Another 365

The calendar is funny. Well, our calendar is funny, since I’m not overly familiar with other calendars, but they do exist and this simple fact speaks volumes on the arbitrary ways in which humans break time up into smaller pieces. Existence is a much easier concept to grasp when one can think of their life in terms of a constant multiplied by a variable and different people and different cultures use different constants to achieve this end. Years, months, days, minutes, seconds and so on, in an infinitely decreasing trend which can never theoretically reach zero. But these are all words that don’t really mean much of anything outside the confines of our own skulls.

Until you die, at which point these units mean even less. Of course, there’s an endless birthday party in the sky waiting for you if you’ve led the good life and bought enough shit to keep the economy jumping during your stay in the temporal realm. If not, look out. Fire and other vaguely menacing things await.

Time is everything, though, isn’t it? Well, it sure is versatile.

It flies, it stands still, it disappears. It serves regret, wistfulness and debt.

It serves competition and greed, but is also the handmaid of sloth.

Time is a limited resource, which explains why time is also money — but that’s another waxy ball of constructs for another time.

More than anything else, though, time hinges on perception. When you’re happy it seems as though there aren’t enough hours in the day, but when you’re in the depths of a depression, time is a bitch goddess with extensive cosmetic surgery and expensive clothing, dangling a clock in front of your nose with one hand while shoving you back down with the other.

“Come on” she says, “why don’t you do something with your life? Anything. I don’t care. Just get off your lazy arse and move around once in a while. Hey! What do you think you’re doing? Back down with you now. Can’t have you getting up, lazy arse.”

Time is oppression, but I guess it’s all we’ve got.

Well, time and the weather.

Nights

I’m a vampire, baby, suckin blood from the earth - Neil Young

I am a vampire — rather, a vampire in reverse. Instead of staying up all night and sucking blood out of my surroundings, I stay up all night as my surroundings get fat off my blood. I do it for the paycheque, see? Easy. I sit on my arse doing repetitive tasks for an above-average working-poor wage, like we all do sometimes. Right? I have responsibilities to keep me interested, but they’re always the same responsibilities, every single night. On cue, done mechanically. The clerical equivalent of being the foreman’s lackey on the factory floor.

Oh God. I’m turning thirty next week. For real.

People tell me “the thirties are great!” without really elaborating on the source of this greatness. I suppose it is the last pre-40’s decade of one’s life, that last vestige of youthfulness before the unavoidable reality of “this is who I am, regardless of who I thought I would be” sets in for good.

But maybe it’s all bullshit.

Maybe the old adage that age is nothing but a state of mind holds true. Even if the late-teen’s to mid-twenties are the sweet spot for personality molding, we still conceivably change as life goes on. Nonetheless, most of us experience all the usual groundbreaking firsts during this period: death, birth, devastating professional sports team playoff losses and sex (the less said about the lot of these the better).

After that it’s just more layers of bitterness, skin and wisdom (best case scenario). Hair and teeth as well, but they all fall off at some point; we cover them up with reasonable facsimiles, but it’s never the same as the original — doesn’t have that new-body scent we all covet. I don’t mean that in a perverted way. I’m pushing thirty, but not yet a dirty old man.

But I digress.

Turning thirty might not be so bad. I never became a troubled but gifted rock and roll musician so I had no worries of dying at 27. I’ve never had a dangerous job, with the exception of convenience store clerk, so occupational death has never been a big risk.

Heart disease? Maybe. Working nights, combined with laziness, can lead to less than heart-healthy eating choices. Gas station food is not part of the Canada Food Guide, but it keeps me fatted for my nocturnal surroundings. The sunrise is always at the back of my mind.

So bring it on, next decade. You’re not so tough!

(feel free to insert a dance number here, if that’s what you were expecting)

Maybe I’ll write a novel; maybe I’ll go to jail. Maybe I’ll get in a fight and not break my hand.

Maybe not, who knows?

Never Trust a Robot - They Killed Bambi

We are about to confront a future already limned by Fifties trash culture. Sure, the big tail-fin bards of pulp celluloid may have been a bit overzealous in their space-age polymer-drunk predictions of other worldly contact, but who can blame them? Post-war optimism at its adolescent best is always apt to make one a bit quick on the draw, but in the grand timeline of human existence what’s fifty or a hundred years? Sweet F.A. How could anyone have known the IT industry would take so long to get their shit together?

But look at us now. Plugged in and playing 24-7, domesticated Sony robots on the horizon, drive-thru everything and no amount of fairly-traded, ethically produced goods can stop another Wal-Mart customer from being born every 1.97 seconds. Our lives will only become smaller and cheaper in the same fashion as the products that define us like the grainy scan of a carbon copy of a smudged dollar sign.

The Robot Holocaust is only twenty or thirty years off. So stock up on water and reflective tape while you can and, for the love of GOD, remember: if you stop buying useless mass-produced garbage then the robots win.