Things have become very difficult since I replaced every single thing with clocks.
I was warned about this. Other people said I might want walls, or a ceiling, or books, or a calendar, or maybe food.
But I pointed out that all those things were basically clocks already, just single-minded ones. Time to repair; time to reread; time to go places; time before expiry, and so on.
Why not stop pretending?
So I replaced the walls and the ceiling and the books and the calendar and the food and everything else. I replaced every single thing. With clocks.
Now when I want to know if I should go outside, I look at a clock for that. When I want to know what I should think, I look at a clock for that. When I want to know if I need to check my clocks, I can look at a clock for that.
It’s very effective. I don’t think I’ve done anything in forever.
The trouble was other people’s fault. They weren’t clocks, you see. I would see them when I went outside and they would tick onwards in a very messy and uncoordinated way. You could not set their clocks by them.
I tried to explain about clocks for a while but they didn’t seem to get it. Eventually I would have to go home, to my clocks, where it made more sense because every six hours I would look at one clock, and every sixteen hours I would look at another clock, and every three days I would look at a third, and so on and so forth. And that made things make sense.
It wasn’t exactly perfect, but it made sense. That’s better than average for anyone, right? I really didn’t feel like I had grounds to complain.
So I added a few more clocks, because some of the old ones had stopped working and there was space, and a few other clocks, because there wasn’t THAT much cramping, and a few more clocks because I liked the look of them.
By this point it was a little hard to sleep soundly with all the ticking. Even the digital clocks do that, just not aloud. It’s hard to rest comfortably when time’s passing in about six hundred different ways along seven thousand different roads.
Especially with the alarms going off too. I used those only for the very important clocks, but since every clock was going to be important in its own way at least once those added up quickly.
The real problem wasn’t the alarms though. It was the older clocks, the ones that didn’t tick anymore.
By my count every third clock I knew of was finished, completed, and done. But I couldn’t just throw out a clock like that, so I kept them around as reminders, stopped on the moment they finished.
The space constraints were troublesome to deal with, but doable. The lack of ticking, though; that started to be a little much. That was so much more tricky to keep track of than the ticking; a ticking clock you can keep an eye on in your sleep, but a stopped clock needs to be checked constantly, every time, all the time, or else you forget how old it is.
I started to keep extra clocks for my stopped clocks. This problem got worse, especially when I started bringing home clocks that had already stopped. Some of them were loved and cherished clocks, some of them were brand-spanking new clocks, some of them were deeply irrelevant clocks mass produced on a conveyer belt somewhere and slapped on a six year old’s wrist for fifty cents forty years ago.
But I needed to keep clocks on them. It was important.
I’m not entirely sure exactly when things went out of hand, but I’m very sure of when I noticed it.
I was walking along somewhere, someday, with my mind on clocks, and I thought of how troublesomely odd it was that nobody else seemed to do this. I looked at all those people and thought about how they didn’t think about clocks.
Then I paid a little more attention and I saw my problem: everyone else was also clocks. They got larger and hairier or smaller and wrinklier and they wouldn’t stop doing it right in front of me. It was compulsive, and it was unavoidable, and it was most disconcerting. Worse yet, each action in their day was also a separate and integrated clock, starting up in the present and counting backwards as we moved forwards together. They weren’t just clocks, they were clockmakers. Profligate ones.
I asked some folks about this and they seemed to consider it normal. This was troubling, and suggested that I needed a lot more clocks at home or else I’d never be able to keep track of every single one as they interacted with every single thing, and clocks for those interactions too as they grew older and stopped, and clocks to track the stopped clocks, and clocks to track the time of the clocks that timed the clocks that had stopped. It seemed unfair for the world to work this way, and it seemed still more unfair that I had to do this all the time. I was very tired of this. I was very tired of paying attention to my clocks.
Then about a half second later (precisely) I paid a little more attention, just a little more than a little more and then a little more than that, and I realized I’d been overpaying all my clocks for years and years and months and weeks and days and hours and however long they’d been doing it.
I had slowly and entirely and inadvertently replaced my attention with clocks. It was very upsetting. It IS very upsetting.
I would like to correct this, but I seem to have also replaced my intentions with clocks. I don’t enjoy doing this, but all I seem to want to do is count backwards and forwards in a very precise and careful pattern.
I’m not sure what I’m counting now. But I’d better not stop.
I think.