The Job Inside Your Head

So the job inside your head isn’t really a job job, because it doesn’t pay enough, at least, not at first and oftentimes not ever. 

But it isn’t a hobby.

Why isn’t it a hobby? Well, for one thing the word hobby is insulting, a word invented by capitalism to make fun of activity it has difficulty monetizing.

The job inside your head is harder than a hobby, oftentimes impossible to quit, but infinitely easier to avoid for long blocks of time. 

The job inside your head drags everything into a big barn labelled ‘raw material,’ and then doesn’t know how to file any of it. As you age the barn fills with old magazines, broken typewriters, antique furniture, dead media, floppy disks and analog tape and zip drives and stacks of vinyl warping in the mildewed air. And box after box after box of unlabeled, uncategorized snapshots. 

The job inside your head is a welcome relief from your job anywhere else. The job can also be nerve wracking. It’s easiest when you pretend that you’re really, really good at it. But you never get any better when you think that way too much.

And when you never get any better, what starts in your head mostly stays in your head. 

Because the goal of the job inside your head is to make things that make the difficult and dangerous journey into other heads. And having penetrated that quarter inch of bone and skin and membrane, like Trojan horses or IEDs or Vaccines or Opioids, your head-made-thing detonates. Blooming into stuff that matters. Stuff that gets dragged into the barns inside those other heads. Tucked into a section that isn’t for raw materials but is instead loosely regarded as inspiration.

Or joy. Pure joy. 

So let us leave the here and now and go to work, or forget to work and just be in that place for a time where the work piles up undone, just mist, ghosts and shadows and briefly glimpsed vistas  of glittering starscapes, sweat slicked gleaming bodies, expanding spheres of quiet destruction, mushroom clouds and armies marching over shattered obsidian. 

Rebels languishing in caves of methane ice. Silent generation ships shepherded by orbs of crystalline computronium dreaming incomprehensible dreams. Chosen Ones and Everyman. Men. Persons. 

Tigerfaced Gully Foyle scattering capsules of anarchy across all spacetime. 

The black hole lurking behind nebula at the center of the Galaxy, devouring all things.

The Instrumentality punishing Command Suzdal with eternity in Shayol.

The velvet black sky full of whispering stars.  

Dark interdimensional spiders aghast at the race that would rule the sevagram!

A pulp magazine. A light saber. A rubber mask. One ring. 

A particle beam handgun with a worn ivory handle. 

Pack them in your briefcase. Finish that cup of coffee!

Time to get to work.