Yesterday was a good day. I spent four hours in the library, sold four books on amazon and ate three good meals. The ingredients for my meals cost me a total of £2.55 (bulked up with a bit of rice). Scallywag around the supermarket aisles at the right time of day and it's easy to stock up on vegetables and bread and other staples for less than half the price it'd cost you in the peak daytime shopping hours. Best time where I live is between about 7 and 9pm, when the stuff they have to sell before midnight gets knocked down even more than it already had been. It's sometimes worth a shot first thing in the morning too, around 6 - 7am.
Income from selling the books was £19.28 - minus postage costs of £9.02 gives £10.26. Take off the cost of eating and last night I went to bed with another £7.71 in the bank. This is nice, but not adequate, given that the current cost of living is still about £25 a day. My last payslip will come through on Friday, two days from now. It's time to step things up.
Why can't I live like this all the time? It's the question I keep coming back to. I want nothing from the world but simply to be in it. Money and power and influence and sex don't interest me enough. It's been 10 days now since I finished working and I already feel 10 years younger. (Well, that isn't quite true, but it sounded good. I'm trying to be honest on this blog, rather than pretentious, but by nature I'm quite a pretentious person so I won't always succeed). The circadian rhythms are stabilising. I sleep when it's dark. When it gets light, I wake up. I have breakfast and some coffee and read for an hour or so. Then I go to the library and write things. Time is key. Now that I have time, my book about veganism and transhumanism (working title - "The Vegan Imperative: Animals, Humans and the Future of Life" - see, pretentious, told you) is taking shape faster than I expected. At this rate I'll have a first draft done by the end of April.
It's like being a student again. My brain is heating up. This has its side effects - when I find myself thinking too intensely for too long, I start to obsess again. Obsess in the clinical sense. About horrible, horrible things. Some people are just supposed to suffer, I suppose. All things being equal, it's worth it. I love writing. I love thinking. Work dulls me, in every sense. Prozac has done that too, but this is the price you pay. The will is strong. The body is stupid. The brain is a maze. And amazing.
The potatoes are coming along nicely. I have a picture of them, but for some reason when you using Manchester Libary's wifi, they won't upload. So you'll have to wait. Inexplicably, my internet access disappeared on Monday evening. There's not even a dial tone. TalkTalk tell me they're working on it. I am being patient. This is fine, as it's another reason to spend time in the library.
Most of my camping equipment should arrive by the end of this week. Hoping to set off sometime middle of next.
Brain
Water and Brains
Twenty Milligrams
Will be interested to hear about your kit list for camping...
ReplyDeleteTent and sleeping bag should hopefully arrive by the weekend. Then I just need to work out how big a backpack to get and I'm ready to go.
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