Time

I’ve always been fascinated with time, mostly in the abstract sense, that force through which we are born and die, invisible and rigid. As a child that seemed both magical and macabre. The, later, the minutiae of the segments of time we track, hour, minutes, seconds. I am never late, barring disaster, though, that has little to do with how we record time, I just find it disrespectful of the other parties time; this is not a case of me being harsher on myself. When you are late it’s disrespectful of my time. Yet, that time doesn’t exist in any real sense; it’s the small countdown to our personal deaths. Your wiki page, should you get one, will begin with the dates of your birth and death. We celebrate days from the past too. The universal time doesn’t care, though it lives in the past too.

I’m going somewhere, I think.

I use to wear watches (one at a time) when I had to go somewhere to do something, even though as a younger man I could feel the time. Quartz watches because they are accurate, cheap and sometimes attractive. This is 2019 according to the calendar with tracks the birth and death of all. Even the newborn is assigned a number on that ledger, and the wristwatch is a bit of an anachronism, the phones we all seem to carry with us have the exact time by satellite feed to an atomic clock. The exact time is still a construction of ours as much as the inexact time.

I’m beginning to collect automatic watches, swiss made, those that work by kinetic power. It amazes me that such a small device beats like a heart, precisely making a pendulum of sorts maintain a rhythmic beat to mark our progress to the grave. It’s not as precise as a circuit board, but is considerably more interesting. The pendulum like thing swings by your movement and store 32 to 48 hours of energy, and the other wheels and gears and whirley do-bobs use that enery to create a steady beat almost like a sentient metronome. They aren’t as precise losing or gaining about ten seconds a day, but they are so much more fascinating and revealing.

It’s twenty nineteen, the great Satan to the west has an idiot on the throne, the sky and earth are choked with the excess of our own sloth, and … other bad shit. An automatic watch now is mostly jewelry, but how fucking beautiful! How strange! How stalwart, an anachronism that won’t die, won’t be affected by time itself.

And, too, the other mechanical watch, the self wind, a spring so tight that it’s slow release fuels the inner workings to whirl on their axis, as precise as the attention paid to it, with the exception of live birth, the hand wind is a more perfect animal that us. Both mechanical watches provide us with the illusion that we are masters of time, though, it’s the other way around (not that we are slaves, time does not regard us at all except for in the sense that we are obstacles of little consequence).  If one chose too, this would put our worlds into perspective.