PROCRASTINATION, as defined in our grassroot language, is a man that is a ‘blow-blow’ or reliable like ‘Cow Dung’, which, when deposited, creates a hard scab but is soft inside, or someone who has grand ideas, but fails to lift the first practical finger towards realising it. In other words, a ‘B.S artist’. This word is many-faceted in its human manifestation; most likely it does not define a recorded disease but it’s definitely a mental condition. We all know such persons that fit the description as friends, relatives, and acquaintances, or unfortunately, in some cases as siblings and offspring.
The most profound example I can identify revolves around a longstanding buddy whose name came up recently during a conversation with a mutual friend.
He’s abroad now, but when he was in Guyana, he complained incessantly about the inadequateness of his salary, which had exceeded mine.
All that was wrong in his life, from his perspective, was somebody else’s fault. This would have been justified had his efforts been innovative and substantial, and the lack of vision and indifference from officialdom were frustrating those efforts. But my buddy could not settle to execute any of his ideas, even to begin.

THE THING WITH DREAMS
Then there is another close friend who, when I told him that I wanted to get into the graphic publication business, taunted me for a long time, attributing a name to define the idea. He addressed me in good humour as ‘A pauper with a dream’.
The thing with dreams is that you never know where they will lead, once you begin the first step.
This close friend had great ideas too, but felt that Guyana wasn’t big enough to conceptualise his vision. When I implored him to try one particular idea out, he confessed to another plan. He’d met a young lady whose reputation was, in his own words, a bit hazy, but her mom lived abroad and had “lots of money.”
With this inspiration, there was a wedding. Then, months later, came the shock: the lady’s foster father died overseas. Apparently, the bigger part of the boom belonged to him, and he had a family before who turned up for, let’s say, the reading of the will.
The marriage became hectic, and didn’t last much longer, so he thereafter resolved to marry someone else to get him to the U.S.
Procrastination is not exclusive to any geographic region. Arnold Schwarzenegger, the Olympian body builder once remarked in an interview, that in Austria, if you propose an idea, they will give you 11 reasons why it wouldn’t work, while in America they’ll say, “Go for it.”

INHERENT ORIENTATION
In Guyana, we seem to have a special kind of orientation that I think colonies inherited, which helps cultivate this condition, a condition that may very well be latent, anyhow, in some people.
The very administrators of colonies themselves lack the belief that ideas can emerge from their own collective; and even when directed to accommodate, cannot transcend the limitations of fixed-procedure directives to expand. So they brush aside portfolios from unassuming presenters with unaccustomed imagery. This leads to the inducement of the defeatist mode into the more fragile presenter that pauses at procrastination, with the beyond-Guyana-salvation mindset, while retreating entirely into the projected imaginations of what can be.
I mentioned that there are echelons of procrastination. I encountered one stage recently. It was two weeks after ACDA’s Emancipation Festival when I was stopped in Republic Bank by a female colleague in the media, who began to chastise me, saying that the festival didn’t have African food.
I explained that booths are rented, and people stock what they feel the public would buy. She rebutted that it was ACDA’s responsibility to have African food, which caused several pairs of eyes belonging to other young Afro-Guyanese ladies to swivel towards me.

WHAT! NO ‘FU-FU’!
I attacked with what was profound. With the wave of a hand, I asked, “How many of you ladies cooked ‘fu-fu’ during August?” Questioning eyes blinked and shifted. I knew then that I had them. It seems that none of the seated ladies in the loan chairs knew how to make, or had even eaten ‘fu-fu’.
Twice afterwards I encountered the young lady, and the subject came up. And I finally advised her to get someone who can teach her generation to make this obviously vanishing delicacy make a comeback. Where the element of procrastination comes in, is in the projection of something one can call on someone else to do, cancelling an opportunity, the execution of which will require a Research and Development work factor, that presents the trial and error, fall and rise probability.
This is the mountain that has to be climbed that nudges one into the comfortable shade of procrastination. For most young men, our first act of procrastination is to carry into reality the many conversations we have in our minds with the first young lady we link all the love songs to; she’s in our class a few feet away, but we dare not sign her initials on the Valentine heart we designed, because the buddy we share the desk and bench with is PROCRASTINATION.