It’s the entire horn section of the once great Chickasaw Falls marching band outside playing the collected works of Miles Davis’s hapless widow (who, claiming to be possessed by the spirit of her late husband, refused to stop composing polka choruses until she dropped dead twelve long days after Davis’s own tragic death). It’s that at nine in the morning on a sad Tuesday in Brooklyn.

When a friend comes to town for only a short time and you don’t have a real career and you don’t have kids, you put your life on hold until they leave. If your friend is at all interested in your life, you have some time to think about the damn thing with a little more perspective than usual.

Well, such a thing has happened to me these last two days. It is interesting that an entire life can seem so fraught with things to do and then one can decide to stop doing those things and experience no immediate consequences. I remember one time my little brother brought me an Xbox to play with and I put everything on hold (and, as I was planning a wedding and working two jobs there was a lot to put on hold) and even skipped meals and personal hygiene whenever I could (whenever my wife wouldn’t notice) to play that damn game. There was minor backlash after two weeks of being absorbed in that alternative reality, but not as much as i had imagined.

It makes me wonder if the stress I put on myself to “be productive” in day to day life is justified, healthy, or useful. I guess that depends on your definition of useful, and for me I guess I am still too immature to stop taking things to their philosophical nadir, and so my definition of useful is anything that makes me feel good right now (since we could die any second and even if we don’t the universe is expanding in all directions at once so anyway we are getting less and less prominent in the world and to begin with we weren’t even at the level of ants on a galactic leaf).