Friday, January 6: The trick is to reconcile the weight of knowing you really don’t have to do much, what with your unemployment check en route, and your supplemental side-job income piling up. Eschew the populist notion that to work is to be saintly. Your obedience to this ethos undermines the stone-cold law you must remember: Oh, how much you deserve this big break from the grind of things. They treated you like a worm, never forget (always remind yourself regardless of the truth). Androgynous you, snooping beak-blind in the tunnels of your office building, they never visiting your little dim-lit nest, the little blue room — naturally a supposed calming color that in fact has been known to increase the likelihood of ferocious, vivid depression. Ha! A worm?! Would a worm know that?! — where all the production happened and all your real dreams stood aside waiting for the passing of another deadline. You owe it to yourself to stress the liberation of an existence exponentially devoid of typical responsibility. You stress your malaise with the whole situation and secretly wonder when someone (an employer) will come find you and whisk you away again to grind and writhe and wriggle in another temple of toil.
The trick then, really, is to pretend you don’t care very much about your job status, and to take pleasure in the hobbies you’ve accrued outside of a normal working schedule. The trick within that is to mask your concern — once you realize your hobby-pleasure is antithetically false — for the gravity of the realization that since these were hobbies accrued in the scant hours outside of your normal working schedule, you haven’t really given them the proper synaptic outlets, or fostered, perhaps, or unlocked the hidden talents through which you’ll truly capitalize on the practice or employment of these hobbies. But when/if you realize you’re just not that good at the aforementioned hobby, or that it turns out devoting more than an hour or so to it per night between coming home from work and going to sleep before going back to work again is just overkill, or when/if the guilt comes from the shock of truncated income and you need to try, if only for a moment, to do some real boots-on-the-ground job huntin’, why then you understand in the fullest sense possible that this may be one trick you don’t know how to execute.
So long, three-card-monte adventure on Hawthorne. We will find each other again…
Week one of joblessness, laid-offness, discardedness, fuckedoverness is like making a homemade parfait. You get everything ready — your fruits, of which blueberries ought to be included, because they’re brain food, as well as your yogurt and your granola, and then whatever other embellishments you care to add — and set it all out in front of you on the counter with a modest bowl-vessel to hold it in. On the cutting board; make sure you’re doing the dirty work with a cutting board. You begin your peeling of the bananas, or the cutting of the apples, or the chopping of the pear, the sprinkling of the raisins, utilizing the cutting board, fetching the granola, studying the probability that maybe you have too many things going on for this particular parfait. I mean, how much fruit can a person eat at one sitting and not shit themselves immediately afterward? And if you pile all that yogurt on top of even a fraction of that fruit mountain you’ve assembled, the subsequent application of granola is just gonna spray all over the counter, likely onto the floor, where the cherry-eyed Dachshund will sniff it out and lick it to death before realizing it doesn’t like granola, necessitating your bare-fingered clean-up of Dachshund-licked, dead granola on a sticky kitchen floor. In the end, you say fuck the whole thing, Tupperware all the fruit and the yogurt, re-pantry the granola, and make a goddamn quesadilla because it’s easier.
Getting everything ready in your head, or on your desk, or on the cutting board, or wherever, for how you’re going to receive and react to your newfound unemployed status is a process that, at least in week one, is, as an unfortunate dupe of a Longmont Potion Castle prank call put it in a completely unrelated retort, “all blow and no show.” Lots of bravado, little noise. Lots of pacing, getting nowhere. Lots of fits and starts. Lots of zoning out and being miserable at the sheer thought of having to sell yourself to someone so you can eat. Or buy bullshit you like.
Sigh, and harrumph, and ugh. I’m gonna make a quesadilla.
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