Cone Man falls in with a company of wizards ...

Cone Man began his adventure to the terrible wilderness of the far north of the Land of the Huttites by rising early with the intention of his house at 6.50am. He intended to test the logistics of getting there by 8am each morning by land canoe and rail canoe.

Cone Man's plan was derailed when at 6.50am he discovered that the terrible Middle Aged Midlife Midriff Monster had savagely rent his pants asunder! Keeping his manly calm Cone Man changed into another pair of pants, but nevertheless found that he was too late for the 7.07am land canoe, which meant that he was too late for the 7.28am rail canoe and was thus reduced to waiting for the 7.48 am rail canoe.

Cone Man's interview was at 10am, so it was not the end of the world, but that was not the end of the saga. "Blazing cones!" blazed Cone Man. "I REALLY MUST STOP FEEDING THIS BEAST!"

Arriving at his destination, Cone Man found that the local Hall of Wisdom was closed until 9.30am. Few businesses on the main street were open at 8.30am when he wandered around. Cone Man had spent the last 25 years getting to work at 8am each morning, and was bemused by this local peculiarity, but it left him with time to while away and he bought a flat white at a gothic café, redolent heavy metal motifs, right down to the counter server wearing a shirt saying "See you in Hell".

Cone Man quaffed his flat white, marvelling at the strange conundrum whereby the government was so secular that it was proudly contemptuous of religion, conservatives were ashamed to admit to being religious, and only twenty year old Satanists were prepared to calmly look the Devil in the eye and affirm the God given right of the average citizen to openly profess their religious beliefs while telling those did not like it to go to Hell. The attendant, furthermore, was polite, charming and courteous, and Cone Man wished her well when he had finished his coffee, which admittedly tasted rather good.

Cone Man's interview was successful and he had got himself a two week internship with a company of wizards located in a tower in the marketplace of the far north of the Land of the Huttites. "We'll see where this epic quest leads" Cone Man smiled as he rode the rail canoe south …

The new quest begins ...

Cone Man was living in a new world. Actually, he was still living at the same house, street and town in the Land of the All Black Tribe, on the same planet, but let that go. Cone Man had succeeded in paying off the mortgage on his man cave, and while he had no job, he had no mortgage either. He was free of debt and income. He hoped to live long in a world free of debt. He hoped not to live to long in a world free of income.

The sense of relief was both surreal and superficial. After years of craven servitude to the Mortgage Monster, Cone Man was a free of its dour dominion, and from time to time he let out an audible sigh of relief at the surreal sense of liberation. On the other hand, the reality of this new freedom had only superficially impacted on his mind - the impact of reality would occur on the 24th of the month when money mysteriously remained in his bank account, no longer disappearing into the monstrous maw of the remorseless monster.

"What should I do with this freedom?" Cone Man cone-templated. Cone Man could live more easily, but could he live more effectively? He was already writing each day - could he not write more. Writers, pretentiously, liked to talk of "writer's retreats", or aspired to be "writer's in residence" or "being in exile" if living outside the country of their birth, even if no murderous regime had driven them over the border.

Cone Man could not see the point of such phrases. As the resident writer, living alone in a three bedroom man cave, in a quiet suburban valley, in the hills to the east of the Land of the Huttites, from which he had been driven by murderous real estate prices in 2004, he was already living in a "writer's retreat".

Cone Man could not help wondering at the wondrous practice of paying for writers to go to live in France for a year. "Why does the government go to all that trouble when they could simply send the same writer to live in Wainuiomartia for a year?" Cone Man wondered. "I am sure that they would feel just as retreated and exiled if forced to write while resident Outer Wainuiomartia" Cone Man shrugged. Alexander Solzhenitsyn had to endure eight years in the Siberian gulags before he was able to write the Gulag Archipelago, so a year in Wainuiomartia would hardly be the end of a promising literary career.

Contemplating the peculiarities of the literary world was not the same thing as contributing to the literary world, so Cone Man ceased from his peculiar contemplation and returned to his keyboard ...

Things seldom go according to plan ...

The Israeli Army apparently had a proverb: "Things do not always go according to plan, but without a plan, nothing happens". Things had not gone according to Cone Man's plan to do eight hours work a day on job hunting, writing, house maintenance, gardening, cycling and cone-gathering. Nevertheless his plan had lead to some progress rather than complete paralysis. He had finished putting the under coat of sealant in the spare room, mowed the lawns, weeded half the vegetable patch, and filed another two job applications.

Today had been reasonably productive, he reflected. He had cleaned the toilet, bath room wash basin and bath, and then spent three hours assembling a double-bed that his neighbour had given him.

Cone Man did not have a cone maiden to service, but he was hoping to gain revenue through applying the magic of Airbnb, and realised that he would have to cater to the flaming passions of lusty young newlyweds. He was not ready to use Airbnb yet, but the idea had been suggested to him during the day and he did not have the luxury of ignoring good advice.

Cone Man had also re-arranged the psychological furniture in his mind. Reflecting of the ancient proverb that "as a man thinks, so is he" he had changed his status on his webpage from Librarian at the Great Hall of Wisdom to Self-Employed, styling himself as "Managing Director of The Between a Rock and a Hard Place Hotel". He was taking in paying lodgers, in other words, but it sounded better than saying he was "unemployed".

Cone Man was not the only actor that day. An old friend contacted him with the suggestion that he could try his hand at working for a technical support company in the far north of the Land of the Huttites, and Cone Man gladly accepted his offer to set up a meeting with the partners of the company.

Cone Man knew that this was a risky course of action. If he served as an intern for two weeks and then was not taken on, he would have sacrificed two weeks for nothing but some job experience. A "course of action" was however, better than no course of action, and if he did not find another job in the said two weeks then there would be no opportunity cost anyway.

The truth, of course, was that Cone Man could easily be taking a much bigger risk by staying with his old profession. Being a "librarian" was all very well and good if someone was prepared to pay you to function in this role, but meant little if no one was prepared to pay you to do this. You might as well call yourself a Samurai - who found themselves either having to work as teachers or muggers or starve - after the Satsuma Rebellion in Japan in 1877. Twenty-six years earlier he had planned to be a qualified librarian on the permanent staff of an institution, and this had happened. But things had not gone according to plan, he had had enough of the tertiary sector, and was not interested in a career in  crime. The bridge to his old life was burning, and he must press on to see what new life awaited him in the distant far north of the Land of the Huttites ...

Real time, wasted time and old times ...

Nineteen days had passed since Cone Man had worked his last day at the Great Hall of Wisdom. Five days had passed since the expiry of his Long Service Leave, which meant that he had ceased being paid for his time at 5pm the previous Friday. Admittedly, he was receiving final payment next week including unused Annual Leave plus his Redundancy, so Cone Man had reason to view this state of affairs with equanimity, but his mind turned again to the question of time. "Fugit inreparabile tempus" (it escapes, irretrievable time) growled the sage Virgil, and sadly, that harsh fact of time had not be changed by the mere passage of two thousand years.

How does a warrior extract financial value from hours for which no employer or customer will pay him money for? Reflecting on this mundane question (most of the questions in Cone Man's life were rather mundane) he remembered that cash payment for hours worked was an invention of the Industrial Revolution. Prior to that time, the concept was ridiculous.

Virgil undoubtedly understood the value of money, but he lived in a world where 90 percent of the population lived in villages, grew their own food, and often bartered for other things. The word "salary" derived from the practice of the Roman paying soldiers with a ration of salt. Slavery and serfdom saw many work as long as was necessary without consideration of paying them anything. War, famine and the Black Death often rendered the value of money completely worthless, and your time on earth tended to be nasty, brutish and short anyway.

Value, nevertheless, could be extracted from unpaid time. Many a warrior survived a battle because of the time he spent in sword practice, and it was not for nothing that the French had a proverb: "The graveyards are full of middling swordsmen".

Less dramatically, Cone Man could clear, dig over and prepare his vegetable patch for the August planting. He could for that matter, finish painting another room in his house. Or take in a lodger (if the lodger could tolerate an old codger). Writing one page a day could conceivably produce a return one day (or so Cone Man fantasised). With this happy thought, he headed down to the local library to file another job application ...

Reality impact

Cone Man had often noticed that he did not really notice things until the reality of the situation impacted. Was he employed at the Great Hall of Wisdom on the 17th of June? Well, he would be there on the 18th of June and thus it was merely another day at work. Was his last day of work there on the 21st of June? Well, he would not really notice unemployment until he woke up at 5am on Monday morning and found that he had no reason to get out of bed, because he had no reason to catch the bus to Queensgate, so that he could catch the bus to Petone, so that he could catch the bus to the Great Hall of Wisdom. Even then, the reality of unemployment did not impact. After all, he had back pay owing and he was taking two weeks of unused Long Service Leave.

Cone Man was not complacently idle in this period, however. If nothing else, he received rejection emails for jobs that he had applied for, and the mounting number of these gradually began to impact on his thoughts. "What if I am not as employable as I thought I was?" he grimly pondered.

Cone Man's trust in the god of Cone Man was implicit, but it almost bordered on Eastern fatalism. If the god of Cone Man had decided that Cone Man could do with a spell of unemployment to re-orient his life, who was Cone Man to argue? And were there not other ways to pay the bills? He would soon find out.

Cone Man's days were unremunerative, but his time had been freed up. The question was how to transform his newfound freedom into an investment, rather than a waste, of his time. Cone Man new that part of the answer lay in willing himself to write. Writing one page a day, particularly if you had a lot of days, could add up to a book in the course of time.

Writing a page a day, however, was not "writing" if he did not have an over-arching theme to tie the pages together to produce a towering narrative. On the other hand, would his readers not enjoy the experience of reading a "book" while it was being written, knowing that the author knew no better than they did where the story would lead or what manner of climax lay in store. Cone Man decided to put the theory to the test and see where it would lead. An so the great journey into the unknown began ...

Cone Man's Transition

Cone Man had been put against a wall and reviewed. Consequently, he had ceased travelling to and from the Great Hall of Wisdom. In a way, this was not an untimely development, because his chariot had died, and refused resurrection without unreasonable recompense, and Cone Man was in the happy position of being able to answer this epic sulk with one of his own: "Sit there and rot in the driveway you ungrateful pile of steel and rubber" Cone Man shrugged as he quaffed a beer on the sofa in his man cave.

Savouring his beer, he also savoured the strange sensation of his newfound freedom. The prophetess Joplin had opined that "Freedom is just another word for nothing left to lose" but Cone Man cone-sidered that view futile and nihilistic. A fugitive from the law was free of the normal constraints and frustrations of the moral and law abiding, yet enslaved to the constant tyranny of having to choose between concealment of their true identity or having to flee from whatever locality they lived in. Freedom, then, was far more than "nothing left to lose".

Others viewed freedom as freedom from degrading work. But if the work had to be done, the worker had to be remunerated to the extent that they could live to work another day. And if they lived enough days they could train at night school and find a better job. So, even if you accepted the bleak view propounded by the prophet Say, that the workforce only received the bare minimum necessary for them to survive, they were still free, arguably, in that they could improve their lot in the course of time.

Others viewed freedom as exercising the choice to train for and pursue a "professional qualification", leading in due course to a "salaried position". For many this was the path to slavery in the form of a "student loan", followed in due course by slavery to a "mortgage". After that, you lived your man cave to be near your work and you worked to pay for your man cave. This was often referred to as a "career".

Writers were often envied by others who believed they spent their days quaffing flat whites in cafes in between travelling the world and being interviewed on National Radio. In Cone Man's experience so far, writers wrote much, were paid little, and lived unremarkable lives. "The other warrior's grass always seems greener" Cone Man cone-sidered. "Freedom" in this life then, could not be divorced from work, responsibility and suffering.

"Life" was widely known pack up and leave after three score years and ten, or by reason of strength four-score - and many found that "life" had a bad habit of leaving far sooner, suddenly and unexpectedly than that. Four of the boys that attended school with Cone Man had died in various accidents before any of them could turn 21. Seven or eight others had not lived long after turning 50. "Perhaps the question of life is not how to seek freedom from work tomorrow, but how to best use the freedom you have to work today" Cone Man mused.

The Twilight of the Gods

Cone Man had heard dark legends that Chrestos the Young and Hip, Mighty Overlord of the Great Halls of Wisdom in the Land of Panpolya, had pondered the parlous state of their frail finances and had duly resolved upon a savage and terrible course of action to remedy matters. The legends, as it happened, were both true and false.

The legend bearers said Chrestos would subordinate the 16 Great Halls of Wisdom to 4 regional Chieftains who would co-ordinate their efforts while perpetrating a few minor atrocities - such as putting a thousand Panpolyans against a wall and reviewing them. The legend bearers, however, had underestimated the epic scale of the catastrophe about to fall upon the Land of Panpolya.

Chrestos, it transpired, had far more exciting ideas for the Land of Panpolya. All 16 of the Great Halls of Wisdom were to be subordinated to a single chieftain, and their existing customs and culture subsumed into one Super Hall of Wisdom, stretching the length and breadth of the Land of the All Blacks. Cone Man knew not who this chieftain or chieftainess would be, but as a hardened veteran of many restructurings he knew that the new chieftain would rule them all, ring-fence them with memorandums and mission statements, and keep them bound in the dark.

Like fortress garrisons facing besieging armies without the prospect of relieving armies, the Panpolyans knew they were masters of their own houses until the passage of time dictated that they would be servants in someone else's house. They were simultaneously free and facing slavery. The period of remaining freedom was about one year - in effect the Twilight of the "gods" who had ruled Panpolya from their desks.

The Germans had a word for this phrase "twilight of the gods", Cone Man mused - gotterdammerung. "Blazing cones!" groaned Cone Man, "This is not the quiet life I expected when I set out to become a librarian 25 years ago!"