Tic

There is a clock hanging on the wall next to the entranceway. It’s tick-tick-ticking along—but if I catch the second hand at just the right time it stays longer than a second. This, ostensibly and understandably, makes me uncomfortable. The clock is perfectly fit into its place—round and boldfaced inside the rivet its own tick-tick-tocking created in the wall over the countless tick-tock-ticks occurring since its placement, which I imagine to be forever ago and forever after—but its tilted, slightly rotated so each number is shifted forward a space. The big bold 12 is where the 1 should be. Because of how these numbers are painted onto the clock face, they are tilted by a manner of degrees, but the small lines running around in a circle still seem perfectly in place. This too makes me ostensibly and understandably uncomfortable. I feel as though each successive tock-tick-tock of the clock is a disguised form of laughter pointedly faced in my direction. The numbers being where they are, helpless to the tick-tock-tick going on between them, seem as lost and confused as I am as Time and I engage in what will eventually prove itself to be a hopeless staring contest for one of the parties involved. Time taunts me with the slight stutter as my eyes look at the face once again—a tail quickly yanked away from the ouroboros. The clock is laughing and taunting with its tock-tick-tocking, laughing at my brain’s futile attempts to make reality seem like a solid, tangible object, and taunting at my attempts to deny the fluidity of everything. I am forced to realize I am swimming; by extension, I am forced to realize I am drowning. All for a tick-tock-ticking clock . I attempt to swim against the current but only find myself going further and further underneath what appears to be to me the most vast sea in history: of history; of the future; of the present; of every moment lived and every moment unlived; of every man, woman, and child that was or is or will be or can be or can’t be. I find all this in the tock-tick-tocking of the face that looks like it may have horns firmly rooted into the top of it that point out menacingly at passersby; everything seems to me to be so pointless by comparison. I find that I am scared—terrified, horrified, frightened, anxious, panicked. As I follow the red second-hand I imagine myself sliding down it, where either way I slide—towards the center or towards the outer rim—is just as terrifying as the other. As the tick-tock-ticks pass into minutes, I imagine standing on the minute-hand as it tocks over and sends an earthquake through me. As these tick-tock-ticks pass into large tocks and eventually to larger movements of the smallest hand I find myself being falsely comforted by the slow movements of the old witch, only to find myself plunging further down the small black stem. The face of the clock refuses to stop staring intently at and in to me. But the face is made of glass; it is able to be shattered. The body is made of metal; it can be dented and dinged and melted and scratched and rusted and forgotten. The hands are nothing but extended mechanisms of the clock’s inner-workings, each themselves only small circular disks of various sizes with millions of rivets that tock-tick-tock around like insidious insects; they can be bent and broken and cut off from the source of their movement. The clock is nothing but an attempt to hold down a mercurial substance far beyond its—and our—control. But the substance itself isn’t as malicious as the things and the people that continually use it as weaponry. The substance, really, is completely apathetic about everything. It is immaterial. It is the embodiment of forever was and forever will be. It does not tick-tock-tick but only lingers absentmindedly, paying naught any attention to anything or anyone but itself. It is not to be hated or feared but merely accepted; whilst it may not care for having loathing and phobia thrown towards it, acceptance it will perceive as a kind of gift; it rewards gifts and makes what could be such as arduous experience a rather painless one. I am solaced by this thought: I can do with this substance whatever I wish as long as I treat it with the reverence it deserves; do not attempt it into constructs into which it could not ever attempt to fit; do not attempt to constrict it with rules and exacerbations which no living thing could possibly stand. Do not make it the thing that controls everything else; do not attempt to make it as meaningless as attempts at the latter. Disregard any attempts to impose a godliness or a servile nature upon it. It simply is, as we simply are; making what is given to be of what meaning can be created. This is important. It is important. We are.

There is a clock hanging on the wall next to the entranceway. I’ve turned it upside-down. 

Memory V

I saw you walking. Baby blue ear buds were placed firmly in your ears, where a concert playing just for you—put on, of course, by a rather emaciated and unforgivable “cool” looking guy—was raging. In the middle of a crowd you became just another eccentricity to the scenery—like a paint at the top of a wall looking vaguely like a face perpetually screaming but indefinitely unheard, or a hole knocked into the drywall and the cracks around it that alternately form either a lady or a hag. You’re all prettied up in your own way, with gaudy and “ironic” costume jeweler strung about you like christmas lights. 

I saw myself in the reflection of your bracelet as I walked by; and had to wonder if the metal felt as cold against your skin as you did. 

The Mysterious Stranger by Mark Twain // 52 Books, 52 Weeks “He only wanted help for the man who misused him, and he thought only of that, and has had no food nor sought any. He has watched by his master two nights. What do you think of your race? Is heaven reserved for it, and this dog ruled out, as your teachers tell you? Can your race add anything to this dog’s stock of morals and magnanimities?” A friend of mine likes to joke around that if I should ever die, I better finish whatever book I’m working on before then. After she lent me this book, I can see why this is almost a legitimate concern. It’s impossible to know what The Mysterious Stranger could have been had Twain not died before finishing it, but with interesting characters and valuable social criticisms, I think it could have been a classic alongside any old copy of Huck Finn.
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The Mysterious Stranger by Mark Twain // 52 Books, 52 Weeks

“He only wanted help for the man who misused him, and he thought only of that, and has had no food nor sought any. He has watched by his master two nights. What do you think of your race? Is heaven reserved for it, and this dog ruled out, as your teachers tell you? Can your race add anything to this dog’s stock of morals and magnanimities?”

A friend of mine likes to joke around that if I should ever die, I better finish whatever book I’m working on before then. After she lent me this book, I can see why this is almost a legitimate concern. It’s impossible to know what The Mysterious Stranger could have been had Twain not died before finishing it, but with interesting characters and valuable social criticisms, I think it could have been a classic alongside any old copy of Huck Finn.

Memory IV

Sitting alone at a table, I write and write and write until my pen runs out of ink. I consider the prospect of continuing with a pricked vein, but I suppose I’d been doing that all along. Someone approaches the table, and me by extension, with a companion. One says to the other, there he goes writing his novel. They look over my shoulder and read and read and read; I shove the paper away and stare at them. Like my pen, I’ve lost any usefulness to anyone in any situation. I stare blankly at them until they become uncomfortable enough to leave me be. You look happy today, one of them says. Well, of course, I’m peachy-keen.

But I feel so fucking stupid and I feel so fucking angry, and I’ve no idea why. I feel like an old, empty pen. 

To Kill a Mockingbird by Harper Lee // 52 Books, 52 Weeks “Maycomb was an old town, but it was a tired old town when I first knew it. In rainy weather the streets turned to red slop; grass grew on the sidewalks, the courthouse sagged in the square. Somehow, it was hotter then: a black dog suffered on a summer’s day; bony mules hitched to Hoover carts flicked flies in the sweltering shade of the live oaks on the square. Men’s stiff collars wilted by nine in the morning. Ladies bathed before noon, after their three-o’ clock naps, and by nightfall were like soft teacakes with frostings of sweat and sweet talcum. People moved slowly then. They ambled across the square, shuffled in and out of the stores around it, took their time about everything, A day was twenty-four hours long but seemed longer. There was no hurry, for there was nowhere to go, nothing to buy and no money to buy it with, nothing to see outside the boundaries of Maycomb County. But it was a time of vague optimism for some people: Maycomb Country had just recently been told that it had nothing to fear but fear itself.” Harper Lee, in her only book and amazing American classic, paints the image of Norman Rockwell painting with words in a way only a spellbinder could. It’s easy to see—with unforgettable characters with personalities and predicaments that are so very easy to relate to contributing to a grand humanistic theme—why Lee is hailed as one of the best American authors in the modern age, or indeed any kind of author in any age. 
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To Kill a Mockingbird by Harper Lee // 52 Books, 52 Weeks

“Maycomb was an old town, but it was a tired old town when I first knew it. In rainy weather the streets turned to red slop; grass grew on the sidewalks, the courthouse sagged in the square. Somehow, it was hotter then: a black dog suffered on a summer’s day; bony mules hitched to Hoover carts flicked flies in the sweltering shade of the live oaks on the square. Men’s stiff collars wilted by nine in the morning. Ladies bathed before noon, after their three-o’ clock naps, and by nightfall were like soft teacakes with frostings of sweat and sweet talcum. People moved slowly then. They ambled across the square, shuffled in and out of the stores around it, took their time about everything, A day was twenty-four hours long but seemed longer. There was no hurry, for there was nowhere to go, nothing to buy and no money to buy it with, nothing to see outside the boundaries of Maycomb County. But it was a time of vague optimism for some people: Maycomb Country had just recently been told that it had nothing to fear but fear itself.”

Harper Lee, in her only book and amazing American classic, paints the image of Norman Rockwell painting with words in a way only a spellbinder could. It’s easy to see—with unforgettable characters with personalities and predicaments that are so very easy to relate to contributing to a grand humanistic theme—why Lee is hailed as one of the best American authors in the modern age, or indeed any kind of author in any age. 

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