Meditations for Men Who Do Next to Nothing (and Would Like to Do Even Less)

by N. K. Peske

  Take a few moments to applaud the wonder of yourself. In fact, take a few hours. Hell, take a long weekend.

  Today is realization day for what I have not accomplished. Celebrations may be in order. Gimme a beer.

  PRESENTS

  A wise lover values not so much the gift of the lover as the love of the giver.

  Thomas à Kempis

  It was your anniversary. And you forgot. So you didn’t come home with a dozen long-stem roses. You didn’t say it with diamonds. Does this mean that you are a bad partner? Isn’t it enough that you simply came home? Isn’t your very presence enough evidence of your devotion? Doesn’t she know what a great catch you are?

  What we do with our lives is up to us, and the gift of sharing our destiny with our significant other is the finest present we men can offer. Recite these truths to yourself when she demands more than you can give, when she insists on going out to eat at a restaurant that doesn’t accept two-for-one coupons or traveling to a place that does not honor AAA discounts. Don’t let her attitude wound your generous inner spirit. All of us have resentments to work through. Just be patient. She’ll get over it.

  Help me to remember that I am God’s gift.

  FAILURE

  A man’s life is interesting primarily when he has failed—I well know.

  Georges Clemenceau

  When I read a passage like the one above, I am inspired. I just want to read it over and over again, to remind myself of how I sometimes suppress everything that is unique and special in myself in order to accomplish a goal. Usually I end up sick and sorry with effort, not realizing that everything I need is right here beside me: my cable guide, my remote control, and my family size bag of Doritos.

  This passage is beautiful testimony to the fruits of failure. Do you think successful guys have time to contemplate what is truly interesting in life, like which bar to hit tonight, who should be on the All-Madden team this year, or how to pick up that hot new babe in Purchasing? Of course not. They’re too busy working.

  Help me to remember that still waters run deep.

  FELLOWSHIP/AFFECTION

  Love and do what you will.

  St. Augustine

  It is impossible to watch the ball game and be intimate at the same time. It takes energy to be intimate, to express fellowship and affection, to do what is necessary to communicate with our mates. Being together is a lot of work.

  Surprisingly, our significant others don’t seem to understand this. They demand that we reach out, reach in, reach over, and reach through. Just the words alone are enough to exhaust us.

  We must explain to those we love that intimacy with another is not possible unless we have achieved intimacy with ourselves. This requires taking the time to rest, to contemplate, to reorganize our collection of athletic socks, or to put a sixth coat of Turtle Wax on the Mustang. In order to merge spiritually with my spouse, I must first become my own best friend. And so I must ask myself, what would my best friend do for me to express his devotion? Certainly tickets to the next pennant race would be a good start.

  Intimacy, like a hangover, begins at the ball park.

  PRODUCTIVITY/CREATIVITY

  We will sell no wine before its time.

  Ernest and Julio Gallo

  Many people believe that it is the workaholics in this world who are the most fruitful, the most productive, and the most creative. Not so! We Men Who Do Next to Nothing realized long ago that overextended deadlines and frantic, anxiety-ridden activity never produce anything of quality. True creativity, like most of the finer things in this world, must be allowed to age sufficiently, and we are experts at that.

  So the next time your mother asks you what you think you are doing sleeping your life away, or shrieks that you haven’t moved for a week and are stinking up the family room, or demands that you strap on your tool belt and complete that kitchen addition you began eighteen months ago, tell her that you are ripening, fermenting, and will get up only when you have reached your peak flavor. Otherwise, your vintage bouquet may be severely compromised. Men, like fine wine, require absolute stillness in dark cool rooms to achieve peak performance.

  Rome wasn’t built in a day, so why should your kitchen addition be any different?

  GRUDGES

  The only things one never regrets are one’s mistakes.

  Oscar Wilde

  Nurturing grudges seems to be the favorite pastime of some people. So you forgot to pick up your mother after her doctor’s appointment and she had to take three buses through the seediest neighborhood in town. She got home okay, so why dwell on it? What’s she gonna do, disinherit you?

  And so you forgot to tell your wife about the night crawlers you were storing in the empty dip container until she tried to serve it at her Lamaze class get-together. It’s not all that different from sushi, so what’s the big deal? Pregnant women are always throwing up anyway. Or perhaps you left the “Dear Fuck-face” salutation in your most recent report to the stockholders. Computer glitches happen all the time.

  When faced with the consequences of your actions or inactions you can hold on to the pain, the shame, and the blame, or you can utter the magic words I’m sorry and move on. Recognize that grudges serve no purpose, and those who hold them are simply victims of their own inability to chill out. What a shame! Thank goodness we aren’t stuck in a victim mentality.

  Forgiveness is a gift you give yourself.

  CIVILIZED BEHAVIOR

  Labor is the curse of the world, and nobody can meddle with it without becoming proportionately brutified.

  Nathaniel Hawthorne

  Has civilization really progressed? Our prehistoric ancestors risked their lives hunting to provide food for the clan. Today, we risk the L.A. freeways at rush hour. The ancient tribes of Europe, Asia, and Africa slaughtered each other to secure their enemies’ land and resources for themselves. Today, we park in loading zones and Handicapped Only spaces to get a jump on anybody else who was thinking of buying a few cases of antifreeze at the Walgreens dollar day sale.

  It seems we are still engaged in a ruthless, barbarous struggle to increase our riches and engine temperature at the expense of our fellow beings. Wouldn’t it be more civilized to avoid contributing to those bad vibes on the freeway and just sleep in today? And if parking is a problem, send your little sister on her bike to pick up your lottery tickets and Alka-Seltzer. Park yourself on the porch, where you can’t do any harm.

  If it’s here today, it’ll be here tomorrow, so what’s your hurry?

  IDENTITY

  I do not know myself, and God forbid that I should.

  Johann Wolfgang von Goethe

  As men, we have been conditioned to define ourselves in relation to the outside world. We have been conditioned to identify ourselves in terms of what we do rather than what we are. No wonder we feel pressured to do something beyond moving our bowels on a regular basis.

  An important part of recovery is finding out who we really are, beyond what others expect of us, beyond what we do, beyond what we earn.

  Who is this person I call me? Am I the guy who schlepps to the office every morning to sell the gadgets that mechanically screw the tops onto tubes of toothpaste, or am I a secret agent in a red Alfa-Romeo with a Rolex watch and a beautiful blonde on each arm? Maybe I’m a lead guitarist for a heavy metal band, in a red Alfa-Romeo with a Rolex watch and a beautiful blonde on each arm. I mean, maybe I’m not, but the possibilities are certainly worth considering. Besides, self-discovery is a lot more fun than working.

  Today, I will begin an inner journey of self-discovery that, with any luck, will last the rest of my life, or at least until happy hour.

  HUMOR

  What’s a perfect ten?

  A three-foot-tall girl with no teeth and a flat head so you can put your beer down.

  Ricardo Panadero

  I love jokes like the one above. They have such a refreshing way of cutting right through to the meat of things.

  How o
ften have we had whimsical, youthful thoughts yet have prevented ourselves from enjoying them because we are in mixed company. We think of a funny but do not share it because we are repressed. People curl their lips at us and hiss that we are politically incorrect. This is of course infinitely preferable to having a martini thrown in our faces, but it still can be embarrassing at a get-together.

  What people, especially the people our girlfriends invite to cocktail parties, have forgotten is that to be male is to be politically incorrect. It’s a package deal. We come naturally by a mischievous, boyish sense of fun. We should not be shamed into swallowing our punch lines. Which reminds me of the one about the sword swallower and the stallion.

  Why can’t everybody lighten up?

  F—’em if they can’t take a joke.

  LIVING LIFE FULLY

  He who draws upon his own resources easily comes to the end of his wealth.

  William Hazlitt

  We can get so obsessed with possessing things that we often find ourselves being possessed rather than possessing the trappings of a successful life. We can get so caught up in the need to own things—a house; a laser disc player; a thirty-inch, high-resolution television; a self-sharpening combination band saw and electric sander; a portable CD player with a belt attachment—that we end up slaves to our definitions of success.

  We need to teach ourselves and our girlfriends that men are like pigeons. All pigeons do is hang around in parks all day, yet have you ever seen a skinny one? No? And why? Because they are free to live off other people’s crumbs, other people’s possessions, and therefore have no need to acquire their own, with the exception, of course, of the laser disc player, which, pigeons or not, I’m buying first thing next week.

  Am I content to fully appreciate what I do not possess? I think so. Although if I get the laser disc player, I guess I’ll have to go ahead and get some laser discs. And my speakers are shot. What good is a laser disc player without good speakers? And my receiver really rots. What I really need is a whole new setup.

  GOALS

  Let’s face it, the first tours the Beatles did, the main essential thing was scoring chicks.

  Paul McCartney

  In trying to reach our goals, we can develop tunnel vision. We visualize the end of our efforts and become obsessed with the finish line or the bottom line. We forget that the real reward comes when we remove all lines from our lives and just concentrate on the bottoms, in every sense of the word.

  When we rush, rush, rush, we can forget that true enjoyment comes from the process. We overlook the violets along the path. We forget about the position that guy in the locker room was describing. Where was her left leg supposed to go again?

  In a perfect world, there would be no finish lines and all women would be double-jointed.

  DECISION MAKING

  When a man hasn’t a good reason for doing a thing, he has a good reason for letting it alone.

  Sir Walter Scott

  How often as Men Who Do Next to Nothing do we feel ourselves pressured to hurry up and make a decision, like which brand of garden weasel to buy or what to do with our lives?

  Of course the problem is once we make those decisions, we come under pressure to act on them. Once we go ahead and buy our weasel of preference, we may actually have to weed. Once we decide what to do with our lives, the implication is that we go ahead and do it.

  Isn’t it much easier to avoid making any decisions in the first place? Isn’t it healthier to avoid asking leading questions of ourselves or, in fact, asking any questions at all, of anybody, at any time? If we avoid thinking about the issues in our lives, we stay clear of the activity danger zone.

  If an issue falls in the forest and I’m not there to hear it, does it exist? Who cares? I hate hiking.

  QUIET TIME

  Edith, stifle!

  Archie Bunker

  Every day we are bombarded by renegade channels assaulting our own personal networks. We’re distracted by traffic, the neighbors, our girlfriends, the neighbors’ girlfriends. And everybody wants to discuss something just when your favorite shows are coming on. Your wife wants to talk about your relationship, your boss wants to discuss the ten grand missing from the Anderson account. Why can’t they wait until a more convenient time, like the next Ice Age, for example?

  We even have difficulty sleeping because we’re constantly interrupted by clients calling during business hours.

  We have to tune out the complaints, the ultimatums, and the threats of violence or legal action and tune in to ourselves. After all, we’ve got the best fall lineup going.

  Quiet time lets me star in my own life.

  WISDOM/KNOWLEDGE

  Tomorrow a stranger will say with masterly good sense precisely what we have thought and felt all the time.

  Ralph Waldo Emerson

  Oh, how we underestimate our own wisdom. Then that stranger comes by and reminds us of what we knew all along but temporarily forgot because, of course, short-term memory loss is an unavoidable part of living.

  Of course we understand those new memo-routing procedures at work. We understand the president’s new economic plan. We knew you’re not supposed to put aluminum foil in the microwave.

  Deep down, we know. We know that we know, even though we forgot. That tax advice our friend gave us, you know, that bit about mailing your return before April 15? We knew that. That suggestion Dad gave us about approaching the boss with a smile and a handshake instead of an automatic weapon? We knew that. The stuff that professor at Joe’s party was saying about quantum physics and its relationship to time and matter in a spatial universe? We knew that, too. We just need a little memory jog now and again.

  Buried deep in my subconscious lie the answers to life’s greatest questions. Anybody got a shovel?

  FAMILY

  Get away from me, kid, you bother me.

  W. C. Fields

  Years ago, Mom and Pop, Grandma and Grandpa, and all the little children gathered together in front of the radio to laugh with Jack Benny or Uncle Milty, to wonder wide-eyed how the Shadow always knew or who that masked man really was.

  But now with a television in every room, urban alienation, and the ability to put physical and emotional miles between families and their offspring, the parlor of yesteryear is considerably quieter. Thank God.

  But we can still share quality time with the little kiddies. If they want to watch Three’s Company and then see the Giants take on Phoenix, they can hang out, as long as they keep quiet and bring their own bag of Chee-tos. I mean, that’s life, right? They’re gonna have to learn eventually that they don’t get to call the channels when there is someone bigger than them holding the remote control, and they better come equipped to provide for their own nourishment. These are invaluable lessons of modern life that I am duty bound to impart to my kids.

  Football is a metaphor for life.

  HOPES AND DREAMS

  Hope is independent of the apparatus of logic.

  Norman Cousins

  As boys, we had high hopes for the future. As men we are told that the future is now, so we better forget about that Stratocaster we’ve always wanted or those vintage Spiderman comic books and start locking in interest rates on long-term CDs.

  Now this really enrages my inner child. I was really getting close to buying that guitar. It’s electric purple, with orange flames climbing up the neck. The guy told me Jimi Hendrix once sat on that guitar because somebody had left it lying on a chair, and Jimi just sat on it because he was so distracted because he was right at that moment mentally composing “Purple Haze.” See, the song was originally called “Purple Bass,” on account of he was sitting on my guitar, but the record company made him change it on the LP.

  When you think of it, it’s really an investment. A guitar like that is bound to go up more than 2.3 percent compounded monthly.

  To hell with the future, I want my guitar.

  SELF-AWARENESS

  Any desire for self-improvement
is petty.

  J. Krishnamurti

  In the race to get ahead, get better, get successful, we risk the danger of not appreciating fully the things that truly make life worth living, like lunch or dinner. In fact, working, rushing around, leaves us little time to be fully conscious of what our bodies are telling us, which is usually one of three things: I’m hungry, I’m thirsty, or I’m in the mood.

  The work world would have us think of our bodies as nonexistent, but what could be more important? Who would work when he could drink instead, or eat, or excrete? Doesn’t the ultimate appreciation of life reside in our bodies? Isn’t it a crime against nature to turn a deaf ear to the most basic demands of our physical selves?

  I better take the time to listen and respond to my body’s demands. It’s the only fun I’m going to get out of life.

  CURIOSITY/TAKING IT TO THE LIMIT

  Curiosity is one of the permanent and certain characteristics of a vigorous intellect.