So much time to waste. It’s like the purpose of time is for nothing, no mean, no excess. Just nothing but waste and garbage. Yesterday I managed to repost a 1940 book I had scanned years ago. Living Musicians. I had posted it to archive.org but only as a blob of .JPG files. I have since discovered that posting to archive.org is considerably simplified by uploading a PDF. Archive takes it from there, stripping out the JPGs from the PDF, creating the DjVu, ripping out the text whic, in this case, was probably about 90% accurate on the OCR. The source scans could not have been clearer so I’m not certain why it’s not 100% but I didn’t get into the forensic analysis. There can be spots on the page, imperfections that make a word seem questionable to the OCR engine.
But getting that book posted involved so much waste. I dropped the 350+ JPGs into Adobe Acrobat, thinking it would take a while but that the software is designed for this task so I should expect it to deliver a single PDF of all these hundreds of pages. After I don’t know how long (I wasn’t watching) it appeared to have assembled the pages as expected. But when attempting to “Save As” I encountered a blank box. I was unable to save the document. Online sources said to disable something about checking cloud storage when saving files. I did that, and the “Save As” box appeared but I still was unable to save the fucking document. At this point I had wasted as much as 45 minutes and, with no way of getting that time back, I decided to shut down the software and start over. There was no way to save anything.
Restarting the software and performing this whole task all over again finally resulted in a usable single PDF of the 350+ page book. Uploading that to Archive took probably 20 minutes, even over a 300/300 connection, because I guess archive throttles uploads, or something. I don’t know how much time it took to process that PDF but after what was probably several hours the book is finally available in nearly perfect archive.org form. Behold. In all its “0 Views” glory.
There were several other ways I found to waste time yesterday. One involved rolling up to 103rd Street on the 6 train to check on a phone that someone tipped me off to. Only as I approached did I recall that I already knew this phone, and it was in the same condition as when I discovered it a few years ago. Big deal. Wasted trip, wasted time.
I imagined a future in which all my nights and days are wasted. I might take to sitting on the couch, something I virtually never do except to drunkenly masturbate or make out with a woman. That was “froggy girl”‘s favorite place, on the couch. Long hours with her on top and me on bottom. Once in a while, I never understood why, she would suddenly freak out about the curtains being open. Some nights it was fine, other times she was certain we were being watched.
When I think of the couch these days there is no froggy girl. Just the concept of sitting there, doing nothing useful, wasting each precious gift of a second when there must be something useful or meaningful I could contribute to this world. There must still be some measure of time left for me to accomplish something.
I do not regard posting a public domain volume of musical biography that will be viewed by no one ever as particularly useful or meaningful, but the act of doing it at least mimics the gestures, mimes the machinations of productive work.
I wasted time in other ways. Masturbation, and the slippery, blubbery thought patterns that accelerate and tornadoize with it, are a definition of waste. There may be other words to describe it but I don’t know how any sentient being could deny that masturbation is a wasteful way to spend time. Wasted seed, wasted sexuality, wasted love.
Then there was this stupid game I decided to horn in on. You scan your receipts and get points for scanning them and for buying certain products. I got once cent for scanning a receipt and one cent more for buying eggs. What the fuck kind of judgment call is that? Eggs get me a penny but an Oncor frozen dinner of 6 fat-saturated salisbury steaks gets me nothing? I’m surprised it didn’t earn me a deduction of that hard-earned egg penny. Now I get daily email announcing that I have cash back worth 6 cents to spend on thousands of products, none of which cost 6 cents. Honestly, the time spent taking the pictures, the cost of the energy used to put the flash into bulb mode, the time, the energy… all of it adds up to much more than one cent of my time.
