roachboy

typing this is a type of procrastinating.

cleaning my apartment, which is another type of procrastination that i mention here in order to procrastinate some more, is a therapeutic form of procrastination in that it provides a convincing illusion of order and directedness that should indicate something about your mental state when procrastination becomes annoying, kinda how you want to be at that point, but it can and does frequently turn out that cleaning your apartment is actually just another form of procrastination, which you become aware of particularly when you notice that the clean apartment and your mental state do not line up----there is a whole region of time-consuming speculation that can be entered into as you try to figure out, for therapeutic reasons, why the therapeutic form of procrastination called cleaning your apartment did not have the desired effect---or rather why it is that, as you were cleaning the apartment, working on what you should be doing seemed a desired effect, but now that you are not cleaning the apartment any more, the effect that was then desired is somehow no longer a desired effect-----but now that you think about it, perhaps it never really was a desired effect----not really---or perhaps it was only a desired effect only when you weren't doing what you have to do----but now that you are nearer to doing what you have to do, it isn't so desirable----because you really dont want to do what you have to do for some reason---but this is a problem, because perhaps cleaning the apartment is not in fact a therapeutic exercise--but this is bad because if i dont clean my apartment, it just stays as it is when it is not clean---so perhaps what i am supposed to be doing is the procrastination device and cleaning the activity i really should be doing---either way, what is it about me that makes me so inclined to avoid doing what i have to do?--am i going to spent the rest of my life here, doing this?

and so yet another seam opens up and you can slide right along that as you can waste alot of time trying to figure out why what seemed like something that you were going to want to do in the abstract, that is before, when you weren't doing it, no longer seems like something that you want to do now. then there are the concerns that arise from cleaning the apartment and all its potential meanings, and while thinking about that one, and of the relation between that and your seeming inability to do what you have to do, and why it is that as you wonder about this relation, you get confused about which is the activity and which the procrastination....time can continue to pass and a state of affairs be reached in which you are not even able to procrastinate efficiently.


these problems multiply like gnats.
worse still, you can do this with any operation, real potential or imagined:
even the most innocuous activity can generate a vast network of problems and meta-problems.


that's why it's better to devote yourself to what you need to do.
it is simpler.

__________________
a gramophone its corrugated trumpet silver handle
spinning dog. such faithfulness it hear

it make you sick.

-kamau brathwaite