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?

While We Miss Chances You Can Almost Hear Time Slipping Away

Part One of Two.

Self portrait, Princess Victoria of Kent, 1835

One September morning eleven years ago David Angell boarded a plane that would lead to his death. On the very same day, due to a sequence of fortuitous mistakes, Seth McFarlane missed the very same flight and Mark Wahlberg cancelled his tickets for that flight at short notice. In another universe where the chain of cause and effect was subtly different; all of them died, or none of them died, or some who died did not and vice versa. When you raise the stakes, the fridge horror of the Many Worlds Interpretation becomes apparent.

Most of us have never dodged a bullet of that calibre, though I don't think it would be unreasonable to say most people have experience of almost being run-over. Not quite the kind of traumatic event that drives a person to madness thinking of all the variables that could have fallen in place and sealed their fate, but with the multiverse theory in mind it becomes apparent that for every recognisable counterpart of yourself that survives a close-call there may be just as many that did not. And now empathically, or perhaps egotistically, your imagination now places you in your other's shoes. For all that you stood outside the path of oblivion you condemned another you to the fate you are so relieved to have been spared.

Ask (GA-Slag FAQ 2)

Prijatelj, Rubberducky, Artemis, Llena, Altavoz

It's hard to imagine things would move on so far that the GA-Slag became part of a different decade. At the time we really were living in the present. By sixth year most of Les Enfants Terribles was in the don't-know-what-we'll-do-after-school class while the majority of the year were in the university application classes. We spent most of that class having a laugh; regularly at the teacher's expense, though she would say at our own expense. It is what it is, and this is the tenth anniversary of the night I was bored and got a freeware FTP application to work and uploaded the familiar black and red image of James Dean Bradfield from the NME. The first rant pre-dates that by almost a full month, but at the time it was being hosted on Stephen's GA-Master site, and so this is really the point at which I took the idea and ran with it. Let's take some questions from the audience...

Sojourn II: There Were Always Dreams of Leaving

We're moving out, 2009, Sint Smeding

It's been two weeks since I came back from London and I've had time to reflect on the trip and also where I want to go next. If you want to take that as literally seeking a destination then I guess that would be New York City as one of the earliest films I can remember is Ghostbusters and dozens of other films over the years have impressed parts of the city in my mind (nearly all of which are in Manhattan, so I apologise to the other four boroughs). My thoughts about where to go next are actually life questions. The sojourn down south was one of three desires that arose earlier this year. You could call them goals or aims, but I've never thought of myself as pursuing very clear objectives which is why I've always had a problem answering questions about the extent of my desires - which sounds too passionate but intentions sounds too immediate so I'll roll with the former. The issues raising themselves mark this as a 'quarter life crisis'. I thought I'd gone through a quarter life crisis back when I started flunking college in the early days of the blog though in hindsight it bears more resemblance to angst, still how I went through it did warrant calling it a crisis. On the other hand whilst what I'm describing now is far more contemplative than a mental car crash, it is far more of an actual attempt to find personal direction in my twenty fifth year. Thus, this post is labelled as if it were the second part of the London travelogue.

Running Blind Through Killing Fields, Bred To Kill Them All

First Person Shooter, rimblas, 2009

As revealed at the end of my long-simmering rant against Sony, I unexpectedly recently received a PlayStation 3 as a birthday present. The bundled game was Resistance 3. I'm not one for First Person Shooters. I never experienced the revelation of Wolfenstein 3D because it would never work on my old computer; and I never actually bothered to play the second coming of the FPS, Half Life, despite having purchased it. The last shooter to grace my shelf was Rising Sun eight years ago - the poor quality of which (save for a few interesting moments) pretty much killed any enthusiasm I had off the back of the success of Frontline. Only a particular subgenre of the FPS has ever really appealed to me - the tactical shooter.

Last Christmas I Gave You My Heart

Playstation 2 Collection, PseudoGil, 2007

When the PlayStation 2 was launched I had to wait a year before my parents could afford one for my birthday, and even then I had to go without a Christmas present that year because it was that expensive (around £250). Flash forward seven years and the old console had succumbed to drive failure. My parents bought me a replacement slim PS2 which cost only £80. With the release of the PS3 in 2006 I was hoping to follow a few series into the next generation: Grand Theft Auto IV, Metal Gear Solid 4, Gran Turismo 5, et al. As always, the launch price was ridiculously expensive and none of the launch titles interested me, so I waited and saved - every year I put my Christmas tips into my 'PS3 fund' and every year there's a new reason not to buy one.

By last Christmas I made enough to afford one, not due to lack of tips over three seasons, but because the price has barely moved. At the time of writing it appears the cheapest model has finally dropped under £200. I imagine that won't last as Sony will employ the same trick they've been using for five years - halt production, swap out the hard drives for larger ones, restart production and slap the old price tag on them. Given how bloody long it has taken for the price point to decrease, adjusted for half a decade's inflation it probably hasn't at all.

It's in the Trees, It's Coming!

missingno, bencanfield, 2010

Back in the summer I was engaged for several weeks with a role playing game. Though you don't play as any defined character, Gran Turismo has many of the elements of an RPG - just look at the grinding I had to do to afford an Audi R8. This month, however, I've got back into a proper RPG, one of the most popular of all time - Pokémon. Fittingly, I fell ill by the due date for this post as the last time I played Red/Blue was on a sick day which I spent bringing my Pikachu up to Level 100 in Cerulean Cave, which must have been at least twelve years ago. So aside from illness, why have I spent thirteen hours playing a child's old Gameboy adventure this month while on the cusp of turning twenty-five? And why am I also watching the anime?

Great Times in Commotion

9/11 Flipbook, scott_bl8ke, 2011

When I was in Primary 7 we had to spend Wednesday afternoon doing drama. At one point this neatly crossed over with our study of the Second World War - in groups of three we had pretend it was 1939 and we had just heard Neville Chamberlain's declaration of war against Germany. I simply couldn't act as if I was shocked by the start of the war. It meant nothing to me and there was nothing in my own living memory at the age of 11 that came anywhere near that event that I could draw upon. To me, the war was documentaries looking back half a century and old Sunday afternoon films about heroic adventures (it hadn't yet been fully abused and commercialised by first person shooters) which was not the context the people of the real 1939 were living in. That drama class is over half my lifetime ago, so I can't remember what response I acted if any.

Into The Nineties and Beyond

Around this time eight years ago I was sitting my Higher English exam (first of two tries). For the writing segment you're given a booklet with roughly a dozen topic sentences to pick from. I can't remember what topic led me to write an embarrassing China Syndrome knock-off - in fact I'd like to forget it entirely. I disliked it enough that I put an apology at the end. However, in the preliminary exam a few months before, I wrote an A+ story I really wish I had gotten photocopied - it was probably one of the best things I had then written. The topic I chose in that exam was "Write about a time you went to hospital". When I saw it I immediately thought of the time I broke my arm in primary school, but I realised that the topic did not necessarily mean 'write about a time you were admitted to hospital' allowing me some room for genuine on-the-spot creative writing. Soon after I intended to rewrite it from memory (it was a single page at most) for my old website, but I never got round to it and the following is therefore an extremely loose reconstruction. I also can't remember how it ends.

Ask (GA-Slag FAQ)

Two years ago in the GA-Slag Retrospective I wrote about the genesis and development of said site. In this second background feature I've collected some questions about the GA-Slag, addressed some issues, and provided a little background to events depicted in prominent editions.

Imprint After

unidentified compact disc, Janesdead, 2005

I hate being subjected to Radio 1. Either my tastes have evolved considerably, or pop music's standards have dropped considerably. Yes I know, I'm twenty-three so that probably puts even me far outside its tweeny demographic; but I swear we've witnessed the idea of the musical composition known as a 'song' eaten from the inside out by the refrain. The refrain - often called the chorus - has always been the catchy part of a song, often where the hook resides. Naturally, it was only a matter of time before the chorus came to form an entire song whereupon the hook ceases to be a means to catch the listener's ear and instead acts more like the little slots on a cheese grater. Coupled with a gratuitous looped sample being shouted over, the whole concoction shreds my eardrum over the course of three minutes.

I'm a DJ and I've Got Believers

cue, danmachold, 2005

A few weeks back I was in the barber's and I was watching BBC News in the mirror - I think this was the same day Gordon Brown stood down as PM. One of the employees then changed channel to the Radio 1 feed. I stopped listening to R1 at the end of 2003. As the Radio 1 Festival was around the corner, the presenter decided to play an "oldie" from years gone by. It was Avril Lavigne's 'Sk8er Boi'.

A Suicide/The Kiss

I've always been interested in space and astronomy. Unfortunately, the sense of proportion that comes with that is a form of torture. I had what can only be described as an existential crisis at the age of 14, bad enough that the school contacted my parents.

Whilst I may not be as acutely mind-fucked a decade on, I've never actually exited the crisis, just attempted to ignore it. It popped up again in 2006, as a large bulk of posts will testify, and now and then since but the lack of posts mostly hide it. I was thinking a lot, however, and I happened to be reading this article:

A particular way of breaking through the sense of isolation is through touch.

when it struck me like a diamond bullet through the forehead, that I already knew this. Nothing could more be described as transcendent than the random hug the girl in my chemistry class once gave me. It sounds so petty and laughable a saudade, but it just could keep me going. Somewhere out there is a connection to be made.

Art: A Sunday Afternoon on the Island of La Grande Jatte (Extract), Georges Seurat, 1884
[185]

Roygbiv

Untitled, 2005

Riding up front to the drifting American Dream
In the garden where whitewashed walls and paper bleach vision to a soft yellow glow
Away from the modem, pen in hand, sheets of untouched paper
Afternoons by the window, in earshot of the news from China
April 2001