Dirty Work: A Chump’s Search for Meaning

Rod Bull

"What was happening? Everything I tried was going wrong. I needed to start again, get my life back. Would it be possible to change the events of my life, was there some basic flaw in me? 'There was a veiled past which I could not see, there was a door to which I had not key.' How would it be possible?" We've all been there: An impasse, a crossroads, an unmarked door—or some asymmetry in the weave of life that leaves us stuck at worst, though at best in question. So too begins Rod Bull’s ribald, funny, drunken, irreverent memoir of a seemingly accidental spiritual life, with a constant refrain to “dirty work”—shoveling manure in a stable or bilge water in the belly of a ship, or cutting cane and viciously cut, the only cure to which is to urinate on yourself… Bull’s is a life of pratfalls, comic encounters (with an angry Jim Brown, the running back, in London, with sundry Tibetan Tulkus or with the tutelary heads of the Gurdjieff-Ouspensky Work) and hard won insights. What is of particular note is that here you read the story of no man soaring from height to golden height but an honest recounting and recollecting, blemishes and all, of a life of the spirit via serious hard traveling. Dirty Work: A Chump’s Search for Meaning is a memoir of crazy wisdom.