COLUMN: Too Much Time on My Hands

Image by Jeff Kubina via Flickr

By Tobin Barnes
We don’t really understand what we want, do we?

Boy, that’s a pretty broad statement. Let me narrow that down a bit.

I don’t really understand what I want, do I?

Yeah, that’s much better. Now if you happen to see some similarities to yourself in the following description, we’ll work from that angle to start widening my theory back out to the totality it was in the first sentence.

Anyway, before the holiday season, I was looking forward to some down time after a lot of busy-ness. Added to that, for a change, we weren’t going to be traveling anywhere for the holidays, so we figured we’d have many wonderful empty hours to fill with nothing in particular—just whatever, you know?

Ah, the bliss of unscheduled time!

Well, don’t you know, we got that in spades. There’s a fine line between “empty hours to fill with nothing in particular” and pure, unadulterated, left-studying-the-wall boredom.

It all began with the big Christmas blizzard. Yeah, a relentlessly white Christmas! That, in theory, would be nice, apropos of so many carols. Uh huh, it was one of those things that at first sounds quaint, picturesque, and somewhat inviting, but then turns into something you’d never want if you knew what it was going to be—like much in life.

The effects of the blizzard—we had drifts people in eastern South Dakota would think of as mountains—and its attendant deep-freeze went on for days. Days, I tell you, days without being able to go anywhere and with nowhere to go even if we could get there. Ay, Caramba! Save me from myself.

Sure, it started great. But after making pancakes, fiddling around with my gadgets, and catching up in a few hours with stuff I thought would take days, I was left with too much time to get anything else done.

Too much time?

That’s right, too much time.

When you have too much time on your hands, doing anything of value becomes nearly impossible.

Why? Because you turn into a big, fat banana slug, barely able to move, that’s why. All you can manage is a few “blub” sounds as you occasionally roll from one side to the other on the couch like a sunning walrus.

Granted, that’s hyperbole…but not by much.

Certainly, when you’ve got too much time on your hands, you can still get out of bed, you can still eat, and you can still turn on the TV. But beyond that, there’s no immediacy. There’s no urge. There’s no need.

And if there’s no need, there’s no action. The metamorphosis from fairly active, somewhat achieving, middle-aged man to banana slug is complete. It is de-evolution at its most deficient. It’s survival of the wastrels. Blub.

Normally, you’d think natural selection would eliminate blubbing animals like wastrel banana slugs and wastrel couch potatoes, but they continue to exist, if not thrive.

Maybe it’s because a banana slug looks like…well, obviously…a banana. And a banana in the jungle is a threat to nothing else. It just hangs there ripening, causing other living things no problem (unless they don’t know how to open a banana properly—which I’ve taken pains to point out before is not by the so-called stem, but by squeezing the bottom).

It is much the same for a couch potato with too much time on his hands. He is a threat to nothing else, except maybe to his wife’s sanity or perhaps to an infinitesimal portion of the Gross Domestic Product.

But, happily, all this will be remedied when the banana is finally eaten properly, the banana slug stays out in the sun too long and shrivels up into a wet spot, and the couch potato goes back to work and returns to a schedule.

And then the world will spin again on greased grooves.