May 15, 2002
In the Words of the Very Dead Michael Hutchence
Not Enough Time, dammit.

JEFF=MUSHROOM. It's dark in here, and I am glowing softly from internal phosphorescence, and this is how I like it, dammit.

Ever notice how often and how strenuously the society we were born into tries to brainwash us? Mind control per se isn't very viable, but when you grab people at a tender age and push a simple, clear message into their brains over and over and over again, reinforced by all the suckers around them who have bought into the same message, well, you can get results. My whole life I've been exposed to the chipper brainwashing of after-school specials, Public Service Announcements, Very Special Episodes and various Charlie Brown or Davy and Goliath cartoons. Their specific purposes have varied, over time. Their meta-purpose of making me conform to society's standards has not. Generally speaking the whole world is terrified that I might someday stop consuming, that I might start growing food in the backyard, sell my car, and disconnect the cable TV. Towards a harmonious universe wherein Jeff consumes his daily share, thus, magically, making the world viable for third-world kids making thirty-cents a day to sew my shoes. The moment I start thinking something akin to jesus h christ in hightops, I am sick and tired of pay-per-view pornography some alarm goes off in the Matrix and instantly a PSA appears on the television screen beseeching me to be a True American and go shopping.

So, I'm inundated by propaganda, much of which tries to impress upon me the value of getting out of the house and experiencing life - not to mention the various Hemingway Cultists amongst my fellow writers who grouse constantly that the road to good fiction is strewn with your own bloody flesh as you embrace life and all its dangers. The whole world has been trying to convince me that I should be spending my time hanglgiding, or climbing mountains, or vacationing in Barbados, or seeing the world, or running with the bulls or some such shit.

I have recently decided that the whole world is full of shit. I don't have time for that crap.

When I complain of being busy, people tend to look at me like I've gone insane. Well, people tend to look at me that way for a variety of reasons throughout the day, most notably the barking jags and the times when I emerge from the restroom without my pants, so that really isn't anything special in and of itself. The reason they look at me like I'm having one of my ‘episodes' when I complain that I'm busy is because they think I'm not. They think I'm not because the sight of me busy looks remarkably like me, well, dozing at my desk. Whether at work or at home, Jeff In Action looks remarkably like Jeff At Rest, and are easily confused.

I'm not busy in the sense that President Bush must be busy. As much as I'm tempted to imagine Bush dozing behind his desk, drool shining on his chin, I have to imagine that being the president is an incredibly time-consuming job. Or else we've all been really screwed these past few hundred years. No, I am busy with my own shit: writin' and publishin' my own stuff and submittin' in an attempt to get someone else to foot the bill. Putting out The Inner Swine, writing this column, writing short stories and working on a novel, keeping up correspondence, promoting my two books and holding down a day job on top of it all. Whatever the quality of my writing might suggest, I don't just pull these things out of my ass. It takes time.

So, recently, it is increasingly difficult to get me out of the house, even to do ostensibly enjoyable things. This is because time is the one resource that is irreplaceably running out on me, disappearing down a dark drain, never to return. I sit at my desk and I feel like someone is going to pop their head in at any moment and say Hurry up now, it's time, and that'll be it. I don't want to look back and be horrified that I wasted so much time at the movies or in bars or in front of the TV.

The really annoying aspect of all this is the simple fact that for a lot of people, it must seem like I do pull all of these things out of my ass, because people think writing stuff is basically making shit up, and hell, if they can make shit up, it can't be all that hard. These people also think that acting is just pretending a bunch a shit, and that painting is just throwing shit onto a canvas and giving it an evil-sounding name.[1] They're unimpressed by any claims that I actually work to produce all this half-assed writing et al. Fuck ‘em. The point is, I have to start cutting some activities out of my life in order to gain some time for writing. You've no doubt heard the theory that all of us have very basic needs - Shelter, Food, etc - that must be satisfied before we can engage in any non-necessary function, like writing, or watching professional wrestling. I have to cut something out, so I made up my own little list of things that I had to have in order to be capable, mentally, of writing. Here they are, most important to least important:

Surprisingly, that's it! As long as I have secured a supply of these items, I'm good to go, writing-wise. So I have begun subtracting activities from my life in order to gain time to write. The first to go was an umbrella category: leaving the house at all. This doesn't make me a bad guy. Does it? On second thought, don't answer that.

Jeff