I've come to see the low feeling, that one I get before going off to work and other times, akin to a kind of loneliness, as a sign of the mind working on something, grappling with an intuition, seeing out an understanding in the landscape of the unconscious. "Obsessed," some girl once said, heaping praise upon me.

So there is downtime, fraught with what seems to be a great confusion with regard to all the practical matters we all like to attend to in order to feel decently about ourselves and satisfied with our position.

Shakespeare had Hamlet seeing ghosts, getting distracted by one. It is distraction. It's not necessarily a mental habit one feels particularly proud of (well, maybe secretly), it just is. Not much you can do about it. Maybe some people will find your dreaminess not so completely unattractive. Or, not knowing you well, they'll write you off as an odd-ball, which is maybe something of what Steven King's Carrie is about. Book of Job, same damn thing.

Perhaps we are vulnerable to falling into the habit in our educations, liberal arts and that sort of dreamy deep stuff. You learn to live with it, an organic part of human nature.

I go about little chores, and the mind ticks away. The process is not one that leaves you feeling very happy as you go about it. In fact, you feel rather bad about such things as' what you've done with your life' and that sort of thing. But it all comes out in the wash, hopefully.

One hopes, or has a sense, that the work he does is somehow a benefit toward humanity.