So what? It’s not your life I’m trying to live off. Be glad I didn’t choose you as a host for my parasitic needs. So what if I don’t want to move my lazy bones? I’m conserving my energy you know. Do you know how much calories I burn by merely yawning?

Maybe a hundred? Geez, I don’t know. I’m not a geek. And thank heavens I’m not. Or I’ll need more calories and an extra just to keep my mind going alone. How about my motor skills?

When I used to work, almost 12 hours a day and the nature of my work asked me to write and to travel; makes me hungrier than I used to. Thinking alone for articles for press releases, staring at a blank sheet “endlessly” for me until an idea waltzing through my head down to my hand and guiding the pen glides its way to form sensible ones, makes my acid container intestines sizzle. What about traveling? Study says the more you move, the more you burn and uses a lot of calories. Huh?

After a burnout and a brink of ulcer, I found myself lying around the house or semi inclined right in front of a TV like a good couch potato does. I ceased working, avoided even household chores. I abandoned all activities that may give me sweats. Congratulations! I’m now a certified bum!

A no good excuse for a person who’s healthy enough to feed myself from my own pockets. It’s just that if I start working again, I will no longer be a bum, a thoughtless, unfeeling moron who just depends on whatever available means of living without lifting a finger or the need to use my brains.

You maybe wondering what I’m really trying to drive at, but hey I’m also at lost why I choose to be a bum for a time being. Could it be I’m a coward to try manipulating my joints to coordinate properly again? Or fear that I might stumble and die instantly or simply afraid of rejection? Whatever it is, a bum could be a lonely state.

Not that we’re not sociable, it’s just that people shun us. Bums like me, I must admit are perennial headaches, pain in the butt, what-have-you. But why did we choose to be one, for the time being or not?

I don’t know myself. It started out as an innocent much overdue rest then before I knew it; here I am a bum too late to realize it and grown weak enough to overcome it.

People shouldn’t be too harsh in judging bums like me, a burden to our family and the society. In fact, you should pity us; for being a bum is a psychological thing that can be incurable or not. Its root problem or cause may not be transparent to one and all, even to a bum himself, err herself for that matter.
But hey, I don’t have all the hard facts behind the reasons of being a bum. I’m just bent on making people aware of what we are, because people notices our existence however don’t have time or care to know why.

In retrospect, hey bumming around is an escape from responsibility and of reality most of us wants to do secretly, at least for a while if only given the chance. So come now, admit it! You fellow bum! *****