with NO DRUGS. My salary does not afford The Good Pills, and my job-security does not allow partaking in whatever over-the-counter euphorics I could perhaps purchase from a neighbor, and booze is a depressant so it would’ve just made things worse.
I feel good because I did paperwork most of the day. That’s right. Menial, tedious, repetitive paperwork. I went into some sort of trance the likes of which new-agey people pay thousands of dollars for (and the kind couch-potatoes can achieve after a good 45 minutes of channel surfing for the cost of basic cable!) and cranked up some Iron Butterfly, and somehow, about halfway through the umpteenth playing of Inna Gadda Da Vida and four hours into the Zen of Office Tedium, the various misaligned bits of my brainmeats just clicked right back into place, snugly and comfortably.
I will relate unto you all a valuable secret, the kind of shit professional gurus will never tell you because if they told you THIS bit then they’d all be out of work. find the fun in doing something insignificant. Find the Joy of Paperwork, the Zen of Channel Surfing, the Completely Forgetting Everything about Everything Because Your Whole Brain Has Been Absorbed By Some Pointless Repetitive Task.
Once you’ve found it this in ONE insignificant activity, you can find it in ANY insignificant activity, and that way, when the sheer weight of the insignificance of anything and everything you do in the face of an infinitely huge and primarily empty universe lands on your head, it just passes right through and you can keep going without being bothered.
It doesn’t make a difference overall whether I do my paperwork or attack some randomly selected fellow-cube-jockey with a red swingline stapler, so I may as well do the paperwork since a stapler attack would require getting out of my chair, finding someone’s red swingline stapler (because if i use MY black-with-faux-wood-panelling Stanley stapler, everyone would know it was me), and devising some appropriately equitable random-selection method to figure out who gets stapled.
