September 11th 1999

From circa 2005. Not intended as anything other than piece of nonsense writing.

It feels like several years have passed since the events of September 11th 1999 . And, for me anyway, they have faded into memory and I cannot for the life of me remember how I spent that day.

One thing is for certain. I was several years younger than I am today, and the turn of the millennium was but a pair of cat’s eyes on the horizon of the winter solstice, waiting for it’s arrival to shed disappointingly little light on the eternal questions which we therefore carry with us into the twenty first century.

And now here we are, three fifths of a decade later. Yet can it be called a decade when it splits it’s legs unequally, not only between the nineties and the “noughties”, but between two centuries of different beginnings, and between two milleniumias: one now wholly of the past, the other almost entirely – and in any case sufficiently so for it to be predominately the case and therefore the dominant simply by the application of the principle majority rule which any healthy democracy knows is the fairest possible way, albeit not a perfect one – of the future?

And where are we today? As a child I used to visualise the months of the year as being arranged in a wheel shape, with November at eleven o’clock on a steep incline, and this time of year at the bottom of a friendly downhill slope from Christmas. If I’m right, that means we go back round the same wheel every year, which means that effectively the passage of time can only bring limited advances until we end up back where we are, like a year-long Groundhog Day.

That is why no amount of training for years in space, and engines that last forever, can enable man to reach the furthest planets. It is simply chronologically impossible to get to anywhere that is more than a year away.
That’s why plants flower but once a year, rather than trying what they know is unachievable – flowering continuously through consecutive calendrical cycles. It’s why animals go into hibernation to make sure they are not active continuously for more than a year at a time.
For if nature allowed us to continue something through two years in a row, she knows we would recognise it second time round, and know that she was cheating and re-using the same year all the time.

It’s why the world can only grow big enough to spin once on it’s axis in any year. And thank god for that. Our lives are busy enough rushing around from place to place. The last thing we need is to live on a planet that spins, say, twice as fast as it currently does. No doubt some pharmaceutical manufacturer would come up with a cure for dizziness, and through lack of competition keep the price high until it’s patent runs out after seventy years (thirty-five new years).

Clearly the less adventurous among us would have to move to one of the polar extremes, which rotate less quickly. And what with the melting of the ice caps, we would experience an extreme shortage of ice and have to drink hot beverages all the time. The resultant extra heat would cause untold acceleration in global warming, and we’d be pretty much bandjaxed.
Don’t say you weren’t warned. Or at least, if you must lie, try not to lie to yourself. It’s one thing deceiving others – it’s quite another to try to con yourself. That’s just a recipe for disaster. Just yesterday I tried to trick myself out of five euro which I wanted for sweets. Next thing I knew, I’d inexplicably lost five euro of my own money. I have no idea where.