Rhetorical Questions Round a Rectangular Dining Table
Vol.12 Calendated lives and pockets of life amid more brain droppings from within The Matrix.
Vol.12 Calendated lives and pockets of life amid more brain droppings from within The Matrix.
“I carry a madness.
Everywhere I go”.
Hello and welcome to the Spring collection of made up words, rhetorical questions and a variety of other brain droppings © George Carlin. The clocks have changed here in the UK, that twice yearly charade is now complete whereby we all blithely and collectively agree to the absurdity of time. Lose an hour. Gain an hour. The language fascinates me almost as much as the surreal collective behaviour we’ve all been conditioned with since birth. Spring forward. Fall back. Daylight Savings Time. Eastern Standard Time. Greenwich Mean Time. Central Standard Time.
Who’s got the time for all this time?
Who indeed.
And if we can simply delete an hour or be little devils and add in an hour, then why bother with the concept of time at all?
Regardless, we don’t have time for such fripperies because you’re humble narrator has made up a new word! Patent pending naturally, but the new word I wish to provide to the world is “Calendated”. A simple search of The Matrix shows only one article with the word, my word, but spelled incorrectly with a middle “a” instead of an “e”, and as this appears to be some quasi American law institute, quite frankly if they’re using this made up word, then so am I.
I posit that we live “Calendated Lives” and here’s a rambling example from the UK:
Mere weeks into a New Year and we’re already either shooting or avoiding the love arrows of Valentines Day before the Ides of March, Mothers Day and then the weekend where bunny rabbits leave chocolate eggs all over the world in celebration of Jesus. Fathers Day, a variety of “Bank Holidays” and a summer holiday if you’re lucky before you’re giving away sweets at your front door to some good natured yet small framed ghouls and goblins, before shooting fireworks into the sky six days later in celebration of a man who tried to blow up the Houses of Parliament.
And failed.
All the while the lead up to Christmas and New Year has been building for months on end and 365 days later you’re ready to do the yearly dance all over again.
Exhausting, isn’t it?
But the above example is brought to you courtesy of a Godless heathen so I haven’t mentioned the every given Sunday gig as well as the variety of other compulsory attendance events throughout the religious calendar. I’m also a parent to a College leaver, so you, not I, need to factor in the “calendated” events such as school holidays, trips and exams into this morass of time, and the “calendated time” that we never seem to be free from. Hobbies and interests enter the calendar and if you’re a baseball fan, you already have 162 dates inscribed into your calendar and if your team reach the season ending playoffs, well you can scrub out most of September and half of October too.
Work?
Who has time for work with all this other stuff to be getting on with?
Dating and a love life? Well good luck fitting that in to your busy schedule and I wish you more fortune than I’ve managed in my Matrix years to date. And lest we forget all the Saints days dotted throughout our collective calendars. Saint Stephen (thanks Mum) and Saint Patrick (thanks Dad) are a staple of our yearly supplement and please do not travel anywhere without saying five daily prayers in the direction of the Moon for Saint Christopher. Then we have the yearly monuments and signposts of a war or a terrorist atrocity, the signing of peace treaties or the abominations of a bomb explosion that tears the treaty to bloody shreds. Now with the advent and all encompassing Matrix internet we have even more dates, places, names and mainly deaths that are signposted and recorded every year, as well as the flowering of social media movements that spawn a week and often a whole month as we’re continually in a “war” of some kind. And it’s always a “war” isn’t it? A war on drugs, poverty, homelessness, immigration. Or an “awareness” drive against diseases, both physical and mental that are “calendated” and often for an entire month.
Birthdays. Anniversaries. Anniversaries of anniversaries, and in the words of Pink Floyd “Every year is getting shorter, never seem to find the time. Plans that either come to naught, or half a page of scribbled lines”. Hanging in on quiet desperation isn’t just the “English way”, we’re programmed as such. Time, real or not, flitters away on the breeze of an old war or a new one or even the escalation of a proxy war that we quietly approve of with our continued silence. Next weekend is that barbecue you’ve been so looking forward to before the week away with the church and back to the work/family/hobbies routine that give you a sense of rightful stability. A famous celebrity dies and maybe one that you were rather fond of. The yearly reminder of their death is yet another nudge toward your own mortality, but you can’t comprehend the gravity of this because time is slipping quicker and quicker through your ageing hands.
But who has the time for such existential thinking on time?
I guess the next rhetorical question (and one I hope is burning from your inquisitive mind as you read this gibberish) is what’s the alternative? Do we tear down the very signposts that we cling to akin to Kate Winslet in Titanic? Is it an “all or nothing” deal? Is it personal responsibility and choice as to which of these quasi religious ceremonies we give our energy too? This one in particular perplexes me (see concluding chapter) as the width and breadth of The Matrix sucks you into events, dates, times, places and anniversaries even if you wish to take a holiday from them.
So we live “calendated lives” and I dare say the alternative of no such events and a radical openness on the concept of the passage and elasticity of time would scare the vast population absolutely witless! We have a programmed reality and even if we take a serious and cognitive detour from it, there’s a good chance it’ll reach our reluctant eyes and ears.
“Calendated”.
You read it here first, folks.
“The boys in the bubble. They want to be free.
They got so blind. That they cannot see”.
Running alongside the patent pending “calendated” lives is a rather more personal reflection I call “pockets of life”. As well as being a questioning type of guy, I’m also an obsessional sort, and so I see pockets of life and pockets of my obsessions as they come and go along with the passage of a quickening time. This infuriates me as, despite railing against the very absurdity of the concept of time, I chastise myself for wasting a precious commodity I’m loath to even believe exists. For instance, I’ve written articles and blogs now for over 10 years and it’s perhaps the perfect template example of my so called life pockets. In the four years between 2012 and 2016 I wrote articles avidly, passionately and with my entire obsessional being. This petered out, love (of a sort) intervened for a year, then I didn’t resume my blog writing for another 4 years until just a few months ago and the creation of this account. But the template is there: Commence an all encompassing passion that I simply must give the entirety of my being to. Live it. Breathe it. Want the entire world to join me in my personal quest and then, well, the pocket closes.
Where one pocket closes, another opens, and reflecting on my life as I’m won’t to do over a piping hot cup of tea and a daydreaming spirit, this has been a very familiar theme since my earliest memories and recollections. Collecting football stickers and their albums as a child was a monumental obsession for me and nothing else really mattered. The collection, the swaps and the completion of the album was everything. Everything. Playing football and cricket as a young teen/adult was every bit as obsessional and all encompassing as I found golf in my early 30’s. They followed the same pattern: I must achieve a personal perfection in each and every sport to the degree I was naturally gifted and then, they all frittered away. Watching these sports was an obsessional hobby but where once they were everything (and consequently my teams simply couldn’t lose or I’d lose), today they are followed and enjoyed from a distance. Regular readers of my articles will be well aware of my love for Liverpool Football Club. This grew into match going fanaticism, following the team all over England and several European outposts. I either went every week or barely at all. Not due to the fortunes of the team but rather the fortunes of life and the opening and closing of life’s pockets. I’m a season ticket holder at the football club of my silly childish dreams and yet I don’t go and haven’t done so in a decade. I watch now with a fan’s pride of their team and from an objective and more analytical point of view rather than the rabid fanatic who drifted through a working week eagerly awaiting the sporting weekend.
Love pockets come in two shapes and two gorgeous sizes and I won’t regurgitate my admiration here again. Suffice to say, a familiar theme emerges but I’d argue this is not dissimilar to any long term love affair. I keep reflecting on the pocket of time spent in my hometown before leaving for good in 1999. The friends I’ve acquired along life’s journey and the ones that jumped ship when the waterline rose. The pocket of my corporate working life and how ludicrously different I am now to the social climber of 23 years ago. The reader. The film geek. The lover. The loner. The writer.
The writer?
Is it simply the passage of time? Reflections of an older mind? Perhaps, but there’s a central theme running back all the way to my childhood, and never more apparent than the alter ego who exists within my own mind. The fetishistic devil is forever screaming “Don’t forget about me!” and during the first lockdown year he was everything and everywhere. My archives here demonstrate the vast output an inspired me can produce, but this pales into insignificance compared with the kinky underworld that my alter ego swims in. Not now. I’ve retired the pesky larrikin, as well as the welter of evidence as to his existence as well as his thoughts on any and everything. Why? Bit of boredom. A lot of envy. And another of life’s pockets closing.
And despite not believing in the concept (or more realistically a refusal to bow down to such a ludicrous system), a lot of wasted time.
“Come on, turn up the sun.
Turn it up for everyone”.
Well it’s been a bumper crop of glitches in The Matrix recently hasn’t it? Has Elon Musk had his hand to hand combat with Vladimir Putin yet? How about the MMA fighter who called out Mark Zuckerberg? Have they fought yet? Are you still cheering on the good guys against the bad guys in Ukraine or have you realised there aren’t good and bad guys here, just atrocious human beings using a strip of land for their own murderous proxy war? Did you see that fight between Will Smith and Chris Rock at the Oscars? It was of course as grotesque as it was staged or at the very least a million miles from the perception of the event.
Perception is everything these days. No nuance. No discussion. A simple black and white issue of good and evil and certainly not the 50 shades of grey needed for a balanced, adult discussion. No-one has time for such luxuries as that, and that’s exactly where the people providing the perceptions want us all. Busy, obsessional, in-fighting and labelling ourselves for the one/two punch (or should that be slap?) in the face for daring to think outside of the ever narrowing paradigm of being either a paragon of virtue or with the hushed toned evildoers. Joe Biden went off script (again) and essentially called for a regime change in Moscow to which his Stateside PR Departments had to back peddle quicker than Lance Armstrong from an impending blood test. Here in the UK we had the hilarious spectacle of two Russian comedians pretending to be the Ukrainian President prank calling various Governmental Ministers, all of whom trotted out a similar “put the phone down immediately and didn’t engage” line. That is until video evidence was shown of the UK’s Secretary of State for War (Defence? Political Editor), Ben Wallace. He certainly engaged! Minutes on end he waxed lyrical as to the amount of troops stationed on various country borders, the export of arms to be expected to be delivered into Ukraine and the coup de grace as he extolled the virtues of the new and improved “stinger” missiles and anti aircraft equipment being lovingly supplied. It’s enough for an immediate resignation as the gravity of the information spewing from this person’s mouth, and very willingly, was monumental in that famed cliché of “national security”. But no. Everyone whistles a happy tune as if it hasn’t happened and our collective silence gives tacit approval for a proxy war that if it doesn’t escalate into a full World War, the crimes being committed in Ukraine will destroy that country in a matter of months.
We’ve seen this horrific vaudevillian show play out throughout our lives, but once where there was innocence, youth and bravado, perhaps now there’s nuance, maturity and a refusal to believe the “truth”, and a truth that’s been “fact checked” for accuracy by the truth tellers. Who has the time to read whether a story has been fact checked? And who fact checks the fact checkers? Who has the time to see that a US President wasn’t going off script at all, but rather exactly as per the script played out numerous times just within my short time here within The Matrix? Under a cloak and employing many daggers, the US sure does love a change of regime! War is good for business, even for those dark and sinister proxy wars where the hands are full of money and not of the blood of a battlefield as a war of conquest as old as the hills continues to play out in a country that might as well be on a different planet from ours.
I don’t have to fear the atrocities being played out in Ukraine now and I hope the war crimes happening there do not wash up on your shores either. Rather we watch them, on our Matrix telescreens and narrated by those darkest of actors as they stare grimly into the camera with their empty words matching their eyes and their souls. Today’s atrocity thousands of miles away will become another “calendated” event, as recent news broadcasts have led, almost exclusively, with the exact same refrain:
“The war in Ukraine is now a month old”.
When you’re re-making the world and building it back better you also have to re-write history as well as recording history today, this minute, this day, this month, this year. Until history has been signed off and finalised, previous history is for chumps. Helps to have a calendar I guess?
Time will tell.
It always does.
Viva humanity.
Rhetorical Questions Round a Rectangular Dining Table
Vol.11 What’s happened to nuance? Do we just signal our virtues now? And what about whataboutery?medium.com
Rhetorical Questions Round a Rectangular Dining Table
Vol.9 Was it really “The best Super Bowl halftime show ever?”. Why can’t I live in the moment? And what is a NFT?medium.com
Rhetorical questions round a rectangular dining table
Vol.7 “The Births, Deaths and Marriages” Edition. And why don’t I remember anniversaries any more?medium.com