After ten days without regular employment I have by this point more or less taken leave of my senses.
Such joy greeted the morning when I left the company I'd been with for some four years: at last the never-ending pendulum of train journeys had been halted; lonely hours reading newspapers, books, magazines - anything to make the journey appear to progress more quickly.
I was sick of standing about on freezing platforms, eyes glancing helplessly at the sky when another delay was announced (there's something about the sky, about the stars. You may have already guessed as much.) Oh, for the inhumane nine-hour turnaround to stop - home at half past nine on a good day, back out of bed at 06:30, temporarily ill and temporaily blind.
At that time of the day, food was a toxin - I'd no sooner let it pass my lips than I would swallow hemlock. I was and presumably remain nourishment-intolerant during the hours when my mind/body have convinced themselves they should still be sleeping.
In general, then, the breaking of the strictures that bind my life to employment was something to be relished. It is a psychological as well as physical cutting of ties - I used words like 'coming out of prison,' or 're-emerging into the light' to describe how I assumed I would feel.
Yet after a week-and-a-bit, I find that having destroyed the structure of my days and interrupted what is - sadly - the rhythm of my life, I am short-tempered, frustrated and silent.
People without talent, people without direction or purpose, people without a first principle to reduce themselves to when absolutely everything else has failed or is incapacitated, turn to the monotonous predictability of their work in order to progress from one day to the next.
Without that bulwark of predictability, whole lives are emptied of purpose and significance. Such a gross humiliation to confess that it's all that ever sustained me in the first place. It's probably not too great an exaggeration to state: people such as myself would almost rather work for nothing rather than do nothing at all. This is who I am, and I hate myself for it.
