As a sacrifice of an entirely different kind.

***

Last night around 7, I took two nighttime pain relievers for the first time in over a year. Normally that dose would knock me on my ass for ten hours and I’d wake still feeling the muzziness.

This time, I woke after five hours right at midnight, apparently fully rested, and with no trace of drowsy peace. Instead I was alarmed, without being particularly anxious, and that too was an unusual circumstance and almost a whole new unique feeling.

In the nineteen hours since, I’ve done a full week’s work, and I neither wanted nor received any money for it in return.

I lived, by the sweat of my brow, but that’s all poetry and not post-Eden nonfiction scriptural narrative.

What the fuck is a fact anyway. It’s a question for God, whether or not She exists.

***

Working steadily and very hard for no money is an exercise in practical anarchy.

Potentially, even also an antidote to trauma, or a least a treatment for the worst symptoms.

Having abruptly ended the working week here, I am full of intention to start all over again in the morning.

I don’t think I’d like to make every day into a week’s work, even if it were possible to keep up that kind of pace. I’d rather stop and smell the hummingbirds, even for days at a time.

But farther on in that direction is a bad road too, every bit as pot-holed as workaholism. A bad road I know too well, cratered with lassitude, and yet paradoxically as slick as black ice pavement.

Distraction. Indulgence. Slipping off the track into the mummifying snowbank of play until it turns into a prison of hibernating torpor.

Start all over again.

That means back past words, back even before Eden. A place of inhuman green, and the spark of consciousness only a flickering possibility, long before it ever imagined itself becoming an all-consuming flame.

Sing it:

Iiiiii … don’t wanna work. I just want to hunt, on my gathered day.