TIMEBENDING

Time is an illusion and seldom more so in the land of Lesser Blogfordshire. I may speak of “today”, or “yesterday” or “soon” or “last weekend”, but this is seldom what I mean. The dark magicks of twisting of time and writing in advance may very well mean that tomorrow is yesterday and yesterday was last month, but seldom that tomorrow is today or I might be a tad richer.

I juggle. I prestidigitate. I conceal.

It is the magic of the pen, the quickness of the hand deceiving the eye, the miracle of the keyboard and the kipper… Kipper… Keyboard… Keyboard… Kipper… the hand is quicker than the eye, the stench is quicker than the nose, the sound is faster than the light. Smoke and mirrors, light and shade, reality and illusion, look into my eyes and BAM!!! You’re awake again… What did you see? What did you think you saw? Where are you? Where were you? Where am I? Where was I? The unknown is unknowable, a conundrum wrapped inside an enigma all hidden behind a cloak of mystery.

I write the words and they are in the now as they string across the page and they are saved, files, indexed, numbered, briefed, debriefed and locked away, waiting for their 24 hours of inglorious obscurity before the next morsel lands in the bucket and they are consigned to the dustbin of oblivion, the cauldron of history to brew and fester before slipping from the memory and fading away.

Sometimes I write and publish almost simultaneously, but usually there is a buffer, a zone of tranquility for thought and reflection and reconsideration. This is the wisest route to take for unguarded words can cut to the bone if carelessly flung into the ether. Usually, today’s posting is already out there when I stagger keyboardwards full of new notions to share, or new despairs to motion. It takes a thunderclap of circumstance for me to “double blog”, a positive tsunami of bile and outrage caused by the troubled spirits of the world, or events so cataclysmic that they cannot pass by unremarked upon.

Occasionally these new raging thoughts still have to wait their turn, bubbling along excitedly, all ready to spurt uncontrollably out there just as soon as the clock ticks into the next day, bumping a former front runner from its day in the sun, pushing it back as that time sensitive new idea jumps the queue before it can become stale or outmoded or no longer relevant.

Sometimes a piece gets bumped so often that it demands a rewrite as “yesterday” becomes “last week” becomes “last month” becomes a more enigmatic “recently” although this shouldn’t really matter as today’s “yesterday” becomes “last month” just as soon as it gets read “out of time” anyway. Dates are important, they give clues to the structure and state of mind of the author, they bear further investigation of just what games were afoot when those thoughts blazed their brief flight across the synapses, onto the page and thereafter into the minds of those who choose to read them, and, on occasion, actually remember them.

Sometimes I am so far ahead with bits and pieces of nonsense that nothing in the list is relevant and still I write something new, and those loiterers lose their sheen and shine and fester down into being considered less than fresh, less than amazing and merely just words that I once linked together in a manner that no longer seems comely. Those words can sit forlornly upon the shelf for many a long moon until a protracted bout of brainblock reduces the backlog and leaves me with little choice but to dust off one of those long forgotten darlings, perhaps taking the time to whisper some new life into its hopeful earholes, before pushing it out unprotected into the big, harsh and unforgiving world to hold its own, or not, in the unyielding, unceasing maelstrom of madness.

For how long have today’s thoughts been lurking waiting to be shared? Are they really my thoughts this morning or those of another mind on another day that shares the same brain space but might be yin to my yang, up to my down, or the peak of a biorhythmic wave as the real me (whoever that is) plumbs the bottom of the same curve half a wavelength away. It’s so hard to tell. I might be extolling a tale of euphoric joy one day, but my soul is scraping out the bilges of the barrel of my hopes and dreams. Another day, the black tar of despond has descended in my words, but I’m busily waking up and smelling the roses.

I toy with time, for here and only here, I can be its master. You may not know when I talk of one weekend that I really meant another, or that yesterday is tomorrow is last Thursday, for only I can know the unknowable, only I can schedule how soon and how the jigsaw is revealed. This was written on a Wednesday evening, except for the opening which first saw daylight on a bright Saturday morning, but will reach out into the world in the dark middle of an autumnal morning on a day when even I will have forgotten quite what point it was I was trying to make.

Beware the trickster who weaves time, for his traps may catch you out. You may find him out when you think he’s in, you may find him basking in the sunshine when he speaks of torrential rain, or you may find him on holiday when you are sure he toils away. Do not trust him, for the owls are not what they seem, and he will reach out and devour your sympathies when none are needed or deserved, and consume your joyfulness when he is feeling like an emotional black hole, and sometimes, if he’s feeling particularly smug and pleased with himself, sdrawkcab swolf emit…