Giving Directions (The Nothing that We Do)

On the bike ride I just took to go get some sleeping juice (aka a 40oz)--a ride and purchase that were spurred on by all my talk about breaking today's routine--a driver asked me for directions.

For whatever reason, probably just some awful combination of knowing that I know something that someone else doesn't and the narcissistic feeling that I get in helping people (all help is like that, right Brandon?), there is little that comes up randomly in a day that I love more than giving directions.

And yet, how many people are able to help with such a basic thing as knowing the streets around them? How many people can point out east/where the direction the sun rises right now? How many know the quickest way to the thruway from where they are? In my experience, not too many. And while they might argue otherwise, it's not because it's something that people are incapable of picking up on without a lot of practice.

Obviously, there are things other people think are obvious that I am unaware of (I'm being modest of course) it's just that it seems to me that knowing one's way around is a very valuable piece of knowledge if not also, unfortunately, all too uncommon.

Still, I'm willing to bet that that driver was thankful that I had developed the pointless accumulation of knowledge of Buffalo's street grid that will never get me a new house or a fortune to retire upon but one that nevertheless can, and did, help two people's nights feel just a little better.

Shat Mat (The Nothing that We Do)

After another weekend of excessive drinking left me too hung over to even drink during the Bills game—and the Bills leaving me too sick to even watch the entire game—last night I was able to reap the benefits of all the people that were over the game by plundering the leftover beers they left behind.

And while doing so my roommate and I decided to play some chess.

Chess is like so many things that I really enjoy doing—drawing, playing music, playing sports, doing chicks, doing nothing—in that I just don’t do enough of it. And it always takes only a brief moment to remember how much I like these things as soon as I get to doing them again.

The thing that fascinates me so much about games is just how representative they can be of human intelligence and ingenuity. Chess alone, from what I’ve read, has more possible moves than there are believed to be atoms in the entire universe. One has to consider that games are mostly the result of people who were sitting around with nothing better to do and simply decided to create something out of doing nothing. (If you’ve never been a part of a creating a game that was maybe played for even only a day, then by all means your life is truly representational of doing nothing.)

And while ultimately, unless the feelings of competitiveness and enjoyment actually do count for something, they contribute nothing in what would be described as a meaningful way, especially in the arenas of making money or pointing your life in that all import direction, that is the very point of them: a natural expression of what we are capable when the burden of meaning or having to do something is lifted from us.

In my mind they are just as pointless as making money, only much more memorable and far more fun. And if that isn’t the purpose of our lives, it has at least be the purpose of our games.

If the two are in fact separate entities.

Check mate.