CounterClockwise

What time is it?
Same time it was yesterday, only twenty-four
hours later.
TICK-TOCK!
What time is it?
TICK-TOCK!
Half past kissing time, time to kiss again.
What time is it?
Time to get up.
TICK-TOCK!
What time is it?
TICK-TOCK!
Time to go to work.
What time is it?
Time to go to lunch.
TICK-TOCK!
What time is it?
Time to go home.
TICK-TOCK!
What time is it?
Quitting time.
TICK-TOCK!
What time is it?
Playtime.
TICK-TOCK!
What time is it?
Free time.
TICK-TOCK!
What time is it!
Time for dinner.
TICK-TOCK!
What time is it?
Time for bed.
TICK-TOCK!
What time is it?
Daytime.
TICK-TOCK!
What time is it?
TICK-TOCK!
Nighttime.
TICK-TOCK!
What time is it?
TICKTOCK!B
Now.
Anyways, who cares? Most of time’s passage is irrelevant.
I mean, why bother noticing the passage of seconds and
Minutes\?
They’re the pennies of time—next to useless, and nobody wants them until they’re all you have left.
What can you do in a second,
Blink!
Wave goodbye!
Blow a kiss!
Shout hello across a room!
If you have a string of seconds, of course, it’s a little better. But singly, they’re next to worthless.
And minutes aren’t much better, you know?
If you say, “I love you,” how long does it take—two seconds?
So, you could fill a minute with thirty “I love you,”s if you were of a mind to.
But for most of us, the passage of seconds, the use of time, is in such
small increments—legal tender, but useless in small quantities.
And who wants to gather them into something worth saving? It takes too much time!
Something you’re trying to save, aren’t you?
So, if you discard seconds and minutes, you can concentrate on units of measurement that actually amount to something.
HOURS.
Eight hours make a workday, if you’re lucky, and you live in the right part of the world, and you were preceded by union activism, and so and so and so.
Twenty-four hours make a day. Well, that’s pretty scientifically accurate—almost
But hours are slippery. They get away without you ever noticing that they’ve been spent—sometimes wisely, sometimes foolishly.
In an hour, what kind of work can you do?
You couldn’t have built the Brooklyn Bridge, though you might have been able to rough out a design.
You probably couldn’t write a book, though you could maybe read one.
How many pages could you read? Me, it’s about thirty pages an hour—my reading speed. And I’m slow.
How many letters can you write in one hour? If they’re short, four or five, I’ll guess. But what if it mattered to the person you’re writing, and you had to take care with your words, could you complete it in one hour?
How many cookies can you bake in sixty minutes? Enough for your son’s Little League team? Enough for your daughter’s Girl Scout troupe??
How many eggs can be boiled in 3,600 seconds?
But again, I don’t care.
I’m not racing anyone to the end of a book. It’s an act of love, not a contest of speed.
I’m not participating in some speed-bakeoff.
And I’m not working in a hotel, or a hospital, or a truckstop.
I refuse to race anyone to the end of an hour, let alone to the end of a day.
Seconds become minutes; minutes turn to hours; and, before I know it, Time has slipped away from me.
Where’s the day gone?
TICK-TOCK!
It seems just like a few minutes ago that I picked up this book and began to read.
And yet, there’s no denying that the sun, which had been at its zenith when I started, is now clearly on its final descent.
Did I check my watch once?
Of course not!
What time was it when I picked up the book?
Reading time!
TICK-TOCK!
What time is it now?
Now!
Look at my wrists!
No leather band, no metal band either, and no round-faced commander with one big hand and one small hand.
No white band of skin!
Haven’t worn a watch for three years, three orbits of the sun, 1,06 days.
Now, days—I’m forced to acknowledge them!
The sun comes up.

TICK-TOCK!
I make breakfast!
TICK-TOCK!
I go to work.
TICK-TOCK!
I go to lunch.
TICK-TOCK!
I come home.
TICK-TOCK!
I eat dinner.
TICK-TOCK!
I go to bed.
The day is always filled with some variation of this routine.
The day, in other words, can’t be ignored. Our bodies are adapted to it. And if you are deprived of light, you sleep more, work less. If you have all light and no dark, then you’re up longer, sleep less.
It’s just a fact of nature—days.
String five of these days together, and you have the work-week!
Insert two days of “rest” between these five-day segments, and you have the calendar week.
String four weeks together—give or take a couple days—and you have a month. An artificial measurement if I’ve ever seen one.
Link the months together, and we arrive at the year.
So, thanks, but no thanks. No watch for me.
I don’t want to be bogged down by time.
I never worry if I’m “late.”
How can I be late, when time doesn’t matter? I arrived, didn’t I? Safely? Then what else do you need to know?
So, I arrived after one person, or before another.
It wasn’t their time to get here.
Seconds? Useless!
Minutes? Marginally useful, but a nuisance.
Hours? Useful, but why keep track of them?
The same thing for weeks, months, and to a certain point, years. Sure, you can keep track, but you’re not accomplishing anything.
Except perpetuating a record that no one else can emulate.
Without the identical experiences, stimuli, who cares? It’s a different path.
I have a radical idea! Instead of sentencing criminals to five years imprisonment, make the sentence in minutes. So five years becomes five times three-hundred-sixty-five days, times twenty-four hours, times sixty minutes.
I’ll let you do the math.
I think, if someone thinks of all the things he can be missing in all those minutes, he might, just might, think twice about their crimes.
So, if you want to keep your family heirloom grandfather-clock, go ahead, but what about making it run backwards? Or, you could rig it so that the chimes go off randomly. You still get the sound, and the effect, but it isn’t really marking time anymore.
The only clocks that matter are the biological clock and the circadian, anyway.
One tells us how long we will live—if only we could check the time on that clock.
And the circadian clock—it tells us how much sleep we need, and when.
All the rest of the world’s clock—they’re just for show.
Well, the one exception, annoying though it may be, is the alarm clock. If you have trouble getting up “on time,” then maybe it’s necessary.
But maybe not. Maybe what you need, what I need, is to work within my circadian day.
Which means I work when I get up, I quit when I need to sleep, or eat, or go outside for a walk around the block.
And if you have to keep your clocks, for aesthetic, or for sentimental reasons, what about painting over the numerals, making a happy face, a clown-face, or just leaving it blank…
Me, I’d have the clock inscribed with: I HAD TIME ON MY HANDS, THEN I DROPPED IT.
So, throw away your watch!
Watches, digital or not: throw them out!
Clock-radios—who ever combined those two? They should be shot!
Clocks in the kitchen—bye bye.
Clocks in the office--=out the window! Down the garbage chute!
Clocks on airports!
Clocks on planes!
Clocks on trains!
Who needs them?
Turn them around, face to the wall.
Join the revolution!
Work as long as you feel like working!
Rise and fall with the sun.
Note the passage of days.
But never, never become obsessed.
There’s too much to do.
Tell me, truthfully, is there anybody here who wants to watch two hands racing around in a circle?
Is there anybody there who likes watching the glowing red numerals changing, never ceasing, marking off the passage of another artificial increment of life?
Down with watches.
Wipe clean all the faces of clocks.
Big Ben—dismantle it and get rid of it.
The atomic clock in Washington D.C.! Remove its fuel! Let it run until there’s no more energy to move the hands.
And then…
Then, put a plaque on it: “Here stands the last monument to man’s obsession with something he could not control. Man eventually overcame his fear, and today declares himself obsession-free.”
Throw away your calendar.
There’s never going to be a new day, just a string of new moments.
What time is it, you ask?NOW!

(c) 1998 by the author