I could procrastinate for Australia at the Olympics, they just have to officially declare it a sport. I have been in training all my life, and I’d hate to give up all those hard-earned (well…) hours of not doing what I should have been doing. I read somewhere (when I was meant to be shampooing the cat) that to attain true expert-level skill at anything you have to put in at least 10,000 hours. I procrastinated at least 10K hours in my final year of high school alone, which is maybe why I did the year twice — oh, and that thoughtfully-timed four month European vacation my parents forced me to join — it may also explain my solid 45% in Chemistry. Anyway, memorising the Periodic Table has been useful exactly zero times since I was seventeen, so that proves I was right all along. Some truths ARE self-evident.
The point is, I am easily distracted from the stuff I know I should be doing. Cat videos, upcoming shorts for sci-fi movies, quirky news articles, camping gear I don’t need, cat videos… Only last week I was forging ahead with the first edit of my second novel when **BAM!** off on a tangent about a fleet of ghost-ships found drifting in the Sea of Japan filled with partially skeletonised corpses, some missing their heads, and with one of the ships having only six skulls onboard! I’d barely got over that thrilling shock, when **BAM!** I read about the instructor whose free yoga classes for disabled university students was cancelled due to “oppression, cultural genocide and diasporas due to colonialism and Western supremacy” unquote. I could still taste bile in my throat, and had barely choked back the rage, when **BAM!** Kylie Jenner dumps Tyga because he’s been messaging Blac Chyna on the sly! Thought my world was going to end. I was good for nothing except a tearful tweet to Kylie and a quick but quality Fb rant against that cheating BASTARD! I’m not even gonna link to it, it’s still too raw.
If somebody spends ten thousand hours learning to whittle the sprightly denizens of the woodland realm out of a block of stupid wood, society calls it art — not a waste of bloody time, so it seems strange that I feel bad every time I segue from my planned activity to an unplanned activity. I’m still being active, aren’t I? And maybe in the tortuous folds of a lurid Hollywood romance I will find inspiration for a current or future character? So if I ever write about a guy with a head like a tattooed scrotum who fell in love with a surgically-enhanced 14 year old yoga instructor and chartered a romantic cruise only to be boarded by the undead crew of a drifting 14th century Chinese pirate ship, you will know exactly what has happened.
Even the crazy shit is just grist for the mill.
