Killer rats and the pleasure of leisure

Today's billboard for the local newspaper contained a headline that conjured some horrific mental images and almost got me worrying about giant, slavvering mutoid rodents with fangs and a taste for human flesh... maybe like these ones:

Apart from fretting about killer beasts, I've been looking for work now that I've found myself 'inbetween jobs'. Its a full time occupation, and one that I get bored with very quickly...all that form-filling, trying to make yourself sound employable, what an impossible task. Despair at my predicament led me to reread Bob Black's great piece of ludic utopianism, The Abolition of Work:

"No one should ever work.

Work is the source of nearly all the misery in the world. Almost any evil you'd care to name comes from working or from living in a world designed for work. In order to stop suffering, we have to stop working.

That doesn't mean we have to stop doing things. It does mean creating a new way of life based on play; in other words, a ludic revolution. By "play" I mean also festivity, creativity, conviviality, commensality, and maybe even art. There is more to play than child's play, as worthy as that is. I call for a collective adventure in generalized joy and freely interdependent exuberance. Play isn't passive. Doubtless we all need a lot more time for sheer sloth and slack than we ever enjoy now, regardless of income or occupation, but once recovered from employment-induced exhaustion nearly all of us want to act."

It's a very entertaining piece from the self proclaimed 'Groucho Marxist', and if you've ever dreamed of escape from the pressures of the grind, then you should check it out.