American Fez

Productivity Figures

As Pascal said, all man's troubles stem from his inability to sit quietly in a room. Nevertheless, man cannot avoid the itch to rise from his comfortable chair, fling the door of his room wide open, and stride out into the world to assert whatever irritatingly manipulative ideas he harbors in his weaponized ego. "I am right," he claims. "We must do this." Yet history has always proven man a tyrant of the worst and most destructive kind, an Ozymandias who takes selfies in the ruins with his wasp-like drones. Man does not stand on the shoulders of giants but on heaps of smoking rubble, trying to convince us that rubble is a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to rebuild. 

We should always be wary of men who are constantly busy: men for whom there are not enough hours in the day; men who measure life in terms of inboxes and output and power and results; men who are gushing fountains of impenetrable self-esteem and unexamined conceit; men who are dizzying blurs of activity, laying the foundations of future disasters they will never acknowledge when the walls come tumbling down; men whose Cheshire Cat grins are all that can been seen through thick clouds of smoke and dust. 

So I relax in this room with no desire to do or be anything, sinking contentedly into my reupholstered, wing-back chair. From time to time, I'm disturbed by a thought, popping up like a slice of synapse bread in a grey cellular toaster. Burnt, as usual, but still fine if I scrape enough butter across its crunchy, charcoal surface. And why not add a dollop of marmalade whimsy? It's not much of a philosophical feast, sure, but it sustains me as the years roll by. And here, I've offered you a bite. I'm always happy to share what I have, which is the best kind of productivity.

And So On

Like a sleepwalker seeking an unpublished book of dream interpretations on the empty shelves in the endless aisles of a defunct library, I'm trying to figure out my gas bill. What are all these obscure itemized charges? It would be easier to decipher the costs for Pharaonic embalming preserved in faint hieroglyphs on broken slates in the deepest recesses of a stygian pyramid by flickering torch-light. But, like the sacrifice demanded by a non-existent God for forgotten sins of the past committed by somebody else, the bill must still be paid in full. Otherwise, like a crippled Starship trapped by the paralyzing tractor a malevolent satellite's tractor beam, I will lose power. Fortunately, all I have to do is go Online and pay with my stored credit card, which is easy. Not quite like Sunday morning but definitely Sabbath-ish around noon. Before the Internet, to pay any type of bill you'd need to write out a check and mail it off, and that meant finding a first-class stamp in your desk drawer, which was like a sleepwalker seeking an unpublished book of dream interpretations on the empty shelves in the endless aisles of a defunct library. And so on.

Winter Weather Advisory

After sweet dreams of crushing snowflakes, the knuckle-dragger awakes from his slumbers. It is a new day and there are fresh flowerings of sensitivity to be abused and eliminated. But this is the needless errand of the Neanderthal, for what the self-appointed, pea-brained knuckle-dragger does not understand is that such snowflakes naturally melt into nothingness anyway, dissolved by their own eviscerating lack of substance. So sleep on, knuckle-dragger, your cudgel-wielding services are not required today.

Besides, the deceptive fragility of the snowflake can be deceptive and usually best left alone and ignored. Behold how the tracks of a wolf in sheep's clothing are easy to follow in a carpet of snowfall. These tracks lead to a lake of very brittle ice, formed from frozen vapor of platitudinous speeches and glacial egoism. So no skating on the mirrored surface, knuckle-dragging Narcissus, because you might fall in and not get out again. After all, Carl Jung claimed the faults we find in others are really just the faults we fail to recognize in ourselves; and dogmatic, unexamined shibboleths long-nurtured in the most rotten recesses of the soul are the commonest fault of all. 

Nevertheless, the knuckle-dragger fires off a round of fallacious information and the snowflake replies with a salvo of phony statistics: an exchange of debunked truth bombs that's like a game of Paper Rock Scissors where knuckles smash snowflakes and snowflakes bury knuckles at the same time, ad infinitum. Or perhaps a running race between feet of clay and a pair of Achilles heels in which both are the furious, over-confident hare and the tortoise of reason is forgotten. As Pascal said, "All human evil comes from a single cause, man's inability to sit still in a room." And in the case of the knuckle-dragger and snowflake, evil is most definitely banal.