Even though I'm on the verge of yet another financial crisis, I just haven't been able to bring myself to go canning. I'm not even sure I'll be willing to make myself do it for even just a couple hours this evening, after what will probably be another bland disappointment in the guise of a healthy vegetarian dinner.
One of the things I dislike about it is that the longer I'm at it the more likely I'll cave into the temptation to drink, something I've been intending to put an end to for embarrassing numbers of years! This means I'm probably going to start tomorrow going out twice daily on micro canning runs of four or five dollars apiece, with the option to collect more if superfluity happens upon me; the idea is not to be at it for more than three hours at a time. Another thing that bothers me about canning is the presence of my betters and the imagined stares and mockery I perceive emanating from them like all people sensitive to the notion of dignity imagine when they feel they're disgracing themselves in public. The result has been that I drink up most of the money earned and eat nothing at all because I've skipped the free meals in favor of more vain striving and even more beer. This has made for a surly and depressed ball of snakes for a psychology whose teeth is always on edge. To minimize my exposure to the more affluent primates of Northwest I'm going to go out early in the morning and later in the evening, instead of during the afternoon and early evening like I have been.
Theoretically I could cultivate a dissociate mentality, something like the clinical detachment doctors charm us with as we languish in our hospital beds ... but, a) I'm a social animal, and b) I'm a mentally untrained one who would probably require some time to cultivate the healthy self-image and emotional maturity required to not let such things get to me so much. What I can do in the meantime, other than mitigating the galling effects of canning on my psyche, is to simply refuse stressing about what is already something of an ordeal. It's chump change, anyway; and since I've always been reluctant to give much of myself to real jobs that pay minimum wage and don't even offer free meals why would I invest so heavily of myself into what is merely gleaning? Seriously! On a good day I pull in maybe a little over three dollars an hour; bad days can see hourly earnings fall below a single dollar. In the long run I'll earn more from canning by quitting drinking and being chill about it than by whirling through the neighborhood like a one-man locust army whilst quaffing copious Hamm's® on the clock. It just sucks that nobody offers me chances at work or even getting a job like happens to people who panhandle; I guess the assumption is we're doing this because we'd prefer not to work? Work sucks, don't get me wrong; but a shitty job that pays quadruple what another shitty job pays is still more desirable.
If worse comes to worst, I'll let the gas get shut off until I can afford to get it re-connected, and just hope that Home Forward doesn't catch wind of it until it's no longer an issue (I've heard that utility shut-offs can jeopardize one's housing). Because I foolishly and prematurely locked myself into a contract with Century Link® for home Internet service, I can probably expect $175 in bills to be due by the middle of next month. Which I suppose probably has some people wondering why I haven't aggressively sought a job ... what every tea-party jerk thinks is the panacea to the pampered indolence of the lumpenproletariat. I'm going to, actually, but I want to be reasonably confident I'll be mentally and physically capable of getting and keeping a job. Else, what would be the point? Besides, my ID is expired, so that has to be renewed before I even think of handing in résumés ... which fiction I need to start working on. (It has to be fiction if anyone is to read even halfway through one without laughing or snorting in derision.)
