On Time

bastards bastards bastards its going to be a long five years. Thank god though cos a short five years would be a sign that you were really fucking old, like as if you were 80 and then your 85 and it's like, wow that was quick, how the hell did that ever happen, what's on the telly, whaddyamean Kojak's not on anymore! One of the worst things about getting old - and I mean my sort of getting old not getting actually old as in decrepit, I mean the sort of old where you can still do things you used to when you were young just they hurt a lot but they haven't actually been fully taken away from you yet - anyway one of the worst things about getting old - older, I should have said, older - is that you realise that things that you thought had amazing significance when you were young were just flashing past most older people in the blink of an eye. I realised recently that the reason time goes slower when you're younger is that young people have quicker brains. Their brain does more in the time, so it appears to them that time is slower, the same as with flies and other little insects. Luckily they're also stupider, so they appear to take the same amount of time to think things - which is why it is possible for us to converse with them, just about - but actually they think at a very much faster rate. I've also realised that no matter how long you've been alive, or how long you live, it always seems like the same amount of time - a lifetime - so a long life or a short life seems the same. Well, life is short innit, goes so quick, they say. Well, of course it goes quick, everything went quick once it's finished, how quick do they think it was going to go? "Oh I thought life was going to take bloody ages but it only took 75 years, blink of an eye." People do talk an awful lot of total shite when you start thinking about it. Life isn't short or long. It's like saying space is big. Well, space is big, but you can also fit it into a matchbox. The reason we call life short is just that we fill ourselves up with so much past and future that the actual life we lead seems irrelevant. In fact it's as long if not longer than the life we used to lead on the savannah, and that seemed to take ages, unless you were eaten by a lion I suppose and then you'd just be glad to get the fuck out of there, you wouldn't be moaning about how quick it had gone. Anyway, the upshot of all this is that time is slow when you're young, fast when you're old, but remember this: it's always now.