The Ink-Pot and the Palette

I read yesterday that Flickr is about to change its retention policies, so I went there for the first time in quite a while to plan a kind of general rescue of my old photos.

The very earliest one was dated 2005, and corresponds to one of the first posts I ever made on LJ. Let's see if I can remember how to attach a photo to a DW post, because it's been a while since I had to actually write HTML to do that.


Okay. Here it is. I went out on my lunch hour one day in 2005 with an early digital camera (maximum image size 600 px wide), and thought this bus ad was funny enough to make a LiveJournal post. I was just getting the hang of even how to think about blogging, a word which etymonline.com tells me did exist by 2005.

So here we are, thirteen years later. I was an Old then and have gotten no less Old, of course, relative to internet people or in absolute terms. I'm 63 today.

Since 2005 I have retired from the job I took a lunch break from that day. The building I worked in for much of my career--behind and to the right of me as I took that photo--is under massive earthquake-proofing these days, basically an empty shell of bullshit postmodern architecture plus a famous statue, while all its 3000 denizens work in rented spaces around the downtown area. I don't get downtown anymore, so I haven't seen it. 

I've also written and published a novel and become a professional editor. I've built myself a little recording studio and become part of a podcast, the Story Grid Editor Roundtable, a group show of which my first solo episode just posted today.


So hello to all who've been more loyal to the DW/LJ platform than I have, and to those returning because of the impending Tumblr diaspora. And happy birthday to me.

I quit making New Year's resolutions a lot of New Years ago--total recipe for failure, in my book--but given that this January 1 will also be the first day of the rest of my life in a more particular way than every other day of the world, I'm giving it some thought.

The thing that has given my life its structure more or less continuously since 1970 is suddenly going to drop away. My external motivation for getting up in the morning, grooming myself, wearing decent clothes, leaving my house, and (in recent years) getting exercise will be no more.

I don't yet have a clue what will replace it. In my limited experience of unemployment, the lack of structure is not my best friend. But the key word is "limited." Will a month of do-nothing nightowl-dom be enough for a more natural structure to start appearing? Two months? How could I know? I've never tried it.

What's more, the fact of having a job has been one of a very few connections I feel to "most people," a broad if rather shallow patch of common ground. Google Plus keeps reminding me to list my workplace in my profile, because without it, I'm only 80% complete.

So, what new scaffolding will I build to keep my life from dissolving into a puddle of undifferentiated time?

I have no idea yet. I should probably be terrified. Maybe I am terrified and I just don't know it. How does one feel at an event horizon?

The very pleasant, cheerful bureaucrat who helped me fill in all the blanks in my retirement paperwork this morning shook my hand when we were done and said, "Retirement is such a different thing today than it used to be. You have a whole new life ahead. I wish you the best."

I walked back to the bus stop in the October morning, looking at the perfect sky and the yellow trees, thinking, "I want to remember this day." It was a big occasion. I felt like celebrating, but it was 10:00 on a Monday morning and I had to catch a bus back in from the suburbs and go to work. So I texted a couple of "Woo hoo"s to people, then rode downtown and got myself a four-shot mocha. Then I went to work.

Only 63 more days.

After being an absolutely vile human being yesterday (mood swings of a sort) and kind of hating myself for it, I was grateful to put in twelve hours at work today. Less time to dwell on my vileness.

The long workday was broken up by a couple of walks. It was gorgeously autumnal, and Eleanor needed work, so I rode her to the shop on the east side before work and walked across to my office on the west side, then back to the shop in the afternoon. The altered route took me past one of Portland's stranger and more charming features.

( Go figure )

It’s lovely, it really is, to have absolutely no further career ambitions (or that nasty sense that I should be more ambitious). Absent those drives, it is VERY EASY not to give a fuck anymore.

When I say I don't give a fuck anymore, I don't mean that my work is bad. I still care very much about quality. It's more about quantity, really. "Do your job, but don't do too much of it," as Jennifer Marlowe once said in WKRP in Cincinnati.

God, it's such a relief to be free of all the authority issues, all the insecurity, all the FUD of the workplace. As the days tick by (159 of ‘em left) and any threat of punitive action recedes further, I become more relaxed. When I walk past the boss’s office with my lunch dishes I no longer really worry whether he’s thinking I spend too much time taking lunch breaks. If someone comes to my desk and catches me on Twitter or something, I sort of shrug inwardly.

("Punitive action?" you inquire. "What kind of place have you been working in?" It's not about the workplace, it's really about my dad. And it's not really about punishment, it's more about rejection. 'Nuff said.)

Mind you, those authority/guilt issues aren’t gone--not from my psyche--and I probably still need to work on them for my own peace of mind. But it is absolutely wonderful not having them foremost in my brain every second of the workday. I had no idea how pervasive they were till they started evaporating.

While I stand here listening to Coffitivity and more-or-less patiently waiting for the lieutenants of finance to finish closing the damn fiscal year already, I found an ancient approach to mental health, Anxious? Depressed? Try Greek Philosophy, by a guy named Jules Evans.

Jules admits to having wrecked his own mental health with drug use in the 90s. Cognitive Behavioral Therapy, with its roots deep in Stocisim, was his road back.

I'm especially impressed by this statement (because I feel like I'm right at this very crossroads in my own mental health journey):

...after 10 years of practising philosophy, I wonder if it leaves something out, if it’s too rational, self-controlled and unemotional... this year I have started researching ecstatic experience, and how people can achieve euphoria through music, dancing, drugs or the passionate love of God. As a friend put it recently: 'Back on ecstasy, eh?'

He has a book, of course. Good advance reviews.

My supervisor just told me that my annual performance evaluation is due in four days. We usually start sooner on this dreaded, tedious task because it takes hours, but today I finished it in ten minutes.

( I should have been this relaxed about it 25 years ago. )

Some people may recall that I have a well-meaning but workaholic colleague whom, for reasons, I refer to online as "Norm."

Lately, as my retirement impends and my job description morphs to cleanup-and-closure, I've had less and less to do with Norm, and it's been lovely. Norm has, however, handed a project off to me to finish up. I think he sees it as the peanut-butter jar with the stuck lid: if I can get the lid off now it's because he loosened it.

I see it as my task to de-Normify the project (which is to say, cut a lot of self-important workaholic bullshit out of it).

So anyway, the day I took over the project, the customer appointed a new project manager for their side. And guess what?

• He looks like Norm
• He acts like Norm
• He talks like Norm
• His name is fuckin' Norm

I am not kidding. He has the same actual first real name as Norm. It's...the eternal recurrence. Or something.