Spend all day playing

... and I thought I’d work on it a couple of hours at most and then go out to play in the sun. As it turns out, I got so into it that now it’s 6 hours later, and I’m starving and I still need to go play in the sun. But don’t let anybody tell me this wasn’t playing for the last 6 hours… :-)

That’s what my friend suggested when I told her I was doing some administrative stuff on the Fourth of July. But doing it while out and about still felt like just playing outside. When your office desk is a park bench, it is hard to think of what I’m doing as work….

... Unless there’s a deadline attached or something like that. I took the last two years’ weekly organizer sheets that I’ve meant to cull for names, notes, addresses and other miscellania that I write temporarily on there (meaning to transfer them somewhere more permenent at some point) and brought them with me on the bus on my way to lunch with a friend. It didn’t feel like work at all to transfer all that stuff. Just play.

...means that sometimes I work hours nonstop on the many minutiae that go with launching a book. The fact is that unless you have wide name recognition publishers do not invest in publicity and it falls on the author’s shoulders. And that’s where I am now: website design as the first step. Which is both engrossing (the way play isb and a lot of work… :-)

... and the fact of the matter is, rather than trying to play more, it’s about the attitude of playing: everything I do can take on that context, if I choose it consciously. Not having fun right now? Well, what can I do to go back to feeling like this is play?

Thus is erased the dichotomy of work vs. play. And thus might I reach the end of the day feeling not like I need to play more because I haven’t gotten around to doing so today, but feeling like thinking back on the day brings me a smile… and waking up tomorrow is filled with the expectation of more play…. all day long.

Not at a restaurant, although that’s occasionally nice too. Dinner at home. Several courses cooked by yours truly to accompany great conversation, good stories, interesting observations, tales that catch us up on each others’ lives. It’s a little work getting it set up, but it’s always a lot of fun and worth it.

Alas, after hours on the computer each day doing legitimate work, it’s hard to justify spending more hours in front of the computer playing games (and these, incidentally, are not the shoot-’em-up games… more like interactively told stories, with character depth, story arc, and plot twists). But, once in a blue moon, I’ll dig up some of the as-yet-unplayed ones and enjoy the world they take me into. It’s like a movie… except you get to decide where the action goes.

A guilty pleasure indulged these days far too little, alas, because it’s near impossible to find in the U.S. the kind of European graphic novels that I grew up with. If I could read French I’d import them (France and Belgium seem to be the maximum exponent of this art form, with the best illustrations—things that I look at for a long time, absorbing all the nuances)... but alas, I can barely make out 50% of what’s going on in French. But occasionally I find something that fits the bill, and there’s nothing like a cozy winter night reading a graphic novel.

It has nothing to do with writing poetry; it has everything to do with living it. The method: empty pockets. Comfortable clothes and shoes. No watch. No time limit. No destination. Leave the house, keep hands in pockets, go where I haven’t gone before, walk slowly.

Vacations to far, distant lands be damned – when I get into Poet Time, 2 hours of slow, silent walking turn into a delectable vacation.

Hey, why should kids have all the fun? I ride the carts at the supermarket, at Costco and at Ikea (usually while the kids stare at me like, “Wait! Is he allowed to do that?”) so why not spend hours and hours seeing what kinds of things they’ve come up with since I was a kid? (Um, physically. Because, as we’ve seen, mentally, I’m still there.)