It's easy to sleep when you're dead
Driving on 9 and actually listening to the song “Drivin’ on 9”, by The Breeders, realizing for the fourth or fifth time that Kim Deal has the nicest voice you have ever heard in your entire life, a voice evocative of smiting your foes and washing away all of your fears. Or for two seconds anyway, before you realize that you are actually diving on Route 9, the most homogenized stretch of road in the entire world, dotted occasionally by a Walmart Super Center. From what I remember, this road will bring me from points south into Canada and further. And it is not long before I begin thinking, could I drive to the North Pole? It does not seem entirely plausible, especially because the automobile I happen to be driving periodically emits a strange smell and makes a funny noise on breaking. And it does seem like some type of geographical improbability. But there must be a way, I think. Why not drive to the North Pole? I could be the new age Shackleton of mundanity and despair. I’ll drive anywhere, beyond the infinite, Space Odyssey-style.

It really only is the fourth day of unemployment, but already I seem to have settled back in to my natural pattern of scuttling around and hanging out in coffee shoppes. I’m like some kind of gerbil that has been removed from its natural environment for a time and is now being reintroduced to that same place, settling in too comfortably. And while the general nature of this environment does seem to be lacking in basic function and OK-ness, it does seem to feature an alluring spin wheel, which is the rote existence of my unemployed life. Already, I’m having an anxiety attack. Being asked what I’ve been doing all day elicits such perplexity in me that I cannot even begin to explain. Layers upon layers of incomprehension are produced from my lips.

Talking to my mother the other day. “You really need to find employment,” she tells me, before inserting, “for the rest of your life.” We both laugh a little at the gravity inherent in this notion. I’ve been running laps and she’s suggesting a marathon. It really is a little daunting. “Well, at least something permanent,” she says. My social security statement arrives that same day in the mail. Checking over the figures. This cannot be right, I think indignantly, breaking out a pad and paper for the calculations. I have to double-check the numbers when I find out that I have made a sum total of $66,000 lifetime. 2003 was a good year, bringing in nearly $13,000, which, on the imaginary line graph of the mind, drops off significantly to $6,000 the following year, and even less thereafter. I run these figures by a friend later. “That means if I were to make a wage that would be considered pretty meager by most standards, I would be living like a king,” I tell him. I later make the completely outrageous suggestion that I will somehow be prosperous one day, but I think what I mean is that I will hopefully make $20,000 at some point.

Oh, man: is it hard to own up to the facts. I will probably be homeless and destitute in two years’ time. The early morning glare will find me staking out a spot outside the Central Avenue Hannaford and fighting the other homeless people for premium loitering positioning. I ruminate over the possibilities of my horrible future as I listen to the radio. And it’s funny how you can find yourself getting so carried away by your own thought process sometimes. You work out some extended rumination in your mind which has no limitations, have an imaginary dialogue with a friend, all the while driving your car around. A routine trip to the corner store finds you crossing state lines. I look up and realize, much to my horror, that I am actually in the suburb or Clifton Park, 20 miles outside the city limits. Not exactly the North Pole, but close enough.