or 101 Ways to Start a Fight With a Broken Bottle in Belgium
Today is the last day of 2009. Unless you’re in Japan at the moment, in which case 2009 is already gone and it’s 2010. It’s also possible that the last day 2009 was yesterday if you are, in fact, reading this tomorrow. If you’re reading this in the year 2378 you’ll need to do the math to determine how long ago 2009 was and also future space reader, thanks for reading my blog. Althought presumably I’m dead in that scenario so I guess I won’t really care if you read it or not. I suppose I could still be alive but very old. Probably so old that I wouldn’t be concerned about a blog. With my attention span, it’s likely that I’ll not be concerned with this blog in 45 minutes.
Time is a funny thing. Or a relative thing. I guess it’s both… it’s a relatively funny thing. Interestingly enough, it doesn’t exist. It’s just a sort of social contract between humans to just sort of agree on a unit of measure of our lives. Some could argue that it’s tangible, like other units of measure because it’s based on the Earth’s rotation and spinning and flying around and such (I’m sure that’s exactly how’d they’d argue it too) but if god (who will be played by Minnesota Fats in this story) were to chalk up his interstellar pool cue and try a bank shot with the Earth spinning it off in a new direction, would a day still be a day if the sun rose and set 362 times a second? I imagine no one would be alive to ponder such a thing what with life being snuffed out in the name of galatic billiards (it’d have to be a very large table, but god’s got an enormous gameroom… where did you think all that tithing ended up? He also has a cocktail table version of Ms Pacman.).
So today someone sticks a marker of time in the sand and says “2009, you come out no more! 2010, you are at bat!” Who gets to decide that? I’m sure it goes back to the Mayans or the Mesopotamians or Middle Earthians or the New Deal, but what if someone were to just say no to New Years. Nancy Reagan told us to say no to drugs in what would end up being a failed campaign of criminalization and an endorsement of an American caste system… but on the other hand it did make for a great episode of Dif’rent Strokes.
I look back today on what the “man” tells me was my year. That’s it. Nothing to wax poetically about. I just looked back and went “huh”.
Now I’ll look forward. The “man” says 2010 will be a new year and I should make resolutions and other assorted things to justify an evening of getting tarted up and sauced… at my house, that’s called Saturday. I could make the resolution about being a better person or doing something healthy or to stop pushing children down stairs, but if I decide to do that, I’ll just do it. I’ll do it because I want to… not because of some sort of symbology that involves Socrates in a numbered banner being killed by a demented baby in a top hat. No, as interesting as that is… the only thing I’ll do in honor of time’s holiday is to work to get myself out of the social contract that is time itself. It won’t be easy… since the rest of the world thinks it’s important. But there will be moments when I can carve out timeless periods in my life and I will work to make those longer and more frequent periods. Periods measured by experience and happiness, not by hours and days.
To all of you who still answer to Time’s cracking whip… a very Happy New Year to you.
Oh yeah, PS… about starting the fight thing… um… go to Belgium, find 101 people and poke them all with a broken bottle. It’s rather simple, really.
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