Indulge me here. Just sit back for a minute. Don’t look at your computer, but keep your eyes open. Wait a bit. Count your breaths if you have to. Wait until you fidget a little and think “Christ, Jeff, what’s your POINT?”

Feel that? You don’t know what you’re feeling, but you do.

You’re feeling minutes of your life die. Seconds are racing past and they’re never coming back. They’re like molecules striking your skin, the tiny white dust that crumbles off a coral reef when you say “screw the sign” and step on it anyway. Each second is unique and special, a fleck in a steady blizzard from the 4th dimension that is never slowing up and never stopping. The fourth dimension never stops hosing seconds into the universe, pumping out the atoms that minutes are made of, minutes where you’re born or die or get married or just wish for six o’clock so you can go back home and get back on the computer again.

The fourth dimension never weakens and the fourth dimension never dies. That’s your job — each second hurtles you closer to heart attack, blindness, erectile dysfunction, a diminished ability to enjoy the seconds you have left.

I swear to Christ I can feel every second trickling out of my life all day long. It doesn’t matter where I am or what I’m doing, if I’m not wringing every ounce of my life out of each second then I’m walking through a curtain of corpses hung in my face by Father Time. “Try yoga, try meditating,” people tell me. “You need to be more grounded, more relaxed!” Bullshit.

Yoga is the Facebook of physical activity, an anesthetic for life spent next to people without ever really communicating.

That’s me, pretty much. If I’m not drinking the rare nectar from perfectly squeezed seconds I’m up to my neck in their poisonous, littered carcasses with my mouth wide open. The Austrians have a saying:

We are already up to our necks in sewage, there is no need to make waves.

Well, too bad, Austrians. In true American fashion I’m packing a big fat hoagie roll with meat from the hand that feeds me.

I love computers and the things they give me: contact with friends, a way to make a living, a non-stop river of information and ever-changing pornography — but I resent them bitterly for being such a compelling distraction from actual life. When I was unemployed I had all the time in the world to take walks, ride my bike, pat dogs and learn Spanish from my neighbors.

What did I do with it? Sat around in my drawers and looked at Digg all damn day, mostly. Now I’ve got a job, a great one with a guy who may well be in the running for best boss, ever, of anything. And I resent that, too — I resent the easy access online to all the wonderful ways other people sculpted their seconds into something useful, something cool — then go get a cup of coffee, sigh, and get back to work, a couple hundred seconds closer to inevitable system failure.

The thing is, I’ve changed. It’s not anyone’s fault. It’s not this job’s fault, or the last one’s or even really the fault of the entire tech industry for making such wonderfully magnetic rabbit holes that suck my attention away.

It’s me. It’s my attitude. I’ve come to terms with the fact that life for me is a series of needle-sharp peaks and flat black valleys. Rather, I’ve learned that with my head.

Once my heart catches up, I’ll have some real wisdom. I just hope I have enough time left on earth by the time that wisdom comes to enjoy it a little.

Popularity: 1% [?]