A new start:started.

So last week I stopped going to work.

The last few years have seen work and its demands intrude farther and farther into our lives. If it isn't the hours spent working, it's the hours spent getting there and back, and the money it takes to maintain a vehicle, make sure the child is supervised: all the little details that every working family encounters and combats. 

That's all fine, but at some point, the machine you're building takes on a life of its own, creates its own demands, and you start doing things for the machine's sake. I was throwing all of my energy at things I didn't want at all. There was no time left in my day (or night) for fun, for relaxation, for reflection, for love. Nothing but eat, drive, work, drive, housework, sleep insufficiently in quality and quantity, REPEAT.

As a creature of habit, I get in a nice comfy rut, and brother, do I ever stay there. It's a strength, and a flaw. I've stuck with bad jobs and bad women for just this reason. So maybe you can see how difficult it is for me to declare "Fuck this!" and step off the trolley. With my habits and lifestyle reaching ever-more detrimental patterns, I truly believe that something awful would have happened, and soon. Physical event, car accident, mental event. I was red-lining on several fronts, and my commitment to routine was carrying me happily to an early destruction.  It wasn't just the 90-mile commute to my most-recent job - that was just the capper.

Even the previous job before that, at the campground in Avery, CA, I felt I was on the wrong track. Some people think I'm smart, but I'd be a lot smarter if I stopped and looked around more often to see where I'm headed. I felt things closing in but did nothing about it. Further committing to plans I didn't really want to be a part of, I was giving my life away.  This course correction I've made last week could have been more drastic, but I'll settle for this, what seems to be an enormous step back in the right direction. 

At a minimum, it is a break, for which I am hugely grateful and in dire need.  It is also an opportunity to embrace parts of me that I imagine to exist: creative thoughts, ideas, needs, passions, impulses, motivations, desires. God, I hope they're not just imaginary.

So last week was about housework (as will all weeks in the foreseeable future, but none so needful as last's). I threw myself at all the labor needed to push back the tide of filth that had worked its way into every corner of our formerly-nice house. The shit was truly disgusting and embarrassing. I was ashamed to be a part of it, and I wouldn't let me kid spend the night in someone else's home if it looked like that. And yet I let my kid spend every night there. My only excuse was that there was no time to spend making it better. And I knew it was literally true: I spent spare minutes and hours just to keep the place no worse than the unfit-for-human-life condition it was in.

So last week I dug in and started moving, organizing, cleaning, keeping house on a more-aggressive level. I cleaned a bathroom, cleared debris from the dining table and reclaimed 2/3 of the once-ample counter space in the kitchen. We can now set groceries down on something other than the floor when we return from the store. A start.

This week though, I have to start making good on the promises and fantasies that clouded my windshield for the last two years of my "supercommute," the name of the daily, merciless trek to work lasting (much) more than an hour each way. Every day and night I promised myself I would exercise, planned to write and perform comedy, and work with some forms of visual arts, if ever I was given the time and grace to do so.

So here I am now, sitting at a quietly-noisy coffee shop with my son, tapping out the longest blog post in a while, just to limber up my creaking fingers, and loosen up my creakier mind. One of the purposes of this blog is to leave little landmarks along my journey, but if nothing else, I hope this has warmed up the old Thinkin' Machine.

Gotta be a good thing.