Timeskipping

Listen: I’ve been losing the ability to position myself in the timestream. In the middle of November, I suddenly start thinking it’s April. On the average Thursday, I start forecasting what I’ll do tomorrow (Wednesday). I wake from an afternoon nap excited to start the new day; or fret about missing a critical appointment that is four days from now.

This started in 2025. I’m pretty sure of that. (But is this 2025?) I don’t know if it’s an old age thing or — more likely — the downstream impact of breaking the 9-5, 40-hour-work-week, hegemony.

Here’s what I do know: those old days, the 9-5 days, were all the same, and yet somehow I understood their position in the space-time continuum perfectly. These days, on the other hand, are all different, more often than not. And yet while “now” remains a perennial concept, “when” has lately become variable.

Here’s an upside, which could either be the chicken or the egg (or neither) of this particular situation: I’ve gotten better, in the past two years, at being less lost in the schedule, the to-do list, the meticulously-arranged time boxes, than I’ve ever been before. I’m better at noticing now and how now feels and what now is asking of me, and following that voice. This was something I was working on intentionally, back when this all started in 2023. So I’m rightly chuffed to have gotten somewhere with it, even if doing so (may) have broken temporal continuity for me.

Here’s a… well, not a downside, but a thing-to-keep-in-mind. You can’t be entirely now, indefinitely, because truly and I do mean this, nothing ever fuckin’ happens if you’re not at least marginally aware of the rolling progression of time and the way, y’know, steps work together to reach goals.

This is especially true without the 9-5. That organizing principle might suck, but it sure does spackle the walls together in a useful way. Rhythm and repeatability might have something intrinsically useful to the way we get shit done, even if they are equally likely to numb us over time to the same end-point as being entirely now indefinitely.

I’ve had to hold the two competing thoughts in my head perennially — the “be here now” and the “but move broadly forward” — with a bit more energy than I ever had before. And the result is that now I sometimes forget when “now” is.

It reminds me of one of my very favourite stories, told to my brother and I at Mt. Kōya, at the monastery, where the monks tell visitors that Kōbō-Daishi went into the temple 1200 years ago and started to meditate and entered samadhi and, effectively, forgot to ever come out. “Kōbō-Daishi meditates still,” my brother and I will sometimes say to one another, and nod.

This image flashes through my brain often when I start to meditate, when I set my timer. If the timer fails to go off, if I miss it, if the volume is too low, if the battery on my phone dies… what happens to me? If I am never reminded that my meditation is over and that now it is time to stop… if I am never reminded that “now” has arrived… will I just keep focusing on my breath forever, and never return to the world?

Maclunkey!

I’ve long argued that the question of the original cut of Star Wars is not one of whether or not Han shot first (he did) or the Jabba the Hutt scene is extraneous (it is), but a matter of film preservation. Star Wars manifestly and permanently changed the way films were made, at a level that only about half a dozen such works in history have done; the specific way in which it did that — meaning, the actual, optically-printed shots — have been erased from existence and unavailable for about 30 years, except in meticulous fan reconstructions.

So: tentative good news: Lucasfilm claims the original cut of Star Wars has been restored, and will be screened in 2027.

Such an announcement, after the last 30 years of Lucasfilm etiquette, deserves skepticism. Whether their “restored” edit is an actual, 1:1 restoration of the version of Star Wars that screened in 1977 remains to be seen. (“Which version screened in 1977?” is, itself, a complicated issue.)

Nonetheless, information has been leaking out on this restoration for enough time now to aver that a) it is real and b) it might be the actual thing we’ve been asking for since 1997. And George isn’t even dead yet! Colour me astonished.

Stranger days

Look, this is entirely up my street, given it’s a screenwriting-formatted mashup of my favourite movie of the year and my favourite movie of the ’90s, which is also a piece of art criticism, but still: wow.

From “Stranger Days” in issue 143 of Bright Wall/Dark Room:

“Bigelow showed us the uncomfortable reality: There is no separation between form and politics. There is no passive entertainment here. Only the viewers and the viewed, both complicit in a world that’s burning.”

Read the rest, by Russell Nichols, here. You might need a subscription to BW/DR to do so? That is well worth your investment this holiday season, if you don’t already have one.