I actually did a fair bit of work today.

I mean workwork, I mean the day job, I mean the stuff that pays my bills and supports me in the modest style to which I have become accustomed.

That was, as usual, a mistake.

Not that the work didn't need to be done, but now it's after eight pm and I have a whole story page which I didn't write the dialogue for last night and I need to catch up on that and then ideally still have some time left tonight to do some more renders. But I'm having trouble doing this, because I am out of brain. I used up all my brain doing my stupid fucking day job.

No, I'm not behind, it's not even the fifteenth yet; it's the principle of the thing. It's a question of significance. It's a question of what's actually important. My weirdass stories, which get read by like fifty people, are far more important in the grand scheme of things than any bullshit I will ever do at my workplace.

No, no, read that again. You'll get it right the second time.

I'm not saying my stories are of vast cosmic significance. That's why I mentioned the fifty people. My stories don't even register on the ground radar of the universe. I have no illusions about that. I am less than a speck of dust. And yet they are of far greater significance than the shit I do to pay the bills. It isn't even close.

I would say that nine-tenths of the office work done in this country is of absolutely no long-term consequence to anyone. It is mostly useless and almost entirely ephemeral. I'm not one of these assholes who believes that physical labor is the only work that actually matters, which these days is the recourse of "Remember when America built stuff?" conservatives (many of whom have never touched a tool or broken a sweat in their pampered career-politician lives) ... but I do think that if you've built a house or plowed a field, at the end of the day you can look and say "OK, I actually did something." You've earned your end-of-day drink (or whatever your chosen unwinder is).

You drink that drink because you are physically exhausted. I drink that drink because I am mentally exhausted, and also need some psychological relief from a day spent dealing with divas and whiners. These two things aren't the same.

Even now, in a post-industrial, post-manufacturing United States, even coming from someone who highly values intelligence and the careers of the mind, I gotta say, I can't shake the idea that physical work has more respectability than mental work ... and that's partially because so much of the desk work is so fucking useless.

I don't want to talk about what I do here -- it's a bridge I don't like to cross. But I will say that I have customers, and they come in two kinds: The ones who are down in the data-shuffling trenches with me, the other service personnel, the ones who are keeping this machine running every day ... and the people who use the services we provide. The first group never give me a hard time, not just because they know what I'm going through, but because they also know how worthless the whole thing is.

The users, though, they don't realize that. They think it's extremely important. They are wrong. They are always wrong. In a few months, they won't be users anymore and they will have moved on, and they will forget all this. They're transient and what we do here will barely make a dent in their lives. Yet, while they're here, they'll scream about anything they can find to scream about, night and day. My theory is this is because they secretly know how unimportant it all is and they have no other way to vent their feelings about that except to take it out on us.

The irony of all this is, I'm very fond of my job, and would like to continue in it until I'm ready to retire. But I am simply not prepared to bust my ass for it except on the rare occasions when I absolutely have to. It's not that I'm not paid enough to bust my ass. It's that I simply can't get motivated about all of this petty crap.

When I write a story, I have made something. I may have made something that noneayall have the good taste to read. I may have made something that disappears without a trace. But by god, I have made something. The work I did at my day job today, which used up my brain, was writ on water ... and when the project is completed and running, no one will even realize it's there.

Even I, the only person who knows the extent of my work code, take it for granted. I write something and it hums invisibly in the background and runs without needing further attention for a decade. I have critical code I haven't touched in more than fifteen years. This is by design. I resent having to do these dumb fucking tasks, so I try as hard as possible to make sure I'll never have to do them more than once: OK, there, I did the damned thing. Now we will not speak of it again.

I'm going to go try to at least write that page of missing dialogue now.