>Yesterday was my birthday. Thank you to the one or two people who read this thing who helped me to celebrate. We ate mock meat and chocolate cake. It was a pleasant ending to a day that had been very much like many other recent days: drab and predictable, with a sprinkling of trepidation. Going to work these days is like watching a slow-motion trainwreck. Every couple of days a couple of more people quit and head for more stable ground. The rest of us just cluster around with deer-in-the-headlights looks in our eyes. We are marked for the upcoming cull and we all know it. Those who care enough to stay on this sinking ship participate in the appropriate shady back-room soul-selling dealings necessary to retain some semblance of employment. I, however, can’t make myself care. Either we get the contract or we don’t. Even getting the contract doesn’t guarantee me employment past September, though, so maybe it doesn’t matter if we get it or not. I feel like this is supposed to happen. I feel like life should kick the chair out from under me; after all, I have been leaning a bit too far back in it. I deserve to be left hanging. What sways me these days, as usual, are words on the page and melodies in my ears. These things don’t pay the bills, but they move me in a way that work never has. As always, I look to the birds for some wordless answers to my vague unfocused questions. Their behavior, unlike mine, is strictly dictated by the harsh rules of nature. Survival of the fittest doesn’t apply to me. I can be rather unfit and still survive. Maybe it would be better if I had to physically struggle just to feed myself. Maybe then I wouldn’t have all these questions in my head…all this existential effluvia constantly choking my more rational thinking. Maybe when I lose my job I will become a hunter-gatherer.