An Escapologist’s Diary: Part 84. 2025 Review.
The year started badly. I’d intended to take a sabbatical and I got one in the form of a long illness. For five months I was housebound with an unpleasant case of TSW, some weeks of which were bedbound. It was very shit.
I Hear the Door Slam Shut
Then I run: down the stairs, down the street, away.
A literal escape from a locked flat, four floors up. While hungover. Genuinely thrilling.
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Squander
I’m sometimes asked if there’s a contradiction between my “you can escape from work” message and “set up your own small business” as a mode of escape.
To start with, going into small business is only one idea. There are plenty others if going into business is not the escape route for you. But I would say that any small business efforts you make will be for something worthwhile, something you believe in, instead of just more crap for The Man.
Anyway, Reader R sends me an excerpt from an interview with a record store guy called Lincoln Stewart who has the right idea. Lincoln says:
Most people try to make as much money as possible, which leaves them with little time. I work as little as possible and therefore have much free time. One could argue I squander my time the way many people squander their money, but that’s a whole different discussion.
That’s the spirit.
I fall into things. I fell into filmmaking and film distribution. I fell into web design and software development. I fell into records. As I said, I try to pursue a time-rich life. If I could go through life without seeing another record, I’d be a few hours happier each month than I am now. I’ll figure it out some day.
The interview comes from an organ called Running Man Press, by the way. It’s a print shop in my sometimes-home of Montreal, but for a moment I thought New Escapologist had a competitor.
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Insane
This is from Jesus Christ Kinski, a brand-new novel by Ben Myers. I’m not sure if this is the fictionalised Kinski speaking here or a real quote from a real interview, but it’s good either way:
I live freely. And to most people who stuck in unsatisfactory marriages and dismal jobs, that appears insane. To most it is beyond comprehension. If one has to be insane to enjoy freedom, then so be it.
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Get in and Boogie
From Stephen King’s The Stand:
Larry felt a strong and guilty impulse to just turn tail and run. Go back … and get the Z. Fuck the two months’ rent he had just laid down on the space. Just get in and boogie. Boogie where? Anywhere. Bar Harbour, Maine. Tampa, Florida. Salt Lake City, Utah. Any place would be a good place, so long as it was comfortably over the horizon.
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Willenbecher
I’ve been watching these short video profiles of the loft-dwelling generation of New York artists. It’s fun to see how these artists live, work, and how they all remember hanging out with Warhol.
They also all seem so young despite being in their 70s, 80s, and 90s. The reason for their youthiness seems obvious to me: they don’t have day jobs to sap their energy and their time. They do what they like to do and, importantly, they do what they’re supposed to do: they’re not railroaded by some timewasting endeavour necessary to pay rent. They don’t suffer daily separation anxiety about not doing what they ought to be doing.
Today’s artist is John Willenbecher. He puts it plainly:
If there’s one thing I’ve done in my life that I think is really great, it’s that I’ve never had a job [laughs]. I’ve never had to work for somebody. I was never a trust fund baby but I’ve always somehow managed to get along.
Live on your wits, live for your art, live for ages. If you can.
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A Dragon Started Burning My Excel File…
Would I feel the need to scroll if the view from my desk is a giant phosphorescent mushroom?
I fear the Virtual Reality future, probably because I’m an old man. So I’ll leave it to this kid to ask: could a regular 9-5 job be worked from inside Skyrim? (Skyrim being an online role-playing action game). And thanks to Friend J for sending this in.
“There are no office buildings in Skyrim,” he says, “but there are places where everything I want from an office building: camp sites).”
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We Launched!
We launched! Issue 18 is now, as they say, a thing.
The issue marks the beginning of a new cycle of four. Thanks to everyone who ordered a copy or subscribed. Copies are now working their way (slowly) to Escapologists all over the UK, Continental Europe and North America.
The launch took place at Aye-Aye Books (with an after party at Ryan’s Bar) on 20.11.25
Thanks to Martin, Samara, Brian, Neil, Alan, Hilary, Jay, Leo, Callum, Jack, Fergus, Bunker, Laura, Johnston, and all the rest of the gang for making it a superfine night.
The colour shots are by Neil and the black-and-whites are by Alan.
The Burnout Society
The modern man thinks that everything ought to be done for the sake of something else, and never for its own sake.
This is rather good. In the second half of the video, Henderson gets into the topic of idleness — the quote above comes from Bertrand Russell’s In Praise of Idleness — but he relates it all back to the relentlessness of 21st-centurt bullshit jobs and digital screenburn.
Burnout? See also: rustout.
Incidentally, I was hanging out with Bertrand only this week:
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New Escapologist Issue 18 is shipping now. Go get ’em, tiger.
Running Away Works
Check this out, from comedian Marc Maron:
Running away works. Sometimes you have to change it up: new people, new restaurants, new Laundromat, new barista, new life. Yeah, the adage is true — that wherever you go, there you are — but you in an entirely new setting is a new you, or at least the old you in a new context, and that’s not nothing.
From his 2013 memoir, Attempting Normal.
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