We’ve all used the expression, “Time flies when you’re having a good time” or “Where did the summer go” or “It seems like just yesterday…”
For some reason the subject of time and its increasingly rapid flow came up at the Pool Hall yesterday. If you knew the cast of characters in this particular saloon you’d understand why time would be a concern, as most of us are either wasting it, frittering it away, unconcerned with it or running out of it.
The Pool Hall is Belmont Billiards in Dayton, Ohio one of the oldest businesses in the area and the smoky ancient den where I misspent a great deal of my youth and intend to misspend a good chunk of my Golden Years, which brings me, rather neatly, back to “Time.”
Time, it seems to me, passes more rapidly with the passing of time, that is, it seems to, and on that I have a consensus of yesterday’s group of local wits at the bar of wisdom.
Remember when you were eight years old and school years were eternal or summers seemed to stretch forever into the sultriness of early September when another painfully eternal school year would begin?
Back then, at eight or ten, “soon” was never soon enough and “wait till tomorrow” was a life sentence of anticipation. Monday through Friday dragged by in a boring sequence of school days, unfairly early bedtimes and dinners that were never ready until you were “starved to death,” while weekends flashed by in the length of time light takes to cross the nucleus of a hydrogen atom. As a kid, time was definitely relative to your personal wants needs and desires of the moment.
Einstein taught us new ways of looking at time as we viewed the physical world and described in “thought experiments” that brought headaches to my young head, the relative nature of time and probably inspired Dali’s whimsical painting above. Einstein was a very smart guy, a regular Einstein as a matter of fact and he might have grown up to be a rocket scientist had he paid more attention in school.
Richard Feynman, another physicist who frittered a lot of time away playing bongo drums (or he might have been a rocket scientist as well) actually described that time could go backwards which got him a Nobel Prize and made my headache a lot worse.
Anyway back at the Pool Hall, during yesterday’s typically stimulating conversation, the passage of time was the subject of the hour with all the wits bemoaning the fact that the years seem to pass more quickly every year. We decided that time has increased its velocity as we have lost our own which I suppose has some relativistic expanation but really doesn’t explain why it takes me half the morning to put my socks on.
Mike the Painter, who I suspect, has spent a great deal of time pondering this issue (most of us thought that he simply went catatonic after a couple of shots) opined, wait, no one uses the word opined at the Pool Hall, I meant, piped up, that time seems to go faster because it does go faster.
He was instantly challenged by the rest of the Barstool Academy of Science who felt that time has one speed and it moves at the speed of … Time. We batted that around for awhile and someone else looked at his watch and said that every minute took the same number of seconds and therefore Mike the Painter had to be full of…. scientific confusion and at that point the controversy became intense. Actually controversy is another word that doesn’t get much usage at the Pool Hall, we just say bullshit.
Well, Mike the Painter reflected quietly over his beer, or nodded off for bit while the firestorm of dissenting opinion raged around him and Vicki the Beer Goddess brought us another round of liquid conversational stimulation in the interest of scientific research and at last Mike the Painter said, Time passes faster as you grow older because a year is an ever decreasing fraction of your total experience of life.”
This brought about a stunned silence as we sipped our beers and shots and pondered the weight of his words and waited for Vicki the Beer Goddess to bring the aspirin bottle as we all seemed to have become afflicted with headaches.
He continued, “Think about it, when you’re ten, a year is a tenth of your total life, ten percent of all your experience happened in the last year, but now that you’re sixty a year is only one sixtieth of your total experience of time so it doesn’t just seem to go faster, it does go faster, relative to your age.”
Well I had a roaring ice cream headache at this point and a vision popped into my mind of calendar pages turning rapidly, madly flipping by, as in an old Jimmy Stewart movie and the whole concept was beginning to piss me off and the rest of the local scientific community didn’t look terribly thrilled either.
I guess Mike the Painter sensed that his audience had grown surly and he finished his beer and left as the rest of us nursed our drinks and the discussion turned to baseball and the group headache began to subside.
After a few minutes I said that I thought that Mike the Painter might be onto something with his theory of time but Bruber pointed out that Mike the Painter was a painter for crissakes, not a rocket scientist and Scooter the Dozer Driver said that Mike the Painter was just full of controversy.
Bob Higgins
Worldwide Sawdust
