Raised by hermit crabs

When the stack of things to do became so thick and disorderly that I couldn’t see the top of my desk, I figured the best course of action was to punt. This week I don’t have to be any one place at any one time, so why not take liberties with my schedule? It always takes liberties with me. So I took a few of days off, a spontaneous vacation for mental vegetation, living more like I did as a college frat rat than like the middle aged fuddy duddy that I really am.

One of the unadvertised blessings of Saipan is that you get away with goofing off. Here, nobody seems to care. In Los Angeles, you feel like some kind of a criminal if you emerge in public at ten a.m. on a Wednesday, clad in jeans and a tee shirt.

The suited drones of yuppiedom look at you suspiciously, figuring you must have contracted something terminal and are on the way to the doctor’s office.
Or, if not the doctor, then the parole officer.

The suspicion sticks to you, and you feel like malingering scum, some sort of seedy member of the social underground. Soccer moms in McDonald’s shepherd their kids away from the line you’re standing in, casting the stink eye in your direction, as if you might be conspiring to molest junior at happy meal time. Chicks won’t even look your way, even the grocery store clerk thinks you lost your job and she acts like your very breath carries the germs of unemployment and poverty. The bank teller cops an attitude when you want a Xerox copy of something.

No, you can’t goof off in urban America. You’re just a broken cog in the land of robo-people, and a vague threat to the machinery of society and commerce.

Does life have to grind on at the driving and unrelenting tempo of a funeral march? I don’t want mine to. My brain works in fits and starts, it has its own tides to consider, and some times are more for creating than others are. And what’s the point of living if you can’t turn your back on a desk full of paperwork that beckons, doing so merely because you can get away with it? It would be a lousy habit to have, but it’s an itch that demands indulging sometimes.

You can forget how laid back Saipan is until you decide to do some laying back, and realize that nobody chides you for it. How blessedly casual these shores are, where neckties are still scarcely in evidence. The tourists at the beach don’t know you’re playing hooky from work, they just regard you as part of the local scenery and don’t ponder your presence any further. For all they know or care you were born right there in the sand and raised by a pack of hermit crabs.

Saipan’s economy is lousy, and it’s a tough place to work. But it’s a great place not to work, which is certainly a consolation.