Writing Challenge

No Time. Too Loose. Or, Time’s Mulligan

Posted on by Mark Aldrich

Nothing is perfect, except for the perfect things. It does not take a precise 24 hours and zero minutes and zero seconds for the earth to complete one spin on its axis; it takes slightly longer, but not so much longer that you could even call it a “tick.”

The earth’s rotation is only a tiny fraction of a millisecond slower than what we otherwise call a day, but these partial seconds add up. Twenty-five times since 1972, the international bureau of standards that handles time issues has added a “leap second” to all of our lives. The last year with a leap second was 2012, so if that year felt longer for you, there is a reason: It was. By one second. Clocks everywhere could have read “11:59:60” at midnight the night of the leap second, but they did not because no one makes clocks that do that.

If it was not for those leap seconds—and, every four years, leap days—our clocks and calendars would slide and slip all over the place compared to what they are measuring; if not for leap days, eventually New Englanders would be confronted with a frigid July and the dog days of December, and vice versa for the Southern Hemisphere.

What our clocks and calendars are measuring is perfect: a year is X number of seconds, days, months, but not the same every year. The earth’s orbit is regular and perfect, but not 365 days every year. It is almost 365 days, and a day is almost exactly 24 hours in length, and we live with the compromise we call clocks and calendars. The ancients came as close to exactly right simply from observation as they could—to within seconds.

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No one is perfect, except we are each of us perfect, perfectly ourselves.

The clock makers and the calendar printers, heck even the bureau of standards that decides how to measure things, regularly make adjustments to the ways we mark the passage of time. Everything, even time, needs a semi-regular do-over, a mulligan.

(The mulligan is a very specific rule in golf—a rule that does not exist in a place called reality—which states that “sometimes rules do not apply,” so do-overs do exist in the universe. Of course, my friends and I found ways to bend even this non-rule. In informal golf, friendly noncompetitive golf between or among noncompetitors, if one hits an egregious drive [if? when, in my case], a drive that everyone agrees there may be no recovery from, everyone might also agree to grant that player a do-over. That is a mulligan. He or she does not get another one for the remainder of the day, even if the mulligan, the replacement shot, was worse or if an even worse drive came off their club later on. My friends and I came up with the “retro mulligan,” in which a player kept his or her mulligan in the bag if the do-over was a worse shot. That was our contribution to the world of golf and the world of do-overs, and it was super-secret, I think. Maybe I will take a mulligan in tomorrow’s column. The “retro mulligan” was the only mulligan that a player truly had only one of, and using it erased it and the mulligan.)

As an idea, the mulligan is forgiveness from the universe, a creative admission that there is a better version of what you just did still available in you. There is a better version of you. The retro mulligan concedes that sometimes we grab a do-over prematurely in life. There is a saner version of a better version of you.

I have a perfectionist streak that I am striving to lose, because I can not be the best version of myself by placing perfect in my path. Perfectionism leads to procrastination, then paralysis. All those leap seconds and leap days, I needed every last one of them to get to where I am today. And I expect I will need every leap second and leap day yet to come, because I am keeping the retro mulligan in my golf bag of life. Every second counts, yet there is no time to lose.

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The WordPress Daily Prompt for October 13 asks, “Good news—another hour has just been added to every 24-hour day (don’t ask us how. We have powers). How do you use those extra sixty minutes?”

Lies, Damn Lies, and Ad Sales

Posted on by Mark Aldrich

The newspaper’s weekly circulation was a closely guarded exaggeration. The circulation manager knew the number, the editorial department knew it, the advertising manager knew it. The newspaper’s circulation was about 2000 copies per week. Now you know, too.

The pliability of the words “circulation,” “copies,” “newspaper,” and “week” was tested regularly. This is because if the advertisers had been told the 2000-per-week number, they might have asked the newspaper to pay them for the honor of placing their ads; thus, they were given a number 10 times larger. More often than not, they were told that over 20,000 pairs of eyes “saw” any given issue of the newspaper. Actually, in an effort at a specificity that would grant legitimacy, they were given a figure of “21,000 readers.”

The word we used was not “subscribers,” it was “readers,” and I may have been the reason for this taint of honesty: even though I was the assistant editor, I was given many tasks over my time there in order to learn the newspaper business, and one week I placed ad calls. I knew that 21,000 was an exaggeration akin to harvests in Soviet provinces distant from Moscow and could not bring myself to repeat it. We did not have 21,000 subscribers: We ordered fewer than 5000 copies from the printer each week. But “readers”? I saw people manhandling copies on line at the supermarket only to return them to the newsstand. They counted, right?

We started to claim 21,000 readers. Each of the four or five communities we covered had populations under 1000, so the only way one could legitimately claim 21,000 anything was by including pets and livestock.

Sometimes, the word was “readership.” We had a “total readership” of 21,000.

Many of our ads were from the local car dealers, so my pang of an honest twinge was not met with an equal bout of honesty from them. They tended to pay late.

Our ad manager was remarkably creative with the set of facts that he made up from the facts that we had. It was a case of a “known known” being treated with the delicate hands of a diamond-cutter. If one fact yields 20 different perspectives, many facets, well, then it is no longer one fact: It is 20 facts. And facts are knowledge, and knowledge is power, so the more facts one knows, the smarter one is.

And math always grants the deployer of facts a sheen of certitude, or in my case when making the phone calls, the nervous luster of flop sweat.

We started the magical addition with the 2000 paid subscriptions, quite a few of which were free, but whatever, these were 2000 real subscriptions and Shhhhh. Each house has an average of three members, so we can assume there are more readers right there. Quite a few of our subscriptions went to doctors’ offices, and who knows how many people thumb through an average issue in those, amIright? These two estimates, home and office, brought us to five digit figure land.

Further, we distributed about three thousand copies to X number of stores and sold quite a few each week through those outlets (in Reality Land, that number varied wildly from week to week). The population in the several counties that these stores were in was Y. Surveying the gas station and grocery store owners at which we sold our newspaper, our ad manager learned their estimates of the average number of customers they deal with each week. Their estimates. Their own exaggerations, um, estimates.

Our ad manager hated when we only came up with enough news to produce a one-section paper. The irrefutable logic was that a multi-section newspaper gets split up, doubling or even tripling the potential readership for that issue.

When I look at my page views and metrics on the website here, I sometimes think about my 21,000-circulation newspaper that covered life in a profoundly rural part of the world. Then I remember one fact, one single fact, that has never been broken up into 20 different facets or perspectives by anyone: I loved that job.

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The WordPress Daily Prompt for October 10 asks, “Time to confess: tell us about a time when you used a word whose meaning you didn’t actually know (or were very wrong about, in retrospect).”

Some Time Travels

Posted on by Mark Aldrich

In his “Confessions,” St. Augustine writes, “What then is time? If no one asks me, I know; if I wish to explain it to one that asks, I know not.” He decides that time is an idea, unique to humans, and also unique in that we can simultaneously grasp the past in memory, the present by attention, and the future by expectation. In our minds, but only there, we are not locked to one perception of one reality.

Yesterday, I deleted everything that I had written up to that point by dragging my unbuttoned shirtsleeve across my laptop’s touchpad while reaching for my coffee. (No, I can not replicate the results in an experiment; yes, like an idiot, I have attempted to replicate these results in an experiment.) In a feat of memory, I retyped all that I had written to that point; simultaneously I remembered what I had written, was super-present and typed it attentively, and expected a future in which I regularly saved my work, a lesson I first learned, oh, 20 years ago. I was in three specific time-experiences at once, and all of them sucked.

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For decades, it has been known that subatomic particles can be in two places at the same time. In yet more recent (2014) experiments, physicists have “simulated” time travel. Science reporters tell us that time travel is in the “near future,” or, more prosaically, “just around the corner.” If this is so, no one from the future has yet visited us, because if it truly is something that we will invent or discover in the future (near or not-so) we would know all about it already. This is because, oh, you get it.

Many therapy techniques suggest remembering oneself in a childhood moment and reaching out to that younger self; the thought is that we carry every self we have yet been forward into our psychological present and can communicate something of a healing nature to those past selves. Whenever I have attempted anything of this sort, I have cried. I have received no reports from the younger self about what he made of the unexplained appearance of an older man leaning on a cane.

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How the false truths of the years of youth have passed!
Have passed at full speed like trains which never stopped
There where I stood and waited, hardly aware,
How little I knew, or which of them was the one
To mount and ride to hope or where true hope arrives.— “I Am A Book I Neither Wrote Nor Read,” Delmore Schwartz

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The thought experiment of time travel has a long history in popular culture. Fantasists invent tools (a jet-pack in every garage) in novels and movies, tools which actually only address the needs of the present moment and do not attempt to imagine the future needs that will be answered by the future tools. In almost every science fiction work that uses the device of time travel, the several paradoxes of “a visitor from the future would influence current history and thus change their present” or “if I go back in time and change a mistake, erase an error, will I not change who I am now?” are addressed.

Many of the heroes decide or discover that the path that brought them to where they are and to the person they are now was always worth taking, errors and all. As long as one is breathing, lessons can be applied. (Ebenezer Scrooge, for example.)

It is a seductive thought experiment, though. Offer a person a time machine to return to a specific moment in the past and take up residence there, from that moment onward, and relive one’s life so one can fix whichever errors and enhance whichever successes that followed, well, it is seductive. Offer a person life from a future moment from which they can see it all unfold, … well.

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delmoreschwartz

Delmore Schwartz

Delmore Schwartz’s heart-rending short story, “In Dreams Begin Responsibilities,” opens with the narrator in a movie theater as he realizes the feature is his parents on their first date; he becomes frantic and yells at the screen, “Don’t do it!” and gives a list of reasons. (Oh, to have been Delmore’s mother. He was 21 when the story was published.) The audience hisses him down, as he is ruining the movie for them, but he knows how it ends.

My father tells my mother how much money he has made in the week just past, exaggerating an amount which need not have been exaggerated. But my father has always felt that actualities somehow fall short, no matter how fine they are. Suddenly I begin to weep. The determined old lady who sits next to me in the theatre is annoyed and looks at me with an angry face, and being intimidated, I stop. I drag out my handkerchief and dry my face, licking the drop which has fallen near my lips. Meanwhile I have missed something, for here are my father and mother alighting from the street-car at the last stop, Coney Island.

At the end, the narrator is thrown out of the movie theater while on screen his father is refusing to have his fortune told by a Coney Island fortune teller. And then he awakens to “the bleak winter morning” of his 21st birthday. It was all a dream.

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As Augustine saw, way back in the 4th century, we always live in the three time zones of our experience and psyche simultaneously: past, present, and future. Always.

I no more wrote than read that book which is
The self I am, half-hidden as it is
From one and all who see within a kiss
The lounging formless blackness of an abyss.

How could I think the brief years were enough
To prove the reality of endless love? — “I Am A Book I Neither Wrote Nor Read,” Delmore Schwartz

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Neat Thing of the Day: Lou Reed reading “In Dreams Begin Responsibilities” (Reed had been a student-mentee of Schwartz’s at Syracuse University): In Dreams Begin Responsibilities.

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The WordPress Daily Prompt for October 7 asks, “Congrats! You’re the owner of a new time machine. The catch? It comes in two models, each traveling one way only: the past OR the future. Which do you choose, and why?”