Lack of Imagination

This morning I did the usual stuff — a grooming routine, breakfast and coffee for me and Jennie, took my drugs – a statin for cholesterol, lexapro for depression.

Now I find to my surprise that I have virtually nothing to do. I have this week off work from my employer because I work for a college and the students are gone — it’s been a tradition forever that people mail it in.  I’m on call so technically I could get a pageout but most likely I’ll have the entire day to myself.  Jennie’s at work, the house is relatively clean, I’m more or less caught up on laundry, and other than a quick trip to the store to get stuff for dinner I can’t even think of anything to spend my time on.  I can’t remember the last time I’ve had the entire day to myself without a ton of shit to do.

Oh, I know what I’ll wind up doing. I’ll almost definitely go to the gym and exercise as soon as I’m done writing this entry. I’ve been addicted to exercising my entire life and when I don’t do it I don’t sleep well and I have more negative thoughts — stuff along the lines of you’re a lazy shit joe why can’t you exercise, what do you want to become a fatty like your brother or something? I know that’s my Dad’s voice in my head when I hear that kind of self talk and I know I should try to fight it and say nicer things to myself but it seems impossible when it’s in my head — it’s easier to just go work out.

After the gym I’ll hit the pharmacy and pick up this special shampoo for my hair that manages the eczema and then I’ll pick up whatever ingredients I need for chocolate chewy brownies because I have to make those tomorrow because my mom and brother are coming over for dinner since I couldn’t see them on Christmas.

But even if I do all that stuff — it’s only about two hours of activity.  I could play more of a video game I’m in the middle of — Red Dead Redemption 2.  In years past, during the week off between Christmas and New Year’s, I’d pick a game and drop 40-50 hours into it — usually enough to finish it.  One year it was the Lord of the Rings game, Shadow of Mordor.  I killed orcs for hours and hours.  It was exciting for about five of them and the other thirty it was tedious, a slog, not much different than doing tasks for work.  I’d talk to someone and run a quest for them — explore a cave, find a lost item.  Not much different than doing something for my manager at work, I’d think.  I wondered why I needed something so banal to fill the hours.  Wondered why I couldn’t find a more productive or creative way to spend my time.

And of course I realized it’s because it requires work, and energy, to be productive and creative.  It’s easier to passively consume entertainment – to watch Better Call Saul and put on old MST3K while scrolling Insta and dreaming about how you could be creative or do something more exciting with your life if you just had the time.

Time isn’t always the problem.  Will and drive and vision are the problems, along with fear — the fear that you’ll make something that winds up to be shitty or useless, write shit that nobody reads, paint something that others look at and then can’t find much to say about — it’s easier to instead watch whatever it is that everyone’s watching on streaming services, easier and perhaps even better for you because then the next time you’re at dinner with friends and they ask if you’ve seen Andor you can say fuck yes I have and launch into why you think it’s either the greatest new Star Wars spinoff ever made or alternately boring and pedestrian and a waste of your time.

The real enemies of my life have and always will be anxiety and fear and depression, the feelings of pointlessness or the certainty that what I’m doing is going to come out bad.

The lack of time that I finger as as the source of my life problems is often a scapegoat for underlying issues that I can probably solve myself if I really wanted to.

So let me be honest.  It looks like I have the time today to pursue one of my old dreams, at least for a while.  I can work on a blog entry or write a couple of pages of the old horror novel I’d been trying to put together.

But I probably won’t.   I’ll go to the gym and the stores, I’ll tire myself out, I’ll want to nap, I’ll wake up and decide to play the cowboy game for a while and a while will turn into three or four hours and then Jennie will come home and I’ll put dinner together and clean up — I’ll do it all for her since I was home doing fuck-all while she was working — and then we’ll put on House of the Dragon and the time will melt away and I’ll somehow feel like I had a completely useless day even though it was good on the surface — it was a day that I spent exactly the way I chose to spend it — and while I’m going to sleep I’ll marvel at the fact that I can have a day for myself and still go to bed feeling unfulfilled.  Because I couldn’t summon the energy or drive to seek actual fulfillment, to do something that means something to me.  Maybe nothing will really make me feel fulfilled.

What I do know is that shooting virtual bad guys in a playstation game doesn’t do shit when it comes to the whistling hole in my chest that tells me I’m wasting my life.  It sometimes even accentuates it, makes the wind blow stronger and the whistling grow louder because as I travel from point A to point B in a made-up place, I am bored and distinctly aware that I’m bored, and I have thoughts like wow I am playing a game designed for fifteen year olds but I’m 45, or I’ve beaten a dozen similar games — this isn’t really an experience I’ll remember — At times I become painfully aware that I am playing this game simply to eat up minutes of life at which point it’s hard to argue that I’m doing anything other than just passing the day in any way that I can, but it’s just very difficult to not ask yourself the follow up questions, like: Could there be a better way to live my life?  (Yes of course there is.)  Why can’t I figure it out and do it?

I’ll wonder if part of me wants to be unhappy — if that’s the real problem.

There’s this line in the book Chemistry by Weike Wang.  The main character is a woman in her early twenties.  She’s a chemist but doesn’t feel any particular calling to the profession.  Lab work bores her, she’s not fully engaged, she doesn’t make any real progress.  She feels her work is pointless — who does it help exactly? At some point she gets a therapist because she becomes depressed.  Her therapist, noting the disillusion with Chemistry, asks what the main character would really like to do with her life.

Tell me what is the most useful thing I could do within the realm of my capabilities as a person and I will go and do that.

You and all of my clients, says the therapist in return.

This is exactly like me and my relationship to my own job — I don’t get much fulfillment or satisfaction out of it.  It’s just something I do.  It fills up time.  I do this and I do that for work.  Then I do this and I do that for Jennie, and I do this and I do that for Jennie’s parents.  I groom myself, I take care of the house, I take care of my body.  I do the things that need doing.  And nothing fills me up, nothing makes me say to myself at the end of the day:  I had a good day.  I am living my dream life.  This is a life worth living.

I have the freedom to figure it out — I have time, or I can make time, to pursue something else, I have the financial means to explore — and yet, I am bound by old habits, by fear, by inertia — and perhaps also by a lack of support or imagination.

Enough of this, I’m thinking in circles and not getting anything done.  I might as well be riding a pony composed of pixels through a wild west town created by twentysomethings who watched a couple of old westerns before throwing billions of polygons together that somewhat approximate the rootin’est tootin’est shootin’est world of cowboys in America.