a bad combination, like
you and me.
20090225
.time.an.origami.rock.
It seems, for once, that my hand-drawn calendar is synched up with the mainstream ones. For a brief moment, I'm entertained by the image of recycled sheets, with shaky grids drawn on sitting on a white rack next to a perfectly quadrilateral, calendar of cats in buckets, the whole package cleanly sealed off behind a transparent film, as if cuteness were a sexually transmitted disease, waiting to spring off commercial merchandise to ruin your life forever.
And when that brief moment is over, I have finished drawing up the next thirty-five days of my life, not even bothering to use a straightedge this time. If these little boxes were houses, then poor March looks like a straw house waiting for a wolf to come along.
And what becomes of the thirty-five expended, experienced days?
I begin to think of the linguistic ways of talking about how one travels through time: we like to think of it in terms of the putting the past behind us, the future in front of us. We envision ourselves boldly stepping forward into tomorrow, as if we were retrieving a baseball we failed to catch from the past. The shining future is like the sun in our eyes.
And the Chinese, I seem to remember, and perhaps even the Vietnamese (to be honest I can't even remember off the top of my head), have a way of envisioning us falling through time, like a marble falling from the past above down the stairs to the deep pit of the future. One can't seem to fight gravity any more than one can fight tumbling into tomorrow. Surely if Newton had been Chinese, he would have realized the fourth-dimensional qualities of time concomitantly as he had notions of gravity pounded into his head by an impertinent apple.
But perhaps we can offer another metaphor, for they lurk under every pencil with lead in its belly. Why not think of time as nothing more than a sheet of paper, ripped off the wall when we are through with it?
Nobody moves us.
We are the movers,
the page turners.
Time is nothing more than ink in a pen, and when the veins are too dry to draw up any more numbered boxes, you are in some trouble, buster.
Time is nothing more than a leaf of scrap paper, fallen from a tree of trivia and flipped over, recycled. It'll be crumpled up when we're done with it, and if the trash hasn't been taken out yet, well by George, we're going to just fold it into itself a little more and shove it into our pockets to dispose of later.
And when our pants come back from the wash, and we extract the shredded pulp of discarded time past, we'll spread it around our palms, thinking it a digested concert ticket, and try to recall exactly where we were, and what all that blowing in our ears was.
And when that brief moment is over, I have finished drawing up the next thirty-five days of my life, not even bothering to use a straightedge this time. If these little boxes were houses, then poor March looks like a straw house waiting for a wolf to come along.
And what becomes of the thirty-five expended, experienced days?
I begin to think of the linguistic ways of talking about how one travels through time: we like to think of it in terms of the putting the past behind us, the future in front of us. We envision ourselves boldly stepping forward into tomorrow, as if we were retrieving a baseball we failed to catch from the past. The shining future is like the sun in our eyes.
And the Chinese, I seem to remember, and perhaps even the Vietnamese (to be honest I can't even remember off the top of my head), have a way of envisioning us falling through time, like a marble falling from the past above down the stairs to the deep pit of the future. One can't seem to fight gravity any more than one can fight tumbling into tomorrow. Surely if Newton had been Chinese, he would have realized the fourth-dimensional qualities of time concomitantly as he had notions of gravity pounded into his head by an impertinent apple.
But perhaps we can offer another metaphor, for they lurk under every pencil with lead in its belly. Why not think of time as nothing more than a sheet of paper, ripped off the wall when we are through with it?
Nobody moves us.
We are the movers,
the page turners.
Time is nothing more than ink in a pen, and when the veins are too dry to draw up any more numbered boxes, you are in some trouble, buster.
Time is nothing more than a leaf of scrap paper, fallen from a tree of trivia and flipped over, recycled. It'll be crumpled up when we're done with it, and if the trash hasn't been taken out yet, well by George, we're going to just fold it into itself a little more and shove it into our pockets to dispose of later.
And when our pants come back from the wash, and we extract the shredded pulp of discarded time past, we'll spread it around our palms, thinking it a digested concert ticket, and try to recall exactly where we were, and what all that blowing in our ears was.
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