Unusual things for sale. Cheap!

It is no secret that I am a lazy man. Even though I walk around with my eyes open and regularly scratch at the innards of my infernal nostrils, I'm basically sleeping. My reason for this is because, 1. Life is tiring, and 2. There are too many details. If I might flesh out this last point, please humor me and listen to my plight. Now take the time to look around you, at all the stuff in your immediate vicinity. Though you might be sitting in a padded cell, still you will notice the extravagant plenitude and variety that characterizes life on the earth. Allow your eyes to settle upon a certain, small area of the wall. What is happening there? While at first you will demur, "Erasmus," you will think, "Are you a ridiculous idiot or what? Why should I expend my finite energies in such fruitless enterprises?" But I tell you: wait a moment and soon the noisy din will quiet in your ears, the dramatic complexity of the slightest most seemingly meaningless thing will take possession of your senses. Here's a concrete example of what I mean. An example so precise and tangible that you can take it to a pollster who will fashion out of it an immortal fact, an exact measure of this slippery reality. To the example then:

So I'm at this moment "cooking" some rice. You'll notice I've placed the term "cooking" in quotation marks, which indicates that I'm not comfortable throwing that term out there so casually. This is because it's really the pan, water and heat that are truly responsible for the cooking, while all I'm doing is sitting here attacking the ghosts of boogers which are forever disturbing my peace. Which brings me to my ripe and low-hanging example: Basmati rice could not smell better. When I pull my finger out of my nostril even for a moment (a moment of neglect is all I can suffer) the sweetest fumes dance wildly upon that abundance of nostril hairs that guard this portal to my skull. Or more simply, with less verbiage: Basmati rice smells sweet. Now this is just one example, a tiny one, of the offensive quantity of sensory experiences that could not be properly described in thousands of volumes of the most exacting prose. That is why life is so tiring.

But what of this not terribly unusual insight? The thing is, I am plagued by the weight of such detail and it is for this reason that I find life so tiring. What of this not terribly unusual confession? Well, since I'm being so nosy I guess I'll reveal more: I'm not wearing pants. But I lie, I am wearing pants. The thing is, I shouldn't be so lazy, and so what if the world is filled with so much that cannot be experienced or imagined? Maybe it's for us to accept our minute, laughably small, glimpses at the vastness of the world and get on to assaulting our nostrils? Probably. But here's my pledge. And being a fully modern man, I mean next to nothing by this promise: I pledge to do my part and describe the idiotic things that I experience and imagine to the best of my modest talents, though they be often trapped in my lethargic indolence, ahem, laziness. So the next time the rustic bouquet of that sweet grain from the Indian subcontinent distracts me enough to stop picking my nose, you can bet the house that I'll have a lot to say about it.