Russell Lee: Seaside, Oregon, is vacation spot (1941)
United States. Farm Security Administration

"My work, my play."

I don't take vacations. DaysOff seem out of the question. My summertime's filled with obligations that effectively prevent me from leaving home. Who would water the gardens and tend the cats? More than that, who would write the daily missive if I went missing? I understand that my time isn't refundable. If I miss a day, I've forfeited it, never to be recovered. I will never again stand in that place or time. I feel a sacred obligation to keep my nose near to this grindstone. When I have to go away, I take my business with me. I can rise just as early elsewhere as I can rise here, so my production continues even if I'm jury-rigging connections in a tiny hotel room in Paris. I will consent to visit, but I will not agree to suspend my writing for even a day.

I do not write for a living; I live to write. I stopped caring whether anyone but me valued my writing when I finally, almost begrudgingly, agreed to become a writer. That agreement was more an acknowledgement than a contract, an admission more than an indenture. I decided to try to become myself, to live up to my highest expectations for what that might mean. It would mean that I would thereafter never be unemployed and that I would agree to work for considerably less than any minimum wage. My work would have to become its own reward. I would need to find something rewarding in it and not expect extrinsic returns. I could share if I chose to, but I couldn’t hold my work hostage to payment. I would produce regardless.

I've never felt I was so far ahead that I could afford to take some DaysOff. I could go roaming only after finishing my daily installment. If that meant ignoring jet lag to finish before the day began, so be it. I would find respite within my work rather than away from it. I remain astonished that anyone might find time in their schedule to play a round of golf. Do they not have urgent business to attend to? How do they justify sloughing off?

Some insist that a vacation refreshes them, leaving them ready to jump back into production again. For me, I'd return with a deficit of however many days I'd been gone and no way to recover what I lost. I would never know what I lost, of course, because I wouldn't have ever found whatever it might have been. I'd only feel the deficit, knowing full well that I could never erase it.

I imagine myself to be a perpetual motion machine. Even when it might appear I'm resting, I'm wrestling with some question in my head. That's how I determine whether I'm dead. I figure that as long as I have unanswered questions, I'm still living. Should I ever manage to satisfactorily answer those questions, I suspect I would expire.

The purpose of my existence is not to take vacations. My bucket list extends beyond infinite horizons but includes no finite destinations. I feel no compulsion to go anywhere to see anything. I know I'm nothing special. I am just a journeyman writer, leaving impressions and trying to avoid drawing conclusions. I do not know what anything means. I'm uninterested in telling anyone, even myself, what I must do. I'm already occupied, anyway, far too busy to take a few DaysOff for vacation. My occupation must be my recreation. My work, my play.

As I enter my FollowingChapters, I can't help but wonder if these terms of engagement will continue to seem relevant. Perhaps I might mature into holding a part-time position, one that only works intermittently. I can't see how that sort of schedule might ever work for me. To my mind, I would be deliberately missing opportunities. Forgive me, but I still believe that every morning might prove extraordinary, that none ever qualify as trivial. I'm here to chronicle my experience in each extraordinary morning, as if my existence amounts to an unending string of utterly remarkable experiences. Of course, with iteration, even the most utterly extraordinary might seem as if it were reduced to the absolutely ordinary, though I can imagine worse fates than to so saturate my experience with the absolutely extraordinary that it seems like ho-hum ordinary to me.

©2025 by David A. Schmaltz - all rights reserved

Tags: #FollowingChapters, #PureSchmaltz