Column: The price of perfecting the art of procrastination

It took the Beatles 5 ½ months to record “Sgt. Pepper.”

“Casablanca” wrapped after 10 months of filming.

Herman Melville finished “Moby-Dick” in 18 months.

After a year and 45 days, the Empire State Building opened.

No, there’s not going to be a quiz at the end of this essay, but those are good facts to have in your back pocket when you start blaming yourself for having fallen behind in completing a planned project.

But, in my case, there’s very little comfort to be found in those comparisons, all of which involve remarkable human achievements.

I’m afraid all that I can offer in my defense is that I’m, well, lazy.

Maybe that’s a bit too harsh; let’s say I’ve perfected procrastination.

Before I let you in on the particular undertaking I’ve chosen to defer, I’d like to try and explain the root causes of my failure.

And if this reminds some of you of the Roman Catholic ritual of confession, that’s perceptive as hell, if you’ll pardon my profanity.

That sacrament, for the uninitiated, has traditionally been the second one administered to a young person, the first having been baptism, which usually takes place when he or she is just an infant.

My first confession took place when I was in the third grade, all of 8 years old. The priest gave us instructions about how to conduct what was called an “Examination of Conscience,” which involved running down the Ten Commandments and counting up your sins.

At that tender age, though, only a handful actually applied.

The best part about confession was the secrecy of it all, the way you pulled open a heavy curtain, which closed behind you, leaving you to find your way to the kneeler in the dark. After a while, as your eyes adjusted to the gloom, you’d hear a screen slide open and that was your cue to say, “Bless me, Father, for I have sinned.”

The confessional provided the epitome of privacy, which, to my way of thinking anyway, was the whole point of the exercise. In years to come, however, the Catholic church, in an effort, I suppose, to keep up with the changing times, offered an alternative.

Known as the “Face-to-Face” option, it did away with the hidden identity of the penitent, opening the process to a more relaxed atmosphere, one that provided a chair for the sinner to sit across from the confessor, just two regular folks having a friendly chat.

Needless to say, I never availed myself of that ghastly choice.

I mean, c’mon.

Telling a priest about the scummy underbelly of your teenage life, with all of its nasty temptations — known as “Near Occasions of Sin” — was not exactly conducive to brutal and total honesty. I’d rather have told Mom and Dad, which was never going to happen.

The last time I went to confession was in my first week at Notre Dame, and I remember thinking, “This is gonna get a lot worse.”

The irony of beginning to question my faith at perhaps the leading Catholic university in America is not something that’s lost on me.

But, as my mother always said, “College is not a job factory.”

Of course, she was also fond of calling me “a child of excess.”

Somewhere between those two truisms lay the course of my life.

So when I started writing for a living, confessing my shortcomings seemed to flow naturally, the way a river heads for the sea, leaving in its wake scores of stories of loss and love, tales of woe and wonder, each of them offered not for my benefit or unburdening, but in the hope that someone, unseen, might find them of value.

Which brings us back to the subject of today’s epistle, the long-delayed project that has been haunting my days and nights lately.

When my wife and I arrived back home in early January 2024, after having lived in coastal North Carolina for almost 25 years, you can imagine the laundry list of tasks that had to be checked off, one by one, as we built our lives from the ground up in chilly Ohio.

She, it must be said, excelled in every single aspect of the relocation process, always busy, seemingly content, even happy.

I, on the other hand — and this is the confession part — did the bare minimum, more than willing to hang pictures where she wanted them and always able to haul boxes up and down the narrow stairs.

But when it came to unloading my personal stuff — books and records and CDs and clothing and stacks of newspapers, piles of magazines, posters and trophies and letters and VCR tapes, all the detritus of life spent collecting but never sifting — I was a failure.

Believe me, I’m not proud of myself, but the job seemed so immense, so daunting, so difficult, that I wondered if I could do it.

My wife’s been enjoying a week’s stay on the Outer Banks with her sons, their plus-ones and some friends, which gives me a few days to at least make an honest effort to finish unpacking my life.

I may not be able to complete the entire project since it’s that immense, but there’s no reason that I can’t give it my best shot.

Well begun is half done … isn’t that how the old saying goes?

If Thomas Edison could invent and patent the electric light bulb in two years, I should be able to complete my task quicker than that.

By my calculations, that gives me about three months to play with.

Kidding, just kidding.

This basement is my laboratory, and speed is my best friend.

Mike Dewey can be reached at Carolinamiked@aol.com or 1317 Troy Road, Ashland, OH 44805. He invites you to join him on his Facebook page, where confession is always good for the soul.