Time is running out
“Time doesn’t give a shit.”
Statistically speaking, I have about 41 years to live.
I’ll spend about 12.8 of those years sleeping.
I’ll spend about 6.4 of those years working.
Already, my remaining life expectency is cut nearly in half with these two commitments and I haven’t even calculated eating, commuting, showering, shaving, going to my kids’ soccer games, listening to podcasts, scrolling through Facebook, writing on Medium, doing laundry, flossing and various other regular activities.
I was inspired to number my days by John B. Mclemore, the protagonist of S Town, aka Shit Town. This is what John did when he wanted to know how much time he had left to leave an impact.
Of all the intricate themes of Shit Town — poverty, Southern culture, mental illness, love and loss — time is the one that undergirds the whole thing.
Time, as narrator Brian Reed says, is a gift and a punishment. Time doesn’t give a shit.
As John’s sundial motto says: Omnes vulnerant, ultima necat. (All moments wound; the last one kills.)
The passage of time is omnipresent in Shit Town. It exists as a sense of foreboding, change and fear of change. The environment decays and the earth heats up and species go extinct. Trees get cut down for lumber and the woods get paved over for Wal-marts.
The Supreme Court rules marriage equality the law of the land, and Woodstock, Alabama, clings to the past.
Time exists as years go by and suddenly you’ve spent your whole life in the same town. Time exists as second chances and missed chances.
And then time suddenly runs out for us all.
While listening to Shit Town, a passage from Neil Postman’s Amusing Ourselves to Death kept coming to mind:
In Mumford’s great book Technics and Civilization, he shows how, beginning in the fourteenth century, the clock made us into time-keepers, and then time-savers, and now time-servers. In the process, we have learned irreverence toward the sun and the seasons, for in a world made up of seconds and minutes, the authority of nature is superseded. Indeed, as Mumford points out, with the invention of the clock, Eternity ceased to serve as the measure and focus of human events.
We’ve never been more aware of time in the micro sense, and less aware of it in the macro sense.
John B. Mclemore’s life can be seen as an attempt to subert the tyrany of time. He stays up all night staring at the stars and constellations. He talks on the phone for endless hours with friends. He spends 30 years hand-crafting a personalized gift. When he writes of what makes a life well spent, he talks of getting lost in nature. He sees the most profound messages in moss.
There are multiple ways to interpret the message of Shit Town. I think it depends on your perspective — which is embodied in a cartoon that Brian saw on John’s property:
This represents the optimist, the pessimist and the realist.
The optimist doesn’t want to think that we’re going to die. The pessimist fixates on the fact that we’re going to die. The realist knows we’re going to die — and focuses on what they can do with the time they have. Can you make the best of a half glass of piss?
The clock is ticking.
