The do nothing

There are people in this country who will turn absolutely anything into a competition. We have contests for eating hot dogs, throwing cow chips, growing enormous pumpkins and seeing how long a person can remain married without admitting he’s wrong.

But a little town in the Midwest recently took competitive sports to an entirely new level.

It held the first annual National Championship of Do Nothing.

The rules were simple. Contestants would sit in lawn chairs for three hours without accomplishing anything. No reading, talking, knitting, whittling or checking cellphones. Sleeping was permitted, provided it wasn’t done with excessive enthusiasm. Snoring disqualified you immediately, because snoring was an activity.

The winner would receive a trophy, $500 and the distinction of having accomplished absolutely nothing better than anybody else.

Forty-three contestants registered. Several had been training for decades. Almost all of the early registers were named Earl. 

The early favorite was Earl Bickens, a retired highway department employee who once spent an entire afternoon watching a pothole fill with rainwater while holding onto a shovel.

He claimed he had been preparing for the competition since 1978, although his wife insisted he’d actually begun training on their wedding night.

His chief rival was Earl Pritchard, a former government administrator who had perfected the ability to attend meetings without making decisions, offering opinions or remembering why he’d attended in the first place.

Earl’s application was 14 pages long and contained no useful information whatsoever. In fact, several pages were blank.

The competition began promptly at 9 a.m., following a 45-minute opening ceremony during which the mayor, Earl Trayvord, delivered a speech about the importance of inactivity.

Three contestants were disqualified before the mayor finished. One applauded. Another nodded approvingly. The third attempted to sneeze and was caught covering up his nose with a hanky.

At 9:17, a controversy erupted when a contestant scratched his butt. The judges consulted the rulebook and determined that scratching constituted productive activity because it relieved an irritation.

The contestant protested, claiming the itch had gone away on its own. His protest was rejected because filing a protest required effort.

At 9:42, a woman named Earlmina Thompson was disqualified for smiling. She insisted she was merely experiencing an involuntary facial response to the sight of her husband sitting motionless in a lawn chair, something she had been trying to correct for 37 years. The judges ruled that finding happiness was an accomplishment.

By 10:15, the competition had attracted national attention. A television crew arrived to interview the contestants, but nobody would answer questions. One reporter described the atmosphere as tense, although another suggested the participants were simply ignoring him.

At 10:38, Earl Pritchard was accused of thinking. A spectator claimed to have observed a slight furrowing of Earl’s brow, suggesting he might have been considering something.

Earl denied the allegation, explaining that he hadn’t had an original thought since 1996. The judges accepted his defense but disqualified him anyway for speaking in his own defense.

By 11:30, only Earl Bickens and a retired accountant named Earl Fogg remained.

Earl had not moved in two hours. And Earl was examined by a doctor to determine if he was still alive. Consequently Earl had not moved since Tuesday.

The championship appeared headed for a historic tie when the judges discovered that Earl had been mentally calculating the interest on his retirement savings. He was immediately disqualified.

The winner was Earl.

Unfortunately, when officials approached to present his trophy, he refused to stand. 

“Standing,” Earl explained, “would constitute an activity.”

The judges agreed. A special committee was appointed to determine how to award a trophy to someone who couldn’t accept it. After 40 minutes of deliberation, the committee accomplished nothing.

Which, under the circumstances, qualified its members for next year’s championship. 

That’s about when I happened along.

I’d been driving through the town looking for a place to eat when I noticed a crowd gathered around a bunch of people sitting in lawn chairs. Naturally, I assumed it was a county commissioners meeting.

I parked, wandered over and spotted an empty chair. Nobody told me not to sit down, so I did it anyway. A judge immediately approached and asked how long I’d been doing nothing.

“According to my wife, most of my adult life,” I replied.

He looked impressed. Then he asked whether I had any formal training.

“Twenty-seven years of marriage,” I said.

Within minutes Earl lost his trophy and I was declared the national champion on the grounds that I had entered a competition without knowing it existed, participated without trying and demonstrated a complete lack of ambition.

They handed me the trophy.

That’s when Rocky showed up.

He was sitting on a nearby tree branch, apparently offended that humans had organized a national competition in which sitting around doing nothing was considered an achievement.

He dropped onto the awards table, grabbed an acorn that somehow fell into the cup of my trophy and made a run for it.

Unfortunately, the acorn was still attached to a stick and that somehow grabbed the cup of the trophy securely. And I was holding the trophy.

What happened next involved a folding chair, a collapsing awards platform, a decorative fountain and a mud puddle of remarkable depth. When the dust settled, I was lying face-first in the mud, still clutching the trophy. Rocky sat on a fence post eating his acorn.

The judges immediately disqualified me. Apparently, I’d accomplished something. I’d made a complete fool of myself.

Connie later informed me that wasn’t exactly a new achievement.

I don’t know how Rocky made it to that town. I suspect he’d hidden in the bed of my pickup. But I’m really beginning to hate that squirrel.