Amok Time

There is a Buzzfeed piece I’ve seen widely shared: The 2010s Broke Our Sense Of Time. It’s a good piece. I recommend it.

Reading it this week probably helped inform my thinking a few minutes ago when I was considering how today, Halloween, has been the absolute weirdest Halloween ever. There are a few reasons for that. Early this morning I had an MRI done. Effective tomorrow, I receive a promotion. These are strange things that have nothing in particular to do with Halloween per se.

You know what else doesn’t have anything in particular to do with Halloween per se?

This photo is taken from my back door.

Again, today is Halloween, a day which is still in the month of November.

In preparation for trick-or-treating, I had to shake snow off of weighted down shrubbery to get it out of the walking path, and then had to shovel piles of wet leaves off of the sidewalk.

I’m 42 years old. I do remember one Halloween where it snowed. It didn’t stick.

My son is 6. So far as he’s concerned, this is perfectly normal.

Have the 2010s broken our sense of time? Sure. After all, WE HAVEN’T HAD A NORMAL FOUR-SEASON YEAR IN RECENT MEMORY. As nice as it might be to put this on the Internet or on Trump or on any of the other things distorting our appreciation of passing time, it’s not the day that feels most messed up, it’s the year, and the #1 reason for this is - say it with me now - CLIMATE CHANGE.

But let’s set aside Climate Change for the moment. (We all know how to do that quite well, after all.)

For me, the year has been a mess ever since 2001, my last year of grad school. As the years progressed after 2001, many of the calendar touchstones sort of drifted away. Thanksgiving and Christmas still existed, but I no longer had a week or two off around any given holiday. The transitions from semester to semester were gone, meaning the senses of finality and renewal were gone too. Work, unlike school, doesn’t really have beginnings and ends, you just keep showing up. If you happen to change jobs, well, it’s kind of randomly timed, and for me at least, there’s been continuity of some sort from job to job anyway.

I thought having a child would lead to regaining my sense of the year, that the school calendar would restore order. But so far it has done nothing of the sort. His first year of preschool was followed by attending a summer camp at his preschool, which meant that the daily routine didn’t really change. Then he had a second year of preschool at the same place. This past summer was different, but it was right after moving, and things still felt really unsettled. Now he’s in kindergarten and so far his calendar just hasn’t restored any sense of calendar order to me.

I was in his classroom today, helping out for the class Halloween party. I was dressed as a Best Buy computer salesman from 1996, a costume I can pull off since I was a Best Buy computer salesman in 1996. This was probably a mistake though, because it just further threw off my sense of time. Not that I had much of a sense, having walked to the school in a snowstorm.

About the only thing left for me to establish calendar consistency is baseball. The World Series, of course, is not supposed to end on a snowy day. But there remains a certain rhythm available over the course of a four week period: World Series, Halloween, my birthday, Thanksgiving. The World Series and Thanksgiving are the key pieces of that these days, because I tend to mostly ignore my birthday, and I never did anything for Halloween as an adult. With the Series over, with snow on the ground, with Daylight Savings ending this weekend… am I just going to hide in my house for the next four months?

I don’t want this loss of grasp of time to be a crutch or an excuse though. We’re plenty settled into the house. We’re settled into kindergarten. Time may be amok but it’s still high time to regain a stronger purposefulness to what I’m doing.

It would just help if there wasn’t snow on the damn ground on Halloween.