This is a Lie

This is all a lie.

I am on a beach. I have my laptop and I’m sitting at the beach. I would not have a laptop on the beach. If I lived near a beach, I don’t believe that I would bring it to the beach.

I have many millions of dollars in “the market” at any given time. I like to regularly check my balance using an app on my phone. I take comfort in seeing that extra comma that most people don’t have, but I’m always a little worried that it won’t be enough. I don’t know what enough is. I would not have any money in “the market” if I had millions. I would feel sick knowing there was so much basic need that I was trading for my psychological comfort.

I separate what I do for a living and how I earn my income from the other parts of my lived experience. I am only a gun for hire. When I close the books for the day, I walk away clear. There are no nights that I am worried about a problem I haven’t solved or a deadline in the future. The work I do cannot be done part time, at least not by me. Every problem is sitting on a bench at the front of my forehead behind my eyes and they each take their turn screaming their name into my crevasses.

When I wake in the morning I am covered only by a light cotton sheet that is only just rippling in the warm breeze through a screened window. I’ve grown accustomed to the crow of the cocks. I spend hours from dawn until full morning watching them interact with chickens, chicks, iguanas and me – with bread, but oh so much more precious – clean water. The roadside here has litter but also eggs. Hens lay on hills and they roll when there are mostly hills. There are days that build to weeks that stretch to months on end here when I can’t get warm. Dad joked about the long johns going on Labor Day and coming off Memorial Day. Fuck if that’s not a joke.

As a professional writer and artist and keeper of a substantial trust, often my hardest decision in a day will be how best to waste the time. It’s all waste anyway. We all die.