Which activities make you lose track of time?
Writing. Note, I want to hear from my reader nicknamed bocopro who has great comments every time. It turns out that he’s a better writer than me and his stuff is funny to read. He has a lifetime of experience to draw upon and I like hearing from the readers.
While I do a lot of physical activities, I’m able to stay in the present about what is going on around me or in life. When I start writing, especially in a personal journal where I pour out my heart on my feelings or memories, I can get lost for a long time.
Occasionally, if I go back to read those words, I can relive that time of the actual occurrence and the time when I wrote it. I feel those feelings deeply and once in a while I am proud of what I wrote.
Delusions of Adequacy 
Two things come to mind: rote physical activities and supplementing my grandchildren’s education.
Creative thinking is best for me when involved in pushing a Briggs & Stratton, or trimming 100 feet of hedge, or nailing boards onto stringers for a new fence. Such work is basically muscle memory repetition, so my mind goes on safari in the wildernesses of Walter Mittyland.
Work out convoluted plots for novellas, rhymeschemes for poems, coulda/woulda/shouldas for experiences I wasted as a younger guy . . . and by the time the job’s done I haven’t a clue how long I’ve been at it. Like stepping through a portal to a parallel universe where time has no meaning.
The other situation is hearing one of my kids or one of THEIR kids misinterpreting history or religion or reality and launching a lecture on what actually happened, such as last night when my youngest grandson (17) announced that he had never heard of The Beatles.
For nearly two hours I pontificated on such things as the effectiveness of carpet bombing on Japan, why much of what’s in the Apocrypha is so much more interesting than Numbers or Deuteronomy or why Revelation reads like an edition of Cryptkeeper Tales. Introduced him to some music he’d never heard, writers he’d never heard of, and historical figures he never knew existed.
His mother came out to the patio and said they had to go home, and when we went inside I saw that we’d been out there for what I’d thought was about 15 minutes but was 2 hours. Fortunately neither of us is bothered by Gulf Coast skeeters.
Apparently I do that with young people, wandering FAR afield into taboo territories, forbidden jungles, and dangerous swamps as I take a simple question of why the Battle of the Coral Sea was significant and morph it into a discussion of “Michelle, Ma Belle” and how to pronounce ensemble over the course of a coupla hours that feel like no more than a few moments.
So I’m a hopeless pedant, a frustrated lecturer, an overeducated old fart. But I gotta say, I always feel justified, gratified, and satisfied by the time their eyes have glazed over and they’ve developed an uncontrollable tic in one knee. Raison d’etre, I reckon.
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