Or: Mountain Time
It’s 11pm Mountain Time here in my hotel room in El Paso. I’m a literal stone’s throw away from where a wall will supposedly be soon built. Dizzy Gillespie’s “All the Things You Are” emanates softly from my phone’s speakers. I’m still not used to Mountain Time.
It’s times like these that I can do nothing but ponder — swimming through a Jello-dense sea of thoughts and feelings. Movement is so slow and exaggerated.
It’s times like these that I feel the profundity of life — not of events, people, the future, or anything specific — but life as its own thing. It’s unlike anything else, for both better and for worse — depending on who you ask, and when.
It’s times like these that I wonder why I feel the need to write about this hodgepodge of whatever has heaped itself into my mind. Times that I wonder if I’m actually doing anything at all as I write, or if perhaps I’m just on hand for this thing that is happening. I’m never quite sure.
It’s times like these that I wonder about writing. I wonder if it isn’t just the closest thing we have to what we believe gods do. I wonder why I still don’t believe in a soul. I also wonder why as I write this, I kind of do.
It’s times like these that I also wonder about time, and then I think about writing, and how maybe we’re throwing sentences and paragraphs as nets to capture, tag, and domesticate time. Maybe we’re all on safari.
It’s times like these that I wish there were more times like these. And that I understand that if there were, I wouldn’t care about times like these.
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