A WASTE OF TIME
by David Eide .

It is difficult to ascertain just exactly what is meant by a “waste of time.” I’m sure it’s is a great sin. If you are sitting quietly reading a book in a nice park and someone accuses you of “wasting time,” does he mean you are a bad person or are contributing to the entropy of the universe or that book reading is not a legitimate activity? I would gladly go to a nice clean park and read a book all afternoon if that book leads me to my better self or shows me something I didn’t know. I would think the best waste of time fills the mind with wonder and pleasure. So that as we sit in the kind park, ass down firmly with a warm wind zipping through the sparse trees, we are, too, somewhere else. Our minds want release.

Is childhood wasted by its innocence and laughter?

Are the student days wasted by its pranks and intoxications?

When a young man dreams of a better world is it a waste?

When a mind takes on the world to solve it is it a waste?

When the man surrenders to the basic feelings of affection is he wasting his time?

When a man admires a beautiful object for days on end does he waste his time?

And who is to say for certain?

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It is odd the way we treat ourselves. We are our best lovers but our worst enemy as well. The enemy and the lover fight for supremacy but no one really wins. There is an exhausted heap at the end of it.

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Each day present its opportunity to be vital and active in the pursuit of freedom. That is, unless you are wasting your time. There are segments that you look back on and wish you had been wiser but regardless. My concern is to carry the best seeds forward, to critique when the necessity arises, to reject the violence of the day; to reject the propaganda and nonsense of the day. This is called the sin of applying the anti-matter to these things by selflessly reading a book in the wonderful park as a beautiful act of freedom and time wastage.

I suppose it’s a waste of time to have a general concern for the United States, the world, and what little culture ekes out of the awful mess. I have a general concern for the free-market, democratic, technological sector of the globe. I have a general concern for the non-market, oppressed, low-tech sector of the globe. Why not make the concern the globe itself? I have a general concern for the region I inhabit; California and the northern portion in particular. It is as fine a place to waste time as any on the globe.

But, my most prominent waste of time is always development of my efforts and the godawful prospect of bringing the efforts forward in the marketplace.

I had to get out of the isolation mode and re-discover some lines that had been lost. I was between distinctive time-wastes at the time but I managed to hold onto lines I found.

The purpose is to produce thought and imaginative constructions on the compelling concerns of truth. I muse like that when I want to sin and waste time. There are pressures without question. There are pressures from the peer group, pressures from the adult group, pressures from the spirits who you admire. They all remind you of time, wasting away until there’s not a drop of it left.

An example of a great waste of time: Laugh at the foolishness of others who thought they were clever and could manipulate a nature such as mine.

It just appears the most ironic thing to me that the elders are wasting their time by expressing the same types of fears that I had when young and fairly paranoid. That is, the civilization is falling completely apart, the US is headed down the dumper because of the lack of respect, drug use and other laxities.

In other words, the young and the old meet in that strange nexus called powerlessness, the greatest time waster of them all. The mainstream whirs down and away from the powerless and so they secretly wish its destruction. So much chopped wood in the culture to throw on the fire. An excellent waste of time!

No simple mind can comprehend the nature of the civilization. Not without wasting gobs of time. Nonetheless, a person must be committed to those things that increase the ability of the civilization to construct, to imagine, think and so forth. And this is reducible to human attributes and their use. In other words, the creative waste of time that edges out from the category of sin and hovers above everything for the hell of it.

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1979

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