King Calm once asked me how exactly an unattached guy spends his free time and now, months later, I’ve finally located a satisfactory reply. When he first raised the question, it occurred to me I’ve never really codified the minutes I churn through daily. I’ve simply never needed to do so, you know? But when you’ve been happily married for 16-odd years, with five children in tow, such knowledge has likely been relegated to the province of lore, and it falls onto people like me to recount the highlights, much as a bard would.
At the time I offered a truthful, albeit boilerplate answer, something to the effect of television and napping, which nevertheless felt disingenuous when I bumped into the entire clan in front of a Linens ‘n Things a few Saturdays later. I was knee-deep in the “n’ Things” aspect of the chain, furtively heading to my trunk with four high-end humidifiers stacked in a shopping cart, each one destined for a decidedly non-humidifying end, and the meeting was awkward. That’s neither here nor there, though, and it’s a story for another time, or perhaps never at all.
The important point is there were echoes of this last evening. Now, I didn’t run into anybody I knew, nor was I flush with Venta-branded air cleaners, but there were great strides made in answering the question. Here it is: most of my time is spent in a celebration of selfishness. Forget, if you can, the negative connotations of the word. I’m merely stating a fact here. My minutes are invested in how best to optimize my life, and in the case of yesterday night it was an issue of breakfast. Oatmeal, specifically, and whether I could purchase enough to last me a year in one fell swoop.
Short answer? I could. And I did. To any outside observer, the ceremony of purchasing boxes and boxes of Quaker Instant Maple & Brown Sugar would appear strange, but it made perfect sense to me. I hate shopping for food. I hate it doubly when staples randomly disappear in a given week, courtesy of the goddamn Coupon Game. You know what I’m talking about: you’re shopping for milk, eggs, or Cheerios, only to find gaps strategically situated throughout the shelves. It’s, like, where did all the fuckin’ cheddar cheese go?
So when the prospect of crossing “buy breakfast” off the list for more than a year presented itself, I seized it. A preemptive strike, as it were, and it took about 90 minutes to move the payload from store to pantry. There were logistical concerns, to be sure, including pricing and amount consumed per day and expiration dates. But I was pleased with the time spent, and after three trips in and out of the store, my Swedish chariot was loaded with 960 packets of the stuff, its haunches straining under the weight of milled oats. As far as how all of this relates to my renewed search for a dog, well, I’ll explain more next week.
Every once in a while, when the numbers align and circumstances lock into place, I find myself reaching for a book, then going one step further and actually opening it. But it doesn’t stop there, oh no! In rare instances I proceed to look at the printed word and, yes, read. The last time this happened was in 2008 and now, two years later, another reading kick is close at hand. It may have already begun, in fact.
Now, I scan the news daily, and sites like Consumerist and Urban Dictionary are mainstays. I’m lettered, you might say. Books, however, are a different matter. Perhaps it’s the ceremony of acquiring them–the wait from Amazon, the drive to the library–that transforms them into veritable events. They ask of you a level of effort that far outpaces what you commit to Hulu or a video game and, let’s be honest, after 50 pages of anything those tiny letters start to get boring. Certainly I’ve heard of people tearing through Harry Potter novels or downing the latest tome of business knowledge in a single sitting. When I think back to A Confederacy of Dunces, though, a book I very much enjoyed, I remember trudging through it in 30-page increments.
Fiction is one thing, but non-fiction? I’d much rather have that knowledge beamed directly into my skull, but more on this later. Since we’re on the topic of beaming information, let me be clear: I’m avoiding e-readers for now. They’re slick and convenient, sure, but if I must consume a book, I’d much rather hold the real thing. The heft, the paper stock, the progression of pages–there’s a tactile appeal to it all. And the title sitting on my desk right now, oddly enough, is the AP Stylebook and Libel Manual, a relic from a journalism class I had the pleasure of dropping in college.
It’s kind of like reading the dictionary, obviously, and I’m not tackling it cover to cover. That would be crazy. I’m randomly flipping through it instead, learning about everything from agricultural parity to fair use to libel of the dead. Fascinating as all this stuff may be, the manual really became valuable when it drove me to a copy of The Atlantic Monthly, which led to a mess of multi-page articles. I’m on my way to finishing the whole issue, so I can only imagine what’s next. Perhaps a written work that contains one-, two-, three-, maybe even four-hundred pages? The problem with zapping too many ideas into your brain is you become, at best, a repository of half-baked thoughts. That’s what I’ve been doing the past two years, with all my favorite news sites, and this may partly explain how I got into this mess. I forgot how to savor something.
The only thing keeping me awake at this moment, besides an abiding passion for typing adjectives into a digital publishing platform, is a handful of Sour Patch Kids. They’re delicious, a scientific fact I don’t intend to contest tonight, and the real issue at hand is how aging has exerted its grim, inevitable grip on me. It’s shortly after midnight now. If I were to travel back ten, even five years, I’d be getting my second wind at this hour. But since I don’t have a time machine, I’m stuck in the here and now, firmly at the till of a wholly different time machine that only moves forward, ever forward.
It’s not like I had a particularly tiring evening. Mainly I ate at a business dinner, worked in a few sips of wine, and now, four hours later, it feels as if I’ve finished a half-marathon, or how I imagine a healthy run would feel. I suppose if I did exercise regularly, energy levels would be elevated, but the marked difference would still be there. I’m getting older, and there will be consequences.
There just isn’t any way around it. I’ve been noticing white hair on the rise, which is a trend that speaks ably to the larger narrative, I believe. Reversal isn’t an option here. The slow march is going to happen, whether I like it or not. Certainly I can get by with plucking now, but there will soon come a point when the ratio shifts and removing all the whites may, in fact, result in baldness, if it hasn’t already happened on its own accord. I could attempt to mask the white, defy it, with hair dye, though I’d risk looking like Coach K or Astro Boy. I wonder if the answer is to simply let it be, gracefully. It may be time to sleep on this.