Time in a Bottle

When I was kid, I read voraciously. I didn't have many close friends, so I spent a lot of time in my room. On the bed. Reading. Alone. I spent a lot of time there, so a lot of my knowledge of comic stories came from re-reading the same comics over and over.

I also remember that my father was always reading three books simultaneously. He kept one by his chair in the family room, one in his briefcase, and one in the car. That way, he always had reading material on hand if he found a few spare moments. But what I found more interesting was that he always had a stack of books and comic books that he hadn't read yet. Despite the fact that he read whenever he could, he was always several books and usually a few dozen comic books behind. If he bought something new, it would take him several months, sometimes years before he got around to starting it. And I was always amazed that he continued to buy books even though he could afford the time to read them.

So here I am, a decade or two later, and I have a book in my work bag, two in my nightstand, and a couple of piles of other books that I haven't started yet. The comics I bought on Wednesday remain largely unread, the complete collection of Amazing Spider-Man on CD-ROM has been looked at maybe twice, and I've got nearly 100 Timely superhero books on microfiche that I haven't touched in the year and a half that I've had them.

The only question I have is whether I miss having the time to read them, or having the lack of responsibility to have the time to read them. I suspect the latter, but the counter-arguement quickly comes that if I didn't have that level of responsibility, I wouldn't be able to afford to buy the comics that I currently don't have time to read.

Is there a well-paying job that lets me just read comics all day?

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