time

confusion, daylight savings, and eliza mclamb

time confuses me. i’ve never had the “internal clock” that i’ve heard my dad hyper-fixates on, or a natural sense of time moving forward at steady pace. i get lost in thought and discussion until hours turn into passing moments that i can hardly admire, or worse, everything slows until ever second, every breath feels like a struggle, like i am wading through molasses just to be able to focus, and once i am able to, it’s so fleeting, i don’t know if i have been productive at all or just stared into space for an extended period of time. this specific feeling is difficult to capture, it can easily be dulled down to “i got distracted” or over-explained until it turns to meaningless mush. the song pulp by

eliza mclamb

does a near-perfect job at this, some of my favorite lyrics include:

“nose to nose i hold you so close in the moment
though i know i feel it slipping away
i told you to shut your mouth when you started talking
about passing years, passing days”

“i don't think i understand time as a line
i wasn't meant to live it like this i guess”

and especially the chorus

“and yet i can't stop trying
to hold every beautiful thing in my hands
i suck the pulp until i choke on what was never meant to last”

it is feels somewhat desperate, pleading with this concept that has been stolen by some universal force, to pause and let the little pleasures and sweeping joys be appreciated and not taken as soon as think we are present. feeling as if we can capture every beautiful thing and hold onto it, when the very beauty is it’s impermanence. we are like babies, only experiencing the present surge of dopamine so long as we cannot conceive of a new goal, something we have become quite apt at achieving.

it’s an odd to not have an awareness of time. not inherently, but in comparison to others i realized this experience is not universal, which really was a discovery for me as silly as it sounds. when i dissosiate i view it almost as manufactured focus, i exist and time is moving at what feels like a normal speed, but i am so detached i cannot possibly retain any information. i function and keep my head down and sleep, but i cant even remember to “suck the pulp until i choke on what was never meant to last”.

i don’t think time can be quantified. it is quite rare for it to be kept track of uniformly, we change it twice a year and never question it’s seeming elasticity, these changes serving only as a reminder we perpetually ignore. to be clear, i don’t oppose daylight savings, i only care just enough to write a semi-pretentious substack essay about it as a means of avoiding doing things i need to.

mayhaps no one will read this causing me to question every one of my life choices. mayhaps i will ruminate on the hindsight so much i end up wasting my entire existence wishing i had just shut up and not written an obnoxious analysis of something i know next to nothing about. but at least i procrastinated.