iNertia, v2.0

(Lazy? There's an app for that.)

As a career single guy, I'm constantly on the lookout for time-saving devices, as long as the looking doesn't take too much effort.

"But Barry," you may say, "time-saving devices are for lazy people, not single guys." And I may reply, after I run several hundred yards away because I don't really know you and I have no idea how gracefully you handle confrontation, "Shut up." (I'll reply loudly, so you can hear me.)

See, being lazy and being a single guy are really just two ways of saying the same thing. And, being lazy, I'm rarely ever tempted to say the same thing twice. Heck, sometimes I need a coffee infusion, or some vague, looming threat of pending physical violence, before I'll bother saying something once.

And as mentioned, I'm 'career' lazy. I'm lazy like somebody was handing out prizes…as if there was some International Sloth Awareness awards committee, who finally had to ask me to stay home this year and give somebody else a chance.

But other than the ISA judges, most people don't appreciate how much effort it takes to be inert.

Here's how lazy  I am: recently, to save an entire minute a day, I quit shaving and just grew a beard. But then I spent more time scratching at my face than I'd ever spent scraping it. So, next, in a misguided effort to be lazy and cool, I went with a mustache and chin beard (also known as a 'goatee' or a 'Van Dyke' or, in traveling circus circles, 'Fatima the Geek Lady'). Basically, I was walking around in public, randomly frightening children, with the facial hair equivalent of a love child fathered by Colonel Sanders and Old Scratch.

That partial hair ploy turned out to be an even more idiotic idea on my part, because now, not only did I have to shave – I had to not shave, too. I had to shave in zones. I had to shave and stay in the lines. I had turned my head into a kindergarten coloring book, but without a graham cracker. Or a nap.

I'd shave my head entirely, but I'm too lazy to calculate the Band-Aid budget.

Career single guys are a breed apart. In more ways than you might imagine, single guys are different from people who have kids and other tax deductions. I've seen it. I've been to homes that house whole families. Family people are used to a residual level of background noise. In my house, if I hear a noise I didn't make, someone's breaking in.

And single guys jealously guard that privacy, that silence, that inertia. Single guys have even learned how to doze without interruption while watching FoxNews, a network that has adopted the marketing technique of screaming "BREAKING NEWS" every time a plane crashes, or doesn't crash, or lands, or takes off, or taxis, or boards, or is on time, or is delayed, or gets bought, or sold, or cleaned.

However, don't confuse the single guy with his sociological cousin, the bachelor. Sure, on the surface, single guys and bachelors may seem the same:

1)      No one is barking in their ear, "See? I told you, you should've turned left!"

2)      No one is barking in their ear, "See? I told you about those socks!"

3)      They're lost, and their socks don't match.

But internally, we're wired differently. Bachelors don't have time to be lazy, because bachelors are still 'on the market.' 'On the market' means bachelors who are still looking for women who are 'available,' because these bachelors still think themselves 'a good catch,' even though they are 'older than Methuselah' and are wearing 'purchased hair' and 'orthopedic socks.' All of this combines to make bachelors 'funny to watch,' not to mention 'stupid.'

To be fair, though, in some ways, we're a lot alike, too. Single guys and bachelors both leap for the television whenever some stiletto-sporting TV news hair helmet mentions that they're about to show "an info-graphic."

(It's not our fault. See, "Coming up, an info-graphic" sounds just like "Coming up, a nympho-graphic," especially if you're 'stupid' or you just dropped your hair.)

So, to revisit our original question: why bother saying 'single guy' and 'lazy'? It would be like saying you're a long-tailed cat and nervous, or saying you're in a Detroit auto union and drinking during lunch.

"But Barry," you may say, "if you're so lazy, why do you say 'single guy' when 'lazy' takes less time to say?" And, this time, I may not reply to you at all, because you've now entered Barking In My Ear Land, and I'll be too busy making sure I never invited you to my house by mistake.

But I'll answer your question anyway, since you asked, and since I need about 75 more words for this week's humor column so that I can submit it to both surviving American newspapers so the editors can reject it without bothering to comment. The reason I prefer to say 'single guy' instead of 'lazy' is rooted in my long-standing addiction to (and fascination with) one of the best board games of all time, Scrabble.

Scrabble puts a high premium on certain special  letters, like Z, Q, and the inter-office correspondence of Dick Cheney. So I naturally respect things like the letter Z, and the letter Q, and Dick Cheney, especially during quail season.

(By the way, playing the word 'quail' in Scrabble is one of those life-changing victories that hits a single guy where it counts, like winning a beer lottery, or seeing an info-graphic.)

But this week I may have stumbled upon the absolute ultimate in lazy. Witness:

Somewhere out there, a proud author published his eBook, entitled Progeny, and (rightly) started firing off marketing efforts to help sell the book. I wish him nothing but the best of luck, of course. I wish him tons of sales. I wish him a spot on Oprah's speed dial. I wish him yachts, and I wish him cramps accrued from signing royalty checks, and I wish him a severely disorienting mental condition that leaves him convinced that I'm his sole heir.

However, among his promotional efforts, he bulk-blasted a marketing email, and here's how it read:

FREE PROGENY ON YOUR KINDLE!

Wow. Free, virtual kids.

Now that's lazy.