The Art and Severe Consequences of Moldering

Saturday evening, while the rest of my siblings went to a tortilla-making party, I opted to sit at my desk in my room and stare out the window at the sunset, brilliant fire in the sky, and write an email. “Come on!” they had said to me before we parted ways–we were in cars in the middle of the road, heads out windows grinning, me trying to pass and they getting ready to turn. “Why don’t you come? What are you going to do?”

“I’m going to sit at home and molt,” I said.

And I did.

By the time they got home, the sun had gone and the email was written and not much else had happened. I had intended to write a blog post, but never got that far.

“What did you do?” Jeffrey asked.

“I sat here and moldered, just like I said I was going to.”

I went up to my room to molder some more, and Jeffrey called up the stairs to me, “If you’re going to molder, you could come and molder down here.”

So I did.

It felt good to be wanted.

I took my laptop to the table, where the room was bright and newspapers were scattered and people sat around eating. (The table is rectangular, but they sat around it anyway, because “They sat arectangular,” just doesn’t have the same sound.)

“What should I blog about?” I asked.

Jeffrey grinned. “Write about the art and severe consequence of moldering.”

So I am.

The Art of Moldering

• First, you must be proficient in daydreaming and deep thoughts. And don’t be scared by the deep thoughts part. It is not actually necessary that the thoughts BE deep, only that they LOOK deep and that it take you a long time to think them. I have been known to deliberate for hours over simple decisions that a non-moldery person might make in a few minutes. But there is no art to decisiveness. It rarely comes with a moldering mind.
• To molder through a decision properly, one must visualize many different scenarios, and then visualize those scenarios in relation to many other scenarios, and these also in relation to many other scenarios, and so on. The whole process is very much like making a construction paper chain a mile long and then running down its length and back again continuously, or until you are too exhausted to do anything but sink to the ground and die.

The Severe Consequences

• You miss out on tortilla parties.
• You miss out on a part of real living, because the dream world and the thought world in your mind is so huge, it IS your life. You’re never completely present in any situation because you’re always thinking about something else.
• Your siblings groan when they are yet again trying to get your attention, and you are staring into space or at your laptop, eyes vacant.

So when you have perfected the art of moldering, leave it behind and step out into the real world. That is the purpose of art: to admire and then to leave at the museum. You may have moldered away an entire weekend, but Monday morning, your hair will still need to be combed, bed made, and school children taught, and YOU are the only one hired. Real life requires attendance.