I’ve been working too hard. It’s easy to tell. My eyes hurt. I type blind almost because I’m tired of looking at the computer screen. It feels like someone has taken a cork and stuffed it up a nostril and lodged it tight right between my eyes.

I’m drinking, well, I was going to say, coffee like water, but that’s not true. I never drink that much water. There’s a drowsy ache behind my eyes, a heaviness inside my skull that makes it feel like work to carry my head on my neck. I try to do some useless stretches but I’m tight, tight like frozen rubber.

I sit at the computer, a hunchback. A Quasimodo nerd with the cast of the computer screen on his anguished face working through the night. Well, I’m Quasimodo without the free spirit Esmeralda to goad and brighten my soul. I have lost, I think, my Esmeralda. And what of the sinister priest? Yes, as with Quasimodo, I have the sinister priest. Money. Bills. The cost of living.

It’s my own fault, I guess. I work in spurts. I’m not nearly disciplined with my time. I need a deadline. No. I need a tight deadline. If I have three days to do something, I’m set. If I have three weeks to do something I’m lost. I’ve been catching up on a lot of work.

Spreadsheets firing people. And numbers to count. Spreadsheets giving people small raises. And numbers to count. Two shots of despair chased by one shot of relief. I wonder if the people with the little raises know that their extra 25 cents an hour is from the blood of a person now without a job. Merge letters that make it all sound very pretty. Corporate tectonic shifting that creeps in at my fingers and spoils my joints and puts a mold in my brain.

There’s a funk on me. It’s physical. It, I guess, is centrifugal from my soul, it starts in the middle and goes out but it feels like the other way around. Like a fog, a haze, a ball of evil of the collected farts of bourgeois demons passing over me, sticking to me, pushing down on me, and crawling in me.

Tomorrow, I think, I need to take a day off. Take my single shot of relief. A day off of work anyway. I’ll still try to be here.

I know it’s spelled wrong: anxziety. Spelling mistakes also make me anxzious. And the z has a lovely sharpness to it.

SS