The Second Hand Unwinds

To say everything exists in context is one of those obvious things that is so obvious, you get away with saying "obvious" like three times in the same sentence. Every seemingly spontaneous generation occurs in a birthing medium of some form or another. Nothing exists in a vacuum, a truism so true it takes tens of billions of dollars just to send people into space, and that's the closest vacuum we know about. And even then, the people who successfully find themselves yawing and pitching and rolling through a directionless void are neither exposed to the vacuum directly nor are they actually directionless. The reason it costs tens of billions of dollars is that it's expensive to keep the vacuum on the outside of the vacuum-traversing craft and to pay for the shitload of equipment it takes to give them direction and some precise control of it. It's a lot of work for a metaphor, but you get good pictures out of it.

After all that, it's a false metaphor anyway. You aren't contextless in space. You just came from a planet, which is going to be the biggest thing out of most of your windows, reflecting all kinds of poxy sunlight, just defying you to notice anything else. Plus you generally know why you're up there and how you'll get back, so it all has a framework, a schedule, a beginning-middle-end. If you forget, there are usually handy patches on your outfit to remind you.

What I'm experiencing currently is way less expensive than any of that, I'm just out of work for the time being. Just shy of three weeks into this thing and I can say that that feeling you get when you are working every day, that weeks both grind and blink by, so you pick your head up and everyone around is saying "I can't believe it's already [whatever times of year it is that generally surprises people or makes them feel existentially unsettled, usually either summer or Christmas]" as time (per its wont) continues to relentlessly, mercilessly pass. Like a kidney stone, but only slightly more cosmic.

These weeks have proceeded stubbornly forward, just like work weeks did, but without any of the scaffolding I'd gotten used to holding my existence together and giving it coherence. I'm not complaining about having paid time off (though I am an American, I'll find a way to complain about most any situation), I'm saying there's a disorientation that I haven't processed my way into yet. So it does feel a bit like tumbling through nothing when words like "Sunday" and "Wednesday" cease to have any functionally distinct signifiers attached to them.

I have all this time off, but when it's not "off" from anything, it loses that play-hooky sweetness of vacation time with regular work obligations on either side. And at 50-plus years old, neither able nor looking to retire, feels a bit like being swept out to sea, if the "sea" mostly involved getting medically appropriate amounts of sleep and quality time with your cat.

These aren't my best metaphors, I will grant you. Maybe that's another thing that goes without a structured schedule, your ability to employ literary devices correctly.

If you're reading this, I'm sure you're waiting for me to introduce what the downside actually is that I seem to be either building up to or have missed entirely. I'll say I've managed to kind of fuck up my billing cycle as I forget which day it is or how long it's been since I last paid this bill or that. But all that's cost me so far is a couple of nights where I had to get out of bed right as I was falling asleep and panic-schedule a couple of payments. I guess what I'm saying is if I could surrender the last wisps of the illusion of control and set my bills to autopay, I might slip out of the time stream entirely. If that happens, the next blog you read might be from the fuuuuutuuuuuure...*

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*or the past, depending on when you read it.