All posts in category time

to me, it’s not better than the weather

Waning, waxing, waning, waxing: the rush and the push of mood from hour to hour to day to day to week’s end and to the moon. Reading F. K.’s diary night by night…sinking fast in the horror bog of familiarity. A morass of similarities. [Will I also get TB. Where’s my Swiss sanatorium.] Writing, not writing, writhing, writing, not writing, the endless breakers rising and crashing against this battered cranial jetty. The crushing repetition of my own inspiration. Heat’s ebb and flow, the dying summer exhales rank and humid rattle-breaths as it’s painstakingly strangled by the coming fall. An ugly death, for sure. The work not done around here could fill a hundred empty trucks, on standby, prepared to haul off a life’s accumulated evidence of avoidance. I, the weather-crazed architect, survey an empty expanse of years, so carefully orchestrated, so carelessly implemented, and on every day I rested. And on every day I rested. And on every day I…clamp down on the cause of defeat with mighty waxen jaws, summer’s flame licking holes in their false walls. Caving in on itself, everything is. Last night again was epic dreams I failed to describe accurately in my journal. Just weak fluid flowing from my pen, sketching a toothpick framework for what is becoming dangerously close to more exciting than what I describe here. That is, intricate nothingness. That is, blank walls of clear shellac taped off and rollered with exquisite care, attention paid to the most glaring lack of any details…a veritable Sistine Chapel ceiling of nonexistence. So proud I am for the big unveiling. [Sound of emergency exit door slamming shut.]

Now I drink yerba mate out of a wooden gourd. Now I reflect on how cigar-smoking guy had a lady friend with him today. Not a loner for long. They sat in those weird half-chairs that have no legs. Just a seat and a back and nothing else, maybe arms. What will they think of next. Cigar-smoking guy was not smoking a cigar. His bike was there, but his lady friend must have walked. I sat on the other side of the locust trees flipping through some literary journals I’m supposed to review. The air felt drained of moisture. This pleased me. All around, bands of men in monkey suits capered about in the grasping thralls of machismo, no doubt bandying their latest conquests in the spheres of sex and business. Strip off their power suits and we would all laugh. Or would we cheer. Or arrest. Recall the Naked Rambler. Corporate embrace of full nudity: I’d like to see it. Level the playing field. No more power coursing through expensive Italian fabric. I’m nude, you’re nude, let’s close this deal and go get drinks. High fives all around. See you at the bar.

11 Comments

by sean on August 29, 2012 • Permalink

Posted by sean on August 29, 2012

https://sd-stewart.com/2012/08/29/to-me-its-not-better-than-the-weather/

from the amalgamator’s observatory

In the city summer after the trashmen have driven off with the week’s waste, a trailing fetid odor stagnates mid-street. I ride through the rank air and it feels so oddly cool and clean. A young man asks if it will rain today and I shrug toward the dark clouds moving towards us from the south. A neighbor stares through me from behind dark glasses and I wonder why, when before she used to say hello. I believe things shifted when she bleached her hair. Perhaps she bleached out more than pigment. In the close quarters of rowhouse life, we are farther apart than in the rural countryside where being a neighbor means more than someone to avoid eye contact with. There it means sharing and helping, a way of life. I like my space and freedom from the noise of others, but I prefer a friendly understanding to rude avoidance. What if, like Bartleby, we all preferred not to. That said, I have my aloof days. I do have those.

And so…summer’s confluence of days spreads farther into time’s watershed, like tiny feeder streams losing their autonomy. Warm water mixes with cool and thus blended seeps through me. I am a slow cracked flagon, never empty, never full. Plagued by seeing all the wrong things, agreeing to mistakes made in advance. Orchestrating release of the next batch of tics, twitches, compulsions to soothe and smooth. Periods of mania descending to flatline. Elaborating on the never happening.

But wait! It’s never just the weather, is it. Isn’t it. Yes and no. This is getting repetitive. Instead let’s go word diving. It’s like pearl diving, but with words, and less dangerous. Fun fact: the average university-educated native English speaker’s receptive vocabulary size is around 20,000 word families (a word family is a base word and its inflected forms and derivations). Receptive size refers to the number of words recognized while listening and reading. Productive size refers to the number of words used in speaking and writing, and is often understood to be half the receptive size. To put this in perspective, the OED defines roughly 600,000 words. So dive deep, the bottom is farther away than you might think.

4 Comments

by sean on July 31, 2012 • Permalink

Posted in breathing rights, city life, communication, existence, human behavior, ignotum per ignotius, life, parts of the whole, philosophastering, restlessness, summer, time, words

Posted by sean on July 31, 2012

https://sd-stewart.com/2012/07/31/from-the-amalgamators-observatory/

d = rt

Rain-washed city at night I welcome you. Empty streets and silent skies fall into step. Green grow the shadow trees. Beneath your leaves, I untether my fears, not even knowing if it’s safe. It might not matter.

Morning yawns open, its breath dry and breezy, this heat island cooled for now. Scudded clouds on blue, white shreds of a humid shroud shrugged off. Suspend seeking sustenance to gaze on bareness before you. I always see(k) it.

Distance equals rate times time plagues time travelers and distance runners. How far outside the circle I stand. Is it distance or time that matters. I can never get that straight. Distance being relative, for some meaning time. I hate math.

Twist the word wrapper at the ends of meaning like hard candy in cellophane. Suck it down to syrup, feel the rush. Spit back at the spitting sky, for its taunts fall on us with no reason. Stretch your hand out, fail to pass it through the clouds. These best things remain out of reach. What we have are objects on the ground. What we have feels arbitrary. I don’t want it.

Thoughts control, alter our actions. I sung that once. In youth we state the obvious. Of course they control; of course they alter actions. What did I know. I was a crippled distance runner. I was a failed time traveler. I was standing in the rain, spitting, waiting for the morning, candy melting on my tongue. One day dawn broke.

And now there is this. An equation to tinker with, variables to solder: a space behind me to fashion into organs of my own truth.

2 Comments

by sean on June 4, 2012 • Permalink

Posted in breathing rights, parts of the whole, time

Posted by sean on June 4, 2012

https://sd-stewart.com/2012/06/04/d-rt/

hello sunday night

O, Daylight Savings, how I despise you. I woke this morning unaware of your silent overnight passage into my unsuspecting life again. Thinking I had a good handle on the day, being up and about at a reasonable hour on a Sunday morning, I was feeling fine. And then you made yourself known. O, deflation, how I shrink within you. From that point on, the time bandits seized my hours and minutes in their tiny slavering jaws and scurried away with them toward evening (perhaps the time bandits are really time badgers, what with the similarity in sharp teeth and all).

And so now I sit, the night’s hours growing slim, feeling time-poor and less weary than I should.

As an aside, I took a peek at last year’s archives and found that I had only posted once last March. Apparently it was colder, but other than that not a whole lot has changed. This frightens me.

spend it as you get it

The tissue holding these moments together, feather-thin as it is, expands and pulls taut as a hesitant breeze carries the fleetest scent of fall for us to breathe in. Moods collide, launch forth into open air, crash empty to the unforgiving ground. Days drip one into the next, weeks gel together, and still we stand here bare and afraid. What is it going to take for us to be satisfied? When we will we stop our restless twitching? This is life, by god, and it is only here to be lived. There is nothing to figure out; all the mysteries we concoct are simply ghosts dancing on the head of a pin, taunting us even as they fade away. The windows we keep in our minds looking out onto future lives are glazed with thick smears of colorless idealism; the pictures of us that we see projected there are shiny distortions, marionettes we yank into desperate action after so many failed attempts to live wholly here and now. We convince ourselves that our daily lives constitute a dead existence, held fast by debt and fear of impoverished old age. But in truth we squander our time here, fretting and wishing instead of living. And it seems like such a simple thing, to merely live, to stay in a moment for its duration, filling ourselves with its wonder. Yet so many of us fail in this one endeavor we all can claim as our purpose. We only have a finite amount of these moments and each passing day drains thousands more of them into the black hole of mortality. The least we can do is spend our allowance before it disappears.

time…again

My coworker cracks me up because she is so strictly punctual. I always knew it but now that she’s moved into the office next door, I am reminded of it constantly. I know she comes in at the same time every morning (even though it’s well before I arrive…I just know it). I see her leave at 4:30 on the dot every evening. And if she doesn’t get to start her lunch right at noon, look out! We used to have a meeting on Tuesday from 11-12. One day when the meeting was running over, she got caught by a previous crazy manager for looking at the clock. While she was certainly embarrassed, she was no less indignant afterward that her lunchtime had been postponed.

I bring this up because I have been thinking about time again. Long-time readers of this blog in its many incarnations (all one, possibly two, of you) will perhaps recall that I have railed against time often in the past. It bothers me what human society has done with time: assigning monetary value to it, breaking it down into chargeable chunks, using it to create arbitrary deadlines and artificial windows of opportunity.

Anyone who has paid a bit of attention to time knows that it has a curious elastic quality to it. How fast it seems to go by depends heavily on what you are doing within it. Sometimes it depends on what substances you have consumed. The part of the day can affect this elasticity, too; a morning will seem endless, an evening brief. Often this has to do with the amount of available light. And certainly age also plays a factor. As we get older, years seem to slither by at an alarming rate.

So, what to do about time. I know I am most content when unencumbered by my awareness of time’s passing. Smash the alarm clocks! Abolish workday schedules! Don’t think about how much time something takes and judge it based on that alone. Shortcuts spring from a flawed thinking. There is no way to “save time.” It’s a delusion. Why are we trying to do things faster, anyway? It implies that what is happening right now is somehow not good enough, not “worth our time” and so we must get past it faster, faster, on to the “better” things that are more worth our time. But in the end, we just shortchange ourselves, because we have arbitrarily assigned “worth” when in fact every moment of life is valuable and should not be rushed through.

We are living in a frightening period of history. An entire generation is growing up with the expectation that instant gratification is the norm. People’s thresholds for waiting have diminished to a granular level. Impatience is ingrained within us. We are in a rush to get everywhere in our stupid cars. We get food in less than a minute, from a microwave or from a drive-thru window. Information is available 24 hours a day from the internet, from palm-sized devices we carry around with us everywhere, even into the bathroom. News travels faster than ever before. When we have to wait, we get indignant. Why should we have to wait? It’s not fair.

The whole situation has gotten so bad that there is now an entire slow movement. I don’t know much about it, but I think it started with Slow Food and snowballed from there. Clearly others are concerned about the speed at which society travels these days. I suppose making a conscious decision to try to slow down is a good thing. But I am more interested in how we got to where we are and why. Are we really more impatient today than we used to be? Is it technology’s fault? What is driving this desire and expectation for everything to be instantly available? Why do people drive so fast? What the hell is wrong with us?

Of course I don’t have answers for these questions. But I think about them constantly. I wonder why I feel so alienated. I know others do, as well. It makes me wonder if anyone would have an answer to the question of why they are in such a rush. Maybe they’ve just stopped thinking, and if they started again they would realize the absurdity of their actions. Perhaps we have all just become dulled to the point that we don’t know what we’re doing or why anymore. Maybe we have just each become a mere collection of tics: foot on the gas, fingers on the keypads, logging in and clicking around, spitting out to each other the words we’ve just heard and read and watched…never stopping to think for ourselves.

1 Comment

by sean on August 6, 2011 • Permalink

Posted in human behavior, human nature, life, time

Posted by sean on August 6, 2011

https://sd-stewart.com/2011/08/06/time-again/

minutiae

I wrote a post last night but it was way too introspective to publicize on here. Seeing as much of what I write here is probably way too introspective, it must have been pretty bad, huh? Yes, yes it was. So what has been going on? Well, I went away for a few days to the beach. Did some birding over there, but nothing extraordinary. The mist on Saturday morning worked against us. Birds were present but it was too foggy to see many of them. Next day was clear, but birds were on the inaccessible side of the pond, and we had no scope. That’s on the list to get. On Sunday, I saw my first of year Barn Swallow, flying over the ocean of all places. Best shot of the trip was probably that of an osprey perched in a tree limb leaning out over a pond, clutching a dead fish in its talon. It was a majestic sight, and in my opinion much more impressive than, say, a Bald Eagle holding some scrap it just stole from a Turkey Vulture. Many Pine Warblers were present in the pines (natch) but it was still early for most passerine migrants. A few other warblers are being reported elsewhere in Maryland (Louisiana Waterthrush, Palm, Yellow). In a few weeks things will be in full swing!

We planted the garden last week. The mesclun mix came up yesterday, but nothing else has poked through yet. The sprawling multiflora rose (aka “rambling rose”) has been targeted for removal due to its invasive nature. I hope to replace it with a native shrub, probably one with berries that birds like to eat.

It’s taking me three days to write this entry…

Updates: some radishes and lettuce up now in the garden. I put out the hummingbird feeder this morning. Crabapple tree out back is in full flower (white), and the cherry tree out front has shed all of its flowers…pink petals now scatter the yard. Weather has been in the low 90s (!) past couple of days. Not good for sleeping.

At work, I sneak away for a few minutes in the afternoon and listen to the house finches sing as I walk around the harbor. One of them has staked out his territory on the Coast Guard vessel and sings his heart out from the very top of the ship each day. This is all I can do to maintain a few tendrils of sanity.

Another cyclist was killed by a car, this time in the county on a road I’ve ridden often. The usual “road rights” argument rages as a family grieves another senseless death.

I am weary, and my dreams, when I remember them, horrify me.

1 Comment

by sean on April 7, 2010 • Permalink

Posted in birding, birds, cycling, introversion, life, time, vacation

Posted by sean on April 7, 2010

https://sd-stewart.com/2010/04/07/minutiae/

sometimes…

…each day feels like starting over. And there are so many things not to care about but that still inflict themselves upon you. When I have a million things to say I barely croak a word. Other people’s lives are a foreign language: they fascinate yet confuse. Why this weight of the temporal? Like life is a waiting room. Seeing the future but never getting there. And the past looks like disjointed squares quilted by a madman and torn to shreds. It’s so far away, even what’s recent. Anxious compulsions wrap tendrils around restless hands. The bands of time tighten. We’re all settled in now so flip the switch and let us ride the unfinished track to blankness.

halting the aversion

The holidaze has come and gone, a blur of mostly family and some friends, a lot of eating, a touch of music with an old compatriot, some reading and sleeping, and a long, luxurious respite from work. I traveled by train and car, but have been off the bike for far too long now. Worked out at the gym, tried my hand at pedal steel guitar, cooked and ate with some of my favorite people. I received an unexpected gift intended to enhance my birding, which I haven’t done in about a month now, besides car birding, and some very meager backyard birding. Christmas Day did unexpectedly bring to the yard jays, cardinals, doves, sparrows, and even a junco or two. We’ve seen glimpses of a hawk (probable Cooper’s) in the trees across the street. Meanwhile, with the close of the old year and the dawn of the new comes the inevitable reflection. I don’t make resolutions, but it’s hard not to stare ahead at a blank slate of 365 days before you and not scratch around in your head for some ideas of what you want to see rise up from that expanse of time. Personally I know I need to stop treading water and start making headway on the changes I yearn to see in my future. No more averting the eyes. My passivity knows no bounds and the time to corral it is way past due. I need to spend the afternoon, as Annie Dillard says, because I can’t take it with me. There is a path that I am supposed to be on and I will claw my way through the brambles to get to it.

2 Comments

by sean on January 3, 2010 • Permalink

Posted in annie dillard, change, growth, life, parts of the whole, time

Posted by sean on January 3, 2010

https://sd-stewart.com/2010/01/03/halting-the-aversion/

3:33

Wake up uncertain, through blurred eyes reach out, unmask the dread box full of time: 3:33 AM. I am untethering; I feel this, yes, I do. I float above myself all day, drifting, occasionally deleting Russian spam, wondering when this gossamer thread shall fray, then sever, to release me. I remember being young, staring at the ceiling, imagined walking on it, stepping over door frames to enter rooms; it seemed better up there. My thoughts upside down, always, then and now; my records all broken, need to melt them down, re-groove with new sounds and words.

1 Comment

by sean on December 16, 2009 • Permalink

Posted in creativity, inner life, parts of the whole, time

Posted by sean on December 16, 2009

https://sd-stewart.com/2009/12/16/333/