– Douglas Adams, The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy
When I was in school – elementary to high to college – I was operating under the assumption that once I was done grinding through the education mill, I’d simply have oodles of time to do whatever I wanted. I was obviously working under a very false assumption. As the rest of you semi-responsible adults know, it’s all a big fat lie. You younger folks who happen to traipse through here and read this, consider this a warning.
After your schooling is done and you’ve got your ed-ju-mi-ca-shun, all that time spent in class and elsewhere doing your projects and homework is supplanted by other things. If you’re a normal productive member of our warped little society, and you like to eat and live in something other than a cardboard Maytag box in an alleyway behind the "adult" cinema, you join the great American workforce. You get a job and work, work, work. You young pups out there might not see this as a problem. You say "Hey, I was in class for eight hours a day, and doing homework on top of that – working will be a breeze!" You know what? You’re right… for about the first year. Tops.
A job gets old reeeeeal fast, I don’t care how much you like it. The problem stems from repetition and lack of control. How would you like to dine on the exact same meal every day? Add to that an eating schedule you have little or no involvement in, with precious few breaks in the routine. I don’t care if it’s your favorite meal you’re being fed. I love Chinese food, and I joke that I could eat it every day, three meals a day – but I’m very sure that after the first week that shit would get real old, real fast.
Ok, so now you’re working eight hours a day not including travel to and from your job, lunch breaks, etc. Once you get home, you’ve got other responsibilities. Feed the cat, cook, feed yourself, do the dishes, wash-dry-fold-put away laundry, take out the garbage and so on. That’s a lot of crap to do no matter how thinly you spread it. Let’s not forget that if you’re married and/or have kids, you definitely want to spend time with them, and there is a whole new set of duties that go along with that too.
Unless you’re a complete waste of skin, you’ve got some friends or family you like to hang out with now and again. We’re not all social butterflies, but we do like to interact with other people on occasion. That takes up time as well. You go out, have dinner and a few drinks maybe, start talking and *WHOOSH* hours have passed (in some cases days, depending on how many drinks you have). Let’s face it, human beings are one of the most social animals in existence. We crave companionship and stimulation on every level from physical to cerebral. We must interact – it’s a driving force we unconsciously act upon that stems from our very DNA.
Sleep. Here is the one thing that gets universally abused. If you’ve gotta work, do all the things necessary to live from day-to-day and run with the herd too, then something gets neglected and it’s usually sleep. It’s the easiest thing to skimp on, and is done in so passively – you just don’t do it. It’s that easy. What’s the loss of a few hours of rest when you can visit with your pals who have come over for dinner? Especially when the wine is good and the conversation is better? Nothing. Why sleep on Saturday night when you’re out on the town, when you can catch it up Sunday evening? No reason, whatsoever. The eventual problem is, all that lack of sleep you’ve been getting catches up with you. You start to get fatigued, and it flavors everything you do.
The human body isn’t like a battery, you can’t run your charge down over the course of several days (or weeks) and get one good night of rest to fully re-charge. You need good, solid rest on a regular basis to stay at your peak. You’ve gotta top that battery off every night. The horrible fact is that we don’t, so the world gets filled with brain dead zombies with an overactive social life.
Here is where I live. This is my life. I work a job that ain’t too bad, but nonetheless eats up a good part of my life. I have a wife that I love, whom I don’t get to spend as much quality time with as I’d like. By the time we get home from work, cook and eat dinner and do the chores, we’re exhausted and it’s time to hit the sack and start the vicious cycle all over again. We’ve got a multitude of fantastic friends that we try to spend as much time with as we can, which never really happens because we all spend the weekends catching-up the things we can’t get done during the week. As everyone knows a five-day workweek lasts eleven days, but a two-day weekend lasts four hours. Top all this off with my bad habit of having more irons than fire to put them in, and a computer/internet addiction that makes most hardened burnt-out heroine addicts look like a lactose-intolerant kindergartener during snacky-time. I don’t get near as much sleep as I should, and it’s starting to add up. Unlike most people, I have a fatigue battery and its charge is full, it’s bulging, corroded and ready to pop.
There aren’t enough hours in a day to do all the things I need to do, much less all the things I want to do. If I were to clone myself and establish a sympathetic, empathic, telepathic link between the two of us so we could share our experiences as if we were one entity, send that clone off to play while I worked, I might get caught up. Actually, while I’m riding the wave of the whole clone delusion I might as well make a third clone to sleep for us. "She touched my pepe, Steve."
It’s not all bad. I’ll eventually lose my mind one day. Many years from now they’ll find me in my little one room cardboard summer cottage behind Billy Bob’s Smut Multiplex and Salad Bar. I’ll have vast amounts of time then to mumble to myself and drool, pick through dumpsters, soil myself and scratch at one spot on my scabby scalp until the hair there won’t grow back. I’ll be willing to bet that there’s plenty enough real estate behind the porn theater for a few of my friends to join me. We can pass a bottle of Ripple and drool in unison. It’ll be a little slice of heaven.