High fluffy clouds, bright sunshine this Wednesday afternoon on California’s north coast, and nearly no wind — gorgeous.
Windows open, back sliding-glass door shoved open to its stop. Around here, weather shifts in a snap-second, as  just a bit earlier we’d had heavy, dark clouds, and a drizzle.

Odd, though, hardly no breeze at all.
Here close to the shoreline — maybe a mile or two, due straight west, maybe not even that far — wind always seems to play a key role in the overall-livable index, and no air moving around can be a bit disconcerting, but way-doable.

Today marks two-full months of retirement, and so far, so good. Biggest problem I’ve encountered is slowing down, understanding not to rush — time is on my side, finally. One apparently has to decompress sort of after a lifetime of working for not only for The Man, but also for The Clock.

(Illustration: Irvine Peacock’s ‘Castle of Illusions,‘ found here).

And on top of that, time itself appears to be moving fast as a bullet. Yet even in my advanced age, the clock still rules the air with meaningless authority.
Lewis Lapham at Lapham’s Quarterly thinks we’ve been time-duped. I agree:

Only a small fraction of mankind’s time on earth (maybe 800 of the last 200,000 years) has been spent in the close company of mechanical clocks, remanded to the custody of a machine unrelated to anything other than itself.
That the association has not proved to be a happy one is the conclusion drawn by Jay Griffiths from her researches among peoples native to the Andaman Islands, the Alaskan wilderness, the highlands of New Guinea and Peru, territories in which the local time is variously marked by the movement of toads and the fluttering of moths, by the scent of oranges and coconut, by “bear births, eagle marriages, and salmon deaths.”
…
The historian Lewis Mumford names the clock, not the steam engine or the printing press, as “the key machine of the modern industrial age…a piece of power machinery whose ‘product’ is seconds and minutes: by its essential nature it dissociated time from human events,” and Taylor’s template for an efficient workplace appeared during the same few decades around the turn of the twentieth century that also vastly extended the powers of machine-made time to levy taxes, amass capital, declare war.
The speeding up of time by telegraph and telephone, on radio and film, with fast-moving automobiles, airplanes, and artillery shells depended for its supremacy on Newton’s conception of absolute, true, mathematical time that of its own nature flows without relation to anything external — neither to the laws of gravity nor the nature of human beings.

And I should chill even more — time is the bogeyman of the brain.
If you slow down slowly, the clock slows, too?
Shitting me (from Nature):

So the flow of time seems very much to be just an illusion.
Consider that we do not really observe the passing of time, but rather how the world around us is compared to how we remember it being at some point of time ago.
A clock measures the duration between events just like how a ruler measures the distance between two objects.
It does not measure the speed of this change from one moment to another.
Only conscious observers such as ourselves register the ‘flow’ of time, meaning that it must be subjective rather than objective.

Time ain’t nothing unless there’s a reason behind it. Yet it moves — WTF!
And I also find myself moving further into the day, especially doing a post for my site here, Compatible Creatures, and feeling the desire/want to write later on — a lot of it has to do with what I semi-call a news-addiction’s ‘sadness factor,’ or too much shitty-ass-news-for-any brain-to-handle syndrome. So it takes time to relax, which is, of course, an illusion.
But a great part is the slowing down routine — fuck the clock.

Later with ugly news — just this afternoon, this business with Ebola has become alarming on many levels, and weird, nasty as shit. Chris Christie is a turd, no doubt.
Two years after Hurricane Sandy, the US disaster preparedness/relief is totally fucked.
Another another murder-suicide yesterday, this one in New York City, and included a beheading, and death by leaping in front a moving commuter train, all in one fatal episode.
And strange turnabout in the continuing East/West dust-up: ‘The Russian maker of the engine used in the unmanned US supply rocket that exploded after liftoff in Virginia denied on Wednesday that its product was at fault for the catastrophe.’
Russkies claims US modifications doomed the deal.
Meanwhile, the White House claimed, ‘hackers thought to be working for the Russian government,’ made cyber-passes on some White House computer networks. So, all’s well, that end’s shitty.
In the pristine Middle East, the ISIS executed 46 in Heet, Iraq, and another 35 near Ramadi, and that whole shitstorm is completely out of anyone’s control, except maybe those ISIS assholes.
So the machines of war against the terrorist/militant/subversive continues, but well within limitations and reality, all just “…really a work in progress,” best played over time.

Yet seemingly America’s reality in that progress as upchucked from Forbes this morning:

The current geopolitical landscape very clearly suggests a significant uptick in U.S. military expenditures in the near future.
While nobody relishes a rise of violence and global unrest, investors should always look for opportunities wherever they may be —
especially in today’s volatile market environment — and the defense sector is no exception.
The facts remain that we will actually create a more peaceful world by maintaining and enforcing our military dominance.

And the ‘sadness factor’ does bloom, or just a horrible case of constant chronostasis.