I never actually made the decision to stop working. For a year after my meeting with the idiot, I told people I was “between contracts.” Then, over the next year, the state of between-ness somehow became permanent. I did volunteer work for a group that helps nonprofits with computing problems, but gradually a sort of miasmatic depression took me over, a dreary kind of fog in which it became harder and harder to do anything at all. When you’re working and hurrying to the laundry before it closes, it seems that having all the time in the world will be glorious. But then, suddenly without the structures of a job, why get up at any particular hour? Why get to sleep? It takes great internal discipline, I found, to make up each and every day for yourself. I began to tumble around in time. I went to movies in the morning. I drank in the afternoon. I began going out to dinner with friends every night. There are three or four very good restaurants in town that have come to consider me a regular. No longer having an office to go to, no place to offer the sort of formal friendliness business acquaintances give you, I found in these restaurants a substitute impersonal solace: the welcome at the reception stand, the satisfaction of being seated ahead of everyone with reservations, being treated as if I’d come home. It’s possible that those places have indeed become what I can count on as home.