What I Did Tomorrow

I can’t remember what I did tomorrow. I remember I had plans. I remember caution and doughnuts. Looking for a candy dispenser aboard the Starship Enterprise. An appointment with Leonard “Bones” McCoy, who cured my tinnitus. And playing golf on Titan.

The illusion of the flow of time arises from our brains' cognitive processes, which constructs a narrative of "before" and "after" based on Marcel Proust, all 26 seasons of Southpark, and the dizzying whims of sundry prepositions.

Right now, I’m lifting dumbbells with Emily Brontë.

It’s 3:00 p.m. on Planet Earth.

I felt something seismic just now, which caused me to pause, and put my dumbbell down. It was one of those pure feelings that do not interfere with life, that are cultivated because they are rare, and whose myriad asymmetries are caressed by a thousand different winds and a thousand different situations, the many latitudes that may accommodate a lush plurality, and leave you standing in a taiga of infinite corollaries.

Never tease an ambiguity. They just get bigger. And more and more confusing. Until the gleam of a chisel on the workbench penetrates your eyes with its very specific function, consider yourself vulnerable to the vagaries of persuasion. And its cousin, propaganda.

What does the relativity of time say about the reality of time? There’s nothing fake about a clock, but its hinterlands are many. It can be a deer in the forests of the Turtle Mountains hanging above a TV in a salon with a player piano and a rack of hunting rifles. The tick of a cuckoo clock mocking the progression of time with the thrust of a bird. This is my way of contributing to the fluid immodesty of time in the cockpit of a fool. I remember the time I jumped from a plane and the cord of my chute lost a toggle and the eerie silence of the sky spoke to the inner, softer parts of my being and I had no control over my chute and a man on a one-way radio kept shouting turn left turn left turn left and I shouted I can’t I can’t I can’t and a small bird dashed by without a hello. Not everything in life has such clarity as the sudden impact of your body on a field of dirt. They tell you not to look at the ground but how can you not look at the ground. And bam, your knees are suddenly in your face. And the world feels new and wonderful again. You can pick up a rock and listen closely to the sound of the shape inside. It’s like that surprise when you have nothing to say until you start saying something and everything emerges like a wave swelling in the ocean and collapsing on the rocks and beach huge and chaotic, the foam rising to kiss the toes of sunbathers. We’d all like a buttery circumference to surround our pi. Which is just plain flaky. Differences are differentiated by outcasts. Sooner or later we all encounter it: proliferation. Plurality. A salacious kiln in a lump of magnesium. A quiet gray day in the Skagit Valley. Nothing broken. Nothing harsh. Nothing severe. Just the sweet sensation of being alive.