This is a short essay I wrote for last week’s Seven Days on the fine art of being lazy.
A great man (Les Claypool) once said, “Funny thing about weekends: When you’re unemployed, they don’t mean quite so much. Except you get to hang out with all your working friends.” Lord knows, I can relate. Besides being unemployed right now, I haven’t had a 9-to-5 job in quite some time, either. Employed or no, I have had more than ample time to ponder the “little things” in life — the little nothings that make life so tasty.
One day Jay Leno is standing in front of you talking about why he loves Vermont, and all you can think about is how you never would have pegged him as one to don the “Canadian tuxedo” as his casual wear. Next thing you know, you’re in your backyard teaching your hound dog about earthworms and why they’re important for the garden. I suppose life is funny that way.
I consider myself a driven and passionate person, but also kinda lazy. I’m not lazy in the sense of laying around in my underwear all day playing Wii ping-pong between bong hits; more in a “why the hell should I mow the lawn today because it’s friggin’ 90 degrees outside and Messner said it’s gonna be 70 tomorrow” kind of way. I like to think of it as being Taoist.
It’s not that I don’t challenge myself during my free time, because I do. My latest challenge is to overcome my fear of spiders. I’ve actually been doing pretty good. Yesterday I held a wolf spider in my palm for at least three seconds before freaking out. Baby steps … I suppose this world is full of little nothings tucked away in dusty corners, staring at us with eight beady little eyes, ready to test us.
First, waiting for a cooler day to mow isn’t lazy, it’s heat stroke prevention.
Second, 3 seconds is a life time, any where near a spider. I’m twitching just thinking about it. Bah!
Speaking of wolf spiders . . . they inhabit my basement, where the washer is. Once I caught one on the wall so big that it was a challenge to fit a canning jar over it. A sad experience was when two of them started hanging out way close to the switch I had to use for the tubs. I resorted to poison (usually catch things and put them outside, but position of these things prevented that). They made two fairly loud “thuds” when they fell to the floor, and that was bad enough; but when I went down to do the next load, they had tried to go back to their lair and were both dead side-by-side right in my path to the washer. Still makes me sad.