The Usefulness of Wasting Time

"I loaf and invite my soul.
I lean and loaf at my ease, observing a spear of summer grass."
-- Walt Whitman, Leaves of Grass

I'm fifty-one years old. At this age, if one has half of a brain, one finally realizes one has lived more life than what remains. It can be a chilling epiphany. But, one moves on with the "third act," as it were, because...what's the alternative?

At this point, with a new aim of creating a second/retirement career as a film and TV composer, I find myself approaching composition and "taking care of business" with a kind of intensity I have never really been known for. (Last year, I wrote sixty-five pieces of music. That's probably as much as I have written since I wrote my first piece when I was ten years old. You can clearly see the inverse proportions...) 

Some guys my age buy souped-up Ford Mustangs and crank up Journey's Greatest Hits, some double-down on their compositional efforts. 

No, I know it's not quite the same, but it is born of the same realization: time is running out. 

It's typical for people my age to look back and be mad about "all the time I wasted." I've felt that way, at times, but, in the end, I have decided I am not angry at Young Chris for "wasting time" because maybe what I was doing was actually useful -- even necessary. Maybe it was kind of an incubation period of the spirit; of the mind; of my creativity. Maybe "the child is the father of the man," after all, and all of that "time-wasting" happened in order to prepare me for the period of creativity and energy I am in now. Children learn from play; maybe young adults learn from loafing. 

I'm not, in any way, advocating peeing away one's time and there are many things I feel are a grand waste. One example is standing in a club with music that is so loud you can't talk to your friends for hours on end. I found that a waste of time when I was twenty, for the record, along with many other things. (And lawn-care. Lawn care is a waste of time, if you ask me.) 

My version of wasting time was sitting in bars with groups of friends, for hours on end, talking about interesting ideas; it was loafing and inviting my soul, Whitman-style, in a hammock in my yard, day after day in the summers; it was watching cartoons; it was watching movies; it was walking and holding hands and talking marathon sessions on the rotary phone with with girlfriends; it was staying up late and then sleeping until two o'clock in the afternoon; I was missing parties in order to read, sometimes three books at once -- especially during grad school.  

It is so easy to look back at all this and lament what I could have gotten done had I just applied myself more. Well, I would have produced more writing and more music; that's for sure. But how good would the work have been? Can a guy who has not "wasted" time with his friends and lovers and with his own thoughts write or compose anything truly moving to others?

Maybe it was all preparation for the real work; work that was, some day, to be based on a matured and experience-based life -- what I'm doing now? Well, you can decide that. But I do think sitting and talking and thinking and loving and dreaming are never a waste of time, so long as they come to action someday. 

These days, though I still like it, I'm not as enamored of sleep as I once was. These days, I compose every day, instead of putting it off for a thousand other things. These days, I schedule my TV watching and only do an hour a day; maybe a movie on the weekends. It's just that it is time to start burning the reserves of action I have in the old tank thanks to my lazy, loafing, fat-backing twenty-year-old self. 

And, you know what I still do? I still "waste" Sunday afternoons sitting on the couch and drinking coffee with my wife and talking. We've been known to sit from ten until three, chewing the proverbial fat. And it's never a waste. (Tons of our conversations have wound up here, in fact.) 

Maybe we humans just know what we need and we instinctually do it. But if we messed up, we messed up. Wiser men than I have pointed out that regret is the true waste of time. So why waste time regretting wasted time when that time wasted is not only not a waste but, just maybe, a necessary part of growing in to someone better? [Yeah, I'd read that again, too. That's some ugly writing, right there.]

Now, go forth and loaf! (And I will go forth and write music, submit music, think of a post for next week, work more on my upcoming literature podcast and on the podcast I have planned for Hats and Rabbits [you heard it here first] and work on the outline for an idea I had for a book [all while raising two boys, training two pups and preparing for a new year of teaching...) 

Or..maybe I'll just loaf today...

Weeping Over Indiana Jones: On the Young Hearts of Wannabe Knights

In Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade, there is a scene near the end in which, when the whole place is crumbling, the knight who was the guardian of the Holy Grail salutes Indy through the falling debris and dust.

I wept when I saw that scene in the theater in 1989. I like that. I was 21.

I could list a whole bunch of other films, books, poems and works of art that made me get all emotional. (I do that.) To me, it is the highest effect art can have: to move someone to tears, to chills or to laughter. No, I'm not a fan of empty sentimentality; I am a seeker of the sublime. The sublime can only exist when the wind of intellect blows through the aeolian harp of emotion. (I know -- I'm getting all Coleridgean.)

Anyway, if I listed those works that "moved" me, some would be no surprise: "Afternoon of a Faun," by Debussy; The Pines of Rome, by Respighi; Miller's The Crucible and Death of a Salesman; Hemingway's The Old Man and the Sea; Ravel's Mother Goose suite... I could do this all day.

But...Indiana Jones?

The Jackassery of Artistic Youth

Years ago, when I was in grad school – maybe soon after; back when I was playing in a band a few nights per week and teaching scattered courses at Rutgers and in community college for a living; back before I even know how to tie a tie, my girlfriend (who I was pretty sure at the time I would one day ask to be my wife) asked me: “What do you love more? – me or music?”

Genesis, past and future all at once. 

Do you know, I had a hard time answering that? What an absolute fool I was. You know what I said? I said, “I can’t live without either one of you.” 

What an ass.

I know full well there are those who might think that guy I once was amounts to a kind of Romantic type. I know this because the type has been lauded in movies for years: Amadeus, Titanic, etc. I know some might see my response as the artistic, back-of-the-hand-to-the-forehead kind of thing that works well in a two hour screening. But, it actually makes me ill, now, to think I said that to her.

C&D Bike Repair (A Memoir Parable)

On a sprawlingly long, deliciously cool summer day, when I was about eleven or twelve, my friend Dave and I decided to put in some hard work. We were going to open a bike repair shop.

We dug in to the work, clearing out and organizing my parent's aluminum storage shed in the back yard. We put things where they belonged and hung things on pegs. We swept. We gathered up the available tools (not that many were around in the home of a trumpet player/arranger, but we made-do) and put them on a shelf, neatly lined up. If I'm not mistaken, we polished them with our breath and a rag, too.

When we were finished organizing, we examined the fruits of our labor -- must have been five-hours' work -- with fists on evaluative hips. I remember bending to pick up a small piece of dried leaf from the concrete floor. It wouldn't do to have the alabaster interrupted by some deciduous intruder, after all we'd done.

We looked at each other. What was next? We snapped our fingers: the sign.

We walked to the nearest store and purchased poster board with the change I kept in my room in a nine-inch high, toy Mosler safe (with a real combination lock). We gathered up markers and paints and pencils and rulers. I, having already been recognized as the neighborhood bohemian (despite my modestly impressive talents as a third baseman) was given the task of creating the sign. Dave reclined in the shade of our walnut tree, a blade of grass between his teeth, as I set to work. Eventually, he fell asleep, no doubt dreaming of the wealth we would accrue as bicycle repair moguls.

The Forever Pill

You know the old cliche -- the young person asks the old person how he has stayed so strong and vibrant and the old fossil says something like, "Clean  living!" or "I ate oatmeal with cinnamon and a splash of whisky, every morning, for ninety years..."?  It occurred to me, last night, that this is a very desirable fantasy: the notion that we might, possibly, be able to pin health success on one clear-cut thing. In reality, the fact that this is impossible is sometimes the reason why we give up on the things that we know are good for us. I know it's the reason I do.

You know? Like, if I exercise every day, science says it will make me stronger and it will even extend my life. If I exercise every day, I will feel better -- that is for sure. But, before long, I will forget how bad I felt before I started to feel better and the impact of the exercise will now begin to be lost on me. I feel the way I feel; exercise is part of my life. Why not skip a day here or there? Thus begins the downward spiral.

There's no certainty to it, even if this doesn't mean (and it doesn't) that we should ignore the findings of science. Marathon runners drop dead in the middle of races, once in awhile. Sedentary fat people sometimes live to a ripe old age.

One of my relatives once had a heart attack in his fifties. The doctors told him he was lucky he worked-out on a regular basis, or it could have been worse. Do they know this for sure?