The key to achieving a good vacant stare is practice. I devote two or three hours every day after breakfast to gazing slack-jawed at nothing in particular. Then, following a snack break, I engage in a couple of hours of looking at something in particular, but without thinking anything in particular about it. By the time I’m finished with that, there’s lunch to eat, a nap to take and TV to watch, all of which has to be squeezed in before dinnertime.

There’s no way I could accomplish this much doing nothing if I weren’t a skilled multi-tasker. While I’m staring, either at something or nothing, I’m also pretending to work. I turn on the computer and lean back in my chair until I can’t see the screen. If anybody stops by, it looks as if I’m searching for inspiration, but I’m really doing just the opposite. I’m seeking un-inspiration. Or maybe it’s dis-inspiration. Or even anti-inspiration. Any of which could be hiding among the cobwebs on the ceiling.

I also get in some quality staring time while brushing my teeth, showering and dressing. I’ve learned to combine staring with patting the dogs and listening to my wife. I can stare while ignoring telephone callers, classical music and smoke alarms. Radio and TV talk shows are conducive to vacant staring, as are newspaper op-ed pages. Staring is even possible while eating, although I don’t recommend it for foods with pointed edges or poisonous body parts.

“The other morning I was staring vacantly out the window,” wrote Patrick F. McManus in “A Fine and Pleasant Misery,” “a hobby I personally find more entertaining than, say, stamp collecting or golf.”

Why, then, is so much written in praise of philately and flailing wildly at a little ball and so little about gazing placidly at nothing? Maybe it’s because staring vacantly has gotten a bad rap by always being associated with the looks one sees on victims of war and survivors of the rock-star lifestyle.

Fortunately for idolaters of idleness, there’s now a book extolling the noble heritage of professional vegetating. My friend, Emmet Meara, a charter member of the Inertia Hall of Fame, sent me a copy of Tom Lutz’s “Doing Nothing: A History Of Loafers, Loungers, Slackers, and Bums in America,” after he roused himself long enough to write a column about it in the Bangor Daily News.

As is appropriate for a book with “Doing Nothing” in its title, it sat untouched on my coffee table for several months. Then, in an uncharacteristic moment of wild ambition, I opened it.

Astonishingly, I could find no mention of my name anywhere. I’d write a letter of complaint to the author, except that would almost certainly constitute doing something, thereby negating my argument. Instead, I’ll just whine to you.

According to Lutz, until relatively recently in human history, nobody was particularly proud of having done a lot of work. That was because everybody had to do a lot of work just to survive. Goof-offs weren’t held in high regard, but, since they soon starved to death, they were considered a self-correcting problem.

That attitude began to change in the 19th century with the arrival of industrialization. More efficient production methods resulted in more time off, allowing Walt Whitman to write “Specimen Days,” a book he described as “a malange of loafing, looking, hobbling, sitting, traveling – a little thinking thrown in for salt, but very little.”

“To do nothing is the most difficult thing in the world,” wrote Oscar Wilde around the same time (or maybe not, I didn’t bother to look it up), “the most difficult and the most intellectual.”

Now, we were getting nowhere. But not necessarily nowhere good. By the late 20th century, laziness had been co-opted by the self-help movement. Wack jobs like Deepak Chopra were extolling the virtues of slacking, promising that letting your mind go blank for brief periods would grant you “infinite organizing power.”

Chopra neglects to explain why a slug would need to be organized.

Karen Salmansohn’s “How To Change Your Entire Life By Doing Absolutely Nothing” has an intriguing title, but on closer examination, she’s as loopy as ol’ Deepak. Salmansohn calls for five-minute idleness breaks, after which you’d have “energy, power, clarity and speed … like you’ve never experienced before!”

The truly idle have no need of exclamation points.

Lutz quotes culture critic Roland Barthes as saying, “the saintly form of modern laziness is, at the end, freedom.” Unfortunately, the modern age can’t leave it at that. Lutz uncovers an actual religion, the Church of the SubGenius, that, for a fee, will help you attain a state of “Slack.”

Lutz has a lot to say about the 1991 movie “Slacker,” which, contrary to its title, is actually about people who “are almost all quite energetic, anxious to bloviate with manic emphasis on their pet topics, like the sexuality of the Smurfs, the aliens who brought us here, the class system, or the Kennedy assassination. They are not working at jobs or looking for them, as far as we can see, but they are not exhausted or listless.”

Trouble is, I don’t want to be energized, enlightened or even entertained. I want to stay just the way I am: enervated.

But my lifestyle choice is under constant threat of being co-opted by the pressures of modern life. Such as editors who expect this essay to be 100 words longer than it is, even though there are only so many synonyms for idleness, and with the exception of the overly literary “idlesse,” the antiquated “dodge time” and the French “flA?¢nerie,” I’ve used them all.

Oh, wait. In my slothfulness, I overlooked “slugabed,” “leech,” “Weary Willie” and the Yiddish “schnorrer.”

Fifty words to go.

Thank the gods of shirking for Lutz’s book: “The figure of the slacker needs to mean different things to different people at different times in order to serve its complex function as a goad to examining our relation to work, as a role to adopt while finding our relation to work, as a critique of our culture’s twisty relation to work and to leisure, and as a celebration of the same.”

I’d give that some thought if I wasn’t so busy thinking about nothing.

It’s not for nothing I write this monthly column. It’s for money. E-mail [email protected], and I’ll tell you where to send the cash.