Slow...

Everyone knows that time can be so inconvenient. You need to go shopping, give a speech at the UN world council, take a bath in pure Fiji water, and give that patient a enema before you can get to dinner with your amazingly hot spouse. All these minute things will take up time that seems to be running away with your trousers, but have you ever thought of the times when time seemed to slow down like your brain on drugs?

As when time speeds up, always being at the most inconvenient moments, it seems to slow down as well in the same way. This event happens when you least want it, waiting for the phone call from the IRS, giving birth, or even falling to your death. This never ceases to blow my mind.

Story: I was in Bucers the other day, sitting, drinking coffee, and having slightly awkward and scattered conversations with someone else in the room, waiting for five to roll around so that I could go to work. It was four, so I lit up a pipe (which usually it takes me forty-five minutes to smoke), filled with God given Black Cavendish, and puffed away, quite like Popeye the sailor man. After I had smoked what I knew was about a good half of the bowl, I looked at the clock, for surely it was now half past four. No, it was seven past four. Strange, so I smoked the rest of my pipe and looked again, thirteen past. I don't know if it was how I packed that pipe that day, of I was in a furry to get as much nicotine out of it as I could, but I was perturbed.

So I spent the rest of that time waiting thinking about these times of slowness that are upon us. Maybe we are to be looking for an opportunity to do something more productive with our lives in them, or maybe they are there so that you can enjoy two bowls of tobacco for the time of one...