But …
You’re mistaken.
I do have work though.

It’s true that it doesn’t pay … yet … and that it may never pay.
It’s also true that almost no one has the least respect for this work
and that to my great moral chagrin, some days I don’t even properly respect it myself.

However.
It is work.
It is The Work.
It will survive the drought of your respect
just as it survives mine, on those some days.

I am holding up my end, paying my own way, completely and totally.
I haven’t even been late on any payment for twenty years.
Beyond that, I am free to volunteer my considerable and sometimes even unique skills and my time for good causes.
Like taking a big moving truck across the country and offering to do it again, uncompensated.
Like watering an old friend’s plants in exchange for a pound of coffee even though it’s not worth it, in dollars.
Like driving down to shuttle another home and accepting a sandwich as payment for the labor of that day.
I expect that this will continue to be true a good long while into the future.
If it doesn’t, fret not, I will most certainly take the necessary steps to remediate that.

I put a ragged-ass roof over my own head.
And not just my own.
I put food in my own mouth.
I keep my ragged-ass vehicles operational.
I don’t renege on my obligations and particularly not those I place upon myself voluntarily.

If you disapprove of any part of the way I run my life or what I do, that’s your business.

Just don’t try to make it mine. That would be inappropriate.

And probably irritating.

I choose to not waste timing caring, beyond normal civilized polite token care, about your appraisal of my modus vivendi.

Whether that opinion is dubious, or even whether, as is rarely the case, that opinion admires.

I mean … thank you, if it is the latter rare case–bless you in fact–but one thing I cannot currently afford is to pay out much attention to anyone’s murmured estimation of me or who I am or my choices.

Positive or negative; good or bad.

I’m laying this down for specific quotidian reasons, of course.

But I’m taking the time to bother with it now so that it always lives here to point to, should it become necessary.

Oh it will.