Letters From Little Rock

As always I’m of two minds about how best to deal with the division between work and life. We all know the day job is not nearly as important as the real work, whether the real work is writing poetry or planting turnips or restoring antique sewing machines. It’s just awfully hard to get paid for the real work. I think sometimes that I’m tied to the day job a little too strongly and would be better served if I quit and went to work for taco bell or something. Of course I’ve been poor and there really is no way to compare the free time I had then to the free time I have now. For one thing working at the lower end even when you do have time off you frequently don’t have time to enjoy it. In the middle class pay range I find myself in now, I can hire someone to fix the car or replace the motor on my washing machine. When you’re poor you get to do those things yourself or they don’t get done. In some ways money really does equal time for me at this point.

On the other hand, I’m finding myself sort of stuck at the day job. Unless I’m willing to go get a business degree, it looks like I won’t ever get promoted again. On the other hand I’m already making way above what a fellow with a high school diploma can reasonably expect to make. The way I see it, four years with no spare time to write poetry and drink wine would be a pretty arid four years. I’m going to turn forty this year and the years between forty and fifty are typically pretty productive years for writers. That’s not to say that writers inevitably decline once they hit fifty, but their aren’t a lot of folks who produced their major works past the half-century mark either. Basically the way I see it is that surrendering that much time out of what I’ve always figured would be my best decade would be giving up way too much.

I’m starting to understand the traditional Chinese idea of retiring from life, someday if I can just lay my hands on a couple of quiet acres in the woods I might try it.