The wonderful things that people seem
to spend their lives doing: Painting garden gnomes, chit-chatting,
piddling, building guitars, sucking on flavourless boilings, learning
to cook, collecting handbags, fiddling about, understanding politics,
pulling up the blinds, holidaying in hot climates etc. You wonder
quite why some folks spend all their lives doing what they do, by
that I actually mean doing things that really amount to nothing as
opposed to vital things. Don't they have any sense of the value of
their own lives, their place in the world and the mark they might
leave? Maybe they do but they don't care, maybe they make their mark
in secret, maybe they've not given any of this any thought as they
are too busy just getting off on the things I'm high-mindedly and
incorrectly describing as idling, procrastination or a wasting time.
Of course there is no such thing as time.
Time was invented by
belligerent and uncompromising European rulers to try to give workers
something to feel guilty about and to measure the long gaps between
ritual events and the less predictable seasons in nature. The first
stages of time measurement used coloured sand in cola bottles, then
they tried candles made from lard wrapped in proper English string.
That worked for while but was tricky to use in open boats and on
horseback when in hand to hand combat. Then the Swiss got a hold of
it and mechanised it into tiny impractical clocks that would have
been better covered in rich milk chocolate that, let no one forget,
pretty much comes out of a cow's arse (or udder I suppose). They also
formed guilds, designed knives and invented sexual perversion (a term
no longer understood by anyone). Anyway that same technology
inadvertently invented the cult of miniaturisation which then
resulted in a number of dodgy sci-fi plots, the rise of China, the
industrial revolution and counter revolution and places called
Silicon Something (Valley, Glen, Bay, Iceberg, Cess-pit, Tits) and so
on.
Thus we find ourselves stuck with bright blinking little
malignant clock faces and glowing numbers plastered across every
device we greedily consume and occasionally use. A constant and noisy
reminder of our wasteful and fragile humanity, the frantic avoidance
of ageing, the countdown to imminent nuclear winters, doomsdays,
lottery deadlines, airport delays, polar caps melting and the
extinction of all the little grey/brown cuddly (but aggressive to
humans) animals and whales.
