Language

Invariably she cried. Back then, and now if truth be told, I was a creature of a very determinant nature. I lacked a sort of understanding of time that I think has been essential to our development as a species. It took Kepler and Copernicus pointing out that the earth itself was not fixed in the heavens in order for the idea of space travel to even be conceived. This theory even and against the seeming laws of nature. Why, just toss an apple in the air and watch it fall. Proof enough that the world isn't spinning on its axis like a top. And yet there they were conceiving of things outside of their seemingly limited spectrum.

I point the story out only to show the retrograde sort of way that my own limited being in the world stands contrast. I'm a throwback of sorts to the hunter and gatherer types who were wholly dependent on stomach to direct them. I follow the sage advice offered in Best in Show "If you get tired; pull over. If you get hungry, eat something." Certainly I'm not as much a slave as I'm claiming here, but I don't hesitate to say that I'm stuck in the moment.

I don't mean this in the sort of way that you're probably thinking, where a person learns to focus on every breath and thank God that they are alive. No. It doesn't mean the moments I live in are any less boring than the next guys. Rather, it means that I can't seem to see my way through a moment and into the future looming right behind it.

Why, if I had been with old Copernicus when he was theorizing about the earth's revolution around in the universe I'd have told him to leave well enough alone. Maybe asked if he could use a beer or something. "The future, my friend, is now. And right now we are wasting it."

Atemporality is probably the wrong way to describe it because that is that which is timeless. I suppose at this point it's probably best to give you an example, but the more I think about it, and isn't it strange that our thinking is relegated into words when we have to communicate with one another, this sort of thing I'm describing is likely an affliction for lots of people working at crappy jobs drifting across this seemingly stationary planet and waiting for it to do the moving.

I guess what I'm saying here, apologies for honesty, is that it was some sort of great achievement in human history when people came up with retirement plans. That's not at all the main thrust of this thing but just another thought, which being thought, is now expressed, and is related to the painfulness of blogs and an old quote about Updike, "Did the man have one unpublished thought," which makes him the world's first blogger. I mean, how did we manage to convince a bunch of people trapped in time like me that it was a good idea to plan for the future.

It took us eight years to reach the moon after Kennedy's speech, so maybe enough of the population has caught on to the fact that the earth is moving, and the rest of us are just being left behind. Some day in the future a ship is going to set sail in the stars and people just like me will be watching it depart from the comfort of a couch or whatever we'll have by then wondering what might have been.