I started the stopwatch on my phone for something over the weekend—timing the length of a work presentation. When I opened the clock today for something else I was startled to find it still running, 39 hours 26 minutes and something something seconds, tenths and hundredths flashing by. It was eerie to observe the stupid machine going on like this, devoid of human attention and oblivious to it, too. It could run for a million hours, it doesn’t care. A hundred million hours. Long after life on earth has been eclipsed and our sun has collapsed into a singularity the machine will be counting the hours. Long after time does not exist, the machine will be counting the hours.

9:23. It’s always 9:23.

At seven o’clock from our roof there was the usual commotion down below, claps and honks and sirens, but almost no one else up on top. A neighbor to the right clapped gamely but inaudibly with garden-gloved hands before lying down to fuck around with the vines curling up around his deck. New Jersey glimmered far away. What would the guys from WBGO in Newark say tomorrow morning when my clock radio goes off at 7:30? It’s going to be a hot one.

Digging through the trash to try to find a piece of the broken angel, I was traveling through the past, back to Tuesday’s dinner, those packages we received back when, the time before the fight. I would eat these coffee grounds if it would turn back time. I got down to the bottom and I didn’t find the piece.

I like when the project manager reviews the key dates and they’re deep into the future, dates like February 9, or April 27, far away but specific, with benchmarks and deliverables associated. It feels like we have lots of time, but that’s not really it. We’re connected to a point in the future. A time when god knows what will be going on in the world, but there we are, gathered safe and sound again on the MS Project timeline. What it really means is that we believe we’re going to survive.

The beginning of a sports season is a celebration of renewal, of anything possible, of life. I always think this and make a mental note to mark it in writing, at the beginning of September for football for example. I want to recognize it and savor it. Then suddenly it’s Week 7, Week 8. I’ve been helpless against the current of time. But in a few days Formula One starts again, and here we are.

Sometimes when the computer gets stuck, you get that spinning wheel or whatever the case may be, it feels like time itself enters a strange, inhuman realm. Something that once took a tiny fraction of a section, directed by humans in programming language, facilitated by unimaginable processing power, now takes, potentially, any arbitrary length of time. Could be 25 seconds. Could be three days. Could be 5,618 years. The machine doesn’t care. It’s just going to do what it’s supposed to do. We constrain machines with our imperfect, wishful thinking. But they don’t give a damn.

Serenely, the clock breathes out & in. Uh-huhh… uh-huhh… uh-huhhh.

Here we are again at the beginning of things: school, work, the football season. Every year I think I'll take note of it, pause before it passes by. Every year I don't. Except for now.

I've had two strange experiences with time lately. The other day I awoke to my alarm maybe the second or third time after hitting snooze and I remember looking at the minute hand on the ten, nine-ten it said, or maybe nine-nine, and I fell into a reverie, a half-sleep that seemed like it could have lasted an hour or more – it was rich with wild ideas and jumbled dream narrative and when I finally awoke again, faintly worried at how late it must have got, I looked at the clock and it said nine-ten. I scrutinized the second hand to see if it had stopped and at first – during its momentary pause of course – I thought it might have but no: It ticked.

Then I was killing time before seeing a movie – it was five o'clock and I had till 5:55 so I walked back and forth down the block, thought about going to a bar, thought better of it, thought about a different bar, hated the chain-restaurant look of it, tried to find another, wondered at buildings and people and shops and retraced my steps a few times before hopefully looking at my watch. Only five minutes had passed.

Last night I couldn't remember whether it was 2001 or 2002. I saw 01 on a computer file I thought was recent and I thought, damn, is it still 2001? Then, is it 2002? Hard to say which was more baffling. And in the morning I was chilled by the looming date on the milk carton – it seemed so far away at the store.

We are well into the future. 

I am becoming aware of the passage of time as a terrible confluence of seconds into minutes, minutes into hours, hours into eons, until lifetimes and generations pass in what seems like instants.

It was my last day at Aetna, and Meg took the occasion of my departure to contrive a pleasant, gossipy exchange about what else, O. J. Simpson. We were discussing the length of the knife used to commit the murders and we agreed that it was indeed a very large knife – I thought of J. L. quoting the cop: "It was a substantial knife," such cop talk – and just as suddenly, as though continuing a phrase uttered about the gravity of the wounds and Nicole Simpson's nearness to decapitation, a secretary mentioned all the wonderful knives her father had given her for her new apartment: some big, some small, all very sharp, with stone sharpeners, her dad is a chef you know. And we nodded just as agreeably to the train of this conversation as to the previous one.