May 21 2007
Fast Times, Slow Times
Do you ever sit and wonder sometimes how when you’re young (grade school, that is) time seems to stretch endlessly before you. Minutes and hours seemed to go on like Chinese water torture; eons between moves. You used to stare vacuously at the second hand of a clock. Drip. Tick. Drip. Perhaps back at that blissfully benighted age, as that clock hypnotizes you, you started to play with your drool, carefully yo-yoing from the side of you mouth. If time was a horse, you’d want to spur his sides and kick his rump into gear (Though I actually wouldn’t recommend you do the latter. Horses have a wicked snap kick, though I’d have to say it is preferable over an Amazon woman kicking you with four inch high heels…)
Anyway, I was thinking about how nowadays, time seems run like a mad pooch on mescaline and with less brains. On Monday morning, I wake up, shower, force down some breakfast and drive a rapid 30 miles per hour on the freeway towards work. (”Hey, get outta my way, Turdball!” Ahem. Actually, most of all that verbosity occurs somewhere between my ears…) I arrive at work, turn on my computer, and stare at the monitor for a few hours. Then I go home.
Rinse, repeat, spit.
Rinse, repeat, spit. And so on and so forth.
Then one morning a fellow co-worker who’s also plugged into the Matrix says to me, either at my cubicle or inside the elevator,
“Damn, did you know it’s Friday?”
“Naw, really?” I said. “I hadn’t heard.”
“Fuck yeah it is,” says my enthusiastic colleague. “Next thing you know it’ll be winter and 2008 and then I’ll be sitting my rosy ass in an old folks home. How’d you like that?”
“Not very.”
(Now don’t get me wrong here. I love my job despite its occasional monotony. It gives me time to ponder the imponderable. Fathom the Unfathomable. Unlock the mysteries of EXISTENCE ITSELF! Well… not really. I just kind of sit there writing things when I’m bored. But it’s worth it.)
But back to time. I occasionally get the impression God is pressing the fast-forward button, and suddenly we feel as though our lives are flashing across our eyes… because it is.
Or in the immortal words of that noted sage Ferris Bueller, “Life moves pretty fast. If you don’t stop and look around once in a while, you could miss it.”