Sunday, July 13, 2003

Clockwatching

Tomorrow is one of those “field trip” days, when I get to go out somewhere else to do stuff.  This time it will be the State Legislature in Sacto, where I’ll be helping, with three of my colleagues and two professionals, to lobby members of the state senate’s judiciary committee.  They’re all in a furor about how much the State Bar charges to attorneys, and how it spends the money it gets.  I need to deliver the chill pill.  Ergo, I am in a state of preparatory chill. 

As I cool my vibe in the pre-chill mode, I note to myself that I won’t be able to post tomorrow, as if that could possibly make a difference to anybody, except I also will be missing a chunk at the end of the week, oh my goodness now chuckles is becoming an unreliable commodity, vrip that’s the sound of the ripcord being torn out of my heart as you leave me for someone you can count on.  This is enough to harsh my bliss, so I’m going to leave a short essay in the extended entry about something I find more entertaining than my erstwhile stress attack.  I’ll be back on tuesday but god knows what else that day will bring… wish me luck I’m going lobbying.

CLOCKWATCHING

The clock is both my ally and my adversary.  It encourages me with the quick flight of time, and taunts me with its creeping minutes and endless hours.  Sometimes it takes sudden leaps and I find myself far along in the future, and sometimes it skips backwards and I am mired in relived moments from which all power and potential have been leached out like nutrients from overwatered earth. 

I pretend to believe that all moments are of equal moment - if not fungible, at least enough alike that each could, if required, be substituted for another.  “If not now, when?” thus becomes, “if not now, whenever.” But in my chronologic soul I know better.  Some moments, some arrangements of the hands of clocks are more auspicious, more propitious, offer greater promise and a more fulfilling experience.  I suppose many people have their favorite times.  I offer mine so you can conform your preferences hereto:

2:20 pm: Elementary school let out; I had 40 minutes to wander home and pour a growler of cold cereal before Match Game came on, and then TattleTales - what a joy, a sense of relief and release.  No more school.  Hours till supper and the tension of the table.  2:20: Time to Play.

10:08 am: In junior high and high school, this was the time of our morning break - an island of relative civility in the raging sea of the school day.  I always bought a cinnamon roll and a carton of orange juice, and ate the roll first, peeling it from the outside in.  I controlled it, and it was predictable and satisfying.  No longer stressed from being late, not yet wasted from overlong classes, at 10:08 I felt okay, and that was something worth noting.  10:08: The Genteel Pause. 

My sister, for just these reasons, decreed that her wedding should start at 10:08 precisely.  She’s got a degree in stage management.  It worked beautifully.

12:34 am: during years of youthful insomnia I often watched the numbers on my flip-number digital clock creep up on this magical minute in which four of my favorite digits appeared in order.  At the instant this sequence appeared, I’d start mentally rearranging them: 1234, 1243, 1324, 1342… I gave myself that one minute to think of all the possible combinations.  I got good at it.  If I could complete that sequence in the allotted time, nothing could stop me - for the rest of that day.... 12:34 am: The Minute of Proficiency. 

5 pm: oh come on

8 pm: Most of my favorite television shows aired at this hour.  While I don’t want to consider myself a slave to the broadcast schedule, even if I’m recording something while out elesewhere living la vida soporificosa I can sense the level of ambient entertainment climbing as seinfeld/simpsons/carter country/some great 8 pm offering fills the airwaves.  8 pm: The Hour of Entertainment. 

4:20 pm: Curiously, not why you’d think.  It turns out that at 4:20 pm there’s a sudden, subtle, nigh-imperceptible fluctuation in the fabric of spacetime.  Some people, properly attuned to it, can utilize this small natural daily occurrance for other purposes, benevolent or nefarious.  I hone this skill in my own self-monitored apprenticeship.  4:20 pm: The Minute of Subtle Power. 

For those who track such things, 4:20 am just basically sucks.

ooh, lobbying!!! i always thought lobbyists, like actual LOBBYISTS, what am i saying that makes no sense. i mean, people who lobby in congress or something were really annoying and they’d never stop talking…

but notice the past tense…

tsk tsk. i am APALLED...as if ONE POST. ONE MEASLEY-well, not measly-POST could RECTIFY what you HAVE DONE.

oh well. happy blogging tuesday…

heh… you said rectify… and yes, I feel slimier already, even though I’m doing GOD’s work… cuz god dont’ want my salary cut…

10:08am, baby!!!!  That’s right!!!  the best time of the day!!

for me, it was the release from the torture of algebra class that cemented that time in my mind.  i see the numbers in my mind’s eye, “10:08”, glowing with a elemental aura of shimmering samnite. 

love your important times, dan.  makes me feel like maybe (I SAID MAYBE!!!!) i’m not such a dork for having given similar import to certains times myself.

you said propitious. that’s one of my all time favorite words. all those lovely Ps.

I don’t think I have specific times that i like better than others. but the ten oclock hour def wouldn’t make the list for me… during 11th grade i had lunch (LUNCH!) at 10:20 am. who the fuck wants lunch at that time of day!!

whoa. sorry. i’ll calm down now. i guess it still just gets under my skin.

lunch at 1020 sounds extreme to me.  our 1008 break was called “nutrition”, ie: time for a cinammon roll and orange juice, but surely not lunch!!

Heh, that’s cool--I wish I remembered the “good times” of the day from high school.  I know I had them.  I’ve just blocked out the entire four years like one of those traumatic repressed memories.  I am also a split personality.  But I’m not.

Much lobbying-luck, or is that lobby-luck?

Is there a bar in the lobby of the State House?  I mean, if you’re talking about legislator-lawyers, I think that’s the only place that matters.

Well, he did say he was lobbying for the BAR.

4:20--we had exactly 2 1/2 minutes to stop goofing off, turn off the tv, dust, vacuum, and pile all the crap in the corner before Mom walked in the door for inspection. We almost always made it, my sister and I.

we had to accomadate 3 lunch shifts and we got out at 2:10 so that didn’t leave much wiggle room in the schedule i suppose. this was def lunch, the square pizza that was always frozen in the middle, the gray burgers, the tator tots (mmm. tator tots!), you get the drift. except i usually couldn’t stomach that stuff at that hour so all i would have would be a soda and a cookie on the way to the library. despite all that, i enjoyed high school.

10 am is too early for lunch.  That would have totally ruined high school for me.  Your ability to overcome it reaffirms you as an avatar.  Hail Pea. 

There was no bar in the lobby, but there is a new Pyramid brewpub two blocks off the capitol, which I was able to visit twice during my six-hour stay in River City.  We visited with staffers for around a dozen state senators, as well as one senator himself, who was not interested because he was on his way to present a different piece of legislation on the floor, well la-de-dah.  Yeah okay it was pretty cool, and I have no idea if it will work but it was not a terrible way for me to spend my Monday.

great stuff about times.  i’ll never forget 6:42a, when my first class started junior year of HS, 3:30p, when middle school let out, and 12:12a, my HS curfew (synchronized according to my dad’s bedside clock).

5:45 AM - the moment at which I wake up each morning and look at the clock, only to realize that my body has cheated itself out of a final solid 15 minutes of sleep. Of course, I never get up - I keep lying there, pretending I’m asleep, but just waiting for that damn alarm to go off.