Downtime

I read somewhere this morning that wireless devices result in too little downtime for our brains.

Somewhere. I say somewhere. On the crapper on my laptop is where.

The human brain, according to my research, (brain taken here to mean the whole shebang, heart, soul etc) does need downtime. Staring into space time.

Best is actual staring into space, except for the falling asleep on the picnic table while falling stars light up the sky above you part. Second best is walking. Driving isn’t bad but you might be someone who prefers to concentrate while driving.

Meditating is good, but that’s already getting a little too organized for me.

As if I knew.

Some people are better at embracing downtime than others. The others call those who are good at it “lazy” and yell at them for not helping with the housework, according to a recent study I performed last night.

Downtime.

There is a German word, Muße, or Musse if your monitor can’t handle the double-S character that looks like a B, that is translated as leisure but has, for me, a far more delicious nuance of just goofing off, walking around, staring into space from a hammock, aimlessly doing nothing, whereas leisure is scheduled and organized and ambitious unless you are talking about a person of leisure or something.

Who would have thought there was such a word in the German language?

And yet, there it is.

Muße.

Muzzle

One held the other one to the gouged wooden floor. It smelled of sawdust and stale beer, chewing tobacco  that had missed the spittoon, spicy chili con carne, bacon and eggs, but also… hang on, it’s almost lunch time. One just held the other one to the gouged wooden floor. “You, what, you want me to just lay it out for you? Tell you the way it is? You want me to be your daddy? You looking for a daddy, is that it? Is that it? I’m supposed to just spell it out for you?” Adrenalin made the first one repeat everything. He pressed the muzzle of a… of a what? WTF is a muzzle anyway? Does only a shotgun have a muzzle, or is it the business end of any gun? If he turns the skull of the second one a little and presses the muzzle of a Saturday Night Special against something, a temple or an eyeball or something, will gun buffs laugh? Would he press the barrel of a Saturday Night Special against the whatever-bone, or the muzzle? If he presses the barrel, does that mean he’s pressing the gun sideways and aiming it somewhere else? All the online dictionaries say “business end of a firearm”, but what do they know? And you can’t just whip out a shotgun, whip, like that, when you’re holding someone or some… some thing to the floor in a place where the floor smells like sawdust and whiskey and the other stuff. The first one turned the second one’s head to face him and, still holding it to the floor, pressed the muzzle of a Weimaraner to his eyeball.

“Answer me, you varmint,” he growled (he pronounced it varmit). “This thing has a hair trigger.”

There was a stage, and upon the stage a band, and the drummer struck a rim-shot on his snare-drum.

“I was holding a sleeping kitten,” the second one said. “It was twitching and making odd noises so I rolled it over, and noticed it had a boner, conical and red. I felt sorry for it, it reminded me of me somehow,  although I harbored exactly zero curiosity pertaining to the content of its dreams. All I could think was, you’re getting fixed tomorrow, enjoy it while it lasts. So, hell, no I don’t need you to spell anything out. Where the hell did that come from, anyway?”

“Beats me,” said the first one, holstering his Weimaraner, and leaning back against the bar. “Insomnia is a harsh mistress.”