In two more weeks I'll be in Dallas Fort Worth/ in one more minute I'll be gone
I have recently seen a license plate reading, “Chilax”, a confluent term combining “Chill” and “Relax,” and so I will relate to you that I am chilaxing at the moment. We used to use this same term last summer, working at the university. “Chilax, man. You’re going to have a heart attack.” Or: “You’re doing way too much work,” we would say to the new person, “fucking chilax.” Thereafter my work criteria always seemed to include this term. Although, it’s entirely possible that it has always included this terminology and it was the term which took so long in catching up to my slack behavior. I don’t know. But we are indeed chilaxing today, and being paid the prevailing wage to do so. What exactly that wage turns out to be, I have no idea, as I failed math 1 and never really recovered thereafter. It’s the word problems you think you’ll never have to use later which you end up cursing yourself for not remembering. If the temp agency fires you, having been paid on average about $350.00 a week, for a sum total of 35 weeks, what will unemployment insurance pay if it’s an average of your previous weeks’ earnings? The answer, it turns out, is not that much, but I totally cheated and what are you going to do?

It’s not a bad arrangement, though. It’s kind of the ghettoized version of that Win For Life lottery ticket you see in the stores, except that it only pays about 200.00 bucks, and life, it turns out, is only a few months long. It’s a test run, I reassure myself, hoping simultaneously that I don’t turn into a compulsive gambler. Blowing the scratch off dust away from my ticket, I realize that the prize is an endless expanse of free time, and then I proceed to have the accompanying anxiety attack over what to do with the earnings, sitting, waiting and wondering—hoping that I don’t waste it all.

I remember having this same conversation with someone at that same temp job I worked at last summer, and asking him what he’d do if he won the lottery he was always talking about. “If I ever won, man,” he told me, “I would buy a big house in the middle of nowhere, with a gigantic television set and just eat anything I wanted and have sex with all kinds of women all day.” I processed this answer, attempting to ignore the nihilism inherent in that type of reply. Because that’s exactly that kind of complacency which I think you want to avoid. “Chilax,” he probably would have told me, had he known what I thought about all that.

Today’s unemployment theme, it turns out, is positivity, which I’m not sure is actually a word—which makes me laugh. But I feel OK. “Feeling OK,” I have recently read in a book, “is the sum total of not paying too much attention and being totally distracted by everything you do all day.” I seem to have embraced this formula, I think, staying relatively busy for the most part. And it’s kind of nice. I do this as creatively as possible all day: running errands, hanging around in the coffee shoppes, make a phone call, go play guitar. Everything feels lightweight and nice. It’s what lies at the end of all that distraction which has me worried. And it’s that which I’m not looking forward to.

Hanging out this morning, I explain to a friend what the night sky looked like in Saratoga Springs Friday. They were having a blackout, and the sky was perfectly illuminated in the absence of manmade light. Walking around outside, with no one around, the big empty sky occurred to me with perfect clarity. The grandiosity of that sky so large and staggering that I stared up at it for 30 minutes, until my neck was sore. And then I was afraid at its grandiosity and my infinitesimally small existence. Then the lights came back on and I forgot all about it.

I really probably should find a job soon. It’s only a matter of time, now. I think. In the meantime, I’ll take comfort in license plates and all manner of other bizarre things, I imagine. You can call me if you want to.