I fall, all too easily, into the cycle. After work, getting home past midnight, all alone, you feel like you need a reward of some sort. A creature comfort that engages a tired body. Too hard to read, after all that, a typical shift. Before, earlier in my career as a barman, I fell into the cycle of unwinding with my work buddies. The drinking part of the social drinking grew into a habit. But these days, there aren't any coworkers left standing when I'm done, so I get home and drink some wine, and sometimes too much wine. The wine keeps me up as it relaxes me, I suppose. I watch late night television. I look at YouTube for musical ideas. And alone, late at night, there is the creature comfort of the internet by which to pleasure one's tired body to as a way of relaxing.

Some life. A perpetuation of a false reward system. Days of wine and roses that draw one further and further into being lost. It's nothing to glorify, beyond acknowledging as another form of human suffering, of which there are, obviously, many, and maybe life itself being, when you look at it, something touched by sadness.

So you stay up too late, 'til it's light out by the end of the work week. Finally, you drag yourself off to bed in a darkened room, shutters shut, curtains drawn. In wintertime a whole week can go by in darkness. Artificial light, an artificial life. Perfect situation of having nothing to look forward to, along with a sense of shame over what one has done with his life, 'being a writer,' the perfect system of offering no reward.

Shane MacGowan, on the song that gets him out of bed in the morning, found on YouTube, a song by The Sex Pistols, "No Feelings." He tells of just getting out of a mental hospital, and here's this song, about a kid who hates his job, 'just wants a blow job, and fuck off,' as far as his relationships. He'd had a dream about playing really loud music in a band, and here's this song. "I got no feelings," Johnny Rotten sings. "It makes me feel great," MacGowan says, his voice clearing out of his inward mumbles. And that's a pretty good description of a particular kind of reward system to be had at night when you don't fit in. Maybe that's not an unhealthy place to start from: I hate my job.

So what can you do when things get like that? What you do reach out for as something to trust? I guess you can only start by leaving the blinds open a crack, so that a little daylight can get in to your life even as you rest. A little yoga, sure, that's going to help, help you stand up a bit straighter. And getting out of the house into the light for a walk, some form of modest exercise just to get you going. That's hard enough, and maybe sometimes it is enough, just to get you out of one cycle and more in tune with a more natural circadian rhythm. And maybe it will get you out into the woods, into the fresh quiet air, into nature again. Maybe that's enough to get you moving and not too despondent, too much in a lack of direction and wholesome reward.