by Some Guy
In essence loafing is just sitting around idly not doing a damned thing just wasting time. Most sportsmen already have very acute loafing skills. But we need to be able to utilize these skills to our benefit. Every time you are idling at home your wife will say something like “You’re not doing anything anyway, so why don’t you _____?” Fill in the blank. This usually means work! Nothing ruins a good loafing session like work. Or she will say, “You’re not doing anything anyway, so let’s go to _____.” Again fill in the blank. This will usually mean a shopping trip to the “Super Mega Rippoff Mart”, or worse yet, a trip to visit the in-laws. Neither one are any good.
Sometimes when you have idle time you will get the idea you can go fishing. Of course this is just a pipe dream! Never will you hear a woman say, “You’re not doing anything anyway, you just as well go fishing.” This is the situation I’m talking about when we need to use loafing to our benefit. If we could only devise some method of making loafing a “good thing”. I’m sure this will never be accomplished. The best we can hope for is to mask the loafing. Making it seem like something other than the complete waste of time it is.
Animals don’t have this same problem that we do. Take the African lion for instance. He has it made! All he has to do is keep his families fed and protect them from other lions. The rest of the time he spends loafing. The lion gets up in the morning to start loafing and the female will say, “Hey pal, these cubs aren’t going to feed themselves!” “Get your butt out and kill something!” O.K., now I’m kind of jealous. I’m never told to get out and kill something. I’m never praised like the lion either when I drag something dead home. All I hear is, “You ain’t bringing that thing in my house!”
After the lion drags home the dead antelope and is praised for it, he then gets back to his loafing. The female never interrupts with stuff like, “You’re not doing anything anyway, so let’s go visit my mother.” The female lion knows that just the presence of the male is providing protection. Other lions aren’t willing to come around and start trouble with the male there. If you are loafing on the couch it never works to tell the female, “Honey, I don’t want to have to lie on this couch all day, but you never know when the neighbors might come over with malicious intent.” Nope, we always end up doing some stupid crap like mowing the lawn or visiting the in-laws.
Sometimes a man’s loafing will be interrupted by a friend coming over and saying something like, “Hey, there’s really nothing to do today, we just as well go fishing.” This type of occurrence is rare! A woman’s loafing detector is far superior to a man’s. She will almost always find something for you to do before a fishing buddy can. The more likely scenario is your fishing buddy comes over and finds you mowing the lawn. Of course you go fishing anyway. You do this thinking it is a “good” thing. After all, you have been constantly brow-beaten about prioritizing things in your life. In your mind fishing has priority over a nicely mown lawn. Being a man you are completely unaware this meant family, work, and that sort of stuff. At the pond you remember the mower you left in the front yard and think, “Ah, it’s probably safe, I’m sure it has run out of gas by now anyway.”
Getting jobs done around the house can help in generating loafing time for the man. You on occasion can hear something like, “You can go fishing after you get “this or that” done.” The problem is that when “this or that” is done another “this or that” immediately takes its place. It’s a vicious, never ending cycle! Sometimes if you are engaged in a big project it will be acceptable to take a break from it. House remodeling projects are good for this. The trick is to never get it done. Otherwise you will just have to start another project.
Anytime a shopping trip or a visit to the in-laws is eminent, you can say something like, “I’d really like to go, but I really should get some stuff done on the kitchen.” As soon as the family leaves you nail up a few boards and push the sawdust piles around a little to give the illusion of progress. You then go over to your friend’s house, help him move his sawdust piles, then head for the lake.
After about ten years or so the woman will tire of the project and hire a contractor. Your loafing generating gold mine is gone in two days! Now you convince the woman that the bathroom needs redone and she agrees. While you’re standing in the bathroom trying to figure out how many fishing trips this will yield, your plan is backfiring. The wife is on the phone to the contractor again. Your loafing time is reduced even more by your clever plan. In order to pay the contractors you end up taking an evening and weekend job at the local mini mart. You still get out of the in-law visits and shopping trips though. This keeps up for quite some time, one year for each room in your house!
Work is in fact the major bane to a sportsman’s idle time. If only there was a way to mask loafing to make it appear like work. Road repair guys have figured this out. You will see them standing around leaning on shovels on the same stretch of road all summer. The cracks in the highway and potholes just seem to get shifted around like the sawdust piles on your kitchen floor. Sometimes I think the road repair guys prop up manikins with orange vests and go fishing. No one knows for sure how they do it. None of them will ever tell either. I believe they are sworn to some form of cult like secrecy on their techniques.
Manikins would be helpful to the sportsman! You could prop one wheel of the lawn mower up on a brick and shove the manikin under it. This would give the appearance of “repairing” the mower so you can finish the lawn. To add more realism to deter detection, you could put a tape recorder under the mower also. The tape would have the sounds of tools clanking against metal, finger bones breaking and cussing.
In three or four weeks when you get the mower “fixed” and the lawn mown, you could put the manikin and tape recorder under the car or bathroom sink. As ice fishing season nears you could put it under the snow blower. In explanation of the bucket of fish you are cleaning that magically showed up while you were repairing the mower you could respond something like, “Bubba went fishing today while I was fighting that mower.” “He knew I had to work today, and he had so many fish, he dropped some off for us.” On rare occasion this might get you awarded a sympathy fishing trip from the woman. Most likely this will get you revealed as the mangy, low-life, pathetic liar that you really are. Either way the woman will be so angry she won’t speak to you for several weeks. The breakdown in communication halts the verbal list of projects. With nothing to do anyway, just as well go fishing!
