Four Years

As my man William S. Burroughs once said (The Western Lands), “People have nothing to say, but they are afraid of saying nothing, so what they do say comes out flat and vapid and meaningless. The shadow of death is on every face.”

As hard as it is for me to believe, today is the four-year anniversary of my retirement. My last day as a productive, income-earning citizen was June 30, 2019 - since July 1 of that year, I've been either a non-productive leech living off entitlements while contributing nothing to society at large, as Republicans would say, or finally free at last, as I would say.   

The four years passed in the blinking of an eye. There was a global pandemic that shut down much of the world in successive waves, or spikes, of infection, killing millions across the globe, and dominated 12 to 18 months of those four years. Then in late October 2020, while the covids were still ravaging the world, a tree fell onto my house during Hurricane Zeta causing catastrophic damage, and home repairs, contractors, insurance negotiations, and other headaches dominated the next 12 months. 

Parts of me never fully recovered from those twin disasters of 2020, and I'm still living in partial seclusion, and nervously eye the remaining trees on my property every time a storm is forecast.  I just took down two more trees last month, the third and fourth since the Zeta incident, but there are still many tons of timber way too high up over my head.

But je ne regrette rien - I'm glad I retired when I did and wouldn't have wanted it any other way.  I'm glad I didn't have to make difficult choices about risking an early return to the workplace during the pandemic just to make a living. I don't miss commuting and working 10-hour days only to enrich the owners of the companies for which I worked. I'm perfectly comfortable being the eccentric old man living all alone in the brick house up on the hill.

I left the working world not because I was so financially secure that it made no sense to continue to work but because I was desperately unhappy in my career and realized that this life was my one and only shot at existence. If I wasn't enjoying this singular chance at existance then I should change it - there's no point in suffering one's way to the grave if it's possible to change things.       

In other news, despite public protests, including over 12 hours of impassioned testimony, the Atlanta City Council voted to approve Cop City, and the powers that be wasted no time clear-cutting some 85 acres of forest land before the inevitable lawsuits and voter referenda halt construction. Last night, someone set a dozen police motorcycles on fire on the site.  A luta continua.