I have more bad habits than an incontinent nun. My bad habits lie in wait for your bad habits and steal their lunch money. I'm sorry my bad habits took your car and crashed it; they are, as one might have previously noted, bad. Let's not even talk about that weekend my bad habits spent with your wife in Jackson Hole.

            Among the worst of these bad habits is my tendency to procrastination. (I've been meaning to write about this for a really long time.) And when I say procrastination, I mean to say, mine is not amateur-crastination; mine has a six-year $12 million a year contract. Mine will not be traded to Denver because of its addiction to pain pills and compulsion to shoplift. Mine puts that football through that hoop with that hockey bat every fucking time. (I'm sorry; I'm not a sports guy. There won't be any more sporting metaphors.) (That's my promise: from now on, only metaphors drawn from unsafe sex practices.) (Or--and this goes without saying--drug abuse.) My four-year gestation:  procrastination.

            I like to tell myself that I do my best work when down to the wire, but to determine that scientifically, I'd have to have a control group, times when I actually budgeted my time effectively and appropriately, rather than, say, divided it up as I usually do: 90% previous to due date for eating, drinking heavily and unsafe sex practices, then 10% just prior to the deadline feverishly working and saying, "Oh, god, man, you fucked this up this time, this time you are not pulling it out, shit, how could you be so stupid? You're gonna die in the gutter with dogs pissing in your face--oh, okay, the dogs might be optional, but dude, there's some gutter in your future!" (Lately I've been singing that to a nice reggae beat, so it's both insane and soothing.) Doesn't matter if it's doing the technical work I do on my day job, cleaning house or writing a blog post, if there's a way to watch an episode or eight of How I Met Your Mother instead, I am so very there. (Sadly, my access to CBS.com has been cut off at work. Well played, clients.) (Except for how there's also Hulu. I win!) I know that wasting time is bad and a sin and idle hands are the Devil's workshop (he's building a dining room set in mine), but I can't seem to help myself. I think my brain might be a teeny bit broken.

            Thus, my house, and its state of cleanliness. I have dust bunnies that roam the neighborhood terrorizing passersby; several of them carry switchblades. (And also do the finger-snapping thing from West Side Story. They're quite musical, these dust-bunnies of mine.) My kitchen floor was more or less capable of yielding crops until the other day, when I just couldn't take it anymore, which is how and when anything gets done in my house. (I think I heard a scream of some sort when I did finally clean it; I resolutely did not investigate.) (It was probably just an Indian burial site.) (It's not bad to dig those up, right?) I like to clean the toilet on a regular basis, just as soon as my girlfriend runs shrieking from my home after looking at it. And of course, my once-a-year vacuuming is a festive occasion, bringing my neighbors together in a multicultural event during which we laugh, we cry, and, yes, we even learn a little. I don't hate doing these things (though I certainly don't love them); I just hate getting started doing these things.

            Speaking of learning, in college I was known as Mr. Extension, and it wasn't because of my fake dreds. (Well, it wasn't just because of them.) My senior thesis was 85 pages long, and I had a year to write it. So when did I start? Three days before it was due. The night before it was due, I was sitting in a study room, typing my ass off (it never fully grew back, sad to say), trying to finish by the 9AM deadline. I put that puppy (and it wasn't really a puppy, you understand, but a thesis; had it been a puppy, it would still have been full of crap, but less so) on the department secretary's desk at 8:48. Then, rather than going to sleep as I so desperately wanted to, I smoked a joint and drank a few beers with my roommate and went to Latin drunk and high, as we were wont to do.

            (My roommate once leaned over to me, as the professor was waxing eloquent about the virtues of the Spartans--as she was wont to do--and whispered, "Yeah, but they're all dead now." My fit of uncontrollable laughter almost got me kicked out of class.) (I managed to nearly fail that class, my final semester of college, which would have prevented my graduating; drunk, high and taking Latin pass/fail is no way to go through life, son.) (Don't do drugs, kids. Stay in school.) (But I digress.)

            Let's say I'm trying to do two or three blog posts a week--let's say that because it's true, not that whether or not it's true makes a lot of difference to me--and I'm several posts ahead, having experienced one of those rare periods of fertility that make me glad I'm not a woman and a devotee of unprotected sex. (Well, I'm not a woman anyway.) Will I be continuing to write ahead, so that as the week wears on and my only active piece (working title: "Fuck, I've Got Nothing To Write About!") stagnates, I don't start freaking out that I'll never write again and will have to throw myself wholeheartedly into my soul-killing job and die of boredom like next week? No, sir or madam. No, I will not be doing that. I will be doing the other thing. Then, Friday morning, as I'm about to leave for work, having bade my wacky notion that I am a writer farewell, some bizarre shit will flit through my brain, and I will toss my briefcase down, resign myself to being late to work again (sorry, anal-retentive client manager, though not really), and write that last-minute piece. And edit it. And edit it some more. And go into work, late again, and take some time off (for which I do not get paid; billable hours is a cruel mistress) (are a cruel mistress?) (is a cruel mistress) and edit it some more again. And then shlepp my laptop to a coffee shop and take some more time to post it. And then edit it some more after I've posted it. Because apparently, that's the only way I can write. Not only am I not getting paid to write, but thanks to my procrastination I am actually paying for the privilege by forgoing billable hours. Could I have waited to do the same piece after I'd posted the pieces I'd worked ahead on, say at home at night? You damnbetcha. Did I? Ermno. Will I? Magic Eight Ball says: It is extremely doubtful.

            This piece? Yeah, I was still working on it this morning. How'd you know?

            Honest to god, if I knew of a cure for procrastination, I'd totally take it. (Well, you know, after I'd watched this week's Top Chef. Dude, they're doing omelets!) Unless of course I'm right and I can only write or clean or be at all productive when I'm stressed, when it's down to the wire and terror has made me gibber. (Well, gibber more than usual.) What if I can only do my best work--or in some cases any work--when I'm so terrified or disgusted with my mess or just generally panicked that everything but the task at hand disappears and I can focus as I never would have been able to earlier, when I had more time? In that case, well played, my brain. And thank god dancing like a monkey doesn't make me more productive.

            Hmmm...dancing like a monkey... I don't know if it would make me more productive, but I'd be stylin' in the hat.