The earthling says hello, on the other side of eight hours of sweet deep roborative sleeping.

That fancy word comes from Stephen Maturin, a majestic fictional earthling.

In waking I was thinking about the way I’ve made plans over and over, and how life happened and made them violently change.

In decades past I cared about a few basic things. First on the list was “this” geography, the elevated Southwest above 5000 feet. I was new to it and I found it … roborative. The name Vairtere is mostly all about it in an elliptical way. Later in coming back to it the third time it saved my life or at least my mind.

I walked it and later I drove it and it spoke to me. So I came to care about having a vardo, a caravan, a bed and a kit that was mobile. A means of moving and hunting and gathering.

I cared about words and shaping them into art–belles lettres. I hope it’s obvious that I still do.

I cared about the glow of warm girls and cold women and the agony and ecstasy to be held in dwelling there.

In the meantime I had to eat.

So whether I cared about it or not, I set my brain to the problem of how to get the most return from hours sold to a bidder. And of course I wasn’t going to sell to anyone, any more. Fuck the deep fryers of fast food. Fuck taking a chain saw to the very juniper trees I loved. There had to be a better way.

Again and again I gravitated toward libraries and colleges. As a student, as a worker; as a theoretical means of ‘bettering’ my situation. More money per hour sold. Less brain damage, per hour lived.

I found random niches. At one point I could “work” fifteen-hour shifts alone in the deep downtown near the University of Colorado–there were only two or three hours of work to do, and the rest of it was being alone in a well-equipped communications lab. Computers. Color xerography. The Flatirons rising in the dawn as the day shift came on to set me free. It would have worked for a lot longer, but the pay was rightfully marginal, compared to the cost of living in that beautiful place, and the business itself was unprofitable for obvious reasons. They shut it down soon after I’d left trying to find a better calculus.

The teaching I do now is no different to me. It’s hours sold to someone else. The only real question is if the wage, and long-term the pension, is worth it, in context.

For a long time it was very much a yes. Then I went below five thousand feet for a year and the answer was Hell. No.

Now I’m back up the mountain and it’s okay, but I’m still looking. I’m always looking.

As the world has become more digitized, so have the opportunities. That’s the main reason I know so much about computing. Making myself, or the hours I have to sell, into a hotter commodity in the eyes of the buyers, the employers.

There’s more to say and thank the goddess.

But for now the point is: everything’s changed, but what’s important hasn’t.