Pension liquidation to buy half that semiperfect silverhouse is off the table (so a tentative goodbye to the dream of fruit trees) but I’m still favoring the liquefaction for other reasons.

I’m watching this so-called democracy go into a nosedive and I don’t want to be dependent on a government agency for my only trickle of income.

I’m watching the slogan in the t-shirt pic become not just metaphorically but now literally true. It took several months for the American train wreck to get to two hundred thousand deaths from the virus, but it’s not going to take very much longer to get to 300K. Most people in most places run around with no mask anyway. Sitting in my car eating, outside the grocery store, I heard an NPR drone saying how happy she was that things were getting back to normal. I don’t know what world she’s living in.

I am becoming very addicted to having no job, partly because going into an office might kill me, and partly because jobs suck anyway.

I could cash out, pay off the credit cards, and still be sitting on enough nest egg to pay five to seven years worth of the bills I’m currently paying.

The pessimistic part of me says yeah, pal, but you’re not taking into account things like the car dying for once and all, and even if it works out, this house is in a town that’s a shithole and so those years would not be happy ones.

The newly born optimist part of me says: there are a billion ways to make some money, maybe even good money, without ever having to have a boss again, and you damn well should get on with the process of making it, while living the life you want. Quit your idiot shivering and get brave.

Rewind, to yesterday morning.

I’d had a good run of pain-free days and reasonably restful nights. But Tuesday I woke from a dream of getting a big hug from a friend of mine who died early in the pandemic, a man I never could have hugged or been hugged by in life. A man who, despite our many acrimonious differences, was on my side in the end when the shit hit the fan.

In the dream it was awkward but nice. In real life it woke me wide after only three hours of sleep, and over the course of the day I got one of my headaches that starts in the gut.

I’ve said a little about those recently. I’ve had them all my life off and on. The kind of jobs I’ve had for the last four years made them much worse and almost an everyday thing. Having no job for four months has made them less frequent and less harsh. So this time I just ate plenty of naproxen and kept going with my thinking and my dishes and my laundry.

I went to bed at one and slept blissfully until 10 AM. I faced this Wednesday down with very clear eyes, and I was productive. I bit the bullet and paid not only most of October’s bills, but a batch of yearly ones for domain names and things that crop up here in the fall. I even paid some bills I didn’t have to pay yet, and I paid them because the alternative was having to trust, and I don’t want to trust right now, I mean anyone.

It cost a lot, and it dropped my savings down below five figures.

But that didn’t make me afraid. It made me alert; sharp. Fierce. Fuck the government gold watch and quiet permanent poverty. Fuck bosses, all of them, in vengeful sodomy forever. Cash me out bitches, all the way and for good. I’ll figure something out.

There was a moment in time almost four decades back when I woke up in a soaking sleeping bag in a public park.