If you focus your eyes just right, and really look, you can see loose time. It’s sort of a weird angle to things...Not that your vision is distorted, but that the universe is. As the man said, “Mass tells space how to bend, and space tells mass how to move”.
An example: Yesterday, Nurse Freeky and I were driving West on Broadway Street, in the right lane. In the center lane there was a small 90s-style pseudo-sports car (you remember the type) with low profile tires...In the left lane, there was a 1970s pickup truck, all primer and rust, with 80s-style hydraulics.
The guy in the sports car was a crew cut kid who looked like he stepped out of 1958, and the guys in the pickup truck looked typical noughties, a bald Black guy, and a White kid with a haircut stolen from the lead singer of Cypress Hill. They were playing with each other, gunning back and forth, like something out of American Graffiti. It ended in police reports and vehicular fluids all over the road and a glimpse of the Sausage Creature, but that’s a story I shall leave for Nurse Freeky to tell.
What’s interesting about this is that there were no affectations on anyone’s part. Everyone involved seemed to be perfectly comfortable with their image and their vehicle (at least until the horrible end of the scene), like they sort of slid in from another decade.
It’s gotten to the point where nobody knows what year it is, anymore. I can’t with absolute certainty tell you who the president is, with respect to Tucson. It might be Obama, but it might just as easily be JFK or Richard Nixon.
Now, the rational part of my brain says that it’s 2011, but Tucson doesn’t seem to give a damn about what rationality has to say about it. In the Legal District, it’s still 1928. In Oro Valley, it’s 1956. The whole damn City is like that, and nobody seems to notice.
I’m wondering if this is a localized effect, or if the whole country or even the whole world is like this. What the hell year are YOU living in? It’s 2011 here, but that could change at any moment, or with a simple 5 mile drive.
I can hear you saying “You’ve said all this before, Dok.”...And you’re right. But the interesting part is, I think the loose time thing may be dependent on the human mind, and I think that the increasing amount of signal we receive in the form of memes may have something to do about that.
Think about it: Physics dictates that time will move at a given rate on this planet, but our perception of time, and the way people behave, are dictated by how their minds process data...And if there’s a wad of bad signal bouncing around in their skulls, their perceptions are going to be totally skewed. Given that we’re creatures of perception, so to speak, for all intents and purposes, time really IS acting funny.
So of course it’s not 1972 in the University District...But good luck convincing anyone of that, and good luck functioning there with 2011 behavior. You’d be beaten by campus cops and dropped into the tunnels for your trouble, and you’d never be heard from again.
Until and unless we can find a way to properly filter all this signal, we - at least here in Tucson - are going to have to get used to the nightmarish reality that everything can slide forward or back without warning.
And I’m not certain that’s a bad thing.
Okay for now,
Dok
