Phantom Timezones

“It’s like a sickness where I just want to prove to everyone I can do it,” he said. “I’m going to show you I can be number one at both. Watch me.”

That’s the Wall Street Journal on day-jobbers moonlighting as aspiring performers, so it’s probably become a thing. These corporate office workers are making time for gigs and auditions, Chinese-walling off their creative life from the one that pays the bills.

Makes you wonder how many creatives are out there whose main workspace is a public toilet and their phone.

Though the article focuses on those who are, well, coming out to their bosses, all those people are effectively living double lives. And they’re doing so because, as the quote shows, they’re paying off debts. Not financial; though that could also be the case. They’re paying off a debt of life, to the choices that got them here and to their lurking shadow, the parts that never went away.

Debt goes on. It gets financed with racked up guilt and frustration, with horizontal time down the tread. What remains, the furtive glances and stray thoughts, is you living on time that’s not lost and not quite borrowed, it’s as if it never existed.

(Also see the mission statement.)