Man, I have no sense of time anymore…hour, day, date, even month sometimes, it is just gone. Just flowing along in the eternal present. I walk outside and everybody’s on a schedule, tied down tightly by 60’s–seconds and minutes, you get the idea–and dozens and two dozens and sevens and thirty or thirty ones. All these numbers you guys live in. I don’t. Years of epilepsy took care of that a long time ago (while her’s disappeared in a few endless minutes coding blue). It’s like I look out the picture window at another universe full of math and inside the two of us flow along in the present, segmented only by our circadian rhythms. I look at the fish tank with the two surviving fish (you might recall their killing spree) and I’m like them. They do their thing, having a ball–if there’s such a thing as a happy fish, it’s a zebra danio–their tiny striped lives managed only by watery circadian rhythms. They swim madly about, from impulse to impulse, and I write, mostly, and wonder where the time literally went, because it’s gone.
Tag Archives: time
Bliss
I have a pretty good idea of the time. Our internal clocks are very, very ancient and keep us aware of about when it is in the day. And we have calendars all over the house and if I look at them I can see the month. But man, my natural state is to have no idea what day of the week it is, or the date of the month. The calendars don’t help. The one I am looking at right now has a mother bear and three baby bears and beneath them thirty one days, each day a perfect little square. I don’t think I am supposed to see the days as perfect little squares. They are supposed to be numbered concepts. But the concepts seem to be missing and I have to keep asking my wife what day it is or what the date is. It’s kind of blissful, actually, this timelessness, but I’ve never been a fan of bliss. I was never a bliss kind of guy. So it’s a struggle not to disappear into this blissful pit, this little brain damaged heaven up here in the hills of Silver Lake. It’s not a battle I am winning. The timeless bliss is unrelenting, like a tide that comes in and never goes out again. And to think there are people who do yoga with goats to get where I am.
Living timelessly
Man, not only do I keep forgetting what day of the week it is, I can never remember the day of the month, and sometimes what month it is, and even season. But I’ve been adjusting. I have a calendar right by my desk in the office here that I stare at every once in a while, which helps a little. At least it’s more decipherable than the Aztec one on the wall above it. But lately I’ve been losing track of time a lot. Like every day. Like maybe more often than not. I sort of exist clocklessly. All the clocks in our place are off by several minutes, none the same as the other. I just noticed this. None of them are synched up. There were two clocks in the kitchen and they were eight minutes apart, and neither were correct. All of our clocks used to be exactly on time. Now which ever clock we happen to be looking at, that is the time until we look at another clock and it becomes the time. I just noticed that my pocket watch doesn’t work at all. I can’t remember the last time I ever looked at it. I lost my cell phone so don’t have that as a time piece either. My internal clock seems utterly random. I’m living timelessly.
I’m sure we each several internal clocks, our body and brain probably have all kinds of ways of measuring time. But the conscious perception of time’s passing, that seems to be missing. Which isn’t actually a problem on my own. In here, in the house, time goes whichever way it does. Doesn’t matter too much. But out there, with all you people and your clocks and schedules and timetables and deadlines and office hours, that’s increasingly the challenge. I used to be one of you, too. A busy, hectic schedule, timed to the minute. Now I pass through time like I’m in another multiverse, ethereal and time free, while yours passes through mine measured right down to the second. We talk, we interact, we hug, we kiss, we shake hands, we laugh at the same jokes, whatever, and we then part again, you in the tightly measured real world and me in my world of words and perceptions. I remember being one of you guys. I just can’t remember how.
Brick's Brain 