Things I Didn't Understand Until I Made Up My Own Explanations

Things I Didn’t Understand Until I Made Up My Own Explanations

The Speed of Time

“Although Albert Einstein did say that “time is relative,” he never said anything I understood pertaining to what or whom the relativity of time was attached.  This shortcoming on his part is the most likely reason so many people show up for things late.  He has provided humanity with an indisputable excuse for tardiness and provided women with even greater latitude in their unending pursuit of ways they can piss off men and get away with it.  Einstein’s theory is not, I assure you, what the people at the Rolex Company had in mind when they invented ridiculously expensive watches.”

Tertiam Quidd,  p. 287, A Better Explanation of All Things.  Riner International Press & Bait Shop, Copyright, 1949.

Part One

Honestly, since I’ve only done it once before, I don’t really know that much about dying or being dead.  I realize that in recent years I’ve commenced not looking much better than a recently converted cadaver wearing a bowtie, but I assure you I am still quite alive and just as disagreeable as ever.  What I do know about dying is that the pain that had me so quickly measuring my length on the floor, the sickness, the taste of vomit burning holes through my throat and mouth were all gone as fully as if they had never been there in the first place; and I felt profoundly cozy, if a state of coziness can be described using such a hyperbolic modifier.  The other thing I know for sure about being dead is that it’s one experience I’m going to have to repeat at least one more time. Now, this is what brings me to the incomprehensible subject everyone over the age of forty five becomes quite keenly aware of, usually with increasing concern but seldom with much in the way of augmented understanding:  and that would be nothing less than the illusive Speed of Time.

Growing up, as I am assuming to be a process you’ve more or less finished with, we’ve all been given similar bits of wisdom and advice from parents, grandparents, aunts, uncles and pretty much every adult we ever came across who had, or at least presumed to have some sort of divinely endowed position of tutelage over all juveniles, along with a willingness to share a cup or two of that counsel from their personal font of infallible wisdom, gleaned, I’m sure, from years of study within the unhallowed halls of the University of Hard Knocks. (UHK, by the way, is not the alma mater of Dana Ratcliffe Dean though many have made that mistaken assumption.  She was, and remains to this day the Magna of all Cum Laude students ever to accept a sheepskin from The Pulaski Institute of Verbal Abundance.)   So, like most every generation before me, I foreswore that I would never say to anyone such tripe as “life is short, a penny earned is a penny saved, just be yourself” and of course, you should “always do your best at whatever it is you’re doing.”  I was going to do my life right and right from the start.  Having sworn such foolishness must now be counted among my innumerable regrets.  I am as guilty of tripe peddling as every senior before me.

The thing is, that like nearly all the people I’ve ever met, my life became a compilation of so many half-hearted attempts, a great deal of wasted time and a prodigal’s imprudence with far too many of my personal resources.  Most of all, like all save the poets among us, I had absolutely no appreciation of how quickly I could go from twenty one to seventy: even with a whole host of do-overs that should have had the effect on my speed of time that a popular movie entitled Groundhog’s Day had for one slow-to-learn reporter.  Not having realized she’d been keeping a ledger, my mother once advised me some fifty years ago that I had already “made so many mistakes.”  She was right.  I had, and I have built upon them since.  I was even held back a year in Sunday school over what I considered to be a minor dispute on the validity of transubstantiation.  Following that, I became remarkably adept at repeating many of my favorite mistakes.  I could move from blunder to bull shit like an Indianapolis Five Hundred pit crew changes tires.  Then sure enough, just like you’ll do some day yourself, I opened my eyes one morning and wondered where the hell all those years had gone and what the hell had I done with my so many of the precious years of my life?

               Sooner or later most of us come to recognize that life, indeed, is short, that you’re suddenly just circling the drain and flying in on that final glide path, and that the speed of time seems to increase relative to the units of time you’ve already lived.  Mathematically speaking, the speed of time increases as the numerator for a unit of time measurement remains at a constant value of 1 while the denominator rises by the continuously increasing number of units lived, be they seconds, minutes, hours, days, weeks, months, years or decades.  And maybe the whole equation should be squared.  I’m not sure; but I know that as the fraction becomes smaller the speed of time increases.  The denominator, of course, continues increasing throughout your life and will not stop until the moment of your death, and that moment, for some of those yet among us, is occurring right about now.  My brother, the physicist, could work out all of this, including variables, on his erasable white board; but my own pitiful comprehension of advanced mathematics is very limited.  That has not held me back, however, from presenting my own equation for calculating the speed of time: 

 IST =                (rt) + (ut)

2

1

x (measured units of time)

Additionally, my speed of time theory allows that no two individuals, even if born at the exact same millisecond, can or will experience precisely the same speed of time at any given instant.  If they ever were to do so one or both of them, even if separated by half the Earth, would explode.  The evidence for this, I am convinced, is found in the smoldering remains of persons who appear to have been the victims of the rare, but nowhere near unheard of, condition called Spontaneous Human Combustion, of SHC.  It isn’t as complicated as it sounds, although I can make it come pretty close.  We all know that no two people move their bowels at precisely the same rate of speed don’t we.  Time, it appears, works in much the same way.  I just used bowel speed because sometimes visualization makes my theory easier to understand.  As for a universal or common speed of time, we have clocks; but they actually have nothing whatsoever to do with time or the speed of time.  Some, to which we attach great monetary value, actually have very little worth as accurate timepieces anyway.  

The theory does begin to get tricky, however, when we further recognize that every person’s individual Speed of Time (IST) is made up of both Recalled Time (RT) and Unconscious Time (UT).   Although it is theoretically possible, it is also extremely unlikely that a person will end up with a balanced state between their RT and UT.  As infants we’re UT potatoes, and even when we are not in UT we seem unable to experience RT.  That’s why we have no, or only very few memories from our first few years of life.  Infancy is a lot like living through the 1960’s; you pass through it and come out of it not knowing or being able to remember what happened.  In fact, if you were coming of age during the 60’s your UT and RT have probably been permanently wacked and distorted to the point that you’ll never be able to be sure you’re traveling in your own IST or that of some other dude you passed by in a cloud of smoke, like two ships sailing at opposite directions in broad daylight.  It gets even more complicated when you factor in things like Alzheimer’s, commas and chronic tardiness as a result of severe disorganization.

What we now understand, then, is that each of us experiences our own individual speed of time, and that all of our individual speeds of time increase as the fraction of our units lived is constantly diminishing right up until the time of death, after which it may be possible that the whole thing goes in reverse or that the numerator no longer remains a constant 1 and begins to increase extemporaneously while the denominator becomes the new constant, fixed at its value at the moment of death.  That process could continue until the numerator and denominator once more reach the same value, making the Fraction of Life equal again to 1 as it was at the exact second of birth.   Of course, there are among us factions that believe that the denominator of the Fraction of Life actually starts increasing at the moment of conception.  And though they are willing to kill for their belief, it is not yet legally affirmed or acknowledged since the United States Social Security Administration recognizes your legal age only in terms of years of existence from your date of birth and not from your date of conception.  That’s why retirement benefits have never been awarded to an individual who has aged nine months short of their eligibility date.  Both the Social Security and Internal Revenue departments, it seems, always and only recognize the date of birth as that which is documented on an official birth certificate.  At the present time we have no such thing as official conception certificates, but if we did I could see where some questionable paternity issues might easily be cleared right up.  The children of Sally Jennings come to mind.  Or, might Thomas Jefferson have been dallying in hallucinogens, resulting in his copulative experiences with his slave taking place in his UT or Unconscious Time?  It begins to make you wonder.

               When one year was equal to one tenth of my total life experience, birthdays were far apart, Christmas’s took forever to get here even starting from Thanksgiving, and waiting for anything was an torturous and agonizing experience to endure.  Now that one year is but one sixty-eighth of my total life experience, birthdays take place every week, Christmases take you by surprise every month or two and waiting for anything is torturous only because every bone and joint in my body aches from age and abuse.  In 1964 Mick Jagger was wrong when he sang Time is on my Side.  So, when the condition wherein a finite unit of time moves at an increasing rate of speed through our lives, it is only natural that every ordinary geezer begins to indulge in moments of looking backwards and assessing the personal value of time recalled and time unconsciously spent.   In other words, we’re all going to have some regrets.

               In the next chapter of Things I Didn’t Understand until I Made up My Own Explanations, we’ll examine some of our most common regrets and the role they play in our ability to screw up our own lives.