Work Habit

 Recently I saw a trailer for the cable show “Black Gold” featuring oil-drenched roughnecks working on a rig, huge boulders of metal swinging wildly like cockeyed pendulum weights about their heads, and I realized that I’d gone my life without proving myself by doing this particular job.

You might ask why does that matter? 

While clearing out a drawer, I found a report card from my ninth grade Civics class. On the back were five subheadings under the title “Work Habits” – 1. Works in Class; 2. Use of Materials; 3. Pride in Work; 4. Initiative; 5. Following Directions. 

Apparently learning good “Work Habits” was deemed essential to a child’s education in the 1950s, and we were given one of three grades: S for Satisfactory; I for Needs Improvement; and U for Unsatisfactory. I seemed to have had good “work habits” -- in all subcategories save one I garnered a steady row of Ss.

In “Following Directions,” during one grading period Mr. Green thought I Needed Improvement. I don’t recall what caused him to mark me down; knowing myself now, I probably decided that my way of doing something was better than the method he proposed to the other students. But I do remember vividly how this wounded me. After all, I was someone who showed Pride in Work. My poor mark seemed to say that he disapproved of me, and winning approval was the very point of learning good work habits. “Pride in Work” didn’t mean simply that I took care in completing and presenting projects, didn’t do something slapdash: it meant that my very willingness and ability to work were themselves sources of pride, apart from any particular assignment. I had pride in the process as much as in the product.

My parents worked, almost ceaselessly. My mother was a full-time clerk in a drilling-records office; she cooked almost all our meals; she did our laundry and ironing and sewed some of her own clothes. She and my dad cleaned the house. He worked as a natural gas field engineer. They never hired anyone – they built the forms and poured the concrete for our walks and patio, erected the fences, planted the trees, shrubs, and flowers, mowed the grass, painted the interior rooms, laid carpet, refinished furniture, hung drapes, enclosed the patio, constructed tables with tops made of Mexican tile they laid and grouted. Then they went square-dancing or arrow-head hunting or camping (my mother made our sleeping bags, and a portable kitchen). Aside from that, they took classes in woodworking, painting, ceramics and mosaics. My dad washed and waxed his own car, changed the oil, spark plugs, tires, anti-freeze. He had tools to fix leaking faucets, broken pipes, lamps, switches, fixtures, evaporative air coolers, clogged drains. Whether it sagged or squeaked, drooped or hung loose, flew apart or collapsed, he had the tools and skills to fix it.

My brother and I grew up having allowances that were contingent upon completing our assigned household chores. At grade-school age, I worked for adults in our neighborhood who didn’t want to clean their own garages or yards. Soon I had a paper route that required me to zip to the newspaper office immediately after school each day to fold copies of the local paper and stack them in my shoulder bag so that I could wheel my bike around my route and toss them one by one. On Sundays, I got up at five even in the winter to deliver the Sunday edition.

I graduated to a better, more grown-up, job the summer I was fifteen. An older friend coaxed his boss to add me as a part-timer in the produce department of our supermarket though I was under the legal age to be hired. I shucked the loose skins from onions, shoveled and hosed out the slimy produce from the floor of a refrigerated locker, unloaded freight trucks packed with sacks of potatoes and crates of peaches and apples. I reveled in working up a sweat, flexing and even straining my muscles (this way to manhood!), relished the idea of customers admiring the way I heaved and hefted this or that.

But the manager never scheduled my work. One day he’d call me in, the next not. And he refused to be pinned down. It was summer, and if I wanted to make plans and asked if he’d be needing me “tomorrow or Friday,” he’d say “depends. Maybe.” Even if I called early in the morning to ask about working later in the day, he’d say, “Dunno. Depends. Maybe. I’ll call you.” He meant wouldn’t call if he didn’t need me. 

One day I waited fruitlessly until mid-afternoon. when a girl I admired called to invite me to a pool party with other kids, some of whom would be girls I might also admire, most likely, if given the chance, and just as I was about to step out the door, my manager called wanting me to come to work. “I’m sorry,” I said. “I waited all day, and nothing happened, so I made plans to go swimming.”

“Oh, sure,” said he. “Just go ahead and go.”

What an understanding fellow! I thought. The next morning, I called to ask if he needed me.

“Oh, no,” he said. “I wouldn’t want to mess up your swimming schedule.”

I knew that would be the answer if he bothered to take my calls in the future. I had been… fired! If taking pride in my work was how I sought and won approval from adults, then getting the sack meant my manager  absolutely disapproved of me. I burned with resentment over what I believed was the injustice; I burned with shame from the stigma. Future possible employers would now deem me unworthy of consideration. 

But I had learned that taking pride in your ability, in your energies, in your wholehearted thrusting of your very self into a job – well, these virtues weren’t everything, after all. Learning to be employed involved a kind of politics I had been oblivious to – there was no subhead called “Gives up Self and Dignity Without Hesitation,” though, of course, “Follows Directions” does point that way.

The next summer my father got me on at a nearby oil refinery. There a crew of five men were assigned various jobs in the plant. I aspired to work beside them, but I was teamed with another man’s son and put to work washing the windows of the engine rooms. This required climbing twenty-five foot ladders to reach the topmost outside windows. Heat from the gigantic turbines rushed out through the windows and combined with a blazing sun to produce temperatures well over 100. We had canisters of Bon Ami, rags, and bottles of water. The windows apparently hadn’t been clean since the plant was constructed in the 1940s, and they were coated with a grayish opaque scum that didn’t yield very readily to the cleanser unless you bore down.

Well, the harder the better, I thought. 

On the first day, my partner, Sherman, decided that he would be the “lower window” cleaner, as he didn’t like climbing ladders. Then he decided that because it was so hot he needed a water break every few minutes. Then the effort hurt his arms, so he could only clean one window between our official breaks (15 minutes twice daily). On day six, he quit.

This aroused tumultuous and contradictory feelings. Secretly, I envied him because by then the new had worn off the idea of toiling hard and proving myself – the encrusted 6” x 8” panes stretched to infinity. All the buildings had them; all in the same condition. We could scrub windows for the next ten years and never finish. Clearly, this was to be our fate: all summer, all windows, all the time. It was tedious; it was boring; it was physically hard. The heat sapped my strength, turned my brain to mush. Too, it seemed vaguely like woman’s work, or, at the least, “make work” to occupy teenage boys whose fathers had a measure of influence.

I envied and resented him for bailing out, leaving me with countless more windows, and, more to the point, leaving me alone on the ladders all day. More so, I envied and resented him for being willing to make that choice. I was so trapped inside living up to what was expected of me that I couldn’t consider quitting. I couldn’t imagine saying to my dad that I wasn’t man enough to take it. He was (and is) a mild-mannered fellow who probably would’ve shrugged, but I knew what his values were, what he wanted and expected from a son.

So a fantasy of heroic martyrdom was my balm. Look at that kid! Day after day on those ladders! Cleaning those windows! That other kid, man, he was a worthless weenie! But, man, look at this kid go!

Then one day, I was relieved of cleaning and substituted for a missing crewmen on the roustabout gang. At last! A real man’s work! Our job was to ream out the mineral deposits in tubes that cooled circulating water needed for refining. The tubes were arranged like the barrels of a Gatling gun inside a huge cylinder, giving it a honeycomb appearance from the end, where we worked. We had a huge electric drill with a bit a few yards long mounted on an overhead hoist, and we pressed the bit to the tube and began to grind our way through the deposits at a rate of a few inches per hour. You had to put your hands over your head onto the drill handles and push to apply pressure on the bit. You stood half on tiptoe and pushed, gripping the handles, arms over your head, for as long as you could take it, then you dropped them to let somebody spell you off. The crew boss only “supervised.” They had been doing this for two weeks straight, day in, day out. They started at 8 a.m., had a fifteen-minute smoke and water break at 10, went back to the drill until noon, took 30 minutes for lunch, went back to the drill until 2:15, when they had another 15-minute break, went back to the drill until 4:30, when they quit and cleaned up. It was tedious; it was boring; it was physically demanding. But if you were a man, you stuck it out.

I was eager to carry my fair share, but my limbs simply wouldn’t hold out for the duration of my first day. On the second day, when the crew chief left to attend to business in the office, my fellow crewmen instantly stopped working the second he was out of sight. I was confused. I stepped up to the drill, thinking they believed it was my turn again. I pushed the trigger. “Hey, Smitty,” said one. I looked at him. He gave me a “cut it” sign. I stopped. “Knock it off,” he said with a grin. “You’ll make us look bad.”

I chafed at the idea of cheating. I wanted to prove I could stand and drill with the best of them. They wanted me to dog it; they wanted me to act like Sherman. It was a tough spot to be in, and my solution didn’t wholly please me or my coworkers. I stood under the drill with my arms crossed, waiting for the lookout’s whistle, conveying my disdain and discomfort yet complying with the pack. When the signal came and they all leaped up from where they’d draped like snakes across the pipes and machinery, I grabbed the drill handles as if I’d been waiting all my life to scour out the deposits in these tubes.

It took awhile to see that, contrary to my illusions, these guys were just like Sherman – except they didn’t have the luxury of choosing to walk away. Their sentence to tedious, boring, physically exhausting labor was not a schoolboy’s summer session; they were lifers. 

The next summer I worked on a roving roustabout crew: a boss and three roustabouts rode in a truck from job to job. It was hot; it was hard work. But my coworkers were grown men, and so I couldn’t complain that I wasn’t allowed to do a real man’s work. The shovel was my primary tool; we dug out cattle-guard road crossings; we dug out leaking oil connections to repair them; we shoveled sand to build dikes for earthen oil tanks. 

Often we laid a pipeline by hand. We’d arrive at a well where sections of 2” pipe had been trucked in and stacked. Our job was to carry each 20’ joint of it across sand dunes from the well to a storage tank. Two men per joint, an end posted on your shoulder, off you went under a sun so fiery bright it burned the blue out of the sky, trudging through deep soft sand, over hill and hump until your legs were rubber and your shoulder was so sore it hurt to even think about setting those last lengths of pipe there.

One Sunday afternoon, my family ran into my boss at our cafeteria.

“Well,” said my father. “Is he making you a good hand?”

“Oh, yeah,” said my boss. “He’ll do a job of work.”

Yes, a triumphant moment. By now I was confident I could do a man’s work. But I was also sure that I didn’t want to prolong it beyond earning enough to buy a car. What if I had to do this the rest of my life? What if like my coworker Arliss I’d dropped out of an Arkansas school in the ninth grade to help my Pa sharecrop and married my sweetheart and now had two little ones, and all I had to look forward to for the next, say, forty years or so was more of this?

Then I was hired at a trucking company as a “swamper,” a fellow who helps his driver load and unload. Drivers and swampers met each morning in the gang room at the trucking yard. When the supervisors picked the drivers for the jobs, the drivers picked their swampers. I was a transient college boy, so I never got picked first, but, once it became known that I carried my weight, I never got picked last, either. Often we loaded heavy drill pipe onto our trailer from a railroad car and trucked it to a site where a drilling rig was currently operating, then we unloaded it onto the rig’s pipe rack so that it could be pulled up piece by piece and added onto the string above the bit that was grinding its way toward the center of the Earth. The drill stem was too heavy to lift; we had to finesse it by using its own weight, pry each piece loose one by one from a pyramid stack and let it roll down a set of runners onto the rack. It was a craft, not a science, and one that often involved your hands and fingers being in the wrong place at the wrong time when the pipe tumbled down the ramp to clang and bounce against the one that had previously come to rest there. Good gloves and steel-toed boots were essential.

Often we had to drive hours to reach a rig, which might be miles from the nearest paved road. After unloading, we’d hang about the roughnecks’ doghouse, drink their coffee, smoke, admire the cheesecake babes adorning their calendars, maybe eat our sack lunches before we returned to the yard. Despite my hard-earned knowledge of what a day’s labor with your hands and arms and legs and feet and back and calves and shoulders was truly like, I retained a romantic idea about rough-necking. It was to the oil fields what smoke jumping was to fire-fighting, what picking at a seam with an axe was to mining, bronc busting to ranching. That man up high in the derrick – wasn’t he the modern equivalent of a pirate’s lookout? The work was long, dirty, hot, and – the added element that evoked the glamour: dangerous. If the rig caught fire, the derrick man had to fly on a pulley down an escape cable that ran from his station to the ground, and the floor crew had to jump off a platform some fifteen to twenty feet high. If it wasn’t fire, it was falling metal. Or flying metal. They wore tin hats and steel-toed shoes, but it was common to see many a worker with a missing or mangled finger. The drill bit could break into a gas pocket and there’d be the extreme danger of explosion from a tiny spark, or there’d be a blow-out that shot the bit and its attached drill stem out of the casing and up through the rig floor and the derrick. 

You approach a working rig on foot and it’s like walking up to an idling freight train. Only much, much taller. The ground under your feet vibrates through your boot soles, and the noise is tremendous: you have to shout into someone’s ear to be heard. To gain the floor, you climb a set of metal stairs. It’s akin to coming aboard an aircraft carrier. Whenever I brought drill stem to a rig, I always felt a hitch in my step, took a little extra care where my foot fell, and I kept my eyes open. My heart beat a little faster. I wondered: now this is a real man’s work! Should I sign on? Or will I be needing my fingers for some future endeavor such as playing a musical instrument or typing an essay or a novel? 

The job aroused the unspoken admiration of other men. Saying you were a roughneck was like saying you were a Navy Seal or an iron-worker in Manhattan walking girders a hundred floors above the street. It put you indisputably in the category of manliness. On the rig floor, there was no room for malingering, as each man had his role and duties and to fail them was to put others at risk. I was in awe of them. 

When the drilling was done and the rigs were to be moved to a new location, that’s when we truckers had our thrills. To walk into the gang room and learn that today we’d be moving a rig never failed to make my heart pound. Unlike the solitary work we did daily – one truck, one job - it took a platoon of trucks and attendant personnel laboring in concert to move a rig. A jack-knife rig was composed of gigantic parts – the derrick, the platform, the mud pit, the engine, the draw works, the dog house, chief among them – and, after the rig was broken down, its components were loaded for transport. 

Our trucks were equipped with winches and gin poles for hoisting our loads - for which the swamper was responsible. He raised the poles, reeled out the hook and cable, hooked and unhooked the weight or secured it on the bed with booms and chains. Because the company caravanned the equipment, no truck could move out for the new location until all were loaded, and this inspired a competitive desire to get yours loaded first – or at least not be last.

We set out one morning with a fleet of trucks moving like a military convoy along a narrow New Mexico highway. A couple hours later we arrived at the site and immediately began jockeying, winching, backing up to the loads, the supervisors shouting, whistling, beckoning as they directed the traffic on the pad – think of a big circus breaking down the big top and setting off to the next city, or a regiment of artillery moving to a different front of a war. I leaped about our truck bed preparing the hook and cable, the chains, unpinning the arms of the poles from the sides of the truck and lifting them skyward after bolting the ends that held the pulley.

We had a choice piece of the action: a sizeable chunk of the derrick laid horizontal. We hoisted one end onto the bed, where we tucked it down tight with chains, and the other end was lifted onto a set of wheels forty feet behind us, so that the load was pulled like a trailer. When we sat in the idling cab waiting, I was pleased with myself: no one had to coach me, no one had to correct me, no one had to hurry me. I was sweating and my heart was thumping and my breath was short from the work. I’d torn a big gash in my forearm which I’d wrapped with a clean rag. To my great satisfaction, the gash had bled through my makeshift bandage. Our boss noted it and said, “You okay, Smitty?” Oh, yeah, said I. Just a scratch. 

We left the sand hills of Eastern New Mexico and proceeded south into Texas with the rig, driving all day with our chunk of derrick, and, at day’s end, the herd corralled at a tiny, one-motel crossroad someplace so deep in the Trans-Pecos region I’d never been there. That night I lost a week’s wages learning to play five-card draw. The next morning after coffee and cold egg sandwiches and cigarettes we were on the road an hour before dawn. I don’t know what possessed me – maybe restlessness – but as we thrummed along in the stretched-out caravan about 45 mph, I opened the truck door and monkeyed my way onto the bed. A faint violet glimmer rimmed the Eastern horizon. I climbed the stanchions of the derrick like a ladder and, minutes later, I was sitting on top, probably thirty feet above the road. We were moving East, into the dawn, and as the light grew, the countryside surfaced to visibility. It was classic Western topography, remote, empty of humanity, consisting of deep arroyos and canyons and stretches of mesa upthrust from the valley floors, and now the sunlight was oozing into the rock in the road cuts, boosting the volume on the reds, the purples, the yellows, while overhead the sky had shredded into pink strands of cloud against a pale violet backdrop, and above that hovered a still deep navy skein of darkness sprayed with whole swatches of stars strewn like glittering seed broadcast on the sky.

I stood with my legs braced and faced the light, the wind. Years later, I remembered this when I saw Leonard DiCaprio posing on the Titanic’s bow with his arms flung wide to embrace the world ahead. I had mighty theme music soaring in my head. The road went up, down, curved through the hills, glided along the tops of mesas, dipped down to make a creek crossing where our convoy startled antelope that had been drinking. From my loft, I could look back and see our line of loaded trucks descending into the crossing, ahead to see and hear the front few shifting their gears down to climb. I felt like a maharajah overseeing my grand parade of elephants and foot soldiers advancing through an unconquered province of Asia. I was King of the Mountain of Hard Work. My head rang like a bell with the beauty of the moment.

That wasn’t my last job earning my bread by the sweat of my brow – I worked one college summer as a rough-out carpenter building cabins on a lake near Austin – but it was my last in the oil fields. I left before taking the opportunity to test myself on a rig floor, and I regretted it, though, admittedly, not recently and not much. Soon, I moved on to the white-collar work of a journalist, teacher and writer. 

The habit of labor has lived on. As a homeowner, I mow my own grass on a block where everyone else hires it done, do my own landscaping, plumbing, remodeling, painting, and general small repairs. I have tremendous trouble hiring a contractor. Typically, this is the problem I encounter: recently we decided that a bathroom needed new countertops, sinks, faucet sets, tub, lighting, floor tile, paint. I told myself that this was far too big a job for me. I researched some contractors and put in calls. They weren’t returned. Here, now, at this critical juncture, my path swings wide of what normal, sensible people do: rather than call those contractors again or simply wait longer to hear back, and rather than dipping deeper into the list and phoning a couple more, I curse and fret, talk myself into believing that there’s no such thing as a good contractor we can rely on. For one thing, Texas doesn’t seem to require anyone to be licensed to do anything except operate a motor vehicle and practice medicine or law, so that foundation guy you just wrote an upfront $5000 check to might’ve just decided last night that this seems like a good line of work to get into. The two times I hired painters, one for an exterior and one for an interior, were nightmarish experiences for several reasons, and my 0 for 2 score discourages me.

Okay, yes, I know about Angie’s List and talking to my neighbors to get recommendations. Speaking of which, all down the block, my neighbors have contractors crawling over their properties, toiling in their yards, on their roofs, in their rooms. I don’t know how to account for this. What do my neighbors know that I don’t? Is it merely desperation driving them to hire just anybody?

I could drive to certain street corners in my city and yell out the window, “Quieren trabajar?” and my van would be swarmed. My Spanish is functional enough that I could guide a crew through what I want done.

But no – what I do is to ease myself into planning all the work myself, in stages. Wouldn’t it be cool to have countertops of bamboo? I ask, having seen a sample square at a store that specializes in green  materials. Thirty minutes of Googling, and I’ve chosen my wood, noted the cost, started a budget, drawn some sketches. While I sleep my brain works out kinks in the installation.

But, truthfully, I believe at this point in my life that I’d rather not do this myself. My energy’s no longer boundless. I have to get a magnifying glass to read the sixteenth-inch gradations on a tape. So what’s my problem? Is it not wanting to fork over money to have somebody do something I can do myself? Am I afraid to relinquish control? Am I such a protector of my privacy that I shudder to imagine strangers tramping through my house for weeks on end? Am I afraid that these contractors will think I’m too lazy or ignorant to do the work, that I’m a Sherman in his 60s? 

I think there’s something else afoot, but to identify it adequately, I have to back up to a particular Saturday afternoon in the fall during college. I lived in a big two-story house that had been cut onto apartments whose rooms were occupied by undergraduates, all Baez-loving, VW-driving, long-haired flower children. My apartment had been refashioned from the attic, and I had a desk by a dormer window. By stepping into my chair and up onto my desk, you could get out the window onto the roof. Earlier that week I had decided to write my first novel, and that Saturday afternoon I had started it, typing on a metal-cased Hermes portable I’d recently bought. It was about this young college guy, a writer, who hankered after a girl who was also an English major, and in this novel he would read reams of his wonderful prose to her in coffee houses where the tables consisted of upended telephone cable reels with Chianti-bottle candleholders, read it quietly to her just before being asked to recite it to the beatnik hipsters in the audience while a jazz trio riffed a background.

My housemates had received a cardboard box the day before bearing whole peyote cacti with their buds intact. Each cacti was about the size of a tangerine, and the batch might’ve filled the hollow of a campesino’s straw hat. They were grey-green, had a coating of fine dust and sand, and had been merely placed in the box lined with sheaths of a Nuevo Laredo newspaper. Looking at them, you could imagine that they’d been gathered up by the packer in the Chihuahua desert. My housemates had been inspired to send off for these after reading Carlos Casteñeda. They were eager to have visions.

Around noon they’d plucked the buds from the cacti, diced them like garlic, and boiled them. When it cooled, they had added Cherry Kool-Aid and sugar since the bare brewed tea alone was too bitterly astringent, then they’d sat in a circle on the kitchen floor and passed it around.

I’d left my door open as usual because the building had no air conditioning, and if I raised the window over my desk as well, I got a strong breeze coming through the room from below. I was just about to lay a red-checked gingham cloth on the table my young hero and his hoped-to-be lover were seated at when a half dozen whirly-eyed persons appeared in my doorway chanting something indiscernible and stomping their feet in unison. They then sashayed in a kind of weird conga line to my desk, where the lead visionary whispered hoarsely, “Into the sky, into the sky, my friend!” I lifted my typewriter and moved back while they trooped up over my chair and my desk and out the window. I tried to go back to work, but within minutes they tramped back through the window and into the hallway. I had just gotten settled when here they came again, this time bearing glasses of iced tea in those colored aluminum tumblers we all had then, and out the window they went.

Annoyed, I took my typewriter downstairs and tried to work on the table in our common kitchen only to be interrupted there as well and eventually I went to the library.

I have to ask now: why didn’t I just join them in the first place? Why was it so crucial to write that would-be novel instead of having some other, maybe more rewarding, experience? After all, that “novel” was abandoned after 78 pages because the author ran out of life experience to describe and because the sole audience for whom it was intended – the “girl” of the novel – returned to her home state to marry her old boyfriend. 

But I could ask the same question about the time spent over these decades since writing the several books that I did finish and publish, and the ones finished and not published. 

What have I missed in the meantime?

I define myself as someone who writes. I also define myself as someone who Takes Pride in Work, whether the shirt I’m wearing has a blue or white collar. My identity has become like a separate entity with authority over my behavior. It insists that this is who I am. If I’m not someone who works hard, who takes pride in his work, who knows how to use tools and who has acquired many skills, then who am I? (I would be someone I disapprove of, that’s clear.) 

So: I think I’m afraid that if contractors do my work, then I am no longer someone who does it. Now and then when I do manage to break down and call in the air-conditioner repairman, say, then I hover over his shoulder and try, in a pitiful way, to establish my credentials by telling him I took the cover off and looked at those contact points and thought they looked corroded, or I find some excuse to call attention to another piece of work I’ve done nearby and visible. I like to tell myself that if a repairman thinks you know something, then he’s less likely to screw you, but, truth is, I just want him to think of me as a guy who’ll “do a job of work.”

I’ve grown suspicious the last few years about this need to prove I can work. Sometimes it’s as if an aspect of my personality that I once took great pleasure in nurturing, developing and exploiting for practical purposes has become a monster controlling me. I wonder if it hasn’t outlived its usefulness. I’ve begun to wonder if I haven’t just been using the busy-ness of it to avoid living in the moment. Around my house, yogic meditation is being practiced daily; Buddhist mindfulness of the present moment is being hailed (very quietly, of course) as the way to be. I can argue that I can be in the present moment when I’m doing something, but, truthfully, almost always what I’m doing leads to the future, not the present.

I haven’t learned yet how to do nothing. I can approach it gingerly by listening to a Beethoven sonata on my iPod, though part of my pleasure lies in building the skeletal form of it in my mind as it enters my ear note by note.

On the other hand, my father has acquired the knack. He’s 91, which probably helps, but he can sit, silently and still, in a chair on his screened-in porch overlooking the lake that borders his place, sit and do nothing else. Not even talk. On the first day of my visit, I’m too antsy for this, so we often work at projects around his house. Eventually, though, when we’ve checked off the list, about day three, then I have a greater tolerance for giving this thing called doing nothing a serious try, give it a work-out.

Generally, though, being idle makes me anxious, and so I wonder if my work habit has been a means of self-medication all these decades, a kind of crude, homeopathic treatment for anxiety. 

But is the anxiety existential, a natural product of living with consciousness, and is work simply the most socially approved method of seeking oblivion, approved because of its general utility to the social order? It’s cheap medicine, in that case, and pretty effective for alleviating symptoms of angst, ennui, and restlessness when taken in moderate doses.

Or is this anxiety an illness that should be treated by therapy and drugs?

I can’t answer these large questions, at least not for anyone but myself. What I recognize, though, as I grow closer to a retirement that will take me out of the work force  -- but not out of work -- is that the jefe in my head is still barking orders, but I’m getting increasingly less able to carry them out. It’s hard to imagine being without this compulsion to work, hard to imagine sloughing if off, neglecting or abandoning it.

It’s probably a good idea to start retraining, though; I need to learn to be the traveler musing on the fragmentary stones of Ozymandias and not the king himself or the sculptor. Time will eventually make me surrender, so that near the end I’ll most likely be as helpless as I was the day of my birth. By then the question of who I am – worker bee or idler -- will have become altogether irrelevant.