The age of restlessness.

I’m waiting. Nothing really happens, but since I’m not expecting anything to happen this doesn’t surprise me, though I am agitated. Restless.

I’ve begun to notice that everyone I know, with a job, hates their job. Everyone seems to hate their job, and the money they earn. These are people being paid to do, to behave, to (however temporarily) think, what, and how, someone else wants them to; this servitude (for what else must it be called?) makes them unhappy. The term ‘wage-slave’ is a little more succinct than I first realised, though that’s not the end of it; without a job, without a servile yoke- the civilised noose, if you will, to give meaning through its meaning, I spend time doing what I want to do, and yet I am unhappy with that. People rarely make themselves happy if they can help it.

A day spent reading American Psycho makes me feel strangely relieved, though it heightens my agitation; over the course of the day I have been accosted by ‘celebrities’, and I use the term loosely, affronting me on behalf of more companies than I care to remember. I miss hating things. I miss being passionate, even in that way towards something. Being passionate, even in a negative manner, was still to be passionate. Hate doesn’t come easily anymore, so I moan and complain, and dredge up excuses to create unease and dislike. Being negative means that I can hold onto that once bright spark, that spark which used to consume me ceaselessly, and keep me ticking and turning and burning over like a man possessed (or perhaps pre-possessed; a being destined to choose the wrong answers. Though at least I chose something) Burning like a man aflame- a man too busy to stop drop and roll.

Like a car in the desert I have no real destination, only endless expanses of dull potential waiting for me- open to me like the dark of a heavy night, like a door, like a tunnel- quixotic, promising, and yet eternally mundane. A dark potential like the mouth of a grave. This was to be the first time that I came to realise that there was no real, no tangible, difference between the two sides of the civilised coin: the ever-hungry career minded toads/ the jobless, feckless, unwashed masses of the unemployed. The lines within society had become blurred, and each side remained as fetid as the other.

The first day after she was gone I made sure I stayed busy; you couldn’t have paid me to make me come to terms with the roiling, rolling, awful, pit-of-the-stomach-is-so-empty-it’s-eating-itself feeling I had going on. Most of the time I found that I was beginning to enjoy the time I had to myself- not the time with myself; never by myself, for fear of my broken core realising just how broken it was, stamping its feet, impatient, why wasn’t I doing anything to sort it out? Love is a strange word. I was a broken person, but I don’t mean that I was a blob of rampant, despairing emotion, unable to hold back the lip quivering, bowel shaking, flood of tears and recriminations, oh no. I was a broken automaton, an ant, if you will, flailing berserkly, in a blind panic-rage as the routine of its life is ground to a halt by the errant leaf. I learned to tell the time by stomach, though often I would pretend to be too busy to eat; this helped assuage my objectionable conscience, irked as it was at my betrayal of social norms- my unwillingness to co-operate and advertise the good teeth, the fine musculature, and the damnable intellect of my own corporeal, bodily temple.