One week ago, we all decided that what we thought was the correct time was the wrong time. We were living one hour into the future since March, and now that it’s November we should time travel backwards by one hour and get on with the serious work of living on the correct time, standard time. Some of our friends know that this time, the standard time, is the right time and they refused to time travel into the future last March and now welcome us back to reality. Of course, they know that we will get all crazy-brained again next March and time travel forward an hour next March, but they won’t follow.
There is a bill in congress (currently both a gravesite for good ideas and an amphitheater for bad ideas) to time travel next March to the future and just start calling that standard time. This is a bad idea, we should just stop these little one-hour excursions twice a year and live on this, the correct time, the Standard Time.
Time is physical. You can touch time. You can hold a dry sponge in your hand and drip water on it and watch as it transforms from one useless form to another, more useful, form. This transformation is one reason why we measure time. We need some demarcation that says something was one thing, and now it’s another. For us, we were one thing: a baby. (Of course, there was a lot of changing of forms before we became that, but you cannot deny we were all once babies.) We slowly transformed into different forms, and continue to do so as we get stronger, then peak, then start the inevitable decay, and then become a completely different thing. A dead body. Our final physical evidence of having been above ground or outside an urn or above the sea or wherever the person(s) in charge of figuring out what to do with this useless sponge of a body has to make that decision.
Because there is a finite amount of growth and decay, we treat time as money. We spend time, we save time, we may have “earned time off” of work, or we may steal a second of your time (which you might consider a waste of time). I could go on, but I’ll just finish this thought then give you your time back. We’ve all been paid with a finite amount of time, and we generally don’t find out how much of that currency we have until it’s too late to do anything about it. I think it’s wise to keep track of your time, and spend it wisely, but also spend it freely, paying yourself with as many memories and as few regrets as possible.
Let me be the first to remind you to time travel next March 10th. Or don’t.
About the elections
There was an election last Tuesday, and there have been an infinity + 1000 think pieces and break downs and ruminations about what this all means for 2024. Since you’re here you might want my opinion as your least favorite, least qualified political analyst. It’s obvious on its face that Roe V. Wade should not have been overturned. People have a right to bodily autonomy, which is a right to privacy, and in as much as women are people (there I said it!) women should not have the government telling them what to do with their bodies. From a crass political point of view, Roe V. Wade has been a disaster for Republicans who have given in to religious extremists who would like to reform this government into a theocracy, and a fascist who is more than happy to use that to build an autocracy.
Women (and men who understand basic humanity) have not yet forgotten the overturning of Roe V. Wade and I doubt very seriously that they will forget by next November. The deep red states that have put women’s rights to the people have seen the people soundly reject abortion bans and even enshrine reproductive rights into their state constitutions.
Ignore the polls for the race in 2024 right now unless you are working for a candidate, in which case, keep an eye on things. There hasn’t been a single Republican primary yet. While we all assume who the nominee will be, I honestly think there’s a chance it won’t be who everybody thinks it’s going to be. Do I think Joe Biden should not run in 2024? I don’t know, I think it’s 50/50, depending on the Republican nominee. I’m not worried about our president’s age. I’m only worried about how the current press we have will spin the subject of how much currency he has left to spend.
About Wichita Lineman
Jimmy Webb songs are remarkable in that in very short amount of time, let’s say 3 minutes or so, he can tell two stories at once. He can tell the story of what man is doing right now, and then immediately fill in a back story or open the heart of that man. No song of his I know does that better than Wichita Lineman.
In 2017 Webb did an interview about the song for BBC Radio 4
He had called up the image of a lineman from a childhood journey across the panhandle of Oklahoma.
"There's a place where the terrain absolutely flattens out," he told the BBC. "It's almost like you could take a [spirit] level out of your tool kit and put in on the highway, and that bubble would just sit right there on dead centre. It goes on that way for about 50 miles.
"In the heat of summer, with the heat rising off the road, the telephone poles gradually materialise out of this far, distant perspective and rush towards you.
"And then, as it happened, I suddenly looked up at one of these telephone poles and there was a man on top, talking on a telephone.
"He was gone very quickly, and I had another 25 miles of solitude to meditate on this apparition. It was a splendidly vivid, cinematic image that I lifted out of my deep memory while I was writing this song."
"I thought, I wonder if I can write something about that? A blue collar, everyman guy we all see everywhere - working on the railroad or working on the telephone wires or digging holes in the street.
"I just tried to take an ordinary guy and open him up and say, 'Look there's this great soul, and there's this great aching, and this great loneliness inside this person and we're all like that. We all have this capacity for these huge feelings'."
I’ll be sharing some versions of this song I’ve discovered over the years. Here’s the most recognizable one.
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