What is time good for if it can be wasted.

 

What is time good for? 

Oh, you have heard it said, people think time is some scarce commodity to share sparingly. The clock mimics our internal cycles. In that sense time may be the perfect metaphor for our existence. "His mind is ticking like clock." Or more contemporarily, vibrating.

I worked in the IT section at Corrections Canada for a period of about one year. I had the opportunity to chat informally with a prison psychoanalyst who explained that prisoners are watched and there are observations to be made of their behaviour. Things like the expectancy of a drug delivery would likely spur milling around and suspicious meetings and communications. That was intel to be used to tighten security at the visitors area. You don't have to be a prison psych to know you can actually observe people behavioural patterns co-relative to times. 

Whichever time we are in we may have to acknowledge the role time setting implies to the overall situation. What is more, sleep, work and play - all follow the clock.  I can say it is bedtime, and we all understand that the time is such. Time to do things to take care of our human aspect.

There is a time of day, time of the year, even a specific point in my life. What is in my mind as I tap out this rhyme,  the thoughts I entertain, are the same ones that my brain, has been over a thousand times. In IT parlance, Cyclic redundancy check. Yes, the brain does not shut down. It stores it's observations away for another day.

Time marches on. 

Maybe we need to slow it down. How though? The clock does not offer any suggestions.  If we replaced the internal mechanism with a slower one, we would just get a slow clock. What if we phased the whole concept of time out, what if we took the cue from science that time is relative and just live as though time did not really matter? There might be a few missed appointments, brides left  at the alter, but very few beers left unconsumed. Parties might last longer. What would we get done really? There might be a lot less order than there is now. Without the time ultimatum there would be no hurry to pull back the troops in a battle, there might not be any timeline for peace. Food might not be planted on time or shipped or slaughtered on time. We might not have purchased our winter clothing in the fall or our shorts in the spring.

It is a clever device someone imposed on you, a control mechanism. She may have wanted to make generalized statements and wanted some standards and time seemed to be a good start. And you adopted it eagerly because the pharaoh wanted the job done in X number of years and every second counted. You even went out and purchased a watch so you could be on time. I have news for you though, it is an impossible concept. As space unfolds before our eyes it is evident that time never began and it will always be an infinite source of confusion to scientists who attempt to decide how to determine, to predict the behaviour of complex systems. At least it will be to those looking for a linear measure.

The legal systems of the world are depending on concepts like alibi, opportunity and placing the suspect at the scene of a crime, etc. Stock purchases and sell orders are programmed and executed at precise moments in the market cycles. A ridged view of time only benefits a few to the detriment of the many. Those lawyers and financiers are holding the rest of us hostage in little boxes, on spreadsheets and in their dungeons. 

Friends 

Some people are appearing in the email system, friends. They are using their work systems to setup teams meetings because we have no time, so I am reluctant to respond. It was great when I worked in the government and we held a common thread. The table 8 group we are called because we all, except one, met at a shared table at the TBS orientation sessions. So basically, we have met on several occasions over the years at restaurants or bars at lunch on Fridays when it was convenient. They want to use their internal network to tele-meet that I no longer have access to.

It has been a while since I started to binge watch all the episodes of the various drama series as I have. It is great to sit on the couch and not do anything other than that. But now I need to take a walk, go buy chips or other snack foods.

I wish only hell for Samantha, Julie and Karen. Samantha made her own job ridiculously difficult and took her frustrations out on me. Julie the director, encouraged it. She had previously marked me as an agitator and Julie was just a knob. Blaming me did not help Samantha who still, at her own hand, became a nervous wreck. Maybe in her mind getting me fired would solve her problems but it could only be temporary because she lacked the basics of civil personality to sustain any kind of relief. She will be the same person wherever she goes. She will need to rely on a savior like Karen, the ADM, who was some sort of tool who just took it upon herself in her capacity as an accountant, to help Samantha and so, after a couple of threats and lies, she actually fired me. I am still incredulous about how the union, PIPSC, did so little to help. Some reading this might think I am being uncivil, but at some point, you must call a cunt a cunt. It was obvious to me that Karen, Julie and Samantha came from a common dysfunctional mindset. Their love for Jesus made them incapable of working with non-Christians. Fair enough, but you cannot use the public dime to exercise your grievances with your coworkers, Karen.

The measure of an individual is how well they adapt to their challenges in life. My road has been full of bumps and getting fired was a pothole I was unprepared for. PIPSC made me face my labour issues alone and after the final bell I am amiss as to what the dues were supposed to be for. I was struggling with physical neurological pain and the side effects of the drugs I was prescribed. I told Samantha and I guess she saw me in a weak moment, for her to strike me. TBS was my last department and full-time employer.

ADHD?

I am not and have never been a highly organized individual and am too high strung at times and unfocused at others. The twenty minutes it takes to play a game of chess online is the extent of my ability. I keep a lot of stuff for that reason, impressions of people and impressions on paper. Some day they will come in handy or serve some purpose. I do not give a shit about most of the garbage I have floating around in my office or in my head. I just want to understand how it all got there and how to avoid a similar mess once I get this all packaged away.

 Let’s see, I am thinking of throwing out the many notebooks I have filled with my thoughts through the last forty years. Notes that take me through my incarceration, my rehab and my return to school and inevitably, my relationships and years of productive employment. Taking time to make a time stamp like a journal entry has been a good habit, one I tried to use to my personal and moral benefit, one that allowed me to overcome my lack of focus.

I suppose my early misbehavior and juvenile delinquency was partially at least caused by head traumas sustained as an infant and later in childhood. I would add maybe the lack of early supervision, but being from a large family that was unlikely anyway. I sit here today knowing that the more I sit the more feeble I will become and my health needs are for exercise which I am missing this morning. Sometimes I wake in a start and it is all I can do  to jump up to the side of my bed after mentally reliving one of the many experiences that have set me crooked. My troubled sleep is sometime like me being in a struggle, and I muster up an assault only to find there is nobody there. The threat is lurking, but it is hidden except in my sub- or preconscious. It comes like a kick I react to. It may pertain to any of the thousands of conflict situations I have experienced and today's will not be the last, I am sure.

Does everybody carry remnants of times when they struggled. These obscure time stamps will need to fade if I am to enjoy what remains of my time. I will go off topic again here to relate the good news and that is that my cancer is now in complete remission. I am grateful to those who made it their jobs to come to my aid and the many specialists who provided input in treatments and in my recovery. Thanks to Ontario health care. I am still struggling to reconcile the past, but I am well and that makes for a fine situation.

 

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