Outsourcing

I’m sat in a little café in a part of this peninsula that I never often reach. I’ve just taken out £50 which I do not expect will last me the week. I’m thinking about where I have to go in an hour’s time. The café is a cute little place, an old home, with fairy lights and free wifi. The coffee is weak, but only £1.20. I’ve been here for the few hours it has been raining and I’m waiting to go along for a medical review. The government outsources the assessment not to the NHS, but to Atos Origin – some stab at a medical consultancy.

Its purpose is to assess if I am fit for work, what help I need to get into work, if there is anything they can do to get me to work, if they can trip me up and force me to work; there seems a pressing theme. Work.

Not that much of a surprise really. I’ve been out of work for the last four months. It is about time that I started thinking about just pressing on with things and ignoring my problem again. It’s a cycle after all, so let’s get riding. Problem is that at the moment it feels like I’m peddling up hill.

I’ve always wanted to be a writer, but there doesn’t seem to be a need for them. Perhaps I should just join the armed forces. I’ve always thought I might like to die for something slightly ridiculous. I once had a dream that I threw myself in front of a car to save a plastic bottle from being crushed. So getting shot at by people I’ve never met seems like the same flavor of stupidity. At least it removes the need to think for myself. If I’m lucky it will even remove the need to end my own life. I can outsource.

Squeeze

Personally speaking I try to squeeze every drop of life from a day. She’s never been like that. Whenever she leaves me she bats her eyes and makes the sign of a telephone with her hand when she says goodbye. I get really pissed off at that. I can’t quite make out the awkward dose of ill-acted senselessness. Simply put, she’s ceased to be significant to me. She’s now as real to me as that hand-telephone she holds unringing next to her ear.
I’m hoping that she’ll soon get bored of me and leave me to my crazy flirting with strangers that comes to nothing and my crushes that last a week and no longer. I’m also hoping that the latest crush Jen found that poem I left in her library book before she returns it. Page 130. If she doesn’t then it becomes a message in a bottle. No doubt someone will find it, next year, when they decide to take a module in Poetic Theory but I’m sure it won’t mean as much to them.
As it begins to snow I realise that these girls, like others, don’t quite see the world the same way I do. They’ve never paid enough attention to the details; never asked too many questions of existence. I realise this and giggle and begin trying to catch the snowflakes on my tongue. I’m thinking how each is unique, like me.

Universe

In the song Around The Universe, by The Beatles there is a section at the beginning that speaks to me. One of them says “You all right richie?”. Every time I hear it, it makes me smile.
A lot of the time I think about what it means to be content. To have that mantra of enlightenment run through me. A lot of the time I need that smile it gives me.
Contentment is being ok with yourself and everything. Utterly unchanging. Nothing is going to change my world. Except me.