My Life [Revision] – Part 7: Leisure

Note the First: I have concluded the ‘standard’ autobiographical sketch with the seven previously posted entries. I am now entering a period of expansion and revision. While these additions maybe anecdotally interesting they are not as fundamentally informative as those parts which have come before. Those interested in reading the entire document as it stands in the proper order may do so here.

Note the Second: This section is inserted as ‘Part 7’ and Family is bumped down to Part 8. This was done to leave the conclusion intact with our tragic figure properly placed at the end as well as maintain the semblance of a proper summary at the end of the text.

Psychological profiles will tell you a few things about only-children. They tend not to get along well with others; they’re often self-centered and have difficulty sharing attention. One thing they can do better than any of their birth-order counterparts, however, is entertain themselves. In part 7 I will indulge myself a bit and discuss some of the varied ways I which I’ve entertained myself over the years.

As a young child I was fascinated by everything. I raced home behind my mother from the cigar factory with pockets filled with rocks, bits of metal and… well, holes. When other kids my age hardly knew what a molecule was I was absolutely fascinated by the way the somehow managed to line up with such mechanical regularity in the bit of calcite I’d found along the railroad tracks. I spent many a long hour walking along those tracks picking up bits of coal, fossils and other debris. Every time I looked up and followed those long, parallel tracks to their vanishing point I wondered what it would be like to keep walking until I too vanished.

At some unrecorded point I determined on my weekends in the country that my grandparents were deep sleepers and found that after they went to bed at 8 I once again had free reign of the world. I recall one summer evening I crept out the back door and into the night. Fearing the worst, I came back in after only a minute or two wondering if they’d heard the door or the floor creak or some other telltale sign. As the nights went on I grew more bold until I was spending whole nights outside with the heavens wheeling above me in utter solitude. You have not seen the stars until you’ve seen them far from the city lights. You have not tasted true freedom until you’ve walked on a dark and lonely road miles from the next wakeful soul. But there is no fear like the fear you build inside yourself on that road as you sprint home as fast as your legs can carry you. There is no regret like that you feel when you realize that your reprieve is only two days long and that soon you’ll be back in your 10x12 room.

When at home with my parents, my leisure was built from a pile of books. When other children read 10 books in a school semester I read hundreds. I was studious out of necessity. With no television or playmates what else could I do but read from the time I came home until the time I went to bed? I recall other attempts at diversion; I tried to watch my dad paint or work in the garage. Everything he did was fascinating to me but he didn’t want to be watched. It made him nervous to be so closely hounded. My mother was a non-issue. She did nothing worth watching and wouldn’t have tolerated my presence anyway. That left just me and the library and oh the times we had.

After my parents divorced and the reins of control were relaxed a bit my leisure interests diversified. I made a brief stab at drawing and an even briefer stab at painting. My artistic muse seems to be somewhat permanently asleep in the visual realms. One thing I did discover was the power of the local ‘antique’ shop. This dusty place had shelves upon shelves of ancient textbooks for $1 and among those tomes of wisdom I discovered some mathematics and language texts. I managed to teach myself calculus in high school (my high school didn’t offer it) and I’ve been learning Latin at the rate of about 2 words per year ever since. I often think that I would have made a great scholar except for one damnably evil purchase I made almost 20 years ago.

I’d saved up $90. In 1987 that was a lot of money to me and contrary to my grandparent’s advice I spent it all in one place. Twenty years ago I marched into Radio Shack with my $90 in hand and bought a Color Computer II. For all intents and purposes this was a keyboard that attached to a TV but it had 64K of RAM (only 1/8000^th of what my computer has now) and it knew how to take instructions. I spent the next three years of my life programming on that thing, cursing the tape-drive when it failed to save and generally losing my grip on every other thing going on in my life. This loss of control and temporary obsession with a single occupation, we will find, is my life’s leitmotif.

When I went to college the Color Computer II found its way to the bottom of the dust bin and was replaced in short order by a 386. It was in this machine that my academic fate in college was truly sealed. This white, rectangular Satan along with Sid Meier and his pixilated demons ravaged my ability even to attend class. Long stretches of my life were utterly annihilated in days of Civilization, online chat rooms and delivered pizzas. The obsession did not abate until Purdue’s polite request to leave left me with no convenient place in which to plug in my computer. By the time I came back, the demon had spent his fury and I was once again free to carry on with my life.

But nature abhors a vacuum and she filled the one left by computer games one summer day as I was working at Value City on summer vacation. The store had clearanced a large bag of football trading cards. Totally ignorant of the hobby I bought them thinking that surely a huge bag of cards must be worth something more than the few dollars they were asking. That first bag amounted to about 400 cards and cost about $10; eight years later in 2005 I had almost 250,000 cards of all sorts and had ‘recycled’ tens of thousands of dollars by selling cards and then buying new ones with the proceeds. In retrospect, I sold eight years of my life in exchange for the pursuit of greed. I honestly believed that I could somehow grow a business from that $10 investment, a business large enough to actually support myself and my family. You can still see the echoes of my dream on the internet; just do a search for “Common Man’s Cards” on groups.google.com.

Late in 2005, I sold the whole lot for a few thousand dollars. In the end, I had worked a ludicrously long time on this ‘business.’ I estimate 8,000 hours of my life went down the crapper and in the end I probably broke even. For eight years I had to trudge upstairs and ‘fill the card orders’ rather than just relaxing or reading a book or learning a new language. Everything in my life took a back seat to this ludicrous pursuit. Despite the ostensible wasted eight years, I think that time taught me how to enjoy my leisure and how to differentiate between a ‘good dream’ and a ‘stupid and selfish dream.’ I wonder if everyone learns this lesson at such great expense.

Since the sale of the trading card ‘business’ I’ve finally managed to get back to some of the less obviously rewarding pursuits in my life. The reading list has been coming along nicely and I’ve taken up woodworking in the hopes of making something my children can hand down to their children (photos in the photos area). Further, and most obviously, I’ve had time to write. Hopefully all this will be significantly more meaningful than any number of idiot baseball cards I could have sold on the internet.

Currently Reading: “Typhoon and other Tales”, Joseph Conrad [160/220]

Periodic Robism: The more technologically advanced a device is the more susceptible it is to primitive attack.