The Waste

I have been stuck on the same part of Thus Spoke Zarathustra since 1996, which is to say, the introduction. The shameful compulsion to buy the book unfortunately isn’t enough to push me through her pages. I added it to an amazon.com order because I thought it was one of those seminal works that a self styled cerebral chap like me should read. Ultimately, however, generous doses of ‘thee’ ‘thou’ and any unreasonable about of ‘–ometh’ is enough to suck the fun out of an experience to the point where the vacuum left is too great to plug up with fantasies of my intellectualism. And so this famous work by Friedrich Wilhelm Nietzsche occupies the same space in my life as power washing the siding of my house or learning a new language; which is to say, doing something worthwhile with my time.

I am convinced headshrinkers could have a field day decoding what I do for fun whenever I am dodging the mundane and left to my own devices. What does it mean when someone blows off the gym in lieu of watching an especially heated game of televised Texas Hold Em? I imagine these therapists gazing into the Kafkian wonder of my playing The Sims 3 and directing my avatar to clean my virtual house whilst my non-digital domicile exists in a state of constant bachelor clutter, and gazing back at these therapists is the face of madness.

So why don’t I learn mixed martial arts or take an art class? Well, those are pretty horrible examples, I reasonable sure children could tap me out and I am horrified of having my worked judged in a classroom setting. But the source question is why don’t I spend my leisure time engaged in enriching activities instead of learning sleight of hand tricks and committing whole movie monologues to memory? (As though Paths of Glory isn’t enriching enough) I fear these are question I may never be able to answer, much like the mystery of whatever the hell that circular divot in plastic milk gallon jugs are for.

That isn’t to say that there aren’t activities I take to with great relish, it’s more or less that the fruits of these labors don’t yield any kind of trophy that I could easily wield for the proper respect. If had read Thus Spoke Zarathustra you better believe I would find ways to drop an obscure passage from it into a conversation, no matter how ill fitting, just to go on to mention the fact that I had read Thus Spoke motherhugging Zarathustra.

I try not to equate the stack of unread literature on my nightstand or flower garden that could be declared a nature preserve, with a lack of ambition. I am an enterprising guy, it’s just I haven’t found that enterprise yet. As the great Randal Graves astutely put it in the great work Clerks II ; “Sooner or later I’ll do something with myself and make my mark but until then, whatever I do is not a waste of time, it’s all building toward something.”