L.A. Weekly, September 20, 2002
I HAVE OWNED THREE WATCHES IN MY LIFE. The best thing
about the first was a bucking bronco on the face that appeared to move
when you rotated your wrist. (I would like to have that watch now, just to
make the horsie go.) The second watch was silvery and adult; I killed it
in the showers after gym my first week of junior high. The third, a pocket
watch, I received some dozen years later as a humorous token of 
my first departure from this
newspaper, which I used to typeset (not long after the switch from clay
tablets). I don't know where that watch is now; it is a very long time
since I looked at it or looked for it.
Strangely, though I haven't worn a watch since I was 11 years old, I have
the habit of checking my wrist whenever a question of time comes up. It is
always a hair past a freckle where I am.
THAT HUMANS ARE AS A BREED obsessed with time means that
there is usually some watch-wearing person within 20 paces who can tell me
the hour when I need to know it. And I am not without clocks, though the
clock in my car is right only during daylight-saving time, and then only
almost right; the clock on my computer creeps ahead of the rest of the
world; and the clock on my answering machine is just broken. The clock
upstairs is unplugged because the power strip doesn't work, and the clock
on the kitchen wall we took down because it made the most horrible
scraping sound when the gears went around; we never know what time it is
in the kitchen. If we want to know what time it is, we have to go into the
living room and look at the cable box, which is the only clock here I
trust, because it is beyond my power to set in the first
place.
I am of two minds about time. I
long to float free in it, and from it. My time, I like to think, is my
own. (Some of the time, anyway.) I strive to throw off its strictures --
its hours and minutes and seconds and milliseconds. I refuse the social
constructs and artificial values of your 9-to-5 suit-and-tie world, man.
I've got nothing on my wrist, and nothing around my neck. (So much of my
life has been determined by what I don't want to wear, it's . . . sad,
really.) And yet I have a high regard for punctuality; I don't like being
late, and I would like to say right now that if you and I ever have an
appointment for which I am not on time, I will feel bad about it.
(Missing a deadline -- which, I admit, has happened once or twice,
depending on your definition of "once or twice" -- costs me deep
emotional pain, and I am not just saying that to impress the editors
who expected this column two days ago.) Though one reserves perhaps a
certain romantic admiration for the habitually tardy, outlaws that they
are, I can also tell you that if you are supposed to be at the van at 9
a.m. to drive to Cleveland for a 4 o'clock sound check, you had best not
be asleep in your hotel room while your friends cool their heels in the
lobby, without even having had their coffee yet, if you know what's good
for you.
WHEN WE ARE SMALL, TIME, like pretty much everything
else, seems huge beyond reckoning. Days last for days. A year is barely
comprehensible. Then we learn to tell time, a prime rite of passage like
learning to dress yourself, or learning to read, or how to work out how
many apples John will have if Mary gives him three and Alex takes two
without even asking so Mary takes one back and gives it to John. (It will
depend of course on whether John had any apples before Mary arrived -- use
your head!) Once you are clock literate, you are on the road to
citizenship in the grown-up world. You can Be on Time. You can
Not Waste Time. But in the end it is time that wastes you. Time
is not on your side, no it is not. It is a willful child that you have to
"keep an eye on" and try not to "lose track of," but it is too quick for
you. It flies. To say that there is never enough time is just another way
of saying, "It is sad I will not live forever" -- which is why heaven was
invented, with its timeless time and everlasting
light.
The people of Earth have long
tried to master time, with their sundials and hourglasses and water
clocks, and yet it was by defining time that they were enslaved by it.
From junior watching the little hand ticking the minutes until 3, to the
worker waiting for 5, we are a race of clock watchers -- and punchers.
What's more, and worse, as soon as you understand that your life is made
up of years, days, minutes and seconds, of a finite and not particularly
large number, you begin to count them down: Time binds you to death.
SOMETIMES I SEE TIME AS AN EDGE, the universal straight
edge of the advancing present, a kind of cosmic paint roller racing into
nothingness, realizing each universal moment into being, ceaselessly
paving over the future with the past. But that is a rather unsettling way
of looking at it, all that crushing Nothing backed up behind the thinnest
film of Now. (I guess it might be liberating in a good old existential
kind of way, if you are a good old existentialist.) More often, I see time
as a house, something in which I am contained, something stable and
established that extends behind and beyond me and my temporary tenancy. In
practice, the present feels more like a smear than an edge, blurred into
the past we know and the future we trust will be there when we arrive. We
are all born fortunetellers: Our minds race ahead of us, paving the void
with possibility. We take it for granted that tomorrow will come, that
existence will not be canceled like a low-rated television show. We behave
as though the future already exists, not necessarily in the Tralfamadorian
sense -- in which what is to come has already transpired -- but in that we
can see ourselves in it, imagining our next move as though it were already
made. I picture myself now getting up from this desk to go to the kitchen
(where there is no clock, but there are cookies). (Mostly I picture the
cookies.)
Will there come a time of no time,
and will it be even duller than a summer Sunday afternoon when you have a
cold and there's nothing good on television? I feel safe in saying I have
no idea whatsoever. Time is defined by growth and decay and movement, and
when there's nothing left to grow or decay or move, no trains to catch or
coffeehouse appointments to keep, that, I suppose, will be that. Your
wristwatch will be good only as a fashion accessory then. I am sure I'll
miss time when it's gone -- there are no movies without it, or music, or
dancing, or seeing how long you can hold your breath underwater. Quality
of life would certainly suffer. Then again: I'd never miss a deadline.
Illustration by Hadley Hooper