let’s start with a toughie: time

My relationship with the passage of time goes back to my earliest memories. I was a pure sci-fi absorbing machine as a child, I blame this on my parents, who are unwitting sci-fi nerds the likes of Star Trek, Quantum Leap, Doctor Who, were all crammed down my entertainment hungry neck. Even on Saturday mornings when I had free reign of the remote control, most of the programming I selected had a fantastical element, but then that’s what kids enjoy. They like to see imaginative characters in mind-bending situations, or at least they did when I was one, seems like now they start off wanting to listen to oddly shaped creatures talk gibberish and then eventually progress to cheering people hitting each other with swords. I would spend hours each weekend constructing various time machines, cockamamie contraptions adorned with calculators and watches, attached with sellotape or blue-tac. Upon the ignition of that weeks contraption I could never be sure if I had travelled back in time or not, this being an age before I knew the significance of the hands on a clock.

I assume my love/hate relationship with time started at that point, but I only suggest this as it’s the first time I can remember questioning the constraints of time. As with most things of an emo nature, my gripes with time started during my teenage years, when my rapidly expanding laziness began to conflict with the seemingly quickening passage of time. The stock excuse of “There aren’t enough hours in the day” was merely code for “I can’t be arsed”, but as we all know, regularly used lies have a way of rooting themselves solidly in the field of the mind and becoming fake truths. And so it was that I came to curse the slow progression of the hands of a clock, each tick another second where I did nothing and each tock a following second where I regretted it.

Before the laziness came awe. The concept of a dimension, unlike the physical ones we take for granted, that could not be manipulated fascinating; time travelling paradoxical episodes of Star Trek, a basket of excitement and a can of questioning worms, all of them arguing and trying to be louder than that obnoxious worm on the opposite side of the can. Even today I’d rather watch old episodes of Doctor Who than almost any other television show. Of course, this is rooted in a compost of fantasy, the desire to be a master of time, a controller of destiny (specifically mine), must surely come from deep set regrets and general feelings of inadequacy? Well, probably, it is a power fantasy after all, and inadequacy can’t help but crush on power, gazing at it from the back of the classroom, drawing their names inside a love heart with an arrow through it on inadequacy’s notebook, when it should be paying attention to its coursework.

So I was very surprised when I experienced time which wasn’t linear A to B stuff. It was during my hippy, devil may care days of being a recent university dropout, a housemate and her chauffeur came home from a free party, still whizzing on MD and special K. So when they offered I had no choice to accept, after all, you can’t be sober and enjoy the company of the head fucked for a jealous man that makes. Why I said yes to a phat, 45” single long catch up line is still somewhat of a mystery, but up my nose it went. Sometime after it kicked in (it’s always difficult to figure out when you’re fucked on K, until the point when you become too fucked) I did my spiderman act, electing to clamber up the walls from the basement rather than use the stairs and with heavy set, wonky legs stumbled into the kitchen. It was there that I found the object I had been searching for all my life, a time machine; it’s form, a washing machine. Staring into the reflective barrel I became detached physically from time, I was stood in my room before my drugged up housemate came home, I was in the basement getting drugged up myself, I was having a garbled conversation with another housemate that hadn’t occurred yet. It was a hell of a fucking K-Hole, I couldn’t be sure if I was high or not, all I know is that linear time was a difficult concept to abide by until I woke up the next morning. And that’s where that story ends.

These days I don’t care enough to question time, or to manipulate it with substances and such. I don’t even care enough to study our great physicians, I’d rather wait for the simplified version to filter through to the storyline of a random science fiction program. I’d rather spend my time watching it go past whilst strolling around in my own head, at this very moment I’m perfectly contented with being lazy, so time no longer need be my scapegoat.