ambition bypass

It’s 1969 and I am 18. I sit in physics class in a middlingly upmarket private school. Pig Snibson, the physics master, dictates unintelligible stuff from a textbook as thick as I am when it comes to physics, chemistry and mathematics. They refuse to penetrate my brain. If I am honest, I must admit that I just won’t let them in.

My interests and intelligences lie elsewhere: on the sports field and in a world of words.

On my mind that day is the dread prospect of failing physics, chemistry and mathematics, and hence matriculation, which I duly do. But what really curdles my bowels is realising that I’m about to spend 40 years in the workforce. Forty fucking years!

In 1970 I gain good passes in German and English literature, a high distinction in politics, and leave school as the oldest matriculant of my year or any other year. I have dashed my mother’s hopes of a glittering career in science and can get on with the unesteemed task of studying to be a teacher. Nonetheless, I still dread that lifetime of work.

Thirty-five of those 40 years are behind me. I have been a teacher, school principal, youth worker, publications officer, and project worker in community health and welfare. I don’t want to do any of these things again. If I retire as scheduled at 65, I have five more years in the workforce, but I don’t want to work again. At all. Period. End of story.

Last Wednesday I go to my job for the last time. I clear my desk and personal computer drive. I hand over my SIM card, swipe card and keys and quit the building. On Friday afternoon I cajole myself to visit Centrelink and inform the customer liaison officer that my work contract ends the following day, Saturday 31 December, and ask her what I should do.

She tells me that I am not technically unemployed until today, Monday, which is a holiday, so I should go away and gaze into my navel until tomorrow, Tuesday. I have done this and all I found was lint. I am without a job, desire to have a job, or any idea what job I might do. I don’t know where my next dollar will come from.

Rock on.