lofty loftlessness

"Oh," he said, surprised, tying his bathrobe in the doorway of my office,  "I always expect you're in here doing something lofty."

Yes, the sad truth is that lately, even when I get up at my Fuck Yeah Early-Early Wake-Up Time -- at which I have not been consistent, more often than not sleeping through that alarm, if truth be told -- there is at least some interval of time when I could be writing or reading or doing something productive, when I am instead lost in the mindless pursuit of Solitaire Blitz.

I have, indeed,  lost some loft.  In fact, I've grown rather loftless.

I'm not proud of it, but those are the facts.

I picked up this Solitaire habit on the Lost Weekend and have been steadily indulging in it, sometimes not for a few days, but then fifteen minutes here, thirty minutes there.  At first I would play just because it was new and fresh and reminded me of that great weekend.  Then, I found it relaxes me in a weird way, allows me to be mentally engaged in something but not really thinking.

It gives my brain a little break.

It's my weed or my vodka or my shows or my pills or my [insert brain-numbing substance of your choice].  I'm fully conscious that I've been using the Solitaire, and I'm fully conscious that I could have gotten through this recent bleak period without it.  Then again, I tell myself at least I never used the Solitaire while at work, though I could see it as an option on my screen, there in the left column of Facebook, behind the endless spreadsheets and email messages and requests for budgets and reports.   [I can't say the same for the valium, if I'm being totally honest.  There might have been a day or two in that bleak period where I swallowed half a tab with my morning coffee just to steel myself for the day's debacles.]

I know, I know: SO fucked up, right? But I did what I had to do to get through it.

Now that I'm out the other side, now that vacation from job has officially begun, my loft is returning. I'm fluffing back out into shape, re-hydrating, re-inflating, resuming my normal physical form.  Oh yeah, it's coming back.  Feels good.

So I probably won't need the shut-down valve that the Solitaire has been providing, this way of letting the concerns of the day and the To Do list fade away and just having a moment to catch my breath.  

Oh yeah, wait: that's what yoga is for.  

And now that I'm back to yoga, sure, I can get all that let-go and breath in other, better-for-me ways.

But still, even though I may be using it differently, I'm not likely to give up the Solitaire completely  While I know I am unlikely to ever beat Sarah's score since she's a freakin' game-savant, I'm still gunning for Marianne, wanting to match or better her on the scoreboard. That keeps me going.  And it's fun.

I've always loathed the either/or: you either love tv or you love books, you're either a Philistine or a Serious Person, you're either creative or a number-cruncher, you're either fashionable or you're smart. 

I choose both.  

For now, I am considering the time spent playing Solitaire Blitz as its own kind of lofty, letting my brain off its tight leash and letting it roam about, unwatched, while my eyes are fixed elsewhere, learning how to do, essentially, nothing.  This is working for me, to have these periods of mental idleness, like fallowness, running my little programs quietly in the background.  

So if you show up in the doorway of my office unannounced, in your robe or whatever, yeah, you may be surprised to find me, not with my nose in a book or scribbling, but clicking through cards on my screen.  It may look stupid to you, like a waste of time, but that's OK: I know it's working for me right now, helping me puff back up to my full-on lofty self, Solitaire and all.

XX