The Concept of Time and I Go Way Back
A Somewhat Complete Oral History of This Relationship
It is March 9th, 2025. I am woken up from my slumber several times by my cats, Bellchime and Metronome. They are good cats, but when I was in the unfortunate position of having 6AM meetings that I had to be up at 5AM to reckon with the harsh reality of waking up, I made the mistake of feeding them, thus establishing a baseline they have never let me forget. We’re working on it.
But today, I manage to snag an extra few minutes before my alarm goes off. As I slowly gain my bearings, I orient myself in my house and go feed my cats and make breakfast. As I prepare four small sausage biscuits for the microwave, I notice a discrepancy in reality. My phone’s clock and my microwave’s clock aren’t in sync. It takes a second to register.
The clocks shifted.
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I wrote my very first long from piece of fiction on Facebook’s Notes app. Even if I didn’t remove the work from the Notes app in aspirations of publishing my fever dream, you probably couldn’t read it because it is next to impossible to find Notes in the current iteration of the site. I bet there is a USB drive somewhere in my position that contains a proto copy of this story, but I remember the premise well.
Isochronal: The Clock Tower Sphinx. This was a story about a recluse in a grand clock tower, 64 stories of laboratories and machinations. This was a story about a steampunk winged vigilante type who took the moniker, Isochronal, the Clock Tower Sphinx, and conducted experiments on the nature of time and the world. He eventually would meet someone who would become his apprentice, The Saint Serpentine. They would eventually discover that the the reason the clocks were designed the way they were was because the world they were on was a husk, and in fact hallow and that the original world lay inside.
I think about the story frequently. It would not be the last time I use the image of a clock tower as one of pensive meditation.
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In roughly decreasing order of popularity, at least as gauged by conversations with my friends and peers, here are my opinions about DST, time zones, and other miscellanea:
We should get rid of Daylight Savings Time.
We should get rid of Daylight Savings Time by adopting Standard Time (that’s the one between November and March).
We should consolidate US timezones.
We should consolidate to a West Timezone, comprising what is currently Pacific and Mountain Time, and an East Timezone, comprising what is currently Midwest and Eastern Time.
Sunlight should not be a fact in picking which clock set to use.
Mountain Time shouldn’t exist.
Mountain Time doesn’t actually exist.
That last one is such an old joke, that I have adopted it as an actual stance that I insist on despite frequently visiting my friend in Denver.
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My Magnum Opus of High School, which is to say, the thing that I really wanted to be my Magnum Opus in high school, was a whole series of books under the title of ONE DEGREE. Amongst other things, it was a multi-generational epic of ten (later twelve) individuals’ legacies and how even across continents and eras, how they were intertwined, all culminating in a confrontation with The American Time God.
I wrote a lot of fight scenes to a lot of songs that I still pretty vividly remember.
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One of my favorite shirts is from a Filipino screen printer.
I do not know if I actually love the passage of time. I am in fact constantly subject to it.
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I have been playing Hades II pretty much nonstop since the Warsong update. After easily handling the game on the base difficulty, I finally challenged myself to use the optional modifiers and found that yes, after 120 some hours, I had gotten good at the game and in my myopic attempts to get better, I had gotten better both mechanically and philosophically.
One of the victory screens asks “Can Time Truly Be Stopped?”.
Since it is in fact a game, the answer is yes, although not while it is in early access.
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So in college, my friend Brooke writes a short story and christens a character after me. Professor Dresny.
I have already talked about this, and I still have other things I want to muse about this time.
It is important to note because these things repeat because these things are cyclical in nature. A spiral, a vortex, a convergence.
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Coincidentally, several of my favorite episodes of television are about time travel. Funnily enough, my favorite episode of all time, Futurama’s Godfellas is pretty much the only one that is not.
In no particular order:
Fringe’s White Tulip
Traveler’s Seventeen Minutes
Stargate SG-1’s Window of Opportunity
Star Trek: Discovery’s Face the Strange
Person of Interest’s If-Then-Else (This is the only thing on the list that isn’t strictly about time travel, but it plays enough with the perception of time and adjoining tropes enough that I’m choosing to include it)
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Stories about time are stories about opportunity. About the value of the road taken and the road not taken. There is a reason why Hades II, Chronus’s entire aesthetic is adorned in gold. Time is inherently valuable. Every second, an option. Every swing of the pendulum, a decision.
In one of my Discords, I typed: The passage of time is relentless and unyielding and so must we be.
It’s the exact type of thing that may could have killed on Tumblr back in the day.
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Alternate realities are technically a separate genre of story than time travel, but most of them have some mechanical time to time travel, so I’m going to quote one of my favorite TTRPG PC’s to end this week’s message.
Your mere existence is an ongoing ontological threat. Act like it.