Do you have the time?

Time. Do you have time? How much time do you have? Can you have time, hold it in your hand, show it to your friends, admire its sparkle and glare and enduring attractiveness and its unwillingness to be locked down in a neat scientific box, its resistance to being defined and categorized and understood and forgotten about? Can you boast about how much of it you have to your drunken friends at that bar with the beautiful women where time passes all too quickly and extinguishes illusions much as a cold shower extinguishes desire?

Time. Enchanting but hazy, like the fleeting remnants of a charmed dream or the misty outline of the seductive siren painted by an expressionistic painter whose vivid palette was robbed by time itself, leaving nothing but a dull charcoal-gray behind. Do we have enough of it? Have we spent too much of it thinking, dreaming, working, studying, scheming, planning for the tyrannical and terrifying future that is now long behind us, passing us by with nary a nudge or a wink or a suggestive whisper about the imminent arrival of the promised possibilities clinging to its bosom? Have we killed time? Can it be bent, curved, spliced, chopped up into minuscule little quanta carried on the energizing beam of glowing light?

Time. Does it flow like a cold spring in the silent night, steady and unending, grinding down the rocks in its path to the smooth dust-like sediment upon which future events are etched? Does the arrow of time fly faster than the human imagination, competing with cupid’s arrow for the chance to wreak havoc upon the hearts of men? Does the passage of time multiply the possibilities in an endless stream of exponentially proliferating states, or does it expose the futility of idle reverie by a devastating collapse of the wave function like a collapsing bridge exposed to a violent sandstorm in a desert where sanity dictates a bridge should never be built? Will time promote the growth of a flower carefully watered and nursed and lovingly tended but which nobody ever thought to plant? Have I wasted my time, or has time wasted me?

Time. It passes in silence leaving chaos behind. And yet, the knowledge that more of it is to come inspires the greatest achievements known to existence. It provokes bright-eyed hope and eager anticipation for that phantasmal chimera known as the future, something that never arrives but always remains just out of grasp right there in the very near future. It turns wise men foolish and idiots into prophets. It is a never-ending carousel of cavorting horses and colored elephants and bad speakers blaring loud music, turning round and round and round without getting anywhere.

Unless. Unless. Unless the time of time is NOW. Glorious and effervescent and right in front of us in all its florid beauty, this now. Future and past and present are now. I shall seize the moment, for otherwise the “moment” is nothing but a cruel illusion called ......time.