Every Six Months

I should've grabbed a scratch pad. By the time you get to the computer, your ideas are withering or congealing. They don't stay fresh more than a minute.

Which is to the point, my constant thing, the passing of time and its relation to us. You think that everything's the same, until you see pictures of the past and realize what a foreign world you were living in at the time and didn't know it. At the time its utter familiarity meant it was normal, and the average person didn't want to go around snapping pictures of everything. It was normal.

It wouldn't be normal for someone to be going around now doing that. He might say the point is to show them all in 40 years what the differences are. Except most of them are going to be dead anyway. His efforts will serve the people at the time, who will glance at the pictures and some of them will recall the way it was. Which is the way it is right now.

So it's not staying the same, but incrementally at least changing all the time. Like how a room gets messed up. A few books that don't make it to the shelf. A stack of papers that gets tipped over one day. Some newspapers set askew. Some pieces of crumpled paper that missed the waste can. Next thing you know you're living in squalor. But it's onward and upward for the town, downtown, the suburbs, other buildings. With funerals everyday for the previous generation.

I've got a couple magazines on the shelf that I bought, probably six months ago. I haven't done anything with them except keep them in good condition. At the time I had a real collector's instinct about these things. Now I'm looking at them with disbelief that I succumbed to that at the time. But no one tried to talk me out of it. The intention was to get a couple plastic bags to put them in, then to put them in a box.

The key thing about them today is that it's surely been six months. Meaning a whole half a year has already passed away right under my nose. Whatever I'm inexorably going toward in life, I'm inexorably that much closer. Sleep a little, eat a little, go out to eat, worry, and all the rest. It all adds up.