time immemorial

March 10, 2013

Surreal-Artworks-Made-by-Xetobyte-1Forgot the DST this morning, even with all the news-site-blurbs yesterday yakking about ‘spring forward’ — a good thing it’s Sunday and there’s no place of got-to-be, so time can just go and kiss my…

Ask a lot of US peoples and this lost hour of sleep is “torture,” panic-filled, “with more than a little anxiety,” and creates an aimless period of “cyberloafing.”
Dangerous, too — in just three days after DST, there’s “a higher incidence of heart attacks,” but modern life dulls the perception: “The good news is that we’re seeing less and less of an impact of the DST change. Maybe people are getting the message, or maybe we’re just sleep-deprived all the time and so the DST doesn’t seem to be making a huge difference anymore.”

An hour of time — a loss to some, a gain for others.

(Illustration found here).

More-and-likely, I’ll get an extra hour of sleep tomorrow (I get up so early it’s ‘crazy’), while most others will be groggy and pissed in the morning, but as humans we seem to all constantly fight “time poverty” in attempts to cut bullshit in a spare few minutes.
Time is a weird-ass sonofabitch to the moment. Lately, days seem to melt together like darting-past window-images on a bullet train — today abruptly becomes tomorrow, and yesterday appears a long time ago. Right now and here it’s Sunday afternoon, and soon this quick-freak weekend will be history, and then it’ll be Monday, which turns quickly into Wednesday, which morphs into Friday, and all-of-a-sudden, here again am I on a Sunday afternoon…
A cycle getting shorter, lickey-split.
Of course, this time-speed rests a lot on technology. Just sitting here in front of my laptop, I’ve a world at my fingertips, and when shit happens it can sometimes be witnessed in what’s most-laughingly called “real time,” vs taped or whatever. Time is near-about right now as far as mass communication is concerned — a dictator can lock up a country, but he can’t very-easily shut down social media, it oozes out via various forms.
Don’t let them kid you, though, all time is real to each individual human, no matter the circumstances. Time is a much-human marker, something DST attempts to change, but really can’t.
Despite the techno-wizardry.
In a reflection of this, I came across a post from last January by Walter Russell Mead, a supposedly foreign policy guru, and his take on time and the nowadays:

The fact that traveling from New York to California is now over a hundred times faster than it was 150 years ago is worth reflecting on.
Between the invention of the wheel and that of the wheelbarrow, thousands of years passed; but between da Vinci’s drawings of flying machines and the Wright brothers’ first flight, only four centuries had gone by.
It’s in the nature of technological progress to accelerate, and the rate of acceleration has picked up in recent centuries.
In 1900, automobiles weren’t yet being mass-produced, nor had the Wright brothers achieved flight yet.
The century wasn’t seven decades in when car ownership reached a quarter-billion people worldwide, and men were traveling safely to and from the moon.
This phenomenon has also, of course, been ugly.
Almost 2,000 years passed between the advent of gunpowder and that of the automatic weapon; only five decades stood between the latter and the atomic bomb.
Clearly, the heightened pace of human technology has also been terrifying.

Well, a good deal beyond terrifying, Walter.
Time now is of the essence. I blog constantly about climate change, read a shitload of related stuff, and the take-away is all the real-time indicators reveal the environment is in worse shape than science foreshadows it to be. We’re moving into uncharted territory on a big, dislocated clock, ticking away on all sorts of weather-related time bombs.
Yes, 150 years ago one crossed the US a hundred-times slower.
And the air was cleaner and cooler — and 12 o’clock high wasn’t just a metaphor for a ‘nooner.’

Leave a Reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *

This site uses Akismet to reduce spam. Learn how your comment data is processed.