I get antsy. I start pacing around and trying on different seats and fiddling with objects of varying sanitaryness. I can’t help shake the feeling that I am spending three+ hours of my life watching unusually large men in tight clothing give each other concussions. But I also can’t look away.
So when I heard of this project – a guy counting to infinity on a canvas – I felt like I got hit in the mouth by a lineman.
Why didn’t I think of that? This makes me so jealous. It requires only minimal hand-eye coordination and almost no thought, and yet given a free hand and enough investment (like, ahem, Sunday afternoons of NFL football) it turns into something completely awesome.
This would have soothed all of my in-game anxieties because, for one, what could be more meditative than counting to infinity?, and for another, with the amount of hours that I have dumped into sport spectating, I could have my “work” featured in several museums by now. Ironically, counting to infinity on a canvas somehow feels much less absurd than spending my Sunday afternoons watching 350 pound nose tackles employ the swim move. But the wonderful thing is that I can do both at the same time!
I can’t do the counting thing, however, because that’s already been done. Damn it.
I need something like it. Something meditative. Something that requires almost no skill or attention. Something that has no end point but that keeps getting better with time. Something so awesome that people will think highly enough of me to want to buy my poop.
I considered, briefly, knitting. I dunno, maybe I could knit to infinity or something. But I thought better of it when I realized that no one would want to buy a knitter’s poop.
Eventually I arrived at a solution that satisfies me: I am going to non-judgmentally write whatever strange word or phrase or sound floats to the surface of my mess of a brain.
The results, so far, have been pretty interesting. I suggest you try it. Just open up your favorite word processor and start transcribing as best as you can the noise in your mind.
Here is what my brain burped up after 14 minutes:
Theo Epstein; thigh bones; pendulums; navbars; countercyclical assets; skeeter bites; fingernail dandruff; cortico winslett; junebegga; Na’il Diggs; scuppernong, or however that grape is spelled; baritone silhouettes; McAfee defense systems; white peaks; apple turnover; contemplated barley; Didion’s first symphony orchestra; cheap gadgetry; Brunswick Green pool tables; ciabata; Kanti; steno pad; dirkshire; comfitz; kraun; süble; ingracious; capitalization; spectacles; hectares of landfront; slashdots and serif font; Farm Bureau golden rod; Victory Jones automobiles; capital makers’ earsets; filings and paperworks; Nash Coliseum; first generation golddiggers; paintstrokes, condensed; rectums in the wall; peg meet hole; goblins and fairytales; Gene Gupshaw; castration; nincompoop; flabberjack; the meaning of a frog-like existence; comupetance; Boj (pronounced bowdge); Jack Crenshaw; Burt Calloway; I feel like I’m naming 1950’s NFL/AFL players that may or may not have existed; pencil sharpeners; flowbrains; council of Coolidge; nevermore hereafter; countenance; troublesome flowerbuckets; nabbed in the buttsack; that one just made me laugh a little; tart weenies; pilfered oats; trendsetting sportswear; I should stop now.
A little weird, I know, but also kind of amusing. If I did this for three+ hours every Sunday afternoon, I might end up with a collection of stuff so large and so bizarre that some PhD student in Psychology might want to use it as a case study for her dissertation, which is almost as good as someone wanting to buy my poop.
Let me know if you have better ideas I can steal.
