So, what do you do to temporarily forget your flimsy, bootlegged residence on a planet, the comparison to which (the planet I mean) you, or more generally: y’all, draw yourselves to strategize your own insignificance, the spiritual version of cuddling after sex.
I think I had a breakdown, sorry. What I meant to ask was this. Who’s your daddy?
No, No. This:
What’s your hobby?
‘Shit my dad says‘ interlude
Dad: What’s with the sexual innuendos in all your recent posts?
Me: I was hoping that’d stop you from sending it to the rest of the family.
Dad: Nah, I just tell them to close their eyes during a few parts.
Anyway, did you figure out yet?
Hobby. Something about that sounds emasculating. Cze we’ve moved on to hustlin’, ballin’, crushin’. The stuff of G’s. Really, when people ask you what you do, what they are looking for is how much money you make? But, alone, they are also trying to find out the pattern you have ordained your days into, for nine hours at any rate—and how it differs from their own. All because they can’t quite ask: How do you do to keep yourself distracted from your own insignificance? All because—because—what’s your choice of depression medication? isn’t a good ice-breaker (I am told).
Enter Hobby. The purest form of occupation. The most significant insignificance. A hobby means you have so little expectation of (from) the thing. Something so purposeless in its purpose. Beautiful it in plainness. Imbued with meaning in its aloneness. You are not meant to be good here. Here, you are indifferent to all ideas of competition, skill, and improvement. Hobbies are eroticisms of wasted talent. It’s something you are not good at but actively chase because it’s what you enjoy doing. Also, you are a tad masochistic like that. Another sex innuendo? Religion, really, but I like the way you think.
I thought writing was a passion. At least that’s how I went after it. With a scimitar (it means sword). What I needed was an armour. Not to protect me as much as the writing, against a self—mine—that wants to attempt to attack to attain. I was trying to find awareness in a broken mirror.
The particulars of the hobby are unimportant. It’s having one that matters. Hobby has no end. No embarrassment. No something else that begins with an e. Hobby is the performance you put up for existence (heyy!). None to please; None to disappoint. It’s not occupation as much as emptying yourself to be occupied by something.
A hobby should look like a waste of time. If it requires you to manage time, it’s probably one more wanky affair—your mistress in dissatisfaction. Hobbies don’t exist for you to find something. They exist so you can continue to be lost. So you can wander, wonder, say wow often. You don’t do a hobby for a streak. You do it to bring a quality of music to everything else you do. Hobbies don’t have to all be about doing something. They could be about receiving. To close your eyes. To swing with the music. To say Yes.
Is reading a hobby? Yes. As is prayer.
You know what’s another great hobby? Being a kid. Children are pointlessness par excellence. They will take something from one place to another place and bring it back to the same place and will do this about five hundred times a day. That’s not OCD. What’s OCD is the adult need to put structure into everything, which is exactly what these established dumb fuckers called parents do and now the kid’s learning advanced Algebra on Zoom. With that ends one of energy’s purest forms: childhood. And yet all adult activity is an attempt to get back to that state of purity. What a parody.
Hobby is something beyond the structured shit you have convinced yourself is the right way to live. It’s fastening your gaze at the stars, at the darkness in between, and realizing there’s nowhere else you’d rather be. It’s a significance so particular to you, it dissolves your you-ness.
In the river of time, the hobby is a paper boat. In the land of devotion, a dance. And in the temporality of your existence, a glimpse in the mirror.
Meditations 