There's a guy who chats me up whenever he buys drinks from me at the bar where I work. Sometimes he mentions The Stranger and One-Night Stand, the column I wrote up until a couple of weeks ago. Though the guy never comes out and says he's a big fan of The Stranger, I've always gotten that impression from him, and that's a nice thing to think. The paper has been a significant part of my life for the past year and a half, and it's rewarding to imagine that the work you do makes some kind of impression upon people.

I was disappointed the last time the guy ordered drinks from me. With no apparent concern that I might take offense to a very blunt question, the customer crudely asked if I had recently been fired from the paper. He said he'd noticed that someone else was writing my column. I told the guy that I wasn't fired: I quit. I could tell he thought my decision was stupid. I told him that the amount of work the job required had become greater than the rewards. "Too much work for one column a week?" he asked, frustrated by my laziness, as though I were his own child and it was his responsibility to scold me for having made such a regrettable decision.

I explained that One-Night Stand was only a small part of the work I had been doing at the paper. I told him I had been the music editor, and that more goes into being the music editor of a weekly publication than writing a column with my little picture next to it. I found myself wondering why I felt the need to justify my decision. Meantime, the guy just sort of stood there, reproachfully looking right through me. Then he took his drinks and went to join his friends elsewhere in the room. In hindsight, I don't blame the guy for his rudeness.

I have been asked to write a "farewell essay" explaining why I chose to resign from my position as music editor of The Stranger, and I decided that blame is a reasonable place to start. That's why I've chosen to recount my interaction with that bar patron the other night. The collision between his open curiosity and my defensive perception of his tactlessness goes a long way toward explaining why I'm not willing to do my old job anymore. I know I am to blame for his forwardness. I've spent the past three years writing criticism, and I deserve to be criticized. It's karmic; it's the rule of nature. I half expect that I will spend the next three years being picked apart intellectually by all of my friends and loved ones, a fate I would gladly accept. I love criticism. I'm smart, so that's the way I think.

What I no longer love is being professionally obligated to opine and justify (a rough equivalent to binge and purge) for anywhere from 30 to 70 hours per week, which is the critic's job. And ultimately, criticism is a terrible way to earn one's bread. It's only minimally creative (you get to write and come up with all sorts of opinions), and it's a soul-numbing job that sucks the joy out of a beautiful thing like music, your love for which is likely why you began criticizing it in the first place. Overall, critics are not very creative or interesting people--artists are. Artists do things, like make records and write books. Critics feed off that creativity. They can choose to scold it, praise it, archive it, whatever. It's still someone else's work that the critic is standing on, and when I began to feel like I was in jeopardy of actually becoming a professional critic--like, as a career path--I knew it was time to go.

But that's only one version of the story. The other version, which I began to write earlier today but thought better of doing because it just sounded whiny, is that within a year of doing this job, the way I listened to music had begun to change. I would find myself thinking too much at shows, taxing myself to figure out which bands had most directly influenced the one I was seeing, or coming up with all the things I was going to write in the paper to preview the band next time it played. Each time I did this I would suddenly catch myself. And I would feel this pang of dread: the same feeling a kid gets on a Sunday evening when it starts getting dark and he realizes he'll have no choice but to go to school in the morning.

No, I can't have that. I hated school. That's why I dropped out. And I love music. That's why I quit.