Time.  I remain obsessed with it.  With what it is.  How it disappears.  Why it goes so fast. 
     Just where the hell I am at any given moment in its vast, eternal reaches....
     The calendar and the weather alike tell me that it's now October.  But when I close my eyes and cover my ears (usually after trying and failing repeatedly to close my ears and cover my eyes), it doesn't feel like October.  I'm not sure what it feels like instead, all I know is that it's been a long time since my body, my head, my complaints, and the season have seemed to be in synch....

     One of the things I've learned in my years and years of obsessing about Time is that we all have internal body clocks run by circadian rhythm gears and springs.  Some of us may even have pendulums and cuckoo birds, but there's really no way to be sure short of open mind surgery, and who needs that?
     No matter.  Whatever the exact components of my internal clock, the fact remains that it's running a bit slow - just because I'm a human.  For every 24 hour day that goes by, my internal clock ticks off approximately 23 and a half hours.  Separate me from such external cues as sunrises, sunsets, and the time and temperature lady on the phone whom I adore, and my wake/sleep cycle will shift about half an hour forward every day as "real" time pulls away from me in the special passing lane apparently reserved just for it....
     My theory is that even though external cues help me adjust my schedule each day so that I don't eventually end up going to bed at dawn and waking up next Tuesday, my internal sense of time remains all my own, criminally unadjusted and increasingly out of synch.  After 14,834 days of this, I figure I'm now actually 7,417 hours behind.  That's no less than 309 days!  No wonder I feel so punk.  While external reality is screaming at me to enjoy the last October of the millennium, I'm still trying to get my mind to wake up and put its pants on in time to celebrate Thanksgiving, 1998.... 

     Yesterday I felt even more punk than usual.  It was as if I'd downed a few beers and a pot of coffee within a very few minutes at some end-of-4th-grade class picnic.  Usually my Seasonal Adjustment Disorder doesn't trigger the irresistible urge to hibernate until December, so I was even more confused than I usually am as a big dumb middle-aged Ohio white guy.
     Could it have had something to do with the fact that I'd spent the day before reawakening Moloch?

     Moloch, of course, is the name I've given the new furnace my landlord put in last year.  He's a strange and powerful deity who has agreed to keep me warm all winter so long as I remember to make regular sacrifices of money to his gas company apostles.  Amazingly, he performs this miracle without having to resort to the use of a single pilot light the way my old furnace, Honey Buns, always had to. 
     Is it any wonder that I go down and bow before his blue metal frame each and every cool night?
     Sunday I actually did more.  I steeled myself and actually touched his holy thermostat (after washing my hands and donning special woolen garments, of course).  Soon foul smelling air was erupting from hidden subterranean channels all through the house. 
     Thank goodness this is just a once a year occurrence.  My heart simply couldn't take such excitement any more frequently, and it'd be a real bummer to have to wash my hands more often, too....

     Ok, so maybe for the first time since starting an online journal I'm exaggerating just a tad.  There's still something primordially dramatic about firing up the furnace for the first time each fall, even apart from the fact that you just might be killing yourself with carbon monoxide fumes in the process. 
     This time I truly felt at one with those ancient cave people who lit the first camp fire in world history.  So what if the foul smelling air that entered my nose as months of dust burned off the burners didn't cause me to lick my lips the way mastodon on a spit might have?  I sat in rapt awe watching the swirls of cat dander emerging from my vents as hypnotized and as lost in contemplation as ever a man has been in the presence of dancing flames, I'm sure.  If unlike ancient man I was moved to mutter "Goddamn fucking feline!" a bit more frequently than ancient man, I'm sure it was only because I  took a lot of English classes in college and ancient man more than likely did not....

     Which reminds me - does anyone know how the various presidential candidates feel about federal scholarships for ancient man? Have Gore or Bush or Paulsen taken a stand on this issue yet?  Exactly how does our society expect to advance into the future if it continues to deny ancient man the same opportunities it affords those folks who just happen to have been born moderns?

     But those are questions for the debates, I guess - now only about a year away.  Right now my furnace has just kicked on again. 
     Mmmm...  Just....  look.... at them...... hypnotic........ swirls....................
 

Be sure to enjoy her beautiful graphics, too... And if you want to join me in beaming her recently anesthetized kitties some good healing vibes, well,  who am I to stop ya?