The No-Scape: Who’s Done?

My wife asked me if I’m done with the job.

It’s a fair question. I’ve been done with a lot of jobs in the past.

Since it’s the slow season… nearing the end of it, anyway… the work has been out of town. Basketball. Country music concerts. One rodeo. It’s been inside, which is nice. Of course, the math doesn’t work out. We don’t get paid while we’re traveling. That means for every hour we travel, we’re an hour in the hole. If it takes two hours to get to a venue and two hours to get home, the pay more or less evens out to nothing unless the event is longer than 4 hours.

I was told the per diem was supposed to cover that. But the per diem is usually $20, which doesn’t cover two hours. So I might end up an hour ahead… which is to say that for a full 8 hours, I might make $11 before taxes. The rest is eaten up by time… time I’m not being paid for, but that is being eaten by my job.

It wasn’t even that, though. Because if I’m being honest, I’ve needed something to do. There’s just enough work to keep me from hitting the road, enough around the homestead to keep me home. My daughter is moving home with her family and they’re going to be living with us until they get settled. It will be exciting to have them here, but we have to get the house ready.

And it’s all lovely and I love my life, adore my wife, and am really looking forward to my daughter, her husband, and my granddaughter being here.

But I’m feeling the absence of the road. It’s hard to explain that I can both love my life here and need to sometimes just wander. My dreams are filled with barren, beautiful, lonely landscapes. Soaked with that voluminous quiet that only exists in the extreme absence of people and the perpetual static they create. When all of our machinations fall silent, the world sings. And if you’re lucky, sometimes you get to listen.

That doesn’t happen here. I long to hear all the choruses of that song again.

But no, I’m not done with the job. I am beginning to suspect I’m done with every other kind of job and the thought still sometimes terrifies me. I’ve all but given up trying to apply for other work… the kind of work I used to do or work that I’m qualified and trained to do. Academia has no use for me. Journalism doesn’t want me. Even “communications” jobs are passing me over and with each passing week my resume gets more and more out-of-date.

I want to see it as a blessing. The machine is starting to forget about me. Sometimes when I walk down the street, bag slung over my back, I feel myself being erased from the database of good citizens. I feel less and less like a citzen, more and more like a free form particle. More and more like the extraterrestrial I often felt like as a child. More and more like less and less.

There’s freedom in that, I suppose. The thing that hurts is the thing that has been cut away, never to grow back. When civility and community have been amputated, all that remains is all there is.