malaise*lithium

I work too much. I recognized this only recently. I never expected to be the kind who works too much, and I’m sure there are many who have known me who never would have expected it of me, but I do. Or maybe it’s not even that I do, in that perpetual sense, but merely that I have been.

It might, though, be more accurate to say that I give too much of myself over to work: I spend nearly sixty hours a week at work or commuting. I spend my days performing tasks which have been honed by a giant corporate mechanism not to require any thought. I participate in hour-long conference calls wherein the District Manager simply reads aloud the content of the email everyone received the previous week. I explain to people why their process is broken and a simple way to streamline it; I am referred to the company handbook.
I have dreams about work, dreams where my words come out of my mouth on receipt paper that is rewound backwards onto a spool so the other side can be used to print inventory tags. When more paper for tags is needed, someone comes and loads another roll into my head.

But many people have dreams about work. And it may be wrong thinking on my part that includes the effort getting to and from work requires in the arithmetic of the work itself, but I think it’s justifiable and indeed a necessary part of the calculation. On a good day my commute takes about an hour and twenty minutes. On a bad day it takes twice that. If it costs a man ten dollars a day to get to a job where he earns a hundred dollars a week, he would have done better to take the job that payed seventy-five dollars a week but cost him only two dollars a day. Time is the greatest of the costs of work in my case, and I must believe that it has value even above the rate at which I sell it when it might have been put to whatever end I choose.

But when I consider finding another job, my initial reaction is apathy. Something in me seems to say, any other job would end up being just the same, why waste the time? and I accepted that for a while. Life is, after all, a bitch. However, I am certain that I could easily find a job nearer to me, which would be less greedy with my time, perhaps have some regard for the operation of my brain, and pay—well, pay enough.

I concede to being possessed by a Puritanistic sense of the good of doing something worthwhile, of being productive, of never giving any quarter, even though I have explicitly disregarded that sort of thinking when trying to define my personal philosophy.

About three weeks ago, through an alignment of misfortune and ignorance, I lost all the data on my hard drive. I back up all my writing every few months, but there were a few recent stories that I did not have other copies of. I lost many pictures as well, including almost all of the ones I took in Alaska.
The first thing I thought of was that I needed a new computer. A new computer would ensure that my work was secure as well as making me more productive, and as much as I have been working I was sure to be able to afford one. New computers have all sorts of new features, I thought, I need to know what they are before I make a decision. I bought a few computer magazines; read them. I looked at computers in the stores. I made special trips.

But I thought that if I were to spring for a new machine, I wanted it to do exactly what I wanted, and I didn’t want to spend more than I needed to. As I considered all the options available, I couldn’t escape the fact that, really, all the dozens of computers I considered did the same thing. And that thing was exactly what the computer I already had did, and did pretty well. The thing I saw that I wanted one of those new computers to do was write; to make me write; to make it possible. But I knew that even if I had a new computer, I wouldn’t use it any more. I might futz with it for a while, but I couldn’t imagine putting it to work.

I realized that I didn’t really want a new computer, I just wanted, and it didn’t matter what. I felt a sense of tremendous dissatisfaction, but I saw that my computer wasn’t the problem. I wiped the hard drive on my old computer. I installed Linux. I am presently writing, but I mistrust my momentum.

For so many among my writer’s collective, writing seems to come easily – they find successes, quite naturally, in being themselves, although I am sure they would discount that perception. Writing rarely comes easily to anyone. But to me writing so often seems like conjuring. Like constricting myself into a lens that can draw some universal and intangible energy into focus. It requires concentration and motivation and a stilling of the winds. When it is done it is though I cannot really claim I created the product any more than a camera lens creates a picture. I do not pretend there is any strange or metaphysical cause for this feeling of mine, yet I have not yet been able to get beyond it. Still, I am content to work that way, but it requires, paradoxically, an extra measure of devotion. I must be available and aware when the chance passed by, for it will never assert itself. I must listen for the silence of a stilling of the winds. Tonight there is a stilling of the winds.

Tonight it seems perfectly clear to me that I am dissatisfied not with myself, or my posessions but with a large portion of my lifestyle. Somehow, while my attention was elsewhere, I returned to the practices of consumerism. I turned my head and forgot about the things I think are really important. Saturated with the drone of popular culture, I began to hum along. Shame on me.

But never mind that. The revelation in this is that I had forgotten what makes me characteristically me, but now that I understand that I have the power to correct it. If I were to spend the effort I spend at work on writing, even if it did not earn me a dime, I would sleep the sleep of a justified man instead of being trounced by dreams of infinite pointlessness.

I try to avoid speaking about this site directly here as I believe that self-referentialism inhibits growth more than it fosters self-discovery, but I’d like to acknowledge the orgy of modification, redesign, tweaks, nudges, gooses, destruction and continual rebirth that has all but replaced any content here. A form of schmaltz insinuated itself in a place plainly advertised to be free thereof. It was a manifestation of this, well, this greater malaise. No more. Here’s to a new malaise, one free of pretense. Content shall henceforth replace bling, because the writing is, after all, the purpose of this place.

Count this a rededication, both of this site and of myself, to the things I believe are most important. I will find a way to give myself to writing the way I have given myself to work, and I have been emboldened with the knowledge that it does not matter it that means I am unable to satisfy the ends of consumerism; I will satisfy my own ends.

Here, then, to the pen.