One year ago today I started this adventurous job. I did not think I would make it 6 months. I did not want to make it 6 months, but that attitude changed. This is the first job job I had in 20 years since getting whacked from Time-Warner. I worked, of course, often times harder than I had to and for longer hours than I put in at corporate. But the lifestyle had its freedoms. I turned idle pastimes into work, tax writeoffs, and revenue. I could walk, and walk, and walk. I don’t miss that as much as I thought I would. In fact I don’t miss it at all. The days I walk now can feel like old times, which is to say they feel plodding, and wasted. Yet plodding and wasted still comes with its soulfulness, its searching. 

However my attitudes about this job shifted I may be required to walk. The money is simply not there. It’s being chipped away, even as an annual raise is supposed to kick in starting today (I guess). But the raise is offset by retirement contributions I cannot refuse to make and higher prices on everything. I’m priced out of the supermarket, ferchrissake.

But still, I made it here, after 20 years unmoored and nearing a point of no return. I went through some dark times during those 20 years. Some good times, too. But times as well where I was basically killing myself. I remember writing about it in one of my journals-to-self: “If I die from this circumstance let it be labeled a suicide.” I was referring to the abusive relationship I was in, where I was systemically drinking myself to death, coming closer to that goal than I could have understood at the time. 

Then there were the flat out plans, the planning, the dress-rehearsals, the experimentation with actually doing it as painlessly as possible, not that I have a fear of pain. My pain threshold is higher than most, as is my tolerance for abuse. I have always been prone to abusive relationships. Maybe this job is just another one of them.