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You know, half of The Inner Swine cache is bitching. Bitching is a safe, entertaining way to communicate, of course, because you're very rarely going to lose by betting on the worst possible outcome of things. Bitching is usually an easy way to appear smart and world-weary, since optimists always come off as starry-eyed idiots. The more I bitch and complain about meaningless stuff, the more I appear to have wisdom that the rest of the world lacks--even though this appearance is directly contradicted by most of my actual behavior, most of which would get me committed to a local hospital for observation if anyone were to document me for a few weeks. But I digress. In thinking about the amount of time I spend complaining, I started thinking about what, exactly, I mostly complain about. If you've read any of the ridiculous writing I publish in my zine or on this web site over the past few years, you can probably guess at the top two or three complaints Your Humble Editor has: One, lack of beer, two, the necessity of having to put on pants and leave the house in order to acquire more beer (what is this, communist Russia? Where the hell are the beer taps next to the water taps we've been waiting for since the 1950s for chrissake? Makes me want to vote Republican. Or vote, period) and three, the fact that I have to work for a living. All of these, of course, are merely subsets of the single meta-complaint I have: There simply isn't enough time. You've all, no doubt, heard me complain incessantly about not having enough time. Between working for a living and keeping a wife and a dominant kitten entertained on a constant basis, I average about six minutes every day to sit quietly with a soothing beverage and write a little. If only I had more time, the old saw goes, I might actually accomplish something. While it's true that I could certainly use more time--which of us couldn't, aside from wastes of resources like Paris Hilton--the fact is, this complaint is utter horseshit, and I've just realized it. I'm not overly bright. It takes me a while to figure things out. The fact is, I have plenty of time. Tons. When you consider that a man of my economic means would probably be worked to death by the age of 25 just a century or two ago, the fact that I average about six conscious hours of free time each weekday and a whopping 18 a day on the weekends is not too shabby. Granted, 66 hours a week in which to write genius novels, snarky essays, and subtle short stories isn't too bad, but of course it only sounds good until you realize there are 168 hours in a week, meaning 60% of my life is currently wasted at my job and sleep. That's horrifying, and certainly as good a reason as any for taking up arms and marching on the White House, but let's let that drift for now. My point is, all questions of social struggle, personal liberty, and fairness aside, 66 hours a week should be enough time to accomplish something of value. My complaints about my job or other aspects of my life might be legitimate, but the fact is, I have plenty of time to accomplish anything I want. What I lack is discipline. Ah, how fondly I now recall the days before 1998, when I didn't have the lure of computers to contend with. Well, I did have an old 386 model starting in 1996, but the damn thing barely worked, was loaded with viruses, and crashed more often than my car. Which is often. In 1998 I bought a pretty decent machine and that was when I encountered what is now known as the Internet, and my attention span has been fractured ever since. And, lord help me, in 2001 I got a broadband Internet connection, and productivity dropped to an all time low. Lord help me when they finally make the Internet2 backbone available to us scrubs. I'll never be heard from again, lost in a tsunami of webcast baseball games, pornography, and movie trailers. The problem is that I can't resist the cocaine-button thrill of slapping my various Internet applications--web, email, news--to see if I have somehow become incredibly famous without my knowledge. I'll sit down at my desk with every pious intention of writing the Next Great American Novel--or, at the very least, a sequel to my only published book--and within moments I am scanning defamer.com or slashdot.org, blinking like a mental patient, and making a strange clucking noise in my throat. And moments after that I'm firing up Doom3 and blowing the heads off zombies for a few minutes, until I suddenly stop and stare at my computer screen, trying to remember what I was intending to do with my time. Chagrined, I return my attention to my writing, where it remains for about two minutes before the whole sordid cycle begins again. The remarkable thing about this is that I get any writing done at all. Prior to the Somers Computer Age, I'm pretty sure I had a decent attention-span, but that was likely because my entertainment options were singular, as in, reading. I had no video games, seven channels on my busted old TV, and no instantly-gratifying pornography-slash-media on the Internet. All I had were books, and my sad, tired imagination. And, of course, Mexican Wrestling, but that's neither here nor there. I still read quite a bit, and I still manage to write quite a bit, but I have no idea how I manage it, since I spend most of my time hitting the aforementioned cocaine-button. So, I really have nothing to complain about. Out of my 66 hours of conscious free time a week, I must spend about 45 of them wasting it. Until I reduce that number significantly, I can only assume this is a steady ratio, which means if I became rich and suddenly had two or three times as much free time, I'd merely waste two or three times as much time as I do now. Although that might actually warp the laws of physics and destroy the known universe. Well, I've managed to hold off slapping that button long enough to spit out this column, so I'm getting a little shaky. Nothing a bottle of booze and an hour at stileproject.com won't cure! E-mail me your outrage here. Jeff |
September 15, 2004