“The Fine Print”, by Michael Schrader

Clocking A Formidable Opponent

(Written and posted 23 October 2003)

Time is my enemy. It seems that no matter what endeavor I undertake, I am constantly battling time. I just never seem to have enough. And that’s a problem.

On home page of this column, I say that I try to post on an average of once of week. In actuality, if I post once a month I am doing well. In my defense, though, I must admit that I do try to post once a week. I have numerous still uncompleted postings to attest to that. However, no matter how hard I try, I just don’t seem to have the requisite amount of time to finish them. Herein lies the problem.

You see, because most of these unfinished columns have to do with current topics, by the time I get around to finishing them up, they are painfully out-of-date. I had a good piece about the Alabama Ten Commandments brouhaha and how, as a Catholic, I was offended because they were the Protestant Ten Commandments and not the Catholic ones. (Yes, there is a difference.) I might as well go ahead and hit the delete button. I have one about how Grandpappy Bush (the Senator from Connecticut) made his fortune laundering Nazi blood money during World War II. While we are not done in Iraq, the fact that possibly illegal sweetheart deals were given to friends and cronies of high Administration officials is old news – been there, done that. I started one just last week about how Rush Limbaugh ought to be treated as he thinks others ought to be treated (“sent up the river and locked up”) and how conservative columnists such as Ann Coulter can justify Rush’s actions while condemning similar actions by those of a different political bent. (On a side note, I must admit that I eagerly await Ann’s columns, as her lunatic rantings make her column the Weekly World News of columns -- of course, the Weekly World News, with its stories about Hillary Clinton’s affair with a space alien, is more credible.) Probably the only unfinished piece that can be salvaged is one about the Republican Party’s history of corruption, cronyism, and zealotousness. (Did you know that the zealots attempted a coup d’etat against a sitting Republican president? Yup. They tried to get rid of none other than Abraham Lincoln himself. Read about it.)

It is not just the column that I have been slacking. Back in May, I decided that I would try to get my deejay business going again. Of course, before I could do anything, I would have to inventory the entire music collection, all three formats (vinyl, cassette, and CD), which is somewhere in the neighborhood of 700 titles. Five months later, I am into the 150s and have just finished “Collins”. Of course, it doesn’t help that I have, thanks to the beauty of yard sales and secondhand stores, been adding to the collection at about the same rate that I have inventoried them, meaning that it will be a perpetual inventory. At this rate, I will go to my grave never having completed the inventory.

Reading, too, has suffered of late. Every two weeks, I go to the library and check out four books to read. Every two weeks, if I am lucky, I return three of four books unread. (I really have to push it to finish one; of course, books with lots of pictures are easier to finish!) Time just seems to be my enemy.

I really can’t understand why, either. It’s not like I have that busy of a life. Every morning, I drive twenty-five minutes to work, sit at my work computer for nine hours a day, get in the car, pick up whatever child or children need to be picked up from dance (it’s on the way home; Mrs. Schrader conveniently drops them off, and I pick them up on the way home from the office), help with dinner, watch a little television (except Saturdays, Mondays, and Thursday, as there is really not much on those days), bathe the youngest three (it’s hard on Mrs. Schrader’s back), and then – it’s going on ten o’clock. As I am rapidly approaching the Big Four-Oh (less than two and one-half years – oh my!), I seem to tire out about then. There have been nights that I have fallen asleep at the keyboard only to find that I have written a bunch of gibberish. (Oh wait! That’s what I write when I’m awake! Never mind!)

Oh my! I see by the clock on the wall that it is ten o’clock! It’s the bewitching hour; I’m turning into a ><2322324324$$#%^#^%^#dhleeyhdlxxzzdeepwwudp!%%#@@#%@#

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