The absurdity of subsidized time (Or why Wednesday's are not the best day of my week)

Wednesday's are always a tight deal for me, work, meetings late in the day, then I have an article due... and tonight was made more difficult by errands that needed taken care of first. My articles, sports realted, usually come pretty easily, but this is the dead time of year for college football.

I could have written about practices, but I am commissioned to cover recruiting this time of year and I was fresh out of ideas. And then I finally came up with an idea, but it required some formatting changes which consumed great amounts of time.

For my articles, I am my own editor and my own copy editor. I am not an expert in HTML, but I know some basics and I have to provide my own tables, charts, etc. so this was a particularly lengthy article looking back at previous recruiting classes and analyzing a group of nine players.

By the time that is done, here I am, 9:00 pm and no reading or personal writing done. Damn, sometimes Wednesdays suck!

Which brings me to the point that writing as a passion and side gig is a very cumbersome task with mostly just intrinsic rewards as we look down at a piece of paper, or up at a screen full of bytes and try to appreciate whatever form of art it is which we have managed to attempt.

Sometimes I like to put down thoughts that are just paragraphs - not a full chapter and not a complete thought, just some fleeting moment that I like and want to capture. This is why I try to keep a pen and notebook with me where ever I go. I came up with one particular paragraph the other night that I really liked:

There was the absurdity of the suggestion that time could somehow be subsidized by corporations through the naming rights of specific segments of time such as days, months and years. I suppose this was the remnant of flailing sports venues whose inability to garner any further leveraging of taxpayer debt to secure the sublimely preposterous yet perpetual improvements in stadium experiences which had become nothing more than a plethora of differing health companies looking for that mythic competitive advantage in brand awareness when in truth those some consumers the health insurers had targeted had no concept of their differentiation.

I have  no clue where I am going to insert this in my current work in process, but the time will come where this particular sentiment will fit perfectly into the dystopian future I have been slowly building.

I also came up with an open for a chapter I have yet to write I have not titled the chapter yet, but it involves a previously introduced physicist when he was young (15ish) wading through the remnants of a party involving the older scientists at a compound they all inhabited. That open goes something like:

As he wandered aimlessly through the main living room; bodies strewn about as if some cataclysmic event had precipitously the lot of his mentors; those whose wisdom had equivocally been considered as exceeding his own young mind; laying in drunken stupor which not insignificantly sounds particularly similar to stupidity, his view of human destiny was thwarted unavoidably into a sort of semi-despotic despair.

That is, of course, a rough draft and will change once the rest of the chapter has been written. But sometimes it is fun to write small sentences or paragraphs and then insert them into later text. Creates a different sort of depth to the words than would otherwise exist.