Is there anything more heart-dragging and suffocating than looking for a new job? You start to notice all the mistakes you’ve made career-wise up to this point which begins a cycle of self-hatred wherein you become hyper-aware of time passing, your age, and somehow even your weight. There’s the family members who play down how many bad decisions you’ve made, how well equipped you are for the jobs that require 6+ years experience in a field of work you’ve never even heard of. There’s two-days off a week you get from the job you already work that is dragging you down, two days where you should be rested and energized to begin the job scrolling all over. But you’re not rested–you’re exhausted, and you want to spend you measly two days doing something that benefits your personal human experience. You don’t, of course, and instead spend three quarters of the first day trying to figure out what that exact thing is only to abandon your hopes and eat junk food or lie around on your cellphone. For me, it isn’t until the peak brightness of the sun begins to dip that I’m reminded of how fleeting daylight is, I jump up, usually clean my apartment really quickly for no explicable reason and then throw a hail mary on what I could do to benefit my life. That benefit is usually a walk around a path and maybe a stop at a cafe… if you want to call Starbucks a cafe to make yourself feel better about the all out consumerism you’re subscribed to each waking moment.

The day ends, day two begins–it’s time to find a new job. Make a coffee, read a bit, enjoy some news (usually of stuff that has no affect on me whatsoever and I will forget about in 2 hours time). Then, clean, again, for some other inexplicable reason–but I think that’s something exclusive to me–and now it’s lunch time. Just something quick, like a sandwich, but maybe I should go get fresh ingredients, because that’s exercise and that’s fresh air and that’s another way to spend an hour avoiding this other real life where I have to find a career and get serious and do all of the things I wish I actually did.

I imagine my life as someone who has enough time and energy in a day to wake up, have a really meaningful run, a single coffee, an artisanal ready for the big-screen breakfast, followed by my own writing, but not just any writing, a full undeniable selection of prose that someone somewhere will have interest in reading. Of course once this ends I’ll have enough time to hit the gym where I’ll work on my A+ physique that makes me feel like I’m more noticeable or something and will of course make me feel more adult. Then an exquisite dinner, followed by that thing (whatever it is) that will benefit my life–maybe in this case it’s hanging out with friends around a beautiful backyard setup with lights and really good wine (I hate wine). Then of course, I’ll have time to watch a great film, read a good chunk of a great novel, listen and dissect a great new record. Maybe all of this followed by a quick reassurance that i’m living my best life and there are zero flaws and i’m quite frankly, a perfect human.

Mostly I spend my time thinking of all of those things and doing none of them. Least of all searching for the “perfect” career. Or, at the very least, the “perfect” job until lightning strikes and something happens completely out of nowhere, as it so often does for people who don’t work at it…

But I can feel the beauty in a great record, shining through my chest. The perfect film frame that invigorates my sense of self. The piece of writing that seems to align every word I couldn’t find myself, but opens up my lungs. How do I harness this beauty? I want to create, myself–I want to create myself. I find it difficult when I work a 7-4 physical job that cleans out my will to be that better version of myself. That italicized version who will never exist exactly as imagined. But how do I get close enough to that creation to feel even the slightest bit content or interest in myself as a human. It’s apparent I attribute success and social standing to career. I don’t want to be this person, but I also know I can’t stay stagnant where I am now wasting it all. Truly wasting it all.

I paused my writing, predictably, to take a drive (it’s the last day of my holidays: does this explain the above?) and felt it all; the wind, the warmth, the traffic, the relative ability to just drive, forever, and escape outside of a radius that my job exists in. It’s not entirely sustainable, but I imagine driving for hours leaving the directions to a sort of improvisation akin to the great jazzer’s, invoking truth and melancholy and something guttural in an instinct: it’s all about the feeling of the road. Night falls and I pull into a very midwestern looking motel. There’s far less shady-looking characters that I probably built up in my head and I stare at the few there as if they’re the lost ones, they return the sentiment. In this fantasy, the realization never sets in, instead I immediately begin a new life. I feel like a fugitive, a runaway, laying low while nobody whatsoever looks for me. In this allusion I’m also the type of person I always wanted to be. The italicized version from above. The money never runs out, my body suddenly morphs into a two-inch taller, much fitter, gruff version of this specimen behind a laptop. I’m mysterious now and I think there’s some truth to that at this non-existent midwestern motel where some people have real lives and struggles and I do my best to blend among them. A telephone pole standing amongst a forrest. But in the fantasy I can enjoy the things I used to dislike–I frequent a bar, where nobody knows me, and I play it cool every time an imaginary woman walks up to me and sparks a conversation. I speak in cliches, but dark cliches that make me deep. She’s been in this town her whole life, 26 years old, never meant to go much further. It could become a mutual beneficial situation, but it doesn’t, because the character of me remains untainted by resisting the urge for meaningless sex. I’ll be off next week, too, of course. There’s something happening in the East and I have to be a part of that moment. I got wind of it through the electricity in the air (because in the fantasy I’m not on my phone for three quarters of the day and don’t waste my precious time scrolling).

But, see, here it is, an entire narrative, and entire process, just to avoid the inevitable. What do I mean? Oh, just that I wrote this extravagant fantasy to avoid… looking for a new job. And I know why–it’s because I don’t feel like there is a job for me out there. I know everyone feels this way, in some respect, but I really feel it. There just isn’t a single thing out there I am meant to do. I truly believe the only way I’d be happy is if I spent my time watching the sunset, walking in the sunshine, or already living a fantasy life that took no work to get to. It’s absurd, it’s me.