Locked in a Vacancy

Rangers - A Fine Frenzy (mp3)

"There's nothing to do when you're locked in a vacancy." -- John Bender, The Breakfast Club

Anyone who is required to write on a regular basis hits ruts. Slumps. No fly zones.

I can think of no tougher week in the year to want to write anything for a blog than the week between Christmas and New Year's. It is a week where I take great advantage of my paltry salary and generous vacation schedule to stare up at the big tall downtown buildings full of busy and higher-paid worker ants and laugh at them while I sit trying to figure out how to stretch out my free time spending as little as I can. (Translation: Can "Avatar" really be worth $10?? Should I get an expanded song pack for Rock Band??)

All that free time comes handcuffed to children and day-long responsibilities of parenting. Call it a cop-out, but I'm not the kind of parent who enjoys doing self-involved things -- watching The Wire, writing, playing online poker or lengthy setlists on Rock Band -- when my kids are up and about. Even later at night, when the pitter patter of little feet is done and the spouse is snoring ever so softly in the bedroom and every square foot of my kitchen (computer!) and living room (TV!) are mine, this was not a week I spent burning and yearning to write. My free time was spent in much more highly-evolved and banal ways.

Last week, my chief goal in life was apparently to enjoy being lazy. Checking email became an exercise in deleting everything non-essential-looking and hoping I could avoid reading the leftovers until I returned to the office. Time on Facebook suffered a similar fate, holding to a bare minimum of maintenance. A few movies. A few TV shows. A few New Yorkers. A heaping helping of time surfing around on iTunes, looking for the best uses of my $100+ of gift cards, finding stuff like the debut album from A Fine Frenzy and thinking it a pristine album for a listless and lazy and reminiscing soul.

But I didn't desire creativity.

Ironically, lots of bemusing ideas emerge from lying prone on a couch or reading the same Thomas the Tank Engine book for the 343rd time. But... what to write when maybe no one is reading? Who hops on blogs and reads them over the Christmas holidays? (The answer, I've learned, is many of the same loyal followers who do so during the school year. But even if that's true, it doesn't feel true after you've read the same Thomas the Tank Engine book for the 343rd time.)

This glut of mental inactivity left me, more often than not, feeling quite happy. Sure, at moments, I felt a little down, thinking that I sure should be making better damn use of such valuable free time. But for the most part, my mind felt very much like my body after that gluttonous Christmas meal. It felt stuffed, overfull, weighed down with yummy goodness. It needed exercise, but even getting off my mental couch required too much effort, and it's just easier to sit there and vegetate to another bowl game, a final episode of thirtysomething.

Is this happiness? This odd desire to do as little as possible, lest the waters of contentment be troubled, lest the ripples screw up my lightness of being? To better quote and dispute Bowie, maybe the stream of warm impermanence ain't so bad after all.

Isn't the message of the first chapter of Genesis that creation requires discontentment, a feeling and need for something more? Didn't God make the heavens and the earth because He wasn't quite satisfied with existing amidst nothingness? Nothing with which an omiscient and omnipotent being could meddle? No one to sing "How Great Thou Art"?

Happiness and laziness? Is there a difference?