“I got a lovely check today from being a writer that I earned by sitting at home. That’s rewarding.”

Harvey Fierstein

It’s always a bad idea in the morning to have the television on across the room when you’re trying to read the paper and eat breakfast at the same time.

Of course it violates a core mindfulness rule of not engaging in social media while eating, but even the Dalai Lama has to take a potty break.

My breakfast consists of keeping one eye on the paper, the other on the television and a third eye on my Buddhist inner calm. Sometimes this is stressful. In the words of lyricist Frank Loesser, “A person could develop a cold.”

I keep my screen on MSNBC in the early hours, and they have this bottom of the screen crawl thing going where they cover top stories, international, politics, economy and health.

The annoying thing about the crawl is that just when you glance over at the screen, something interesting, suspicious and often terrifying is just ending. An example “… found dead near the vice president’s home.”

Then it moves on and you have to keep watching through some boring news stories, interviews and endless commercials until that subject comes on again. When I finally catch it, it usually reads something like, “A dead squirrel was found dead … in a driveway near the vice president’s home.”

What was I talking about?

Something I saw on … oh, yeah … on the Health Today button, that could be of great interest to most Mainers and Americans in the whole. It’s about sitting. Just when I had standing, walking, lunges and crouches worked out, they bring in something new.

A recent study claims “prolonged sitting can cause health problems like cancer and cardiovascular heart disease.”

Oh boy! This is of great concern to me because I am a writer. Writers, and others who have to sit to perform their tasks on their butts, are in danger of contracting one or more of these terrible conditions. Of course Ernest Hemingway liked writing standing up, and he did avoid cardiovascular disease and cancer, but he shot himself. Not what I had in mind.

I guess I could write standing up, but one of my jobs is reviewing movies. Standing up while watching a movie comes with its own problems, mostly from the people sitting behind you.

But most sitters can’t perform their duties standing up. Example: people who drive taxis, buses, train engines and garbage trucks. The guys who ride on the back,who actually work very hard picking up the trash, apparently will live longer, healthier lives than the guy driving.

Airline pilots fall into the difficult column. Astronauts who pilot space ships get off easy, they tend to float around a lot.

Cops sit a lot and I’m concerned about their cardio health. Of course cops have a lot more to worry about in the course of a shift than about how their heart is doing. As recent events have shown, sitting in one spot can be dangerous. They have to keep moving, but, always sitting, rarely getting out of the car. (I was going to write “except to go into the doughnut shop,” but I’m reminded that cops often read this column.)

In my youth, only detectives rode in cars. Beat cops had to walk their beats. In freezing winter, roasting summer, night and day, they walked. That’s where the derogatory term “flatfoot” came from. I used to work for a police department and got to know a lot of very old retired cops, but not so many detectives.

Comedians seem to live longer than serious actors. That’s why they call it “stand up comedy.” I see the point.

In the interest of science and my health, I spent today gauging exactly how much time I spend sitting down: 30 minutes writing a column, two hours correcting the punctuation, another half hour rewriting, an hour eating lunch at a cafe, an hour at dinner, then four hours watching three political shows and maybe another hour watching an old movie I had taped. That’s about 10 hours. That’s a lot of sitting. I don’t count sitting while driving, as everything in my little city that I need, coffee, groceries, wine, the gym, is only eight minutes away.

I’ve been sitting here for an hour and I’m having a funny pain in my left arm. It could be from lifting that purple bag full of garbage. I’m going to finish this standing up.

J.P. Devine is a Waterville writer.

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