Turning The 2000 Clock

Time. Beyond the gods and their eternal houses of immaculate promise lies the fortitude of time and the undeniable realization that its effects are the only truths that are assured us. And to each of us there will always be a time that we are locked into, as if it were some secret survivor trapped within the wreckage.

I can recall, with surprising clarity, the life I led beneath the shadows of the atomic clock. Pressed hard against the cold tiled floors of a sixth-grade classroom grinning at the futility of surviving some nuclear baptism, the truths of time are evident. Lock-jawed to the wrists of millions we were terminally bound to, despite the countdown. No matter the endless plagues of madness that creep in and out of your day-to-day life. After everything, even the splitting of impossible tiny components, time will carry on. Which must lead most to wonder whether or not time existed before we gave it a proper name and some moving parts.

Somewhere, beyond the expanding universe, there must surely exist a bottomless well of time that has yet to be tampered with. It moves neither forward nor back. Undefined, it simply is.

And so, as our clocks march towards the birth of a new era of imbalances, I find myself amused by the myriad of predictions that have been tossed around like they possess even an ounce of reliability. If there is anything in this world that I’d enjoy more than witnessing the end of the world it would definitely have to be watching a world assume that it was coming to an end.

It wasn’t too long ago that millions of us used to lament about whether or not some anxiety-ridden Russian sub skipper would snap and take matters into his own hands. Somewhere, deep within the frozen waters of the North Pacific, he would launch a heavy rain of molecular obedience and then simply slump in his chair as all those years of back tension seeped out of his body. He would retire to his quarters, rapt in wonderment of knowing the future, and sleep soundly for the first time since childhood. And as his slumber took hold the rest of us would awake to the paralyzing realization that the sunrise had come too early, as the futile droning of the emergency broadcast system played itself out in the background.

It always perplexed me that such a warning system should be based upon such an annoying sound. In the event of a nuclear attack I always thought it more appropriate for a calm voice to break the airwaves and repeat a single, solitary sentence: Good morning sunshine, time to go.
In the time it takes a fork to drop from your hand to the floor everything within a fifty-mile radius is liquified. Beyond that, everything is hit by a shock-wave and crushed like a beer can, not to mention spontaneously bursting into flames. So much for that important informational segment that’s supposed to follow the dog-whistle portion of the broadcast. Thankfully, the dogs would make it to the minimum safe distance in time.

After living with the possibility of hell-fire raining from the sky, it baffles me to think that I would ever allow something as infantile as the disablement of a bank machine to get the better of me. Looking at the alternatives, I’d rather have all the computers in the world crash than have several hundred kilotons of sugar-coated plutonium sprinkled on my Raisin Bran.

The most recent doomsday scenario was almost desirable. All the computers seizing up in the first moments of the new millennium. No more phones to answer, no more answering machines to answer them for us. Planes, keeping with the extinction rate of their biological relations, plummeting from the skies, destroying numerous multiplexes, strip malls, and prefab townhouse complexes. Traffic lights worldwide going dark, leaving millions wondering who has the right of way. Billions will attempt to skip town for the countryside before realizing too late that gas station pumps, along with most things, don’t work. Faced with this new and frightening dilemma, we would have been forced to turn to those countries too underdeveloped and impoverished to know the luxury of mechanized transport to teach us how to get from point A to point B. No more all-terrain vehicles. No more armoured transports. No more armour. Everything, and anything, that you’ve come to rely on would be gone.

There was a time when your entire financial life was kept within the safe confines of a tiny little booklet that was updated by hand (human hands, no less). Little good your bankcard would do you then. We would be forced to return to the barter system. Which means that your two-thousand-dollar VCR is worthless and that old bike you haven’t used since 1978 is worth its weight in gold (gold being four cans of beans, a loaf of bread, and possibly a couple sticks of Juicy Fruit).

“Too far, too fast,� my grandfather used to say all the time. Born in 1913, he used to drive a horse-drawn delivery carriage when he was a milkman. He was in the air force in World War II, following which he graduated to a delivery truck. If he were still alive and in the delivery business today most people from his childhood probably would have assumed that he’d be driving some form of flying delivery vehicle.
According to most works of science fiction from days past we were supposed to be living on the moon by now and eating steaks in pill form. But that’s not the case. Instead we’ve decided to turn to increasing our conveniences. And though that might somehow lead you to assume that being the masters of our own destiny should encompass both possibilities, I can assure you that one deters the other.

As we expand our ability to achieve greater levels of convenience we decrease our seldom-used ability of actually progressing. Instead of going back to the moon repeatedly, we turned our attention to making television remote controls more difficult to operate than spacecraft. We haven’t been back to the moon in quite a while. I wonder why that is? Maybe someone thought Done that. But you know what. I sure do wish there was a universal controller that operated my TV, VCR, and stereo all at the same time. That’s not to say that there aren’t a million things that couldn’t be better right here at home.

Who needs to go to the moon when you can starve to death in the very same country that brought you such excitements as the Apollo project?

But thankfully Sega came out with a new platform because things in the home-entertainment world were starting to get stale. Just like all that unused bread that we heap into dumpsters at the end of every week. Oh my, a guilty First-Worlder indeed Mr. Good.

The future’s always been tricky like that. It’s the one thing that everyone strives to prepare for but can never really take when it arrives. The future is time’s true face. Because like time it remains undetermined and wholly represented by nothing more than a word and the unshakable fact that it’s lying in wait, spiced with rumour. Time is time because without a name it would only be recognized by the fact that, throughout most of the world, light appears every morning and disappears every night. So it’s only logical that it has a name. Add to that the fact that we’ve decided to chop each day up into a variety of different representations of time, and you’ve got predictability. There will always be a three o’clock after two o’clock. Human beings love that sort of thing. So instead of just living our lives not knowing when McDonald’s stops serving breakfast, we thought it prudent to make sure that we could get there in time to enjoy their sausage and egg McMuffins.

The future, which is nothing more than our concept of regulated time waiting to occur, is necessary to ensure that you can loosely predict when you’re probably going to need to start using Depends. Age reflects the effects of time, so it’s safe to assume that in the future you’ll look and feel older. But is that time, or is it nothing more than the effects of the earth’s gravity coupled with the inescapable wear and tear of our body-machines?

Without the future represented, we would be able to continually enjoy those things that are locked into a specific section of the year. Like the fact that the football season begins in August and ends in May. Without having compartmentalized the future, no one would know when these things were supposed to end. Thus, Premiership Football all year round. I like that. I like it a lot.

The future is quite a personal affair, making any attempt to reflect on its impending state quite pointless. Because you and I will always see it differently, as will our children. The future is nothing more than what you think it should be. And the disappointing feature about that is that it rarely becomes all that you hoped it would.

When I was a boy I used to pace around the living room at night because the thought of being vaporized by some horrific device of incomprehensible destruction loomed over me like a wounded tiger. Being an avid student of 20th century history I was always cognizant of the adage that to ensure peace one prepares for war. But somehow, at that age, the truth of it mattered little to me. My entire childhood, as may be the case with some of you, was spent wondering just how stupid we could be given the opportunity. It’s easy to rationalize the numbers behind such idiocy. Victory means very little when all is lost in the attempt. I used to wonder if the Russians knew that. Just a foolish boy, sometimes I lost sight of the fact that all people, in their own way, knew that had we been dumb enough to do it then we would have become that which we’d spent numerous millennia trying to convince ourselves that we weren’t.