I was an early casualty of The Great Recession and by the time of my layoff in January 2009 I was eager to be laid off.  While I haven't found stable income as a writer, yet, I am happy to be unemployed because as an employed person I was slowly dying inside.

 Three years ago I had been employed by Sun Microsystems as a software engineer.  Sun was at one time the "dot in .com" but ran into hard times after the dotcom bubble burst.  By early 2009 the company had started to recover, but the company's main customer base was the financial institutions which vaporized in late 2008, which sent Sun into a nosedive and a later merger with Oracle.  My layoff was in part a desparation move by Sun to get the company finances in order, but for me at a personal level it was a gift from heaven giving me time and monetary resources to focus on the writing I'd long been doing.

This time to write let me explore the ideas I'd been writing about for years on my own blogs.  

Inside me is a message wanting to be expressed.  About what a stable sustainable society would be.  Back when I was regularly employeed I'd spend hours of the work day reading up on sustainability, posting ideas on my blogs (www.7gen.com), or maintaining the electric vehicle discussion forum I'd launched (visforvoltage.org).  But it made for an inner conflict, I'd been cheating my employers of the time I spent on my own blogs.  It was clear my heart was in that topic, society-level-sustainability and electric vehicles, and I longed to have the freedom to spend full time on those topics.

That's what being laid off gifted me.

I understand many of the unemployed are fearful about their future, losing their homes, etc.  While I have my bouts of fear and self doubt about the path I've chosen, it's not like what I hear about the other unemployed.  Perhaps because of the writing work I've found the sense of purpose helps to circumvent the fears.

The writing work I've found to do is, I hope, a taste of what I'll be doing in the future.  That work is a step above writing on my own blog, but instead is what they're calling "citizen journalism" in that I'm covering news stories, writing news articles, while not having official formal training as a journalist. 

There's a lot of bogosity masquerading as professional journalism where it's political partisans spewing lies and deceit dressed up as news articles.  The topic I'm most interested in, passionate about, is "green transportation," and there's a bunch of political crap being spewed about energy and transportation policies that would undermine the shift to a greener transportation system.  Covering the stories in this field lets me counter some of that bogosity, and bring truth to the conversation going on that will determine whether electric vehicles live or die over the next few years.

 As someone who has built several electric vehicles including a beautiful 1971 Karmann Ghia EV conversion, I bring actual knowledge of how EV's work (or don't work) to covering the electric vehicle news.  For example when a Chevy Volt battery pack burns, and the NHTSA publishes their forensic study of why, it's easy for me to read it because I've built similar gizmos in my garage.

There's a lot of work going on in governments and automakers around the world to change the transportation system.  It's exciting stuff and could change how we transport our butts around town in a way to minimize the negative environmental impact in a way that'd be good for all of us.