The daffodils have started to bloom, but the temperatures have dipped into the low 20s and may kill them off. Yesterday, snow blanketed the mountain tops and while driving to work I drove through a squall that made it difficult to see – a corvette had spun out and was in a ditch. Times of transition can be turbulent in their see-saw ups and downs, their push-pull back and forth. This seems to be a big-T truth as we look for balance in the world, in nature, in our relationships.
Lately, when I’ve sat down to write, I’ve been preoccupied with these notions of time, attention, balance, and purpose. The title of my last post was a nod to Pink Floyd’s song “Time.” I’ve had the lyrics open in a browser tab for a few days. I grew up listening to Floyd – mostly The Wall and Dark Side of the Moon. I never cared for the jarring alarm clock beginning of “Time,” but have always appreciated the lyrics – a wistfulness (perhaps critical) for the inevitable slipping away and ticking away – often unnoticed until it’s gone.
Ticking away the moments that make up a dull day
You fritter and waste the hours in an offhand way
Kicking around on a piece of ground in your home town
Waiting for someone or something to show you the way.
I feel guilty when I fritter – guilty when I mindlessly consume garbage on Facebook or Twitter – ten minutes here and there. Minutes that fill small voids but in sum, make up days lost to passive inattention… how little it yields in terms of pressing me to see or think or feel. How little it inspires. My only justification in frittering away is that even those moments are an exploration of humanity and our modern digital condition.
As I frittered today, I saw a post from an uncle. It was a meme taking a shot at millennials – the good old trope of the old guard calling the new guard weak or sissies, or unable to cope. It was for all those born before the 1990s and said, “First, you survived being born to mothers who took aspirin, ate blue cheese dressing, tuna from a tin, and didn’t get tested for diabetes…. After that trauma, your baby cots were covered with bright colored lead-based paints….” etc. etc. As if improvements in science, like testing for diabetes, is bad…. I didn’t read the whole thing, but I paused briefly to think about that sort of mentality. The voice of grievance dripping through – a mix between the “adversity makes us stronger” crowd and the “I survived and am doing fine, so why do you need to be pampered with your avocado toast” crowd… The more I see those types of things, the less I want to be around aggrieved and bitter people. It seems like such a closed-minded way to live – as though progress and change are bad because they don’t benefit me directly – a reverse compassion of sort.
Because I couldn’t come up with anything cohesive for this blog post, the plan was to jump around a little bit. Spring like temperatures one day, cold the next – form following function or something like that. In addition to writing about change (seasons, etc.) and the martyrdom of the aggrieved, I was going to write about how I’ve been missing my cat, Nick, lately. While I didn’t get the dog as a replacement, it’s hard not to observe how different the two are. Nick was my zen, chill guy. His affection was sweet and he just seemed like a gentle soul. Kimbrough’s affection is a little more over the top. He’s hyper and goofy and sometimes a pain in the ass. Kimbrough is a different type of buddy… but I still miss my bud Nick.
All of that was where my head was this morning. But by afternoon as I settled in to re-reading the lyrics to “Time” I realized the blog post I may have wanted to write would have been about how my sense of time, loss, and the complex nature of memory and desire has been influenced by all of those songs I listened to as a child – the ones about the slow march of and distance created by time, the ones that told somewhat sad and complicated stories. Scrolling through the Youtubes, I was reminded of Paul Simon’s “Slip Slidin’ Away,” Harry Chapin’s “Cat’s in the Cradle,” and David Bowie’s “Space Oddity,” or any number of Beatles songs – “She’s Leaving Home,” “Fixing a Hole,” “Strawberry Fields,” “While My Guitar Gently Weeps,” “Eleanor Rigby.”
But that’s not the post I explored… I lost steam and the sentiment has, more or less, gone.
The time is gone, the song is over
Thought I’d something more to say