Blog Love Omega Glee: Where Does Time Go? (4 March 2012)

March fourth is the date that also doubles as a command--"March forth!"--or so Francine read on a day by day tearaway calendar once so she figures that it's a good day to get things done, particularly a bit of early spring cleaning. She wonders that it's almost spring again already, another year whizzed by. Where does the time go? What is time anyway? Stories are only possible because of time. One thing happens, then another. If the two are related, then a narrative can grow from that. But could everything happen at once? Eternally? Do we just perceive the separation of events chronologically because our minds have been genetically-coded to instinctively make meaning? Give a human being a random cloud formation and he or she will find a meaning in it, a dead aunt's face, an elephant in the sky, a word. Is the meaning there? Just in our minds? Or in the meeting between the two? We can find meaning, even when there's no meaning to be found. Some of this is fun. Too much of it leads people to not leave the house some days due to their astrological charts, and eventually insanity beckons. Weighing the danger of heading in that direction, Francine sets down her broom and sits on her bed, and thinks about time, "I need time to think, or do I need think to time?"

Time is passing now, as Francine thinks, as you read, as I write. As we think about time, it seems to slow, but it still goes forward. Where does time go? Where does it come from? If it's like a river, then does it have a beginning in the melting snow of the mountains of The Big Bang? Does it pick up speed flowing downhill into our lives, the more of it that's flown on by the more it speeds up and the more likely it sweeps you up and carries you into the sea of death as your cells grow, mutate, and fall apart due to the ravages of experience and the unending pull of gravity? What's the speed of time? Years? Months? Weeks? Days? Hours? Minutes? Seconds? All of the above and any way you measure it? Does it flow in only one direction? Or is there an eternal now, and only our sanity demands that we chop it up into bite-sized pieces? Where is the future before it's the present? Is there a universal waiting room for time, where Father Time and Baby New Year read magazines before they take the stage? Does Mother Nature know the answer? To someone of the fourth dimension, is this like asking what is depth to a third dimension personage? It just is. Are those mysterious shadows 4th dimensioners looking in on us just as we gaze down upon the citizens of Flatland? "Can I travel in time backwards?" Francine wonders, "I'm always traveling forwards apparently, albeit at the same steady pace, well dependent on perception, hours at work seem to drag on whereas hours at play fleet on by."

"Half the people I know think the world's going to end this year, all because of some date on a Mayan calendar. But that's just an arbitrary date. Those ancient chronologists used stars and sun and moon to measure time, but that's still measuring time against something that's also moving in time. If time is relative like Einstein claims, slowing down or speeding up depending on how close one is to the speed of light, then how can time be measured in any precise way? One can't just grasp time. It slips away. 2012 is just a number and math itself is just an arbitrary method to count, to enumerate, to distinguish one thing from another, even an abstraction from another abstraction. In any case, rival calendars measure things differently. It's 2012 now because some Christians decided to count down from Christ, the king of kings, rather than using regnal years, the old-fashioned way of counting years by the name of each thug who seized power, then European colonialism spread the counting method around the world. When the Gregorian calendar was adopted, they dropped ten whole days. What happened on October 4-14, 1582? Nothing. They never existed. But the time existed. Just what we called it changed."

Francine's even found some scholars who claim that three hundred years from the Middle Ages never really existed either. What are those years hiding? Who benefits? And why couldn't something like that happen to Francine's junior high years?

Blog Love Omega Glee is a novel by Wred Fright about two bloggers who fall in love while the world falls apart, which is being serialized on his blog. To start reading from the beginning or read another installment, please visit Blog Love Omega Glee Central on WredFright.Com. If you like what you've read, or you've read all of Blog Love Omega Glee and want more Fright, then please read his first novel, which is available in print and as an ebook.