"Time is a matter of fact,
and it is gone and it'll never come back,
and mine
is wasted all the time"
-Daniel Johnston
It's not every day one gets to choose how to pass the time, and let us pray it stays that way, for nothing is worse than the guilt incurred upon us by the wasting of valuable, potentially productive time with idleness. God didn't give us hand so we can stick them in our pockets, and he didn't give us pockets without giving us things to fill them with. Fill them with tools if you're a labourer, money if you're a trader, or even stolen goods should you be a thief; whatever you do, don't be idle, and don't put your hands in your pockets!
Alas! I have been cursed with so much spare time! I've have long ago become an idler. It wasn't my fault, but the conditions into which I was brought, you see. Time is to man what food is to a dog: he needs someone to regulate it for him. If a dog is given infinite amounts of food, what's to stop it from stuffing itself to an unhealthy degree? It doesn't know any better. And time, I fear, may be infinite.
I try to fight it, god knows I do. Why do you think I'm writing this pointless... I don't know if I can even call it a story. Shall we say an idle rant? But it doesn't matter how many things you find to fill your time, there'll always be more time. You do your best to keep up with it, you put up a good fight; let no-one call you an idler. But at some point you have to stop (you're only human, for fuck's sake), and while you stop, time just keeps running and slipping through your fingers.
Time is infinite, as I suggested above, but our time most certainly isn't. Maybe that's why we're so concerned with it. I dare say that if I was immortal I'd never get anything done. "What's the rush? I have all the time in the world", I'd say, and mean it. Maybe then I could actually enjoy life?
When did I become like this? All the signs were pointing the other way. I come from a family of doers. Honest, good, hard-working, dumb doers. My grandfather worked in factories for as long as he could remember. He only retired when they finally shut the factory down. For the remaining few years of his life he rotted in idleness, not knowing what to do with himself. He'd sit around all day watching German tv, probaly thinking about working. His wife, on the other hand, never did a thing in her life. For as long as I can recall she watched American soaps, with the occassional interval for sleep, so she could gather more energy to watch some more soaps. I'd almost respect her if she wasn't such a stuck-up princess. She never quite came to terms with marrying a blue collar worker. She would pretend she could speak French and English, throwing random words about, which she'd probably picked up from the soaps. She had a brain like you're still interested in this story.
Time! Won't someone take away my time?! No, don't! What a funny creature we are: we hate having time on our hands and keep looking for ways to avoid it, yet as soon as we get our wish and find a way to kill 8 hours a day we start complaining and asking for more time. We haven't come a long way from being young children, paying no attention toa boring, dispensible toy, but damned if we let anyone else have it!
