Ode to Time

(2005)

Just a little something..

 

This world of ours..   What a place.   How perfect!  How typical.  How horrible!

No one knows why we are here.  We have names for unfathomable ages.  The Silurian Period was over 400 million years ago.  The Azoic age was between 3.8 and 4.5 billion years ago.   A million of anything is unthinkable.   A million years??  Four hundred million years?  4 Billion years??

 

4 000 000 000 years.         I have been alive for 25 years, and I probably only remember about 22 of them.   I have done many, many things in this time.  Things commendable, reprehensible, memorable, and plain exhilarating!   Yet I have barely left my city.  Ive never even seen an ocean.

 

Time.   It seems like I have been alive for so long and done so very much, when in truth I have been alive for 2 seconds and Ive done nothing at all.   How could 1 million years even exist?  I have been alive for around 9000 days.   People typically live to about 30 000 days.   A million years ago was 365 million days ago.    So what was happening where I stand now,  a million years ago?  How about 400 million years ago?   Was there God then?   Is there God now?

Ok so we know about the dinosaurs.  Giant reptiles and birds, and likely fish that existed millions of years ago.  Along came an ice age and everything became extinct 65 million years ago.  At least that’s what they tell us.  You know, the teams of people around 12 000 days old in numerous countries who have been finding bones and studying them for the last 20 000 days or so.    I like history, but more like the last 100 years.   After the dinosaurs what happened around the world?  I don’t know.  Around 10 000 BC, there were people all of a sudden.   Then the next thing I know was the first year recorded!   That was 732 000 days ago.  Less than a million days ago!

 

So lets see, year one, what comes to mind?   Jesus Christ, Southwest Asia, and the fact that someone realized that time is occurring, and decided it would be perpetual and recorded.  Now there was a roman empire somewhere in all of this.   I think it lasted from 20 BC to 1400’s AD.  So then what?  What happened in the year 106?  Or the year 600?  or how about the year 1000 or 1388?  How did they keep track of all this time and how did they spread the word?   Like some cavalry rode from country to country with a fucking white flag and somehow translated the fact that time is being recorded and they are to now know this as the year 216 AD?  (assuming everyone knew what a white flag represented!)  Oh yeah, and by the way, its 530 pm..

 

I heard of Lief Ericsson’s voyage in the year 982 that led to the discovery of Greenland and ultimately North America when he landed at Vinland the Fair, known today as Cape Cod Massachusetts.   But then you wake up in the morning and go to school and they teach you that it was Christopher Columbus in 1492 or whatever.    ??    WTF? 

 

 

Anyways, I digress to morality and violence.   I wasn’t there, and I tend not to believe in most of what Hollywood produces, but as far as I know, for 1800 years people have been fighting each other with swords.     Swords and fire, catapults, bows and arrows, rocks and cannons.   Can you imagine the pain of dying from a sword impalement?  Or even living after one?  Just trying to imagine that is like trying to imagine a million years.   Yet people have felt this pain.  Millions and millions of people have felt unimaginable levels and variations of pain and death in every single place that exists, for as high a number of years that you can come up with.  Death by a sword through the chest.  Or an arrow through the neck.  Severed limbs, scalded and bludgeoned.  Hangings and asphyxiating, tortured, and eventually…   shot.

 

After millions of years, dinosaurs and empires, sword fights and torture chairs, we live in a world where you get shot with a little bullet from up close or bombed from far away.  2200 years of cutting and slicing to finally advance the weaponry to a little metal thing fired from a distance with the power of a thousand swords.  You don’t even need to make eye contact.   Have we just created a more reasonable way to kill?  One not so dreaded.  One ostensible to sympathy, promising to be quick and respectable like a bullet to the skull or instantly in an explosion?  Or is it more cowardly with the ability to fire a trigger from 300 yards or punch in some launch codes from 7 countries over?   Not to underrate the almighty bullet, them things can cause some awful harm.    Large caliber rifles, shotguns, non fatal casualties of war – once again, I cannot fathom the pain ensuing from this method of fight.

 

How many people died by the sword during the roman empire, or prior to that?  What was happening in China during all those years, or Brazil, or Zimbabwe?  Don’t know, but Im sure millions of people were slaughtering each other with metal objects.  How about all the people who died in Virginia closer to our time, or the people of Rwanda, or Europe in the 1940’s?  France, England, Scotland, Vietnam, Korea, Japan, Russia!  Now Im just listing places that come to mind when I think of horrible deaths on large scales.

 

So many people have felt pains I cant imagine for periods of time I cant even conceive.  Me?  Broken nose once or twice, cuts and bruises, some that needed stitches.  The pain of a broken heart!    The worst pain I have ever felt was getting sprayed with Bear Mace (unimaginable pain!)  and getting kicked in the balls.  I think a toothache I once had would fall a very close third place.

Speaking of bears, what about the brutal and savage deaths of animals throughout these millions of years?  From cavemen taking down mammoths with stone tipped spears to cheetahs sinking their teeth into a gazelles neck, to chickens getting their heads twisted off by people or machines.  Human to human, human to animal, animal to animal, machine to human, machine to animal, there is no escape. I wonder who has felt more unbearable pain if it could be measured through these millions of years, humans or animals?  (OUCH, I stubbed my toe!)

 

So whats next?  Is this the empire of the United States?  How long until that country, or mine, become occupied by an overpowering foreign military who has come up with better ways to kill?  Or how long until our leaders bring down and occupy countries that are currently not dependent?   How long before a map has to be significantly rewritten?  Or the next world war?  Nuclear missiles will fly like bullets resulting in a perfect ending for a world reprehensible and bitter at its own predicted demise.    I believe the missiles will be exploded because they exist, and they will exist until they are exploded!  No one is going to dismantle them.  So they will sit there until some jackass uses them.  Apparently, people can wait about 2000 years.

 

Ive never read the bible, but Ive heard all the talk about the apocalypse near our time.  (our time:  the baby born this second to the oldest person alive)  Maybe the apocalypse is inexorable because it was written?  After it happens, will the remnants of mankind rebuild into another destructive and perhaps vengeful existence?  Or maybe some smart ones will proselytize the fact that the way we lived proved only a million days of pain, death, and all hell unimaginable in a turmoil and anguished animosity.    The survivors of the new world may also recall the biblical prediction and the prognosis of our destruction, and choose to further document this with brand new warnings of its accuracy.  Or they just might blame the whole thing on religion period, and throw it all into the fire.   But most likely, there will be no survivors!

 

Maybe it will never happen, and people will be living under domes on Mars, or some planet with grass a galaxy away.  Will the pain follow us there?  Interplanetary wars.  Planetary Monarchies.  I can see it now.  Well have destroyed more than our share of the universe.   What will be where I stand now, in the year 3000?  Or 5000?  Imagine that party?!    When will they stop recording time?  I guess when there is no one person left to maintain its existence.

 

Aliens will come here, will they salvage and interpret any forms of documentation to bring our legend back?  Will there be anything left to salvage?  Maybe not by the year 4567, but how about the year 31019?  or maybe a million years from now!  or 750 million years, dare you think higher?

 

 

 

 

This world of ours..  What a place!    I was brought into it, somehow escaping all forms of pain and suffering that has completely surrounded my species for hundreds of centuries.  I watched and listened for 25 years and it recently struck me how perfect our time falls into history on the grandest scale of things.  How typical we truly are.   Its funny looking at every single person on this big sphere and observing how they’ve adapted to cultures meshed with rules of the world, with the furthest thought from everyone’s mind being anything that took place prior to their own existence.  Your fence picket needs replacing and the mortgage payment is due soon, when just 100 000 days ago a battle of a million men too place where everyone fought and died horrible deaths beyond your darkest nightmares, right where you stand.  Kings and Queens, slaves, martyrs, armies, horses!  People with enough power to take anybody’s life undisputedly in a second or a week, abound in the times before anyone’s existence.   Times of true heroes that are barely remembered in classrooms, heros that would make your idol look pitiful!

 

What would ancient romans think of us or say to us?  I try to put myself in the shoes of Julius Caesar, if given the opportunity to learn about the ways of the year 2000, and its journey to and from!     Watching it on a big screen or Imax Theater of course.   I think I could predict the end.   And I would probably say repeatedly  “I saw that coming”  and “what did you think would happen?”   I would of course be astonished by technology and things like commodity control, but in the end I would probably shake my head and ask how the hell did it get so bad!  But I am not him, or any Roman, or any living being within 700 000 days of them.  Im just a 25 year old kid who somehow ended up born in the easiest, most pathetic, cruel, predictable, typical and civilized place in all of time, which one could unabashedly abnegate as a result of the humility it provides upon realization!

 

This was work of Lachesis? I will be Prometheus!