The kid next door is screaming again. It’s a scream that could melt the shell off a snail in the garden where he’s playing. Every day this kid drops a tantrum bomb on the neighbours. Or more specifically, on me. Because every day, I’m at home to hear his breakfast tantrum, his playing-outside tantrum, his dropping-food-on-the-floor tantrum, his one-in-the-morning tantrum. It must be the hardest life any two-year-old has been forced to endure. But I get it. When you’re choking on the mucus of the things you don’t understand, sometimes screaming seems like the only way to cope.

I used to have a job. Until I gave all that up ‘a few months ago’ to write a collection of poetry. Depending on your attitude toward jobs, you’ll think that quitting a paid writing gig at a modest lifestyle website is either a bold move or (in this climate) a bit stupid. It must’ve taken six weeks for me to break the news to my dad. My baby boomer dad has owned his business, working with his hands, running wires through roofs, for forty years. The words ‘content writing’ and ‘website management’ don’t mean much to him. But jobs do. Jobs make you money and money keeps you in Maslow’s good books when depressions hit.