Monday, November 30, 2009

Speed of Light vs. Speed of Lint

Black Friday! The day people look to celebrate peace on Earth and good will towards men by elbowing their way past grandmothers and nuns in order to get their mitts on a big screen television. Actually, the last few years I was one of those people rousting myself out of bed at a time roosters scorn to witness in order to get my hands on something one of my children didn’t really need at a price I believed I couldn’t pass up. I was a lemming running towards the consumer cliff with credit card abandon.

This year I am going to sleep until the sale junkies have already cleared the aisles and maxed out their Mastercards. The foremost reason for this is last year wasn’t any fun. The previous years there was a sense of camaraderie. People laughed. People poked fun at themselves for standing in a discount store at five in the morning. People gave each other directions on where the various cool things were stashed in the store. Last year there was blood in the water and the sharks thought Robert Shaw was somewhere nearby singing about ladies of Spain. (That is a reach as an analogy but if Richard Dreyfuss happens across my blog he’ll enjoy it.)

Another reason for my non-participation in the feeding frenzy of electronics and Cabbage Patch Kids (okay, I am that old) is I no longer feel the need to hurry up. I’ll be more leisurely in my approach to shopping. As I get more mature (mature = gray hair, expanding waistline and attention to things having to do with IRAs and prostates) I find I value calmness more and more. Multi-tasking and speed seem much less necessary. I am perfectly willing to be the tortoise except even though slow and steady wins the race I don’t even care about winning. I just want to finish well and avoid the need for ace bandages and Ben Gay.

Recently I was reading a book called “In Praise of Slowness.” In this book there is discussion of the term time-sickness, the obsessive belief that time is getting away and we must go faster and faster to use it all. The author mentions in other cultures they see time as always coming as well as going. Time goes away, but it also keeps showing up. Time waits for no man is the modern day way of thinking about it, but it might be healthier if we all realized that just like the manufacturers of Doritos chips, they’ll make more.

This demand for fully utilizing every minute causes people to the believe time is so precious it is deemed horribly imprudent to waste it. This leads to road rage (the bozo in front of me allowed a full three seconds to elapse after the light turned green before he hit the gas), shopping rage (the bozo in front of me has 12 items in the 10 items or less express lane), airport rage (the bozo in front of me is taking forever to remove his shoes and now he has walked through the metal detector with his stupid car keys still in his pocket), drive-thru rage (the bozo in front of me has ordered enough food to sate the appetite of the Mormon Tabernacle Choir after a week long fast), and newspaper columnist rage (this bozo has written 117 words already and he still hasn’t finished this stupid sentence). There may be a dearth of time in our lives but there is an abundance of bozos.

There was a reference in this book about a novel written in the 19th century (when the industrial revolution was first starting to make time the master and man the servant) in which a civilization develops where time is the currency of the realm. Think about that. We pay each other for things with time. You fix my car and I owe you a couple hours. The problem for the guy who fixed my car is my list of skill sets doesn’t lend itself to a fair exchange. I could write 800 words about why machines are turning into people and people are turning into machines or I could answer any question he had about “The Dick Van Dyke Show”. On the other hand this could be the only way he ever gets anyone to watch his home movies of the family trip to Niagara Falls.

No comments: