The Benefits of Nothing
Remember when you were ready to go home from the bar but your (work, etc.) friends started to wheedle and cajole you into staying because, oh, I dunno, going home would make you be all old and shit and, c’mon, there’s so much more fun to be had and let’s go to another bar and have fun there?
So you look at your phone (does anyone own a watch anymore (no need to answer that or add a comment to this article attesting to the fact that you still own a watch and then go on about the benefits of owning a watch and why doesn’t anyone own a watch anymore because that is not this article)) and you sigh in that way of yours that everyone thinks is some kind of act or makes you out to be the office curmudgeon and off you go into that never-ending night to yet another over-crowded bar to buy yet another over-priced cocktail (that you make better at home, let’s face it) or watery beer (or even non-watery beer because what, really, is the difference? (and also refrain here from adding a comment about the superlative microbrewed beers in your neck of the woods because whatever, FLOTUS eye-roll)) and when you get to the next place (after, what, thirty minutes of debating about it on the street corner outside the bar you just left which is more or less just like the bar you finally decide on going to) it’s crowded and loud and you spend most of the time nodding at whatever someone is yelling at you because it’s all just blah blah blah whatever.
Yeah, I don’t do that anymore.
Being older is the perfect excuse to finally acknowledge that all that peer pressure to constantly enjoy yourself is finally over, because how often did it really work out that the next place was better than the last place and all you really wanted was to go home where your warm bed and your (if you’re lucky) warm significant other was waiting anyway and all you really wanted was hours and hours and hours of nothing.
Nothing is what you long for when you’re old. Nothing is the thing you’re supposed to have plenty of but never seem to find. Nothing, finally and at last, is the goal.
Tired All The Way Down
If you’re attending a gym right now (no, not right now but perhaps you’re thinking right now you should be) you won’t be by the time you’re old. People go to the gym for two reasons that I’m aware of: To stay in shape or to stalk that cute guy you never have a chance with. I’m in the latter camp, and now that I’m grey-haired and saggy and mopey the only cute guys that are interested in me think I’m wealthy until they see my apartment and then they have a sudden pedicure appointment, so obviously I no longer go to the gym.
The first reason - that ‘staying healthy’ thing - that doesn’t last long either because at some point no matter how hard you’re trying to stave off the attack of Old Man Syndrome it starts to happen anyway. Joints ache and pop. Your hearing thins out to a stream of tight insect noises where words used to be. You’ve been wearing glasses for years, but now the lenses are dividing into portions for the various reasons one uses eyes instead of just for focusing on traffic lights. Your feet - well, let’s not even get to that horror yet. Frankly, friends, ‘Feet and Why They Suck Donkey Balls’ is an entirely other chapter.
You will still pass by the gym and look in the window at all the zombies on treadmills running nowhere and think, gee, I really should get back to the gym (keeping in mind that it’s right there and all you have to do is walk through the door because they’re all pleased as punch to keep sucking those monthly dues, believe me) but you won’t because when you wake up tomorrow, just extracting your knees from the sheets will be like sucking a bowling pin out of a vat of honey.
And yeah, that doesn’t make sense, and yeah, I’m old.
Lots of people catch on to the fact that they can “just go home” and never contend with smelly bar patrons and loud girls shrieking about their boyfriends and drunken bros spilling Pabst on your pants - but these people are generally married and gave up on life a long time ago. People like me, however, the lonely, childless, self-loathers, we don’t learn this lesson until much later.
My Sofa, Myself.
It’s even weirder now because in the olden days - and I’m talking even before TiVo - we needed to base our nighttimes around when our favorite TV shows were on. But now they’re on all the time and whenever we want them to be so that excuse is gone.
And that was a great excuse.
Your daydreams - which once involved naked people and probably chocolate - will start to revolve around three things only:
- What’s for goddam dinner?
- The couch
- The bed
Dinner is a fiasco. You’ll finally end up ordering something because the idea - the mere idea - of making something seems so tiring. You’ll also spend a good deal of time staring into your fridge looking for the meaning of life, but all that’s in there (if you’re lucky) is several good bottles of vermouth, a package of grey sandwich meat, lettuce that feels like it’s made of balloon rubber and several odd and curious bottles of various kinds of mustard because you can never remember if you have that good kind of mustard (you do).
The couch is like your default position. The couch is merely the pitstop before bed, and it’ll sometimes be confusing because you’ll wake up on it and wonder what happened and what day it is and why do you drool so much all the time? You’ll need to train yourself to recognize when it’s time to get off the couch and go to bed, and that sense of guilt that there’s so much night left to use up doing things and you couldn’t possibly go to bed at 10 o’clock, c’mon, that’s just sad.
Yeah, that goes away.
Bed is wonderful. Take it from me, that money you were saving to spend on a new car? Buy a new mattress instead. They cost thousands of dollars, too, but you’ll be spending the rest of your actual life there, while driving in rush hour traffic only seems like the rest of your life. Then get some truly decadent sheets and pillows, and I’m talking the kind that make you achieve orgasm when you slip between them and push your face into them. It’s probably the only time you’ll ever come again.
Bed is the thing you dream about even while you’re in bed. When you go on trips, you won’t ache to be back with the kids and the garbage and the bills, will you? You’ll be aching for your own bed. Your solace and your nirvana. Your reason for living will be to die a little every night wrapped not in your lover’s arms but in the ridiculous thread-count of your Italian sheets.
Busy Doing Nothing
Inertia, my friends, is the goal. Newton said it best:
The vis insita, or innate force of matter, is a power of resisting by which every body, as much as in it lies, endeavours to preserve its present state, whether it be of rest or of moving uniformly forward in a straight line.
Thanks, Wikipedia!
You might feel a twinge a guilt about the search for perfect laziness. That won’t last long, because laziness is its own reward. You can try being lazy at work, just for practice. The fact that you’re reading this rather than whatever important thing it is you do there (palette selection? code cleaning? insuring that this generation has enough ways to broadcast its inchoate yammering of meaningless drivel into the cloud?) means that you’re already aching for the age where you can get away with laziness without being accused of it.
Laziness gets a bad rap. We’re supposed to be constantly adding to the welfare of society like busy bees in a hive supporting the queen. But I’m sure you know that bees have been dying by the truckload and between you and me, maybe they’re just tired.
It’s important, also, to separate laziness from boredom. When you’re lazy you’re never bored. Boredom signifies that you’re looking for something to do, which I think we can all agree is the exact opposite of laziness. Kids are bored. Adults are lazy.
The practice of active laziness (and by that I mean you’re not being accidentally lazy because you lost track of time or you’re an inveterate procrastinator or you just, like, “forgot”) is its own reward because unlike other forms of activity, the goal here is to become one with your own nothingness. In a way, it’s a philosophical goal that might allow you to surrender to the void that is your life and turn inward, searching for the light of your soul within the….
Nope. Thought I had something there and lost it at the end. Oh, well.
