Sittin' here, basically alone. There are other people in the room, but I don't exactly know any of 'em. Not countin' the gal behind the bar, but I don't really know her, other than that her name is Lori.
(Me? Apparently my name at this particular point in time is "Hon'". Good with that.)
It's a young, budding relationship- hour, hour and twenty minutes, maybe- but we've already found we have somethin' in common: Lori used to live in Kansas. I've been to Kansas.
(Did you know that if you order a "double" that the entire process is streamlined for all involved? It is, in a number of ways, but it's just me and Lori. Lori and Hon'. But we're friends. Friends look out for one another.)
Lori's workin' today, so I'm gettin' the occasional moment to myself to just think. Just to think. Consider. Even reflect.
(Reflection is always a big damn deal. It's a personal favorite of mine, even when it breaks me into tiny, tiny pieces. Little, tiny pieces. Some so small that somethin' like a door held open or someone walkin' past can scatter 'em like so much dust or pollen or bug shit.)
But, I digress. (That's pretentious ass speak for ramblin', but it sounds cool. Cool in that pretentious ass kinda way.)
I am really havin' trouble gettin' rollin'. Apologies. Gonna just go:
Bein' the creatures we are, we all carry somewhere between a preoccupation and an obsession with the Passage of Time. It ain't our fault, it's basically unavoidable. Just like Time itself: Unavoidable.
For the average cog we're most familiar with, or happen to be, it's typically driven by a schedule over which we have little or no control- shit like work or kids or maybe even vices. Or a million other things. It's complicated.
For the tiny pockets of folks that have somehow managed to hold on to and strictly live by the genuinely necessary shit- eatin', sleepin', not dyin' if you can avoid it- the Passage of Time may be as simple as Day and Night. Dark versus Light. Live or Die. Beautiful in its Simplicity.
These are the Lucky Ones. The People that Time Forgot. Or, perhaps better described as the People that Everybody Else Forgot and Could Give a Right Goddamn About. Yep. That's a better description, that.
(Distill that down to "Fuck 'em.")
Shit. Did it again.
Most of us tend to mark time with the common conventions: minutes, hours, days, months, years, decades, centuries, blah, blah, blah. But, I've come to realize that, for me, I've always tended to gauge the Passage of Time mostly in relation to the Change of Seasons.
I've tried to trace this back, relative to myself, and I believe it began, again: for me, with the association of the season of Summer with the break between school years, beginnin', obviously, with grade school.
It was somethin' like this:
Kindergarten?! Are you jokin'? You expect me to trade an absolutely perfect Life of Leisure for this dumb shit? Colorin'? Learnin' how to use those shitty, cartoon scissors and the friggin' limited pallett afforded by those chunky crayons that were flat on one side 'cause me and my fellow inmates couldn't be trusted to keep that shit from rollin' off the desk?
I had a theory back then: Why can't my desktop be flat, level, not unlike the kitchen tabletop or the coffee table or even the friggin' floor at my house? Then you knotheads could just give me access to a crayon with a point more acute than my thumb!
But that ain't most of us. Most of us tend not to measure Time by the Seasons.
I expect that I tend to use that as my guide, my gauge, mostly because of that- that first measure that was forced upon me- the "School Year". And that was, for a kid, not about the Task, but about the Break. Summer Break. Single-Digit Salvation.
After that, it was ingrained in me.
As a relatively-speakin' grown man, I spent a decade or so wonderin' why I got the Blues on toward the end of Summer. There were the obvious reasons: Cold weather comin' and all the restrictive shit and what came with that. Basic End-of- Good-Weather shit. Everybody experiences that stuff, right?
That ain't me. Not my thing.
I've come to realize that, since I was apparently about five years old, my personal primary marker in regard to Time has been Summer. Not exactly a clock or calendar thing. Not quite.
Clearly, I ain't had to go back to school for a while. But I still, every August, I get that feelin', that sick-to-my-stomach, every-day-is-friggin' Sunday feelin'. Hurt me more than it hurt my boys durin' that sixteen years of school thing they endured. Never quite got how they were able to move through it like they did. Stronger than me in some way.
Days, weeks, hours, moments, all that shit- finite. You can count days or years or whatever device you've settled upon to make you feel better, lighten you condemnin' load, maybe even fool yourself into thinkin' you got more than you got comin'. Maybe just color it all with fat crayons, flat on one side so they don't roll away, screw you out of a particular shade of somethin'. Press really, really hard. Perhaps even tear the paper in your effort to cover somethin' up, obscure it with a coat of thick, colored wax.
Or just count Summers, or the End of Summers.
Apparently, that's what I've been doin'.
There's worse things.
Fish~
