When you get to a certain age, you find yourself trying to explain your history to the generation that’s coming after you. You think if you can do this, it will help them make sense of the stages of life as they pass through. It may even help you make sense of your own life.
So you begin by giving them basic information. In my case, it goes like this: “I grew up in Rochester, New York in the 1960s and ’70s.” The younger generation looks at me and says, “Oh yeah, the ’60s. We know what that was like.” And their eyes glaze over.
Problem is, they don’t know what it was like. They’re thinking about “The ’60s,” which they’ve seen on television and at the movies and it all looks like Haight-Ashbury or the March on Washington. This generation, still young, has not yet learned about the physical laws which govern time and space. They don’t know that time does not reach all places simultaneously. Due to the patterned texture of the time-space continuum, it can take ten years for cultural time to travel from places where it is created, like San Francisco in the ’60s, to a small Great Lakes city like Rochester. So when I say I grew up in the ’60s and ’70s, I really mean I grew up in the ’50s and ’60s. It was during this period Bugs Bunny used to do a routine about “this week is next week’s last week.” It helps to think about that.
At the end of the ’70s, which is to say culturally the ’60s for Rochester, I moved to the Allegheny Mountains along the New York-Pennsylvania border, which was 10 years behind Rochester, so I was back to living in 1960 culture, but 1980 time. I had just been through this for the 10 years previous, so everything was familiar, nothing was threatening. All the fashions were old; it was very comforting. I stayed for seven years, felt the ’70s approaching again and got out.
At this point, I did something questionable. In chronological 1987, I jumped from the late ’60s Wellsville, New York to Washington, DC, where the present – at least the political present – is manufactured and shipped out for consumption elsewhere. It was a jarring experience to lose my perpetual deja vu and have to deal with the present as it happened, instead of watching it happen somewhere else on tee vee and be all ready for it when it finally got to where I lived. No, I was 26 years old and finally, fully in the present; stepping over the homeless, fighting traffic, breathing in the low-level ozone pollution.
But, as I said, that was 1987, several lifetimes ago. Faxes, VCRs and answering machines were new gadgets. Since then we’ve all gotten access to the global positioning system, overnight delivery services and the world wide web. Time is more compressed and evenly distributed. The present arrives simultaneously in many more places than it used to.
There are still places I can go. I can jump in the car and drive off to some remote spots in Vermont or rural New York state where it’s still, oh, maybe 1995. If I cross the border and head for an isolated part of Quebec, I can probably get back to 1990, but maybe that’s just because I don’t speak French.
Some time in the coming week, the world’s population will reach six billion. It took from the beginning to time until 1804 to reach one billion. We may hit 12 billion by 2050.
Maybe that’s one reason time is so compressed and the present seems to be arriving everywhere at once. Maybe with all these people, we’re running out of time.
Where I Live
When you get to a certain age, you find yourself trying to explain your history to the generation that’s coming after you. You think if you can do this, it will help them make sense of the stages of life as they pass through. It may even help you make sense of your own life.
So you begin by giving them basic information. In my case, it goes like this: “I grew up in Rochester, New York in the 1960s and ’70s.” The younger generation looks at me and says, “Oh yeah, the ’60s. We know what that was like.” And their eyes glaze over.
Problem is, they don’t know what it was like. They’re thinking about “The ’60s,” which they’ve seen on television and at the movies and it all looks like Haight-Ashbury or the March on Washington. This generation, still young, has not yet learned about the physical laws which govern time and space. They don’t know that time does not reach all places simultaneously. Due to the patterned texture of the time-space continuum, it can take ten years for cultural time to travel from places where it is created, like San Francisco in the ’60s, to a small Great Lakes city like Rochester. So when I say I grew up in the ’60s and ’70s, I really mean I grew up in the ’50s and ’60s. It was during this period Bugs Bunny used to do a routine about “this week is next week’s last week.” It helps to think about that.
At the end of the ’70s, which is to say culturally the ’60s for Rochester, I moved to the Allegheny Mountains along the New York-Pennsylvania border, which was 10 years behind Rochester, so I was back to living in 1960 culture, but 1980 time. I had just been through this for the 10 years previous, so everything was familiar, nothing was threatening. All the fashions were old; it was very comforting. I stayed for seven years, felt the ’70s approaching again and got out.
At this point, I did something questionable. In chronological 1987, I jumped from the late ’60s Wellsville, New York to Washington, DC, where the present – at least the political present – is manufactured and shipped out for consumption elsewhere. It was a jarring experience to lose my perpetual deja vu and have to deal with the present as it happened, instead of watching it happen somewhere else on tee vee and be all ready for it when it finally got to where I lived. No, I was 26 years old and finally, fully in the present; stepping over the homeless, fighting traffic, breathing in the low-level ozone pollution.
But, as I said, that was 1987, several lifetimes ago. Faxes, VCRs and answering machines were new gadgets. Since then we’ve all gotten access to the global positioning system, overnight delivery services and the world wide web. Time is more compressed and evenly distributed. The present arrives simultaneously in many more places than it used to.
There are still places I can go. I can jump in the car and drive off to some remote spots in Vermont or rural New York state where it’s still, oh, maybe 1995. If I cross the border and head for an isolated part of Quebec, I can probably get back to 1990, but maybe that’s just because I don’t speak French.
Some time in the coming week, the world’s population will reach six billion. It took from the beginning to time until 1804 to reach one billion. We may hit 12 billion by 2050.
Maybe that’s one reason time is so compressed and the present seems to be arriving everywhere at once. Maybe with all these people, we’re running out of time.