago, I would have considered his achievement a perfect example of a vigorous and thorough fulfillment of the American Dream. Today, however, I define the American Dream - or at least my personal version of it - a bit differently. In a nutshell, I think the Dream is less about earning vast riches and more about living the type of life you really want to live. Of course, if I read that last sentence in five years, I'll probably be shaking my head at my naivete once again.

At this point in my life, however, I'm ready to leave my current job as a writer of marketing materials like brochures and newsletters and advertisements. I'm going to start my own t-shirt company, designing and distributing politically themed shirts from my hometown of Ocean Beach, California, U.S.A.