Where Does Time Go?

Part Two of Two.

A Wistful Look, James Carroll Beckwith

He's supposed to be old, like 26.
-The Brain, Brick (2005)

Yes, I did wait a year to use that quote. The previous post tangentially touched on my own pessimistic suspicion that I have missed the metaphorical bus. Like the time I decided to take a real bus home from work four years ago on a torrential day before Christmas - I waited in the rain for twenty minutes (not that it mattered since I had already been in it for four hours at this point) and not a single bus appeared. I was therefore prepared for two to appear at once. It turned out they were cancelled due to the flooding. At other times I instead feel there's enough time to just catch the last one. And yet whenever I take a few moments to just lie in bed and think I glance at the clock to find time is flying and I have somewhere to be - it hardly ever seems to do that illusion where it holds onto a second, but then is there really anything meaningful you could do in a second that would wipe out any death-bed regrets you might have?

Having passed the midway point of my twenties, I now seem to continuously encounter dates of birth from years that aren't just hazy Music Has The Right to Children-esque half-remembered deep memories only given structure by parental stories. These are years I can look through a list of chart-topping songs and fully recall my own life and contemporary events - I have one memory from 1989 but as a three year old the felling of the Berlin Wall was not on my radar. Upon writing this I saw a boy in the local paper looking forward to celebrating his 12th birthday on 12/12/12, which neatly demonstrates my observation. Eminem's Stan was number 1 that week and how I wish it had stayed at the top for Christmas in 2000. It could have been my generation's Another Brick in the Wall. Well I suppose 2009 made up for Bob the Builder in 2000.

The power of music to evoke memories triggered an awareness of the increasing speed of the passing of time last summer. As I was power walking around my delivery listening to my iPod, Will Smith's Will2k come round on shuffle. Time has not been kind to that song. Smith seemingly didn't have the foresight to release his millennial song a dozen years beforehand, whereas Prince's 1999 had years to become popular and thereby crowd the royalties market in a future dystopia where the media can't think of any other song to play in December 1999. You still hear Prince's aforementioned single on the radio occasionally, yet Will2k is trapped between being contemporary and being an oldie for young adults like me (can I even call myself a young adult at 26 anymore?). Whilst enjoying the song that introduced me to The Clash (don't look at me like that),  it dawned on me like a lightning strike just how much of an oldie it really is: "Man I remember when the ball dropped for 90 / Now it's 9-9, ten years behind me". My feelings were a mix of amusement and creeping horror. When the track was recorded, New Year's Day 1990 was indeed ten years prior. But it's now thirteen since that lyric.

It's also thirteen and a half years since the Chemical Brothers' album Surrender was released, which I believe holds up far better than most of the music I was listening to then. I was recently interested in reading some opinions whilst listening to it and looked it up on Amazon to see a few customer reviews, some of which dated back to 1999. It occurred to me that if back in that year someone had looked at a thirteen year old review that would be from the year I was born. I grew up knowing the 80s were the last decade and they still are to me, which could be the reason I'm preoccupied with the passing of this last ten years - one I can vividly remember from start to finish. Back then the centenaries of the sinking of the Titanic and the opening shots of the First World War were in a distant future that Back To The Future II taught us would have flying cars and hover boards. The hundredth anniversary of the Titanic going down has come and gone, celebrated (or weakly cashed-in on) by a converted 3D re-release of a film itself fifteen years old. I've kept reminders of places and events that help me keep track of the passing of time, but now as the ratio of a year to years-lived becomes smaller it's all serves as a stark reminder of chronological distance.

Which is not a yearning to travel back, though I have found myself nostalgic for the mid-90s. I am also completely aware that nostalgia is for an imagined childhood. I really would not go back to it, and if I had a time machine I would never think of re-writing the intervening years. Even my adolescence that didn't quite turn out how I'd like to look back on it is still critically important because, I hope, we learn from our mistakes. It's the future that I'd like to embrace. Unfortunately, having gone through an existential crisis in my teens, I perceive it as the bugle call of the beginning of the end. I think I'm afraid of ageing - it used to be that famous people were older than me. I remember supporting Damon Hill in the 1996 F1 world championship when he was 35 and I 9. Now I hear someone six months younger than me has won his third F1 title. It plays into a subconscious fear that everyone is doing better than me. I need to remember something that isn't some event in the distant past - that the future is all possibilities and a new opportunity is never far at hand. But please, time, stop making me look like a hypocrite.

Written December 6th and 7th 2012
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