My time is slippery and quick – not fast (it’s still slow) but quick like a fat guy who can dunk.

Everyday I’m stuck on a train there is nothing to do and my eyes glaze over blankly through a cloud in my brain that suggests rainfall.  There’s light thunder and you start to smell the rain but ultimately it never produces a single drop, the clouds break up, the train moves along, and Access Hollywood is on and what’s up with Billy Bush anyway?   But somewhere in the gray darkness is a series of seeds that have been planted – probably in the angst filled dramatics of my teenage years.  In the middle of all that hyperbole was an overactive brain that was not searching for quiet, but raising quite a stink about one thing or another.  I did not have rent to pay – I had a trumpet to play.  I did not have a family to feed – I had a family feeding me.   I did not have small talk – I had Kind of Blue.

This is a post about the missed opportunities of not doing anything.  This is not a post about the potential of my seeds.  That was a single entendre.

I can’t not do anything as well as I could when I had 4 lawns to mow in the middle of a summer afternoon when it was Tuesday or Thursday (it didn’t matter to me anyway).  At that time, I could do nothing so well that when the time was over, I was better at something than I was before I started not doing it.  Now I just wait.  Not like a waiter in a restaurant, but like the 13th juror in a courtroom without  a book.  Huh?

When I am not doing something now, I pretend to be doing something, or am wishing I was doing something else, or yelling at myself for failing to do the thing I should be doing, or washing dishes.  The goal of my days is to get myself tired enough to sleep quietly at night.  It helps best if I run and cook an elaborate meal and do the dishes.  I avoid the emptiness of a nothing-moment because they just get filled up with check-lists.

It was more productive when it was meaningless.