Downtown Diary

My best friend David and I were sitting in my living room on a bleak winter day.
“Time!” he suddenly cried. “Time is the issue. Sometimes I look at a clock and think to myself, the clock measures something, time, that theoretically goes on forever, yet I myself do not go on forever. This intersection of the finite and the infinite troubles me.”

“Time, in fact, is not on our side,” I said.

“Time waits for no one,” he said.

“Time is a bitch,” I said.

“Thanks for that insight, Wittgenstein,” he said.

“You know, David, last night I was looking at the American journalist Dahr Jamail’s Web site, www.dahrjamailiraq.com, and I was mesmerized by the photographs of Iraqis killed by U.S. troops, their bodies bloated, leathery, the skin of some burnt off, and on the faces one sees first horror, and then one reads into the photographs a stoppage of time.”

There was silence.

“Time of the killers,” David said.

There was silence.

“On a lighter note, time can have comical consequences,” I commented.

“What do you mean?” David asked.

“Well, think of our friend Jennifer, who in her youth dazzled us with her piercings and tattoos,” I answered. “Now that she’s older, she’s gained a bit of weight, and that art-tattoo on her back has grown to resemble a map of China And I’m told that she hangs her spare car key from her pierced nipple!”