Open the vein
My super-secret, slightly shameful side gig
Writing, according to Ernest Hemingway, is easy.
“There is nothing to writing,” he said. “All you do is sit down at a typewriter, open your vein, and bleed.”
I’d like to think that I sit at my laptop and regularly open my veins for the benefit of you, my dear readers. All these ones and zeroes zooming through intercontinental cables yet retain some trace of my own red blood cells. But those aren’t the only ones I open on a regular basis! Everyone around town wants a taste of my sweet, sweet blood.
Various income streams sluice into my household. I write here, regularly, and receive payments from a select coterie of highly esteemed, extremely attractive paying subscribers. (For instance, they were recently made privy to a vital piece of Adam Fleming Petty lore.) I work in a grocery store, stocking milk, cheese and yogurt. And my wife remains the primary breadwinner in our home, doing marketing work in the educational sector.
But there is still another source of income I draw upon, one I am somewhat sheepish to admit to. Why sheepish, exactly? Chalk it up to the lower middle class guilt I still carry with me, and will continue to do so, until my dying day.
What is this income stream? Am I posting salacious content on OnlyDads? Surely not; that would be a worse investment than a subprime mortgage. Although this method of earning money does involve bodily fluids.
That is right:
I regularly donate plasma.
I started donating plasma one year ago. Twice a week, I go to the donation center, where I lay in a kind of divan specially designed to relax the body and place the arms in such a way that the veins are easily accessible to the phlebotomists who scurry about, bee-like, with needles instead of proboscises. My protein is tested; my hematocrit levels are determined. That has to do with the ratio of red to white blood cells, I have learned. My vein is poked, and over the next 45 minutes or so, I pump my fist with the aid of a squishy ball ( you can just see it in the pic above) as my blood is siphoned out of my body, its plasma separated, before getting returned to my awaiting vein.
It is, I have found, a mostly pleasant experience. The donation center is clean and well-run. The technicians are friendly and professional, even the young ones in their early 20s. I am given uninterrupted time to read, which was how I finished 2666 over the summer.
Yet a trace of shame remains. A sense that, were I doing better in life, were I earning more money from more respectable pursuits, I wouldn’t need to be here, pumping my fist and filling my plasma bag.
I don’t think I’m the only one, either. Indeed, I think the entire plasma donation experience, as it’s currently practiced, is meant to assuage the fears of the downwardly mobile such as myself.
Years ago—two decades, really; yes, I am that old, I keep reminding myself—back when I was in college, I donated plasma exactly once. The experience was profoundly unpleasant. The facility was cramped; the staff were terse; parking was a hassle. And I, as a college student, imbued with the belief that my degree would enable to ascend to bigger and better things, took all that unpleasantness as an affront to my dignity. I didn’t have time for this! Me, a white man getting a degree? Surely it’s all roses from here on out!
(This was the early 2000s, by the way. Pre-2008. Pre-financial crash. We were young once, and beautiful.)
Now, though? I’m doing everything I can, however I can, to earn some scratch. And I’m not the only one, either. Far from it! Our economic precarity means that whole swathes of the population, many of them middle-class folk with the sunny outlook that suggests, are in similar boats as mine. Needing money to shore up our hard-earned dignity.
The plasma donation industry has refashioned the experience to address the needs and anxieties of people like me. The whole visit, from the moment I walk on to when I leave, exists as a kind of cross between a gym session and a financial planning consultation. Basically, the sort of responsible action you, the middle-class person with a bright future supposedly ahead, need and desire.
I get money from the transaction, of course. About enough to cover the monthly grocery bill, provided I only shop at Aldi. Even more than the material benefit, perhaps, is the psychic reassurance. You are going to be alright, the experience tells me, with every pump of my fist.
Am I, though? Are we? Or will society continue to get separated into haves and have-nots, like my plasma gets separated from my blood?
Either way—at least I get a supple metaphor out of it!