A Straight Shot of Politics

A blog from a gentleman of the Liberal political persuasion dedicated to right reason, clear thinking, cogent argument, and the public good.

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Location: Columbus, Ohio, United States

I have returned from darkness and quiet. I used to style myself as "Joe Claus", Santa Claus’ younger brother because that is what I still look like. I wrote my heart out about liberal politics until June of 2006, when all that could be said had been said. I wrote until I could write no more and I wrote what I best liked to read when I was young and hopeful: the short familiar essays in Engish and American periodicals of 50 to 100 years ago. The archetype of them were those of G.K. Chesterton, written in newspapers and gathered into numerous small books. I am ready to write them again. I am ready to write about life as seen by the impoverished, by the mentally ill, by the thirty years and more of American Buddhist converts, and by the sharp eyed people [so few now in number] with the watcher's disease, the people who watch and watch and watch. I am all of these.

Monday, February 13, 2006

1,111,111 And Counting

Two weeks ago I did something for the millionth time. Literally. The what doesn't matter. I have never consciously done anything one million times before. I have been alive 20,000 days more or less, and even something that I do regularly, like eating three squares a day, I've only done, perhaps, 60,000 times. So it is quite possible that I have never, voluntarily, done a million things before, whether consciously or not.

I am bemused by this. We are bound by the appearance of Time, but we do not perceive Time directly. We mark it by actions or events, before and after. So for 2 years and 3 months I have had a million marks to show me the shape of Time. This is a thick textured Time, thicker, obviously, than any before in my experience. The texture of it is articulated, like crosslight over corduroy, by the memories of sitting down and doing the same thing, over and over, in a concentrated way, every day. Yes, I mean literally every day, for at least 100 and up to as many as 10,000 times a day. Every day differentiated from another, and every day thoroughly and internally well marked.

Today I reached one million, one hundred and eleven thousand, one hundred and eleven. The number made such a pretty pattern writing it down that I decided to post this. The texture of my Time surrounds me very thickly now, almost palpably. This is a good thing, but I cannot explain why to you until you yourself make the attempt to consciously do something up to 10,000 times a day, over and over.

Maybe from this point forward all of my Time will be deep textured. I hope so. There are one or two other things I could easily do for the millionth time, perhaps in a year each. Beyond that, who knows?

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