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A lord asked Takuan, a Zen teacher, to suggest how he might pass the time. He
felt his days very long attending his office and sitting stiffly to receive
the homage of others.
Takuan wrote eight Chinese characters and gave them to the man:
Not twice this day
Inch time foot gem.
This day will not come again.
Each minute is worth a priceless gem.
Time has a funny way of getting away from you. It has something to do with
our vision of our place in the universe. Each of us sees a universe in which
we are the central character, the pivot around which everything revolves. The idea that things
happen in the world without us is a pretty abstract one. It takes kids years
to realize that the person playing peekaboo is really still there when they
can't see them. It takes adults years to realize
that other people have lives even when they're not paying attention to them,
and that time plods mercilessly on even when you aren't watching it. A typical
human lifespan is 2524608000 seconds. Each one of the 1800 seconds spent
watching Friends every week is just as valuable as the ones on your deathbed,
when your life is flashing before your eyes. While I'm laughing at Chandler
saying "quick.. what would Jack and Chrissy do?", there's an somebody nearby
working to the bone to feed his family, there's a patient fighting for her
life on the operating table, and somewhere else there's a child being born,
starting his two-and-a-half odd billion seconds on this world. Now, you can't
go through life this way, fearful at every moment that you'll waste time
badly, striving to fill each second with something of import, interest at the
very least. I've known some people who seem this vital, living every moment as
if it were their last. But it's too hard. As a person with about 1.7 billion
seconds left to me, the odd two or three here and there just don't seem worth
it. You don't ever waste time: even sleeping is a vital use of it. But
you do spend it, every second. Each one of them.
Of the last 7.8 million seconds, since my last little entry here, I've spent
about 2.5 million sleeping, 3 million at an office solving problems for other
people, 486 thousand eating food with people from that office, mostly at
McDonald's and the Mongolian BBQ and other parlors of dubious culinary
integrity, and 162 thousand driving to and from that office.
I spent about 432 thousand seconds with my parents at Ghost Ranch, in New
Mexico. It used to be a program center for the Baptist church, except that the
church has been cutting back funding in recent years and the ranch is turning
into a more independent cool place to host art classes and retreats. They have
a full schedule of classes throughout the year, although it gets cold in the
new mexican desert in the winter so they have fewer then. It's kind of like a
summer camp, with small cabins and a community-building cafeteria. It's also
where Georgia O'Keefe spent
upwards of a billion seconds painting. It was also the beginning of my
bi-annual short-lived facial hair experiment.
March also included 150000 seconds of unexpected travel when the ski trip,
planned for March 9th, turned out to be a surprise birthday party for me,
complete with an all-expenses-paid trip to Seattle. The email flung about
beforehand said that Chris had rented the cabin, we were to meet them at such
and such an address in south Lake Tahoe, they would get their first, and Phil
and I had to pick up Simeon from the airport on the way out. Well, Phil drove,
we get to the airport, I've got nothing on me but my wallet and my phone, we
go in to find the gate, I can't find the gate anywhere because there was no
plane coming in from LA at that time, but Phil was sure it was A5, we get
there and I remember saying "this can't be right, people are getting on this
plane, not off it.. and it's going to Seattle..". Phil pulls a pair of tickets
out of his pocket and says "For some, the final objective is neither what, nor
where they expect it to be".
So we get on board, and the co-conspirators (Chris, Stephen, and Simeon) are
in the row in front of us giggling behind the in-flight magazines. We get to
Seattle, rent a car, go to a hotel that's somewhere under the Space Needle,
have a great dinner at Entros, which is a game-theme restaurant. This group
makes games for trade shows and other corporate happenings, and they beta-test
all their ideas at this restaurant. We played one game that was a combination
of a skee-ball target laid flat with a balance-the-ball table-top maze game,
all on top of a big innertube. You move the ball around by leaning back while
you stand on the platform, and are constantly yelling at each other to run to
different sides in the hopes of driving the ball away from the holes and
through the maze to get to the high-scoring spot in the center. Quite cool. We
were at the restaurant from the time they opened the doors at 5pm, till we had
eaten dinner and played every last game at 2am.
The next morning we had the champagne brunch in the revolving restaurant on
top of the Space Needle, which was quite a sight. We visited with a number of
Phil's friends from the area, including a couple Microsoft folks, and Phil's
sculptor friend Katrina, who recently had a bit of a disagreement with some
molten iron and received some nasty foot burns, but is now recovering well.
The real ski trip took place in April, when we spent around 200000 seconds to
their utmost in a flurry of a trip to Tahoe. We got to see Phil's friend
Randi and her boyfriend Diarmuid, and even Jesse showed up.
We drove out on friday night, (all the while I was expecting to get left alone
in a gas station somewhere and discover a note under my seat saying "your
first clue is..."), got to the cabin (Chris found us a very nice one) at 2am,
slept, made it to the slopes the next day in time for the post-noon half-day
tickets at Heavenly, skiied until 4:53 when they were about to close the
mountain, raced down at breakneck speed to catch the last lift up, and then
tried to take a new trail down to the lodge to return our rentals. Now,
Heavenly straddles the California-Nevada border, and the trail was called "The
California Trail", and it looked like you ski along the ridge, jog
upwards a little bit, and then get on the main big trail that comes down the
CA side. But no, it seems that once you get on the ridge trail, you have to
take a lift to get back to the california side, as the ski patrol who were
busy clearing the mountainside were happy to explain. And all the lifts had
closed. So we had to go down the Nevada side, race down to catch the last
shuttle bus over to the California side, and run to return the skis at exactly
5:59pm, one minute before the rental shop closed. Having spent every minute of
that day to it's fullest, (well, at least all of the minutes after we woke up
at noon), we spent the evening watching Babe (don't ask me why..
anthropomorphic produce and poultry just isn't my thing) and trying to get the
hottub up to a reasonable temperature. Phil and Stephen finally accomplished
it through some creative plumbing involving the house washing machine (which
may or may not still wash clothes). I don't want to know.
Speaking of farm animals, I know this pig named Penelope. I finally got to meet it when I had dinner at
Cathy's house overlooking scenic Milpitas. They've got a pretty fun road too:
the driveway is a 178 degree hairpin turn that drops 20 feet, and if you miss
the turn, the road becomes a one-lane ledge overlooking a sheer drop into the
Central Valley, with nowhere to turn around for about 5 miles. Cool.
May also included a whirlwind tour of Syracuse, New York (172800
seconds), to celebrate the 80th birthdays of my grandfather and his identical
twin brother . One redeye, two showers, three naps,
four cousins I never actually knew I had (one of which owns a Saturn dealer in
South Carolina!), and five flights later (two hops there, three back because
they canceled my flight from Syracuse to Detroit due to "lack of pilots", and
rerouted me through Boston), and I was back where I started, wandering the San
Francisco airport waiting for my ride. In the process I made it to a ham radio
swap meet, a computer fair, a massive dinner, and a visit to the town where my
great-uncle and most of his children grew up. A neat sense of history, there.
Once I get the other roll of film developed, look here for a graphical family
tree.
And then I bought a QuickCam because
they were on sale at Fry's. Isn't it cute?
Coming soon to this space:
Marathon 2. Beats Doom hands down. Mayhem with a story, and with really
creepy audio to boot. I was working on making the IHOPv3.0 level with an
editor called Pfhorte, but it
keeps crashing on me, so I've decided to wait until Bungie releases their own editor with
Marathon Infinity this
summer.
Brian Warner <warner@lothar.com>
Last modified: Sun Sep 15 23:05:48 PDT 1996
