TODAY I AM DYING

I feel in a literal sense I am coming apart. Like the trees lost their leaves in autumn, my hair follows suit. For a while, I was reminsicent of a Beatle, now I’ve embraced a look of corporate, less corporeal. (I first encountered the word corporeal whilst reading a Harry Potter book, about summoning a patronus, and of what caliber it was siphoned into Harry’s world.) I remember sitting in a beautician’s chair for the first time in nearly four years, to have someone else cut my hair. Seeing hair fall on my sleeves and then to the floor with a brush of my hand was something surreal. Strangely enough, I have been toying with the idea of dying my hair platinum blonde. Now I feel a little ironic. Will my head next resemble the snows of the season? I am a little behind the times.
Time is a disgustingly elusive idea. I tapped into this in another column, and I’ve begun wondering again. There is a picture, here, in my mind, of how it works. The job now is to translate it.
I’ve consulted my magical thesaurus. This wonder of man has below a single entry, in this, Time, the links to all the possible interperitations of the word you could think of. Or in any case, of that Mr. Roget could think.
Time, as a noun, has several synonyms, my favourite of which are quotes from authors and philosphers. "The author of authors" in accordance of Francis Bacon, "a short parenthesis in a long period" in accordance with Donne, and "the soul of the world" according to Pythagoras.
None really suit my needs. Then again, I’m not entirely sure what these supposed ‘needs’ are. (Oh, I’d like to warn those people who’ve not yet read or listened to any of my literature: Due to a very unfortunate wiring of my brain, I’m prone to using language loosely, I like to manipulate words to the point of incoherency. So, I beg that you churn water for a while and go with the flow.)
I think this may be because time, in concept, surpasses my imagination. Like the concept of a boundless universe, and even Parallel existence, alternative universes, infinity; all of these I can fantasize about, but never really understand. Even the idea of the mind, and memory is quite beyond me. But those are for other columns.
Time is the most profound of human perceptions.
I am really a pretentious creature, and want to sound really impressive in my writing, so I researched some theories of time, and find all of them out of sync with mine. They suggest that time is a tangible property of the universe, "Under such a conception, time is scalar ( scalar = weight ) and quite passive. It only supplements the spatial arena, against which the events of the universe are played out. Owing to one scalarity of time, in the equations of theoretical mechanics the future is not separated from the past;" not because I need layman’s terms is it that I don’t understand this explanation, but the general theory that time can be discovered by geometric devices and differentiated from space intervals, and the suggestion that time can be predicted in units, are both beyond the capacity of my ego.
I cannot comprehend time in units: those being seconds and hours and days. Those are all earthly products of mathematics, which is another of those theories I’ve never come to grasp. Time is self imposed. The passage of human perception can’t be sliced into periods. Right?
To encapsulate the idea that the world is how we view it, I borrow another quote: "Reality, like time, is partial to the observer." Myself, I don’t know if this is a word for word review, or how unconventional it is to quote from a movie(In this case, that movie is Contact. Terribly good and boggling). In this ‘quote’, the main focus is reality, but work with me. If different people view the world in different ways, then it is obvious that time, to one, can be a contradiction to another. If this is, and I’m sure it might, then why do we constrict ourselves to one measure? And such an ignorant measure, at that! The sun is used to measure days and thereby hours. But it can never be equal. Imagine the earth is not the only planet in this universe with conscious beings. I doubt the other planets with life move around a star and turn over at the same rate. Does that mean time moves differently for them? Or am I even going too far to say that all other life forms even find it necessary to measure time? Where does this leave knowledge, or the idea of a definite passage of events? Can we say there is such a thing if everything is relative and a contradiction? Multiple perceptions of the passage of time contradict and exclude each other. Perhaps this is to show that the true existence of time outside the mind is nonexistent.
What exists is a process of life, and of living, and experiences that happen during. A process that reduces things to chaos. Entropy. This is not time. Time is not an entity to be measured, or a container of events. Past, Present, and Future I find to be neither nor. The other is the same. Together they are nothing. The past was once the future, and was at a point the present. What is now thought of as the future will be present and past again and what is the present is nonexistent. And yet…
I once heard or read that the sky of night that we look upon is only an image of the actual sky a million years in the past, as it takes a millino years or so for the ligh to reach the earth, or something. And a million years in the future, anything that looks into the sky will see what is happening now. So, what then takes precidence and is therefor the present?
This is discombobulation to the extreme.
I am perplexed by us, as in the human species including me, that we are perpetually seeking order through time, an illusion, a medium of chaos. As I approach 1,1150 words I observe that time, as we govern it, can be thought of as a sort ribbon without beginning or end, continuously existing as idea, but without encomassing any ability to elicit a response in the material universe. In this way, events should take place outside of time, but, because we insist apon it, with the aide of time. I mean, isn’t an event a perception of an effect of a cause? Time is active in shaping our perception of life, and therfor death, which in some ways, is the essence of our world.
Today I am dying…