Two Days Off

For the better part of the last three weeks, I was in routine. Get up at four, watch soccer, go to work, come home, watch recorded soccer, go to bed. There was a slight change when getting up at four was pushed back to getting up at six but the schedule remained, for the most part, intact. On the weekends the schedule would be varied to accommodate hanging out and doing laundry and shit like that, but the overriding theme was an obsession and dedication to hour after hour of grown men running around and hoofing a soccer ball to and fro.

And then, this week, for two whole days, this stopped. For the first time in three weeks there was a break in the World Cup schedule. The U.S.A. and England and South Korea packed their bags and went home. The French weren't there to kick around anymore. I woke up at a normal time, went to work, came home, and...then what? I was at a loss. Everything seemed to have lost its luster. Even Nate's smiling cock-and-balls couldn't cheer me up. I don't mean that as a personal affront to Mister Murphy, but it has to be said; your package has lost its magic. I. Was. Bored.

I've come to the realization over the years--and it has been enhanced by the last two days' worth of thumb-twiddling and irrational anxiety--that this world, and by extension our lives within it, are about nothing. Not necessarily meaningless, mind you, but driven by the perpetual struggle between doing what must be done and yearning to do nothing at all. More than language, the capacity to reason, or even senseless murder, the one thing that truly separates human beings from animals is the former's immersion and dedication to the thousands of different way we can waste our time. Diversions and entertainment don't hold much sway in the harsh hard wilds. They are the exclusive domain of us stinky, hairless bipeds.

Take your common squirrel, for example. Its entire life--every waking moment--is devoted to eating, storing enough food for future eating, and not getting killed. Every so often--once or twice a year, maybe, I'm no expert on squirrels--it feels the urge to, and thus does, fuck. And then its back to eating and foraging and not getting killed and, when it can, sleeping. It has no time for television. It can't set its alarm to wake up earlier than it should to watch Brazil and Portugal dink a ball around for 90 minutes and draw 0-0 what the fuck that was a fucking waste. The squirrel's life is short and to the point--it can't afford any dithering around, knows not the meaning of the word "dither" and, on a somewhat unrelated note, would tear your face off if it meant survival, as adorable as the little bastard might be.

I, on the other hand, would not. But I would spend countless hours in front of a television watching soccer. Not even soccer I particularly care for (Slovakia vs. Paraguay, anyone?), but just because it's there and because I can I watch. It is a diversion from the life I should be living but really would rather not. The squirrel does not have this luxury. I do. I, too, have to eat and save for the future and fuck, and although I do anywhere from 1-3 of these things at a given time though certainly never all three and in all honestly only really one, unlike the squirrel I can stop, say "Fuck it all," and spend a good amount of time, when all is said and done, not doing anything at all if I damn well don't feel like it.

What that nothing entails is different depending on the person. Some people might watch soccer. Others might play video games. Some will read books or watch films, while other more socially capable people will go out to a bar or a club and drink and flirt and dance and drive home drunk and hit a homeless man and leave him to die in her windshield. Or, as that link shows, some of us less socially capable sit at home and watch a film about it. But whatever it is we do, we do it for one over-riding reason, beyond enjoyment or betterment or satisfaction or any other buzzword our brain fools us into believing means anything; we do it to do nothing else. There is no real need to waste our time. It doesn't, in the end, help us eat, secure our future, or fuck (however much time one may spend pretending to do the latter, it doesn't really count). But it certainly doesn't kill us, anymore than doing anything else will, and as long as that remains the case, who's to say it's not as essential as doing something "productive?"

Entertainment is the key. Whatever form it takes, it is crucial. It is life-giving, insomuch as anything can be. Without it--without the wasted time, without the idle moments of fleeting fancy--we would, like the squirrel, merely toil endlessly along, working harder and harder to trudge toward our eventual and utterly unstoppable demise. It would a life of a sort, to be sure, but not one I would envy. I fully realize that all this soccer-watching--which has started up again this morning--is, frankly, a waste of my time. As are, once the World Cup is over, the million other ways I fruitlessly spend my spare time. But I think I can pretty reasonably argue that my time, to begin with, is a waste. And thus the natural state of things--my squirrel life, if you will--is not one of work and diligence and the things I should be doing, but one of nothing and nothing more, which is really what I should be doing in the first place, and would be doing more of if it weren't for all that crap that I'm supposed to be doing that keeps getting in the way.

In other words, I'm with Diego and the Argentines on this one. At least until they go home. Because what the hell else better is there to do?