Sitting in my apartment, drinking coffee and smoking a cigarette with the minimum required clothing on, listening to a cool covers project, on the Friday morning of a latterly-weighted long weekend, with nothing more important to do today than grab a Cuban sandwich with one of the latches and hit the lanes in Vanier tonight sounds pretty relaxing right?
And it is, believe me, except that the dump truck-sized pile of maroon Turkish coffee that I crammed into my stove top espresso maker half an hour ago has got me buzzing real hard. Trivial mention perhaps, but this post and the topic it is concerned with, the dreaded, high-blood pressure inducing pains of procrastination, is intrinsically tied to God's Crack-Cocaine, Colombia's other national export, the only reason the Roman empire lasted as long as it did, coffee.
Sorry, in my heightened state of alertness from this reddish-brown magic I just had to water all my plants and rearrange them to take advantage of the fengshui and optimum UV ray coverage. Back on track and on topic, procrastination is a bitch. It has already caused me three medium-intensity heart attacks right smack in the middle of the university library, people crowded around me as the paramedic attempts to subdue me with leather straps so that he can administer the defibrillator, while I'm on the ground on my back, the keyboard clenched in my right hand while I type furiously with my left at 110 w/m, valiantly attempting (and eventually succeeding) to complete a 5000 word paper on Soviet-Cuban economic and political relations pre- and post-perestroika, which I eventually hand off to someone while being carried away on a gurney to submit for me to the class I am already twenty minutes late for by paying them off with cigarettes.
The mere fact that this has happened on more than one occasion is cause for concern. That amount of stress and adrenaline is not healthy for anyone, except maybe a championship boxer, but that doesn't stop me from doing it again and again, every single time I have been given a deadline for anything. It's one of those things, which at the time of caffeine and adrenaline induced clarity, is the creation of a beautifully crafted and wholly eloquent essay on whatever the topic may be, but that afterwards, weeks later once the paper is returned with the inevitable 79.8% mark and "well written but could have used more editing/research" commentary, that one pauses to remember the creation itself, and the only thing that is recollected is the ten minute cigarette intervals, constantly bouncing knee under the keyboard, jittery head turns back and forth, wondering if anyone else in the library at all of those computers around you is noticing all of these suspicious actions and may actually believe that you are in fact a crazy person.
I have now completely forgot what in the fuck I was writing about, so I will drop some knowledge on you all from one of the literary world's most successful habitual procrastinators, Hunter S. Thompson:
...it might easily be something as simple & basically perverse as whatever instinct it is that causes a jackrabbit to wait until the last possible second to dart across the road in front of a speeding car. People who claim to know jackrabbits will tell you they are primarily motivated by Fear, Stupidity, and Craziness. But I have spent enough time in jackrabbit country to know that most of them lead pretty dull lives; they are bored with their daily routines: eat, fuck, sleep, hop around a bush now and then... No wonder some of them drift over the line into cheap thrills once in a while; there has to be a powerful adrenalin rush in crouching by the side of a road, waiting for the next set of headlights to come along, then streaking out of the bushes with split-second timing and making it across to the other side just inches in front of the speeding front wheels.
From Fear and Loathing on the Campaign Trail '72
Who knew.
It's one of those things, which at the time of caffeine and adrenaline induced clarity, is the creation of a beautifully crafted and wholly eloquent essay on whatever the topic may be, but that afterwards, weeks later once the paper is returned with the inevitable 79.8% mark and "well written but could have used more editing/research" commentary, that one pauses to remember the creation itself, and the only thing that is recollected is the ten minute cigarette intervals, constantly bouncing knee under the keyboard, jittery head turns back and forth, wondering if anyone else in the library at all of those computers around you is noticing all of these suspicious actions and may actually believe that you are in fact a crazy person.
ReplyDeleteThis sentence really put my hangover to the test.
Long Orating Latch is what that is.
ReplyDelete