Areas of Unrest

4 February 2001 - The Meaning of Life at 3:07 a.m.

QOTD: "Satire is tragedy plus time." - Lenny Bruce

Reading: just finished Knight's Castle by Edward Eager

Listening to: nothing since I'm in an incredible rush

It is 11:08 a.m.. I need to leave the house at 11:43 a.m. so I have time to grab a quick lunch before going to Lonny and Lauren's for a game day, which I will have to leave earlyish (by 3:17 p.m.) because I need to fly to Denver tonight at 4:54 p.m. so I can be at a meeting at 9 a.m. tomorrow.

Last night I left my apartment at 5:28 p.m., picked up Barbara at 5:31 p.m., picked up Penny at 5:37 p.m. and drove to Malibu, arriving at the church where the concert was at 6:43 p.m.. We'd have been a bit earlier, but the address was actually incorrect on the flyer, with two digits interchanged, so I drove to the end of the windy road and turned around and came back. The concert started at 7:33 p.m. and ended at 9:47 p.m. and, after driving back and dropping off Penny and Barbara (and chatting at each stop and stopping at the store to buy orange juice for this morning), I was home at 11:04 p.m.. But I was still hyper after performing and stayed up until 12:59 a.m., reading and generally fussing around the apartment.

The above two paragraphs should amply illustrate why digital clocks are all wrong. Human time isn't measured as 3:17 and 4:54; it's a quarter past three and just before five. It's quarter hour intervals that are most meaningful to me and, if I think hard about that, even that seems like too short an interval to care about. The real wasted moments are the ones we count too obsessively.

During the concert, I didn't ever look at my watch. Was my opening story the nine minutes I had timed it to be? Who cares? I time the stories so I'm not taking up an unfair amount of time on a stage I'm sharing with others, but once I'm up there, I'm reacting to the audience, pacing myself by their laughs and silences. We work out the flow, balancing longer and shorter stories, but also balancing pleasure and pain, humor and tears.

I didn't really look at my watch to see when the concert began and ended. Before the start, I was absorbed in feeling the room, in checking out the sound system, in knowing how we'd handle the flow from one story to another. At intermission, we were absorbed with the delight of the audience and, again, at the end, we had the pleasure of being congratulated on how well we'd done. Time is incidental.

It was the need for railway schedules that led to standardized time zones. Airplane schedules rule my life all too frequently. I consider it thoroughly awful that I know what times all the flights between LAX and Denver are, but I also get distressed when they change the times, throwing me off. I know it's unrealistic to live in story time all the time, but I need to find a way to feel less like those digits are ruling my life.