Sunday 4 October 1998

Hey, why is the clock round, with the hands spinning around, and the calendar square, or rectangular, with seven days in a row, and then—next row, next row, next row? It's all just time. The days of the week could as well be placed in a circle, with Sunday on top, and that hand would just keep coming around to Sunday again and again and again. Like with, certain hours, certain days—it seems like they keep coming up, like a game of crooked roulette. I used to have a car with a broken clock—back when the clocks in cars had hands, not digital, but of course always broken, never saw it work. Anyway, since it was just an ornament, and always said the same time, I just set it at seven o'clock. Seven p.m., preferably, time to party! You know, I just thought of that, about the round week clock, but in this world there's not a stone untouched—I'm sure there are alternative time expression freaks somewhere, who have calendars in the shape of clocks, and clocks in the shape of God knows what. Fortunately, until we have internet stations implanted in all of our brains, we can disregard the existence of so many things. The world keeps getting smaller, by exponential leaps, but it's still possible to keep your world small, just for your own sanity.

Ahh, this week the smell of the salty ocean, unblemished by the heat of summer. No more rotting seafood, now it's all crisp and clean until spring. Except for Indian Summer, of course. Which I always welcome. I really should get back to one of my previous topics. Particularly that one about putting things into code, disguising things in order to tell the truth. The definition of fiction, after all—telling lies to be able to tell the truth. My friend Randy has, or used to have, I don't know—I haven't heard from him in awhile—a small (small) press publishing company called T.B.S. Publications. He won't tell anyone what the T.B.S. stands for (except that it doesn't stand for Turner Broadcasting System or Syndicate or whatever). But he told me the secret, which is that it stands for True Bull Shit, which, he says, is the definition of fiction.