Clocks
Your life clock is ticking – how are you allocating your time?
“No one mentions Twitter in your obituary.”1 –Julie Klausner
Time is a cake yet to be eaten. Time is a plump moon orbiting closer, ever closer, messing up your tides. Time is a furry spider, dropping from the ceiling above your head, legs feeling the air while reaching delicately for your hair. Time is a truthteller. It allocates itself to each person at the start of the journey but does not communicate the allotment. Time is the quietest voice in your loudest room, standing by the chips and dips and tapping at its wrist. It is thirsty. For you, for your life, for all your perceived treasures. It will drain you to depletion.
Stop the clocks.
Except you can’t because clocks aren’t real. They are display cases for the cakes. They take Time, an ethereal concept that cannot be gripped by feeble hands mechanical or otherwise, and give it comprehension. Ah, I get it. Understood. But clocks are not Time, just the messengers. Time is dying cells dancing defiantly in your body with that Kate Bush Babooshka2 energy, knowing theirs is running out. Time is a Hans Zimmer swell at the back of your theatre as your movie plays all the way to the end credits. If you’re lucky, Morricone was there for a bit in the third act. Time is both the glass half full and empty with the empty holding the final scorecard. It drinks itself or others will drink it for you. If you’re doing it right, you’ll get good and drunk all on your ownsome.
Cut off the telephone.
Hear the suck of sound as you peel your face away from the epic trolling and the endless Rickrolling. There’s no Nobel Prize for Tweeting. No Pulitzer for Best Hashtag. No Presidential Medal of Freedoomscroll. Time dies in screen light, slain by the swipe and witnessed by the willing who will see all but do nothing. Time speeds up. Time stands still. The test of that stand is our mission. We must vow to the Time Cop Code, balancing our efforts, donating the tithe while creating the craft. We must not exceed the limit of our characters by diverting from the real-real of creation. Time lords it over us and we must pay the tax.
Dogs don’t wear wristwatches but they know when it’s time for walkies. Instinct is a Rolex wagging its tail and Time holds the treats. For every season, there’s a time for tweeting and ‘gramming and running and socializing and chasing frisbees and purpose, and your purpose—if you’re serious about it—is to dig up your juicy bones. If you’re not serious about it, then by all means go hump a leg. If there truly is a time to be born, a time to die, and a time for moaning aeroplanes circling overhead, then surely there is ample time to reap the likes of your tweets and still put that shit aside and do the actual work. Your dream is not to be King or Queen of Twitter, is it? IS IT?!
*sigh*
❤️ If you think the love emoji lasts forever, you are wrong. There’s the dopamine hit of it. ❤️ The blush of red that plucks at your goo. But love doesn’t look like that and neither do hearts. ❤️ Your heart—your real, beating, throbbing, blood-pumping, artery-fed heart—and its desire to create whatever you think up, is a bonafide forever follow. Time marches on, folds in on itself, taps its glass face, and looks you in your bleary eyes. What does your heart say? What is its bpm right now? What project will you give your heart to? Time is a metronome in the cage of our ribs, set to the beat of our desire. Like and subscribe to its newsletter.
You are not dead. Not yet. But it will happen. Time makes sure of it. Time bandits, timekeepers, doctors of Time. We are born with our stopwatches already running. Our cradle-to-grave land run begins the second we hit the deck, yet we are easily distracted by the tiny parcels along the journey. We steal it from others. We waste it like fools. This concept, held in watches, thrown into disarray by time zones, and obsessed over by time-murdering hatters with pocket watches—we hate it, but it keeps our feet moving. It keeps us racing and honest.
Televisions are clocks. Books are sundials. Movies are timepieces of extraordinary beauty. And people? People are ticking love bombs. Spend Time with these time wasters, but be mindful of your own world-building endeavors. It takes time to make Time. Time is money. Time waits for no one. We kill it and yet it flies. It flies Big Time. You will never have enough of it but Time doesn’t care—it just keeps marching on. And so should you.
Because you don’t know how much you’ve got. You don’t know how long you get with the horologe and so you must use Time wisely. An hourglass may be used to measure it, but you don’t get to flip it once it’s done. There is no sand. There is only blood and flesh and the slow decay of your daylight. Weigh the ticks and tocks and progress bars and determine how you are going to use this mysterious, unquantifiable number to the best of your ability. Because the older you get, the faster it seems to go. Get fit for it if you wanna keep up with it. You must work out to run with time.
But Work. You must always do the work.
That is how we punch our clocks.
*
Janeen McCrae, human woman, and resident of IP 192.0.2.423, shut down unexpectedly last week after a short battle with a Russian bot in the Twittersphere. She shucked her shell at the time-defying age of 97. Her last words were: “Can I get a retweet? 🙌”
Born before Twitter was a thing, she shelved her childhood desire to write books to instead focus on working her way up the Twitter follower count ladder. Her rise up the ranks of legitimacy was swift, attaining first a blue check, then white, amber, and chartreuse before claiming the highest of all verifications in the Triple Saturated Pantone Platinum Tartan with Leopard Accents check. At the time of her departure, she was Dean of Twitter University, an institution she herself graduated from with a Masters in Advanced Hashtagging.
Success at not writing a novel came easily to Janeen, effortlessly avoiding that tiresome and labor-intensive task her entire life. Her greatest claim to fame was becoming the first non-bot twitterer to post a yottabyte-worth of tweets, which are now archived in the Smithsonian Cloud. Big ups! Her lifelong desire was to really nail the 140-character medium, spending countless hours honing her craft and advocating for an edit button.
While her first Twitter thread bombed (no likes, no retweets, no comments), she studiously put that failure behind her and applied herself more fully to her goal of becoming the G.O.A.T. (Greatest of all Twitter), which she did at age 56. At the age of 70, she collected the Lifetime Achievement Award for Most Consistent Tweets by an Underachiever; the Pulizter Prize Best Hashtag for Humanity at 72; and just one year later won the Nobel Prize for Twitterature. Her most famous tweet was sent into space as part of the “Yo, But Seriously, Is Anyone Out Here for Realz brought to You by Amazon Ritz Biscuits” mission and cannot be reprinted here due to licensing issues.
Her later years on the platform were marred by controversy which ultimately led to a lifetime ban for constantly tweeting misinformation and conspiracy theories about voles. Before she rode that giant ol’ fail whale4 into the blue sunset, she expressed but one regret, which archivists found in her Twitter draft folder: “I posted too many photos of food early on. It really hurt the algorithm.”
She is survived by her record collection, which never reads the comments.
Yours in tiny thought,5
Janeen
PS: I wasted no time on this header.
This week’s amends…
“Recognizing that people’s reactions don’t belong to you is the only sane way to create. If people enjoy what you’ve created, terrific. If people ignore what you’ve created, too bad. If people misunderstand what you’ve created, don’t sweat it. And what if people absolutely hate what you’ve created? What if people attack you with savage vitriol, and insult your intelligence, and malign your motives, and drag your good name through the mud?Just smile sweetly and suggest – as politely as you possibly can – that they go make their own fucking art.Then stubbornly continue making yours.”
― Elizabeth Gilbert
Emphasis mine. Via Swiss Miss
On Rotation
Reminder: The Stream playlist (with songs that have been in issues up to now) is riiiiiight here.
I mean, it’s everywhere and there’s no way you don’t know about it, but I for one cannot wait to see this. I was a HUGE Beatles obsessive as a teenager. Who am I kidding? I still am.
Via Kottke
Did any of this spark a tiny thought of your own?
Full quote: “I mean, it’s just a bandaid really. Like Tom [Scharpling] always says, the satisfaction that you get when you send a tweet and you get likes or feedback is similar to the satisfaction you get when you actually write a real thing and send it out into the world. So why would anybody want to write a book when they could just send a tweet? I definitely think there’s a junk food quality to it. And that also when you walk away from it, you realize, “Wait a minute. I have nothing. There’s nothing there that I can leave behind.” No one mentions your tweets in your obituary.”
Read the full interview here
I looked up how to make up an IP address for fictional purposes, yes I did. Is that a good use of my time? I didn’t cross-reference anything and that was the first thing I found, so I think I partitioned it about right.
I miss that ‘ol lump.
With apologies to W.H. Auden.
I absolutely adored this email
I think Twitter (and other social media) is mostly a waste of time. I don't buy the common wisdom that a huge Twitter following will translate into books sales. Social media addicts are social media addicts. Twitter readers read Twitter. They are not going buy your book. The other authors on Twitter who have bought into the "you need a huge social media following" might buy your book. If they like you and can afford it. They are authors after all (broke or working a day job.)
Live your life. Social media a distraction from living life. Don't give it much of your time.