When did killing time become anathema? Probably when business execs stopped taking a two-martini lunch and started carrying around a cell phone. No time to kill if you’re always tied to the office.
The new hustle economy makes it doubly bad to just goof off. Not only are you not advancing your brand, you’re losing money. There’s no all-seeing corporate eye watching your every move, but that corporate eye also writes a steady paycheck (if eyes could write—never mind, just go with it).
I have three jobs and I can only dream about killing time. I am awake and working, or I am asleep. There is no in-between.
But if I had my ‘druthers, this is what I would do:
Go to the airport and watch planes take off. It’s impossible not to be awed by the sight of 200 tons of steel launching into the sky with humans inside of it headed for God only knows where. Imagine if you had just appeared at Cleveland-Hopkins airport from the 1800s. You wouldn’t even understand what you were seeing.
Go to the zoo. A lot. Sometimes you just want to sit and stare at some giraffes.
Walk in a field of lavender. I know there’s a lavender farm nearby, I just need to find it. I don’t even like lavender, but it sounds soothing to walk around in a field of flowers. As long as I don’t get stung by a bee. I tried lavender ice cream once—it’s not for me.
Watch kids play baseball. It’s probably creepy, but I just want to sit on a bench and watch young kids swing at a ball and run around. So innocent. So oblivious to the horrors awaiting them. Maybe that’s the wrong mindset, but I can only work with what I’ve got.
Birdwatch. When you pass the age of 50, a gene is triggered and you begin to think things like, “I could watch the hell out of some birds right now.” The problem is actually seeing the birds with your failing, elderly eyes.
The American legal system has a lot of problems, not least of which is that you’re guilty until proven innocent.
Say you’re a pharmacist. It’s been a crazy day, as usual—people lined up at the drive-thru, people at the counter, people on the phone. Insurance tangles and doctors’ orders and a job that can mean life or death if you do it wrong.
Say there’s a new COVID vaccine that you’re going to start administering to children the next day. You think, “I should look at the product info and be prepared to the best of my ability.”
You slip a vial of the vaccine into your jacket pocket, planning on looking at it later. And then you forget about it and walk out of the store with it still in your pocket.
You have just committed a fourth-degree felony for which you could possibly go to prison for 18 months.
“But it was just a mistake,” you say when the cops show up at your house. “I didn’t take it on purpose.”
The cops look around. “Hey, here it is, lying in the grass.”
And the vial is pristine, even though days have passed since it went missing.
And you have a social media footprint as an anti-vaxxer.
And people have complained to the pharmacy that you’ve tried to talk them out of getting the COVID vaccine.
Okay. But what if it was an innocent mistake?
The State has already decided that this is a hot-button topic and they’re going to prosecute to the fullest extent of the law. They have a lot of theories:
You’re a drug addict and you sell or trade vaccines for drugs (so they make you take a drug test as a condition of your bond, even though the COVID vaccines are free);
You were going to give the vaccine to some right-wing conspiracy group to test and then claim that it contained magnets or nanobots or something else equally ridiculous (even though the police found the vial on your front lawn);
They scrutinize your hand on the video that shows you taking the vial from the cooler, describing it as “claw-like” and claiming that you purposefully hid your hand from the camera (even though their description pretty much fits any human hand picking something up and putting it in a pocket).
The problem is that no one is going to believe you in today’s America.
If it was, say, a new chickenpox vaccine, and you tested clean for drugs, and you hadn’t gone around telling people not to take this new chickenpox vaccine, then yes, you made a mistake and no charges are brought against you.
But instead, it’s a controversial vaccine for children that’s all over the news. And you have a history of claiming that the adult version causes coronary problems. And it seems farfetched that you regularly “fling your jacket over your shoulder” when you get out of your car in your driveway, thereby propelling the vial onto your lawn.
This is called “circumstantial evidence” and it means you might go to prison even if you’re innocent.
American prisons are full of people who, although the state had no direct evidence of their crime, were found guilty because they were in the wrong place at the wrong time, and circumstances conspired against them.
I always wonder what I’d do in that situation. If I knew I was innocent, but no one believed me.
I like to think I’d be strong and stand for the truth.
But the system is sneaky. It doesn’t want the truth. It wants to save time and money and effort.
A jury trial is a hassle.
“What if we offer you a lesser charge and we stay out of sentencing?” the Prosecutor wheedles.
And, facing so many unknowns, terrified of prison, I would take the offer. Of course I would.
And no one would ever know the truth but me.
The truth in this piece makes it all the more chilling. In addition to all the death and misery it caused, COVID seems to have also killed truth. The politicians' favorite mantra, "Never let a crisis go to waste", has caused both sides of the aisle to pile on and try to make political gains from it. Endless conspiracy theories are spun off, and every day somebody does something to reignite the fear. As they used to say on 'The X Files', "The truth is out there". But we'll probably never know what it is.