Time Is Death’s Valet

What time is it? Whose time is it? Was it time? Is it time? When the time comes. There’s a time for everything. Do you have the time? It was her time. It was his time. It was my time. It was our time.

Time is on our side. Time is against us. Who can find the time? I don’t have the time. There was a time. It will happen in time. Just in time. The passing of time. Time stopped. It’s about time. Time flies. We don’t have a lot of time. The ravages of time.

I’ve got all the time in the world. Out of time. In due time. Time stood still. Just on time. What a waste of time. Slaves to time.

Fuck time. Einstein said that at a party. Later, having recovered from a nasty Schnapps hangover, he changed it to E=mc² and stopped getting proper haircuts.

Who hasn’t wished to ignore it? That buzzer goes off in the morning and its game on. There isn’t a move we make during any given day that isn’t dictated to us by a preconceived notion of time.

It’s light, it’s dark. No, that wasn’t good enough. I’m awake, I’m asleep. Sorry, you’ll have to be more specific. How collectively driven were we to come up with the abstraction of seconds? Seconds, is that specific enough for you?

Bink, oops, I’m sorry, I didn’t accomplish anything there. Bink, shit, nothing there either. Bink, my life is wasted.

No doubt there’s a passing of our personal existence as we understand it into something that we don’t understand. And maybe we can’t understand. And maybe we can’t understand it in part because we tie ourselves so melodramatically to the abstract of time.

Damn, Grog’s been dead for 35000 years now; I wonder how he’s doing? Who gives a shit? Not Grog anymore, he’s stopped watching the clock. And that’s the thing, only we keep time, and only for ourselves ultimately.

There is no denying that moments pass. We certainly change. Our appearances alter, our perceptions decay and are reborn. There is a frighteningly finite aspect to life as we know it that we can’t alter no matter how we try.

So what? I can almost guarantee that the first person to quantify time was close to death, because that is what our understanding of time measures, a nearness to an end.

And for us there’s only one end that matters, death. Time is death’s valet. Excuse me my lord, may I suggest botox and a subtle vacuuming of your ass and stomach? Turn back the clock so to speak.

In a tremendous twist, our prefab notions of time are founded on the vague knowledge that time itself seems to have no beginning or end.

So, in our manifestly obvious march towards our own end, we have decided upon the most immortal and invincible of enemies, one which only exists through our perceptions, and yet one which we can never understand.

Maybe we measure time so as not to consider the measure of no time. Do you recall a beginning? Have you tried? And why not? Will you recall an end? Does it matter?

Ask an insomniac how important time is. They have more of it than anyone, yet they would gladly trade with you a moment’s rest.

We don’t have the means to control change, but by one of the many gods, we can identify it.

It has been said by they that you can’t take it with you. Well, who would want to? I don’t want to count anything for all eternity. I know they mean money, but let’s face it, time is money.

‘Count the seconds.’ What insane freak-show first uttered these defeated words? You count the seconds; I’ll be over here with the living learning to mambo, because when I just watch the clock all day I get tired.

Soon we’ll seriously be considering lesser increments of time for other than deciding chemically enhanced sporting events.

As an aside, this, maybe more than anything, illustrates our absurd addiction to the restraints of a self-inflicted mechanical hell. Two or more people race, and one is declared a victor by one one-thousandth of a second.

Are you kidding me? Every sporting event that can’t be decided by the human eye should end in a sword fight.

Bob, I just turned two billion nanoseconds old, two billion and one, two billion and two… Who needs drugs, we haven’t even begun to explore the perception altering possibilities of time.

Come join with me as I embark upon an adventure. I haven’t the time to explore the infinite possibilities for random and magical discovery to be visited upon me, but I know where I can bungee jump.

So I allow a scruffy perfect stranger to tie my feet together and help me waddle to the edge of the abyss; what, no trial? I am asked: “Any last words?” No, no, that’s not right; he said, “are you ready?” Of course I’m not ready you fool, push me.

And so I tip over the precipice into a time releasing, adrenaline induced rush of pure terror. At least it would be terror if it had lasted longer.

The main thing is that for those brief moments I was free of time. It held no dominion over me. It was reduced to a purely irrelevant abstract, a method of counting no longer important, for I was somehow now alive outside its boundaries.

Suddenly I was aware that I was simply alive. And it was good.

Alas, I was also suspended upside down by my feet and at the mercy of any number of human and mechanical failings, how long can a person live in this condition, start the clock and haul me up.

Yet from this day forward it would be known throughout the land that I, I, had transcended…. stupidity.

For that is time, we can neither beat nor embrace it, we can only choose to let it rule us or accompany us on our journey from moment to moment.

An unwanted companion, to be malignant or benign. Somehow existing, yet needing our compliance to be real.

There’s the rub, I measure time, but time does not measure me.

Because it’s an abstraction, a creation of sentience. It exists through our desire to quantify an existence we know to be fleeting. So, perversely, rather than accept the finite nature of our trip through the flesh, we count it down.

Not wanting to appear as rampant nihilists, we do so by counting up. I’m minus 82 just doesn’t have the same feel of achievement.

Let’s return to the older methods, I’m 568 moons; by god man, I have no idea how long that is, seems like a lifetime though, nice work.

Imagine we’ve crossed over into a world of immortality. There’s no murder, we all exist forever. Violence? Probably. Immortality won’t necessarily predispose wisdom, but fools will eventually seek fools as a defence mechanism against repeated failure to force acceptance.

Now we can simplify insanity. No more mitigating circumstances; “your honour, I humbly submit that the defendant wears a watch and constantly refers to the ‘good old days.’”

What!! Off with his…. Wait we don’t do that here, send him back to earth, make him the curator of the Greenwich Museum, that’ll learn him.

Only a pessimist brings a watch to eternity.