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Back in the days when I was working an 8:00 to 5:00 job (all of two weeks ago), pissing my life away helping to make terrible people obscenely wealthy (if it is true that "Corporations are people, my friend!", then it is also true that most of these "people" are huge assholes, and that some of them -- I'm looking at you, Bank of America -- are downright evil), I would sometimes daydream about what a "perfect job" would look like. You know, that ideal, fantastical "perfect job" that Alan Watts asks us to imagine if we were living in a world where money didn't matter.

(For the record, all such "daydreaming" occurred while I was on the road, driving from County Seat to County Seat, securing judgments against poor people. No company resources were expended on said "daydreams.")

In any event, a typical day on this "Daydream Job" looked something like this:

I would have no alarm clock. Rather than being jarred awake by a bell or a siren or tricked out of a dream by a soothing "gentle mountain stream," I would simply wake up when I was done sleeping. I would find, I imagined, that I would generally rise at about 8:00 am. I would go down to the kitchen and pour myself a cup of coffee, and drink it while I read the paper. I might fix myself a light breakfast, maybe a bagel with cream cheese, or a bowl of granola, some fresh fruit, a glass of juice. I might turn on the radio and listen to NPR. I would take my time, because I had nowhere to go. No appointments, no meetings, no court appearances. I had a schedule, if you want to call it that, but it was my schedule. There would be no one to answer to but me.

After breakfast, I might check my email, responding to some messages, archiving others, but deleting most without reading them. Then I might put on my running shoes and go for a run. Maybe five miles, maybe ten, maybe more. It just depended on how I felt that day. After my run, I would stretch a little (I've always preferred stretching after a run rather than before), take a shower, and then maybe just sit quietly for a while. Maybe 15 minutes; maybe 30. Whatever seemed right at the time. You might call this meditating, but I prefer to think of it as just sitting quietly. Whatever you call it, a few minutes of solitary stillness and quiet is practically essential for me to get ready for my day, and was virtually impossible to do while working a rigid 8:00 to 5:00 schedule.

Then maybe I'd make myself a light lunch. A salad or a sandwich, with maybe a cup of tea or a glass of milk. I might check my email again, to clear any messages that came in since breakfast (again, probably deleting most if not all of them unread). Maybe I'd give Facebook a quick scan, or maybe not.

And then I would go to work. My primary occupation would be writing, so I would spend the next several hours working on whatever my current project happened to be: an article, a short story, a novel. On any given day, the work might involve as much reading or research as it did writing. But whichever it was, I would work, and continue to work until my wife came home from her office and the kids came home from school. And we would have supper together. And after supper, I might retire to the front porch, with whatever book I happened to be reading for pleasure, and, under the porch light, I would read, and smoke a cigar, and drink some wine, and then come back inside.

And, the next day, I would do it all again, with whatever variations I felt were appropriate. And this was my Daydream Job.

You've probably already figured out where I'm going with this, but I have to go there anyway, so bear with me. As it turns out, my current situations is not so very different from my Daydream Job. I no longer use an alarm clock, and sure enough, I really do just more or less spontaneously wake up at around 8 o'clock. I drink my coffee. I read the paper. I eat breakfast. Sometimes I go for a run, and sometimes I don't. (My Daydream self seemed to have more energy than I do.) Sometimes I sit quietly (meditate), and sometimes I don't quite get around to it. I eat lunch.

And in the afternoons, I work. But my work isn't writing; it is looking for a job, which is a spectacularly unsatisfying occupation (worse than any unsatisfying occupation you might happen to find is the act of begging for one you really don't want). I manage to squeeze in a little writing-time when I can, but there's no money it in, of course.

Which brings me to the major flaw of the entire Daydream Job premise (Alan Watts, you should know better), which is this: Money matters. It matters a lot. There are no bill-collectors in Daydream Job World. Houses are not foreclosed upon in Daydream Job World. Child-support payments are always current in Daydream Job World. In Daydream Job World, we drink wine and not whiskey.

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