February 2, 2002
My Personal Event Horizon
Time goes by wicked fast, dude.

Well, it's February, friends, which means 2002 is already 1/12th of the way done. Gone. Lived. It also means that these TIS web columns, and More Shit I Gotta Do specifically, are almost one year old. One year! Jesus fucking christ, it seems like yesterday that I decided to fool more people into checking out my lame web site by promising ‘web-only' content - as if any of you bother to mail be two crappy dollars for the privilege to read my works o' genius, much less surf to my web site more than once a year. The fact that it has been about a year since the first "More Shit" is frightening.

Sometimes it seems like life is like riding a really, really fast subway, with every day a platform, whooshing by in little blinks of light. And then, of course, at the end of the ride the subway crashes into a concrete wall and explodes, taking you with it. It's like I wake up, and then quite suddenly it's noon. Then, equally suddenly, it's eight o'clock. And then I'm asleep again.

I've been obsessed with time and mortality for some time now, of course, and I've tried various ways to maximize my time, or at least stop thinking about it far too much. I've tried drinking heavily, of course, as any intelligent person does in the face of terrorizing knowledge. But while intoxication makes mortality easier to swallow in the short term, overmuch of it tends to shorten your life a bit, which is the opposite result. I've tried not sleeping, as sleep is just several hours a night spent dead, if you think about it, and therefore isn't really productive - but sleep is biologically necessary, and my sleep experiments generally end with me either a) asleep on the couch at all hours of the day, or b) once again in a hospital setting, being observed. Neither of these results really helps me get more out of my time, or increases how much of that time is spent conscious. In fact, both generally result in less time spent constructively existing, and more time resembling a plant, or jellyfish.

Of course, being busy also makes time seem to go by faster. One of many truly genius concepts Douglas Adams gave us all (he will be missed) was the idea that the secret to immortality was simply being bored all the time, since time really crawls by when you're bored. Be bored enough, and time will dilate to the point where it hardly moves at all. I've been bored for brief periods of time during my short life, and it certainly works for me. But being bored for eternity doesn't seem so great, and I suspect that the heavy drinking would creep back in if I gave it a try.

So, this is the 20th installment of this occasionally fair-to-middling column I started writing. It is, like most of Inner Swine-related material, mostly filler designed to give the look and feel of content without actually requiring me to do anything that hints of research, deep thought, or originality. Lord knows why it works, but it does. Twenty columns in roughly 11 months (so far) does not necessarily mean anything beyond the fact that I came closer to a biweekly update than I would have expected, but it's startling to wake up one day and realize that you've written twenty goddamn columns without really realizing it. This is kind of the way time works for me, and possibly for you too: I wake up one day, and BAM I realize that time has passed. I wake up, BAM I've been at my soul-sucking day job for seven-and-a-half years. I wake up, and BAM my novel has been out for a year and lord knows we didn't sell very many, you cheap bastards. You wake up, and BAM, you're really a lot older than you ever thought you'd be.

I've tried to be more attentive. I keep a journal now, writing down not my feelings and worries every day, but simply what I did. I can look back on any day in the past 2+ years and tell you what I did that day, which is kind of useless, but which comforts me, because I can put everything into perspective, and keep my chronology straight. But it doesn't really slow down time, and now I'm realizing that this is just a function of age. It's going to seem faster, and faster as I get older. My last few years will probably go by in a warm blur, an afternoon's worth of television shows, games of Rummy, and sugarless teas. And then the train, the concrete wall, and that's all folks!

I know what you're thinking, probably just another overeducated girlyman's existential crisis. I've always said that life was a meaningless existential hell, and maybe this is the proof of it come to swallow me. So be it! There are more columns to be written, you poor souls, and I suspect that if you've hung in this long you'll probably end up reading them. Suckers! At least they're free.

Until next time, then, I remain