Wood pellet exports double
Nearly $500K for car crash
Mounties won't be charged
Minister defends right to bail
Vise grips as steering wheel
$36M for vaccine injury 
Historic Trump hearing 
Pig kidney transplant 
Car insurance fuels inflation
Big loss for Boeing 
Metro sales edged higher
Retail sales slip 
Warriors snakebitten in loss
Iginla off to Europe
Rockets ink prospect
Perry teams with Lu Kala
Megan denies harassment
Swift ‘one of the family’
In theory when you take a break from work you return feeling fresh and eager. You fully intend to stop being a slacker. However, ‘theory’ is just another word for ‘yeah right’, because you will soon find that your brain has come to a complete standstill from too many idle thoughts thunk for too long. This means you will need to work through a back-to-work process called Restarting The Slacker Brain. I have used ‘writer’ for our worksheet example because a) that’s what I was before my brain went into slacker-mode, and b) writers rank as the worst slackers in the entire world. If you’re not a writer, just wing it. That’s what I do.
1. You sure had fun while away from work. Now you are fresh and eager to get back to writing. All you need is a functioning brain, which is not what the idling blob of slacker-tissue inside your head can reasonably be called at this point.
2. You have so many things to write about that you are feeling overwhelmed. Do not worry, that’s just your seized brain, deprived of brain nutrients. It wants a glazed doughnut.
3. Glazed doughnuts are good, they contain an important brain nutrient called ‘toomuchsugar’.
4. While eating your doughnut, you consider using the feeling-overwhelmed card as an excuse not to write.
5. You realize that using the ‘feeling-overwhelmed’ card has ‘Fail’ written all over it. See? Your brain has already recognized a Fail, a sign that it is attempting to reboot.
6. Look! It’s sunny outside!
7. You return from your sunny bike ride to find that the page is still blank. As is your brain.
8. You sit down with a serious look on your face and get busy not writing.
9. Wait, where is your coffee? Coffee is a powerful brain stimulant. However, it only works on an active brain. Your brain is essentially still missing in action. Still, can coffee hurt? Of course not. Go make the damn coffee.
10. You return, with coffee, and type ‘Untitled’.
11. You suddenly remember that years back you wrote another column about writer’s procrastination. Yet here you are, writing another. You don’t care. That column was then, this column is now. People have short memories. People are also crazy. You suspect that crazy short-memoried people are easily tricked, so you start writing. Besides, this column will contain avant garde words fresh off the avant-garde vine, and will be typed in a totally different order.
12. You feel sick. Maybe you are dying of Ebola. That would be an awesome way to get out of writing the column except for certain drawbacks, like dying.
13. You type ‘by Jo Slade’.
14. You realize that you’re not Jo Slade, I’m Jo Slade.
15. So now I am one step ahead of you:
Untitled
By Jo Slade
16. Ha.
17. You have an epiphany: Everything worth writing about has already been written by someone somewhere at some point in time. Why even bother?
18. You think, no, that’s not a good approach to life. You will write because your words will be coming from your unique brain.
19. You decide it is pretty vain, maybe even pathetic, to think that you’re really all that unique.
20. You wonder, can you plagiarize your own work? Sure, why not? Who’s going to sue you? You?
21. If you could, in fact, sue yourself, you could be rich if you won the case, and you’d never have to do a stick of work again. Except you would also lose, meaning you’d be poor, so there’s that.
22. Your brain flutters at #21’s seemingly insurmountable paradox. Your brain slips into full flutter-mode. Not even a doughnut will help now.
23. There is no #23. While your brain was in flutter-mode, I submitted this column.
24. There is no #24. This is the end. You’ve probably failed Restarting The Slacker Brain.
25. Hold on, that wasn’t the end. This is the end.
26. The end.
27. Think
Photo: Contributed
This article is written by or on behalf of an outsourced columnist and does not necessarily reflect the views of Castanet.
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