Lots of people are under house arrest and when you were at work, well, you knew what to do with idle time, but now what? You can’t have fun because yer supposed to be at work. And you can’t just do more of what you did before Corvid or what you did on weekends – things like drinking, smoking, listening to loud rock music and using profanity. Some of you probably dig video games or golfing every day or watching SportsCenter for hours or maybe cruising the Worldwide Interweb for inappropriate purposes. But now you can’t do any of those things because: A) you’re supposed to be at work, remember? B) you may want to stay married (why is beyond me) and in a good marriage happiness is only doled out in small doses and C) all that fun stuff takes dough, and the only thing that sucks more than being bored is being broke and bored.

This all means that you may need a few time-fillers, you know, little activities that aren’t evil and provide the very brief sensation of living a productive, purposeful life.

I should say that the diversions listed below are not even remotely fun but then you likely have your own guide to fun shit. Remember, if spending every waking minute at home was supposed to be a hoot, then houses would come without mortgages.

Hoard Stuff
I’m not talking about cat-lady-living-in-a-double-wide hoarding, I’m just recommending maybe collecting things like toilet paper, paper towels, chili beans, Lysol, rice, handsoap, fruit snacks, Cheez-Its in quantities of about a hundred or so. It can be interesting to stack them and look at them and imagine what you could get for them on the open market should the shit really hit the fan.

Sorting
You have drawers in every room of the house that you haven’t opened in a coon’s age. You could uncover piles of broken pencils and loose coins and electric adapters for every gadget you’ve had since 1983. Pull that shit out, sort it, organize it, dedicate an entire drawer to remote controls. But whatever you do, don’t try to throw any of it away because I’m told that anything that goes in the trash becomes something you really, really needed as soon as the trash man picks it up.

Kill Weeds
Some of you may remember having to pull the weeds by hand, but now you can use expensive poison to spray the weeds dead. It may kill you but do you want a nice yard or not? Spraying the weeds is like having your own in-home shooting gallery and this target practice will help you build coordination in your old age. A single spray that’s on-target should do the trick, still, it’s more amusing to use half the container on each weed, I mean you have the ammo so put it to excessive use.

Pet The Dog
The dog will enjoy it, it’s therapeutic for people in your compromised mental state and the oils from your hands will give the pooch a shiny coat. For years you and the dog were just ships passing in the night, now you’re essentially coworkers, so spend your government-mandated coffee breaks and three-hour lunches with the animal, tell him your problems and just come to grips with the fact that you’re both living a dog’s life.

Paint Stuff
You can get in touch with your inner tagger by purchasing a few cans of spray paint and then painting items that were never designed to be painted. I’ve painted bricks and rocks and old garden pots, it’s psychedelic, man, and when you finish a day with paint on your hands it makes you feel like you have an occupation. If you pick colors with fancy names that you’ve never seen before people will think you’re sophisticated.

Buy Power Tools
Go to Home Depot and buy one or two of the loud power tools that you see on the commercials. Then wheel it (them) out onto the driveway and just let it sit there all day. The other dopes in the neighborhood will be jealous about your level of craftsmanship and the whole purpose of having neighbors is to make them feel inferior. I have a neighbor who has an old air compressor from the Sixties. He has a shop smock that he pulls on, turns on the compressor and blows the dust off his smock as if he was a master carpenter. It’s reassuring to just own a useless tool instead of being one.

Good luck with your new activities.

Photo credit: byzantiumbooks on Best Running / CC BY