Experiencing Time

Photo by Arthur Humeau on Unsplash

I’m gutting a storage unit. I’ve had it for a little over a year. I knew I would have to get to it eventually, but I didn’t realize that just a little over a year later I wouldn’t know what half the items were until I opened the boxes. Had I been asked on the spot what I had in the unit. I would have correctly guessed maybe 60% of the contents and the rest I would be clueless about until I saw it again.

Today will be the last day of emptying items out. I’m both relieved and anxious. Relieved that the task of looking through things that I hadn’t remembered to think about would soon be over, but also anxious that I would overcommit in sentimentality to things I won’t realize are part of my world until I see it again later today.

All of this coincides with a healing ankle and I’m someone that has spent a good deal of time with my leg elevated thinking about the tasks at hand.

Have I enjoyed the time being slightly broken to think about what it all means? A bit. Have I enjoyed the tv viewing that has taken place? Absolutely.

I learned of Outer Range during a commercial on Youtube. I saw Josh Brolin as a cattle rancher and I was sold. This was two seconds before I realized there was a supernatural element to it. A hot cattle rancher that doesn’t like to talk too much? Yeah, I’ll tune into that. A hot cattle rancher that is having an existential crisis, questioning his faith and place in the universe while simultaneously dealing with a possible rip in the fabric of space and time existing on his land? Just call me angel of the morning and I’m there.

Amazon Prime wants our subscription so they’re giving us two episodes a week. I look forward to every Friday’s release. I’m preparing myself for a season 1 cliffhanger so that I’m not disappointed when we have to wait over a year for answers.

We Own the City started on HBO. I binged The Wire a few years back and it’s still fresh in my mind. To see the team back together with some new faces is exciting. I don’t know who I’m rooting for yet. I rooted for the bad guy sometimes in The Wire and it looks like I might be doing the same in this new show as well.

The fall of CNN+ has been hard to watch. I wasn’t surprised, but I was hopeful that it would make it. Honest to God, I had no idea they weren’t offering live news with the platform. Being blissfully ignorant to that glaring fact allowed me to enjoy the Prof G show as well as old favorites like Kamau, Tucci, and Bourdain. I don’t know what will happen to CNN programming, but they need to make it available for those of us that don’t want to pay for live television and I believe Galloway will get another show either with CNN or another network.

Season 2 of Russian Doll was soothing for me. A lot of people commented that they felt claustraphobic watching her navigate different times and meeting her mother and grandmother at different points in her time travel. For those that don’t understand, I get it. If you haven’t experienced the trauma of losing those close to you, it may be hard to understand how every second after they’re gone in the past, present, and possible future happening all at once.

Being in WWII Budapest one minute and then 1980’s New York the next is not hard to fathom and I never lost my footing. Daily, I’m faced with California on a spectrum of decades all at once and sometimes I have to stop and say the year out loud to focus where I actually am.

The ghosts on that subway for Nadia are as real and present as they are in anyone’s mind. I actually found the subway calming. Doors that opened and closed on different points of space and time I would definitely try to use to my advantage. Like Nadia learns, no matter what you try, things will always play out how they were supposed to. There is a comfort in the inevitability of failure.

There were signs in everything that I have watched recently. Messages that told stories of how the unexplained had answers that would be revealed calmly at the right time. Whether through star gazing or hopping on a subway bound for a time travel into your loved one’s past, there would be answers. Most of those answers have turned out to be that we won’t have all the answers in this life.

Abbott doesn’t know the answers and his main priority is to keep people away from that wrinkle in time. Nadia learned that we can’t change the past and that space and time will always know more than us, so the best thing to do is pick a really good vice and enjoy yourself. I watch We Own the City to keep me grounded. I can lose myself in mythology, but watching shows by David Simon reminds me that while I may be star gazing and trying to solve the mysteries of the galaxy, time is still finite, and shit still happens.