Hazy and Lazy
I make no apologies for it. I have had a lazy streak in me my whole life. I tend to think it is caused by my not inconsiderable bulk and Newton’s First Law of Motion that a body in motion tends to stay in motion and a body at rest tends to stay at rest. And the bigger the body, the more energy it takes to keep it in motion and once at rest, the more energy it takes to get it back into motion. During any given day I go through countless moments of inertia confrontation. When I stop to sit on one of my garden benches, it is a chore to get up and start moving again. That may sound like an exaggeration, but it really is not. I have to consciously steel myself and give myself a mental kick in the ass to stand up and mobilize. Whenever I am with Handy Brad he always declines to sit down when we are talking because he says its too hard to get up again. I used to think that was just about work ethic and years of slave labor, but now I think I understand that it is simply easier to remain standing than to sit and be forced back into motion.
Today started as another one of those days with an extraordinary fog outside even though the weather projection was for a sunny day with almost no chance of rain. That fog or haze does burn off, but on some days, like today, it can take until almost noon for that to happen. I generally don’t mind the fog because I always work on the assumption that a fog means moisture and moisture is good for the plants. And I am all about my garden these days. When the day starts foggy, I have and immediate tendency to sit in the living room and find things to occupy me on the computer rather than to go outside prematurely. It’s not that I’m scared of a little humidity, its just that the plants are getting good stuff and it seems silly under those conditions to rush out to water them. Furthermore, unless I had a very specific motorcycle trip planned (not a particularly frequent occurrence), it never seems too encouraging to jump on a bike and go for a spin. I know it will be sunny and clear later and I’m usually not so driven to force myself to launch forth in the fog.
So, on a foggy day, I take my place sitting on the red leather sofa in the living room with the bean bag lap desk on my knees and do one of three or four things. I might prepare my lecture slides for my next class. I am continuously tweaking those slides to make them better and better. I did that first thing this morning and even emailed them to my guest lecturers. If I have some expert witness tasks to accomplish, I will focus my attention on those. I added a page of questions for a deposition next week by one of the law firms I am supporting. He had told me to spend a half hour on it and I spent a full hour. I rarely bill for half an hour since I figure my normal inertia requires at least a full hour to get itself in gear productively. I might write a story for my blog (I am on my second one of the day and I am already ten stories ahead of myself and needing to decided posting order to maintain story relevance). I might do some general news scraping. Or I might settle in for a movie from Prime or possibly Netflix. I try to save that for later in the day and spend my more productive morning hours doing things that are … more productive. I might be feeling so forward-thinking that I might put some time into laying out and starting a syllabus for my next semester class on Ethics, Law and Policy. I am now three months out from the start date of that course so its not wrong to start thinking about it, but there is no need for a forced march.
Let’s go back to that lazy bastard issue I face. To be clear I have sixteen benches or chairs set out and around my gardens and that doesn’t include the various stone or stucco walls, well-positioned and sized rocks for sitting and the three table and chair set-ups on the patio. That may sound like a lot, but there’s the driveway under the shadesail, the Cecil Garden, the Rose Garden, the Bison Sculpture Garden, the Rock Garden, the Joshua Tree Garden, the Games area. I have lots of areas where I might want to rest or sit and contemplate things. A lazy man can never have too many benches on which to sit. I suspect that to me a garden bench is what people used to think of as a rocking chair on the porch. It’s so much more than a place to rest. It’s really all about contemplation. When we are younger and in the working prime of life, we admire people who take time out and reflect and meditate. It seems like a luxury and those people are generally admired for their life balance. When you get to my age and station in life, a bench and contemplation thereon is more akin to sheer laziness.
And make no mistake about it, haziness breeds laziness. It is far harder to adopt a lazy man demeanor of a bright and sunshiny day. It is uncomfortable to do so from the get-go in ways that may be overcome later in the day presumably after some sort of effort expended. But when it is foggy or hazy, we are supposed to be cautious and wary of running out into the teeth of the day. We might hurt ourselves or at least pull a muscle. And then where would we be? A pulled muscle is grounds for all sorts of inactivity on a rain or shine basis.
It is now 2:30 in the afternoon and the fog has long since worn off, but it is still a bit of a hazy day. Not so much as to deter outdoor activity, but enough to allow a slow morning to linger into the afternoon by default. Now I am forced to juggle priorities. I have my spa programmed to go on at 1pm and on days when I think I may go in, I put on the heater to spend a few cubic feet of propane to make it nice and warm (it is a HOT tub after all). I did that today and it takes about an hour to heat up sufficiently to be a comfortable plunge. It is programmed to turn off at 4pm and while I can easily extend that, it does give me a natural timeframe to my soaking. Soaking is the quintessential lazy man’s activity and I am all about it. It is not only a form of repose since I am sitting in the spa, but the warm water lends comfort to sore muscles and joints and even cleanses my Croc-borne feet, which get dirty from gardening. If you think there is inertia involved in getting up off a bench, wait until you try to force you’ll=self out of a hot tub after an hour or more of soaking. It takes an enormous amount of effort to do that and it really does need to start by the pump and heater shutting themselves off automatically at 4pm.
The good news is that by 4pm I am close enough to dinner and my evening that I can don my lounging wear and be confident that I do not need to go out for any reason. So, here is the resume of the lazy man on a hazy day: Arise slowly for minimal ablutions, check outside through the windows to see if there is any basis for going outside to the garden. If not, get set up open the sofa with the lap desk and go at whatever needs going at. Note when you rise that stiffness enters the joints at this stage of life as quickly as in an hour of sitting. That makes it advisable to get up and move about as often as possible. I haven’t done the math, but I think mini inertia and stiffness adds up to much less than the major inertia and stiffness from sitting around an hour or more. Somewhere along the way, go out to the garden and do something productive like watering or locating a new wind sculpture (I did both today). You know its a doomed lazy day if you either go back to the sofa and write another story (did I mention this is story #2 today?) or start a movie before lunch. regardless, by early afternoon, consider a spa visit (I will do that as soon as this story ends) and then abandon yourself to the sofa in front of the 82” Samsung Smart TV and try not to go in to the bedroom until at least 10pm. Then hope that tomorrow is less hazy and therefore less likely to quite so lazy.