The Great American Clock punches out for the last time and the haggard Type-A knowledge-worker… decades of toil etched onto his face like a cracked roadmap of disappointments and half-victories… shuffles off to join the great ranks of the retired. The siren call of “slack,” that most decadent of working person’s vices, rings out like the church bells of leisure.

Slack, oh slack… thou art the balm of the tired ol’ pack-mule, the honeyed oblivion that washes away the stale aroma of missed opportunities and academic turf wars. It’s sleeping past dawn without the shrill cry of an alarm clock. It’s puttering about the van with projects that may never see completion. It’s entire afternoons lost in the dusty pages of forgotten paperbacks fished out from a bargain bookstore bin.

History sings with stories of those who chased the golden paycheck and unexpectedly found themselves wading knee-deep in slack. Take Harland Sanders, a lifetime of greasy failures… gas station flops and dishwashing stints… seasoned him just right. One day, his finger-lickin’ chicken recipe catapulted him from roadside chef to white-suited emperor of a fried poultry empire. Talk about trading an apron for a yacht.

Or consider poor, bumbling George de Mestral, a Swiss fellow with a penchant for wandering through fields. Burrs kept clinging to his trousers… a mighty nuisance to your average suit-wearing gentleman. But in those prickly seeds, he saw possibility. A decade of fiddling later, Velcro burst upon the world, replacing buttons and zippers, and earning de Mestral a mountain of cash… and much-deserved slack.

And who could forget Ruth Wakefield, the proprietor of the Toll House Inn, a regular empress of efficiency until a chocolate shortage forced her to improvise. She hacked up baking chocolate into chunks and tossed it in her cookie dough, half-expecting disaster. Behold, the chocolate chip cookie… a culinary miracle and testament to the virtues of slacking off with the best of intentions.

But what of those blessed fools, those slackers from birth, who stumble into riches as if led by a drunken cherub? History whispers of them too. There’s Art Fry, the church choir singer who, in search of a better bookmark, slapped a bit of not-too-sticky adhesive on some scrap paper. The Post-It Note was born, turning Fry into a corporate legend and affording legions of office workers the ability to slack off with colorful, passive-aggressive memos.

Then there’s the saga of Gary Dahl, the man who turned tedium into treasure. In a bar, amongst half-hearted complaints about pet care, he struck gold… the Pet Rock! Yes, a rock. A plain, ordinary rock, cleverly packaged as the perfect low-maintenance companion. It was an idea so brilliantly stupid, so utterly slacker-inspired, that America went mad for it, and Dahl found himself unexpectedly wealthy.

And let us not forget Robert Kearns, the inventor of the intermittent windshield wiper. He fought tooth and nail against the auto giants who pilfered his design. Lawsuits flew like confetti at a ticker-tape parade and finally, after decades, the victory was his… along with a fat settlement, finally allowing him to savor a hard-earned life of slack well-deserved.

For all of us, the chips fall with a clatter, as random as raindrops in the desert. The haggard retiree, weathered by a thousand battles won and lost, might finally earn the sweet slack so long deferred. For others, fortunes rain like random practical jokes, slapdash rewards for lifetimes of cultivated aimlessness. In the end, we all play the hands we’re dealt, Aces or Jokers… and we learn the cosmic truth: life is a carnival ride, loopers, a hell of a ride, and whether we end up in a penthouse suite or a van down by the river, the ride is sure to be one hell of a story.

Can this Type-A retiree change?
Hot-springs slack… or Type-A busk?
Come along for the ride… we shall see… :-p

Onward through the fog… R.H.