Express Yourself
The Art of Not Doing Art
Procrastination as vocation
I have embarked upon yet another of my Massive Secret Time-Wasting Projects. It’s too late to interrupt the process now: Once undertaken, these things take on their own unstoppable momentum. O the seductive and terrible lure of whatever you’re not supposed to be doing, whomever you’re not supposed to be with, wherever you currently are not. I remember my late cat, whenever I would munificently let her out into the backyard, wanted nothing more than to escape immediately into the adjacent yard: “Over There,” we called it, that alluring and forbidden land. The cat heart yearns for Over There, and so, too, do ours. Human beings are incorrigibly contrary: We write on bathroom walls and have sex in libraries. A vast and unforgiving system of rewards and punishments, which we call civilization, is necessary to get us all out of bed to keep the world running every day. One of my favorite-ever jokes comes, embarrassingly, from an old Jay Leno monologue on The Tonight Show: “Can you imagine what the world would be like if everyone goofed off at work as much as you do?” It takes a second to sink in; the world itself is the punchline.
I don’t pretend to have any special expertise on this subject, but I am a writer, a profession that may be unequalled in its refinement of procrastination…
