With apologies to The Irresponsibles, who really gave me the inspirational notion of self sabotage, I’m beginning to wonder these days if it’s time for me to scratch that itch. Here’s the thing, I moved out here, I searched for a shitty job and I got a pretty good one instead.

But, and here’s where the bullet through the foot, the one that’s not going in my mouth, here are the voices I’m hearing in my head (metaphorically). In Richard Adams’ story of anthropomorphized bunnies, Watership Down, the gang comes upon a possible safe haven. Cowslip’s Warren is full of well-fed and seemingly happy characters. But there is an air of melancholy, a mysterious vibe of things just ain’t seeming right. Lately, my toil place has felt a little like Cowslip should be hopping there.

We get free food at work. We have airy and open little warrens and space enough to live complacent lives. But there’s the shining wire outside that may be the farmer’s snare of death. I haven’t quite figured out what my corollary wire slipping through my fur and cutting into my throat will be in the real world, but I feel like there are farmers keeping me well fed.

I’m worried about complacency setting into my soul. I’m worried that I’m just counting down to eventual death. More than anything, I’m worried that I’m starting to feel that tension around my heart that clutch that says there’s no where else to go, nothing else to do, bills must get paid, any job is a good job, unemployment is up, salaries are down.

Right now, yeah, unemployment is up and I’ve been unemployed and underemployed during various era along with the others among the great, unwashed masses with whom I identify. Maybe I’ll become one of the folks on the news lining up for healthcare from volunteers and do-gooders used to lending a hand in the third world, but setting up shop in our modern, capitalist, choice-loving, fuck the poor America. Obviously, I can’t take a shitty economy lightly.

I don’t want to scrabble through dust and despair all Tom Joad and depression. I’ve already packed up my possessions and driven long and hard into a promised new future in the golden west.

But, I don’t want the kind of tamped down emotional sub-life. Simmering at my desk. Worrying about office supplies. Hating the mere voices of those around me and their mewling needy ways. I ain’t saying I’m there. I’m not even clear on how much I’m hating work as compared to simply hating that I wasn’t born silver-spooned and silk-slippered and fat, dumb, fabulously rich and happy.

My two primary fantasies for most of my life would be comfortable wealth and intellectual shallowness. By intellectual shallowness, I actually mean flat out stupid. How fucking awesome would it be to be so stupid that no one expects nothing from you and you don’t care ‘cuz you don’t know? I had a dream that one day I never even figured out more than enough reading to be sure I could get the instructions for my instant oatmeal.

If I were rich, filthy fucking rich, but slow, folks might even help me. No one would expect advice or help from me. Nosiree, Bob, nope. How could I help without insight and understanding and book learning? And, the money would ensure I still got feigned respect.

Simple.

But, I’m smart enough and poor enough that I have so many fewer options. I can do something to earn me some cake or I can go hungry. That’s about it. Work or die. Or work til I die.

Four years in, though, four years into this gig, I’m still at a sweet enough spot where no one is avoiding me in the hallways. I’m in a sweet enough spot that the free Diet Coke still keeps my afternoons moving. I’m in a sweet enough spot that I even got a long-awaited title change (even if half of everyone in the building got one at the same time, too).

I think it’s not so much Watership Down and dying outside my cushy warren, but George Costanza. Maybe all I need to do is figure out how to leave on a high note.

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