Time Warped

This Halloween we traveled to Africa...and here's what was the scariest part about it--Time turns on you. It waits around every corner to jump out at you, dressed not as a humble workaday wristwatch or helpful hum-drum digital alarm clock, but as a hideous, demonic creature that not only wants to scare you out of your skin but scare itself into your skin. 
It starts with the trip to Los Angeles to catch a London-bound flight. As any resident of Southern California knows, there is now only a two-hour window for getting in or out of LA without becoming entangled in the nightmarish traffic which routinely spills out of the night and paints the day time black. Miss that two-hour window by 15 minutes for, say,  a pee or coffee stop, and you're in for a white knuckle ride of painful, excruciating slowness that allows plenty of Time for conjuring up the horrors of a missed flight. My particular horror was that I had left my passport behind. I knew I hadn't, but for three quarters of the trip to LA I was gripped in the fear that I had, and I didn't dare pull off to the side to check my travel bag in the back for the greater fear of finding that I really did forget it and could not turn back because I at least had to get Lorna to the airport where I would have to confess to her how badly I screwed up. 
Then in Heathrow in London, the fiend Time changes out of its White Rabbit costume, taunting you with cries of "I'm late...I'm late" and dons the guise of Chinese water torturer (or depending on your politics, CIA water torturer). And it's drip...drip...drip...the tick...the tock of every second on the clock as you wait out an 8-hour layover for your connecting flight to Johannesburg. There is only so much Merlot you can drink to pass the hours before you're in danger of just passing out and missing the flight...and beginning the wait all over again....only this time it's 24 hours, not 8.
You're lucky to make your departure...on Time...or in spite of Time....or at the mercy of Time...whatever...in any case Time is fully in control now. But you're still fool enough to think you can beat it. Your strategy for the 10-and-a-half hour flight to South Africa seems sound to the unsound mind--eat the meal, drink more wine, watch a movie...preferably a long, soporific movie like Exodus: Gods and Kings which will put you to sleep...which it does. But when you awake expecting a glass of orange juice and greetings welcoming you to Johannesburg, you find you still have another seven and a half hours to go...an average work day. There are more movies to watch...and TV shows...and self-help videos...and a 3-D map which has the effect of distorting the plane's 543 mph traverse down the African continent into a snail's crawl up some I.M. Pei glass tower. But you decide to pull out the book you brought for the trip and risk running down your iPad battery for prolonged, unexpected future delays (yes, there's a USB port on the plane, but in your hurry not to miss that 2-hour window to LAX, you've forgotten to pack your USB connector). The book is Jonathan Franzen's Purity, and as it frighteningly turns out one of his characters is having his own existential battle with Time. Andreas Wolf has just killed the stepfather of his 15-year old beloved who had been raping her for three years...and now Andreas wrestles with her question about the pain they just caused by bludgeoning the man to death:

"If time was infinite then three seconds and three years represented the same small fraction of it. And, so if inflicting three years of fear and suffering was wrong, then inflicting three seconds of it was no less wrong. He caught a fleeting glimpse of God in the math there, in the infinitesimal duration of life. No death could be quick enough to excuse inflicting pain. If you were capable of doing the math, it meant that a morality was lurking in it...Infinitesimally soon, his own death would commence and render all of this unreal."

I chose to view the passage as a glass half-full and tried to draw a positive message from it. If time was infinite, then five more hours of flying time was the same small fraction of infinity as five minutes was...and besides I would soon be dead, rendering my current discomfort unreal. Voila!

When we finally arrived in Johannesburg, our hotel mercifully let us check in early so we could sleep through a breathtakingly gorgeous day. When we awoke it was dark again, except in other places, like California, where waking up at that moment would have made perfect sense. We tried to exhaust ourselves into more sleep...the tread mill, the stationary bike...more wine...then lights out. At 2 a.m. I was lying in bed "watching" a digitized simulation of the game being played back home between the New York Jets and the Oakland Raiders...two teams I hate. Father Time is an abusive parent. There would be a play and an arrow on my tiny screen moved forward or backward to indicate the success of the play. Then there would be a text message to detail the play--Chris Ivory over left tackle for 2-yd gain. Then came the wait for the next play...1 alligator...2 alligators...3 alligators. I would get to 75 alligators before the arrow...like the animation of the airplane on my in-flight monitor the night before...nudged. Text: Geno Smith bounces ball off Brandon Marshall's head. Incomplete pass.

Who is the audience for this technology, you wonder to yourself. After all, Time is Money...or so they say. And so it must be, for how else to explain all the nations of the world giving up their precious sovereignty to standardize Time...to agree on Time Zones...to uniformally recognize Greenwhich Mean Time, Coordinated Universal Time? Not for world peace, not for starving children and homeless refugees, not for an ailing planet...but so the trains and planes can run on time. And if Time is Money and Money is speech it must follow that clocks are people too. After all, we have grandfather clocks, why not grandmother clocks...and grandchildren clocks? How cuckoo can it be? Cuckcoo...cuckooo...cuckooo....

(BTW, Lorna knitted her way through the entire trip and Demon Time never gave a passing glance.)