I have never been unemployed, before this. Actually, I was employed long before I wanted to be.

My father ran a gas station in the Belmont Shore area of Long Beach, and he thought it a grand idea to take his 12-year-old son to work with him on Saturday mornings so the kid could do scut work. That son would be me. Well, and my younger brother, too. Poor kid started when he was 10.

We saw Saturday as a day off, and our father dragging us out of bed at 6 a.m. to open the Chevron station at 7 a.m. … was not our idea of fun. Even less so during the summer, when we took turns opening the station and pumping gas, washing windows and checking the oil. I did Monday, Wednesday, Friday mornings, my brother did Tuesday, Thursday, Saturday. Etc. All summer. It probably was good for us, though I’m a bit hard-pressed even now to come up with positive experiences in an environment for which I was utterly unsuited.

I worked at the gas station into college, not that I ever liked it, and that background of clock-watching was a factor in my glee when I found out a person could work for a newspaper and make a living at it. Then, later, that a person could cover sports as a full-time profession, paid to go to games. Like, how great was that?

But … today I am a casualty of the Great Newspaper Implosion of 2008. Out of work for the first time since I was … let’s see … 11 years old.

And how is it going?

I feel a bit disoriented. Still. And it’s almost three months now.

Isn’t there a game I have to go to? Some local event coming up I need to see? Someone to call, a credential to set up, a roadtrip to pitch?

This blog provides an outlet for some of that. The daily writing and opinion-venting. I have done some freelancing, which puts me into venues in a clearly professional setting.

But most of the time … I’m not working in any traditional sense. No clock to punch, no time card to fill out. No paycheck.

The queer thing is, how my time so easily seems to get soaked up. I have little or no sense of wasted time, of nothing happening. And I feared that; the shiftless sense of just sitting and looking out a window.

Yet, I’m NOT doing something that required 40 hours per week of my time, with long commutes and late nights.

How does this work?

Moving, is part of it. I was in the process of moving from the San Bernardino area to my hometown of Long Beach just as I was fired. Moving is an enormously intensive experience. Especially if you are trying to rent the home you left behind, as I was.

Part of it is finding myself back in the middle of my immediate family. I had been gone, 70 miles away, for most of 32 years. While three of my siblings and my mother still lived here in Long Beach. Returning has put me back in the family circle, and the small but fun events that are part of it. Dinner with this brother, and that sister, with my mother, nieces and nephews around, and my eldest daughter, as well. Watching “Dancing With the Stars” because my mother and wife find it amusing.

My modest exercise regime takes a chunk out of three days a week. I’m doing more entertaining than ever. I could go years, in the past, and not go to a single dinner not clearly associated with a major holiday. Now, people and a few friends come by and we do … whatever. It makes a huge difference that for the first time since college I am not working nights or weekends. I actually am around when everyone else is around. That’s a little weird, in a nice way.

I probably am paying more attention to the ebbs and flows of television. Programming other than sports, that is. I rarely miss an episode of “Lost” or “Boston Legal” or the “Sopranos,” which I’m seeing for the first time because I always refused to pay for HBO. I am a huge fan of “Survivor” and three of the four Monday night sitcoms on CBS. (“How I Met Your Mother” sucks.)

Truth be told, this isn’t a bad life. And, I should note that many public employees actually DO retire — for real, and permanently — at my age. My cousin, for instance, is done done done with the L.A. Sheriff’s Department — at age 54.

I am a bit concerned that I might get too comfortable with all this. I’m at a sort of subsistence level, in terms of economics, and by being careful I should be able to avoid financial disaster, thanks to my wife working. There is some financial imperative out there, but it’s not beating on my door. Yet.

I like the time. To sit and read. To blog. To go to dinner. To watch Comedy Central.

Still, I am looking for work. I have applied for several jobs (“numerous” sounds too embarrassing to admit to), and I assume that one will turn out to be a good fit, and I will get it. Perhaps even sooner than I might want, considering this is my first extended period away from the workplace since the summer after I graduated from Long Beact State. (When I was making cameos at the gas station, but not so much that it was a burden.)

I never figured to be out of the work force this soon. I’m fairly certain I will go back in a formal setting. Though I might not mind some loose arrangement of piece work and seasonal or part-time jobs.

Truth? I rather enjoy this. I feared I wouldn’t. And I have at least a vague sense, now, of how the chronically unemployed 1) feel no shame at not working and 2) see working as a step down from the nearly boundless freedom of making your own schedule, day after day.