Just now I was lying down in the caravan as the sun set, reading the Philip Roth book (very good, btw), listening to Miles Davis (Kind of Blue) and pondering how good I was feeling. It occurred to me that the uncertainty of where all this was leading definitely coloured my stay here. That’s not to say I regret that – it was essential to be in a completely new and strange place in order to put stuff in perspective and get out of the mental hole I’d dug myself in to – but I started to think about what it would have been like had I had a concrete thing to go back to. I thought about Fred’s offer of a job should I want to come back to the Island and the idea of doing this same thing again next summer. It occurred that having this plan would be a good way of ensuring I don’t get trapped into another dead end job or into a cycle of despair and destruction. My aim is to put myself into a position where I am able to spend two or three months on a farm next summer, but also to have something to go back to afterwards.
A good friend of mine’s ex-boyfriend had an interesting approach to work. He still lived at home and worked in computing earning relatively silly money on short-term contracts. His system was to spend a few months earning loads of cash and then spend the next few months constantly online gaming until the cash ran out. Then he’d do it again. Whether this led to him being a friend of mine’s ex-boyfriend I’ll let you decide, though I should say he was a decent chap and good company down the pub.
This is not a new idea for me. I’d often thought about what I would do in his situation and now it looks like I might be in a position to do this. If I could be in a position where I’m able to just fuck off for a month or two to dig up weeds on a farm that would be a good thing. A little, teeny worry is that once I’m back in a city I’ll lose not only the fitness but also the mental attitude I’ve developed these last few months. If I can recharge regularly and as part of my normal life with minimal reliance on the goodwill of others that’d be five-red-cars-extra-super-good.