# scrolling/strolling

2019-05-22

Today I waited for work to be over.

I wait for the ending bell to ring most days, but today was especially taxing. I had nothing to do but I wanted to do something. I had a paralysis of the will where I could not think of anything worth my time.

A point of fact: the ending bell, referenced above, is not actually a bell at all, and would not be any sound whatsoever were it not for one of my coworkers owning a watch that beeps every hour. I'm not sure who it is, and I don't hear the watch except for at 4 p.m., but every day it chimes the end of the workday (minus about twenty seconds for the timeclock to catch up).

While I waited my mind was blank. I tried to fill it with mind-numbing scrolling, but I was quickly bored. I wonder if scrolling is the twenty-first century equivalent of nineteenth-century strolling, when people aimlessly would walk around the countryside because they had nothing better to do. It seems more generative, strolling, as compared to scrolling.

When I arrived at home I began to wait some more for the time when I might go for a walk. The day was hot and unforgiving. I decided that evening was a better time for a stroll so I sat on the couch by the twenty-first century hearth, the TV. I didn't turn anything on but sat and stared at my darkened silhouette reflected back at me in the screen. I thought of waiting. I thought of waiting.