TASK #15: HOOK, LINE AND SINKER
“Good judgment comes from experience, and experience comes from bad judgement”. Barry LaPatner
Every man works. They don’t necessarily work at a job, but they work, because even not working is a full time job. I had stretches when I couldn’t find work and I was basically sitting around the house or goofing around and that was as tedious as most jobs, and often worse if part of each day was getting bitched at by a mother, a girlfriend or wife, sometimes by all three in the same day.
Skip work. Play HOOKY! Do it because there is more to life than work. A LOT more.
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If you do work, you either have a career or you work somewhere til’ you quit, get fired or layed off, then you find something else.
And no matter what you do for money, whether you fry cook, change oil, paint, sweep floors, sell hardware, cut hair, or like some lucky bastards I read about who sit around all day and play video games like Call of Duty and look for flaws; no matter how exciting or mundane it is, no matter how much money you make, no matter if you love or hate what you do, there are two inconvertible facts: 1) you have a boss; and 2) there will come a morning when you wake up and say, “fuck, I don’t want to go to work today.”
But you’ll go anyway.
It happened to me recently. I woke up, stared up at the ceiling and said to myself, “I would rather drive to a random doctor’s office and beg for a colonoscopy than go into work.” Then I sighed and got up and started to get dressed.
But I didn’t go to work. I got in my car and pointed it in the direction of my job, but I took a left at the corner, not a right, and the next thing I knew I was standing in front of the public library. I like libraries. I’m not much of a reader, but I like to look at photographs, so I sat down with a big-ass coffee table sized book full of pictures taken in the 1930s by Ansel Adams, Walker Evans and Dorothea Lange, who was a remarkable photographer, evidenced by her portraits of Okie families trying to survive during the Depression.
Later I went to the mall and had lunch in the food court, then I drove to a Little League field and watched a game. Around 6pm I went home, had dinner with the wife and kids, and they didn’t ask how my day was, so I didn’t say anything, but it was great. And the next day I went back to work.
TASK
Skip work. Play HOOKY! Do it because there is more to life than work. A LOT more. What do you do when you’ve skipped? Anything that’s legal. I recommend going to a ballgame, or hang out at the mall, or play pool, or go to the movies, or sit in a coffee shop, or go to the beach, or hunt–you get the picture.
If you have a story to tell, or a comment to make, e-mail me at [email protected]
Photos: Pierre Lognoul and courtesy of the author