time

"that passed the time___ waiting for godot. samuel beckett

let's have a look at my state...the political one...and my physical/mental one...

oh, the national politicians are still wrangling ( it is an election year )...

and "the market" continues to swing wildly between hope and catatonic despair...

and people are still emptying store shelves as quickly as their fearful hands can grab stuff..and at the moment that seems to be a dwindling selection...and that's all germane but not the focus today...the governor of this state just signed what the papers are calling a "stay at home order" yesterday ( which takes effect at 11:59 p.m. today which strikes me as downright weird...perhaps he wanted to give the population one more free day to infect one another )...it has a multiplicity of loopholes and, even though local mayors are promising they police will "enforce" the order fully, it seems people will still be able to empty store shelves at will...perhaps more politically expedient than effective...since it is in effect until 7 april the reopening of the retail store where i work will be delayed yet another week ( which won't help their bottom line if congress doesn't get off its ass ) so i am left with a surfeit of time on my hands...which is unusual..i am inclined to stay busy for a number of important reasons we will leave for later and so filling time becomes a challenge...as a primer on waiting and the passage of time i watched ( yet again ) the excellent production of "waiting for godot" from the "beckett on film" series that was made for beckett's centennial ( and posted a link to it on my facebook page )...i would recommend it to anyone who wants insight into the absurdity of 1) human life and, 2) boredom...i have been reading a lot...samuel pepys' diary, a journal of the plague year, plagues and peoples, the plague by camus, ( sense a theme ? ) and, of late, james gleick's book "time travel"...ostensibly a review of science fiction literature on time travel...with h g wells "the time machine" as a start point...it quickly delves into the perception of time from the standpoint of physics and philosophy...its newtonian rigidity...einteinian relativity...philosophical elasticity...from st. augustine's "what then is time? if no one asks me, I know. if I wish to explain it to one that asks me, I know not" to einstein's denial of the possibility of simultaneity to john banville's " even here, at this table, the light that is the image of my eyes takes time, infinitesimal, yet time, to reach your eyes, and so it is that everywhere we look, everywhere we are looking into the past"...an all-round a good read for the time because time is behaving oddly and i begin to understand why the character orr from "catch-22" did only boring things to make his life seem longer...there are interesting things to do around the house as long as human attention cooperates...tedium is the enemy...einstein puts us into our own, individual frame of reference viz time...mine is oscillating...elastically shrinking and stretching...there are more challenges from this virus beyond physical, political, and economic feebleness...if the weather cooperates i will go putter around the yard...if not, brace yourselves...there will be fresh numbers from the state and cdc later today....and we haven't even touched on entropy yet...and this can't help but invigorate entropy.