Live this day. (2004)

It's a brand new day. I'm sure you've said that before. Can you count the times? I won't even try. Maybe you can't remember having actually muttered the words. Doesn't matter. You have heard it said. How many, many times, so have I. Welcome to today; it's brand new. Uncharted territory. The only frontier left to us undiscovered, pure, original. A brand new day.

Dog shit.

I know the theory of today far too well. I know the logic of that flawed argument. Yesterday ended, tomorrow has yet to come, welcome to today by default and a play on verb tenses. The real truth is - it's all an illusion. Time intervals are tricky fallacies we trap ourselves in to separate moments, events, lives. In reality, yesterday hasn't ended and refuses to do so. It continues forever. Day after figurative day it grows more monstrous and unrelenting. It's a collection, a limitless dumping ground for all our spent moments of life. Tomorrow never comes. There is no such thing as tomorrow. It is a lie. Even in our deaths, as our consciousness fades into the infinite void and we slowly rot away, we can not touch the tragic and failed legend of tomorrow. There simply is no morning after, no next day, no future. Today is the never-ending story of our whole lives and beyond. There is no escaping this day. Today is forever and ever and ever.

We confuse the complexity of this truth in so many ways. We watch our shadows move around us in small arcs until they finally stretch and explode and envelope our worlds in the darkness of a dead day. We make our observations and measurements and calculations. We mark the hours. Add. Multiply. Divide. We fancy ourselves brilliant masters of time management and believe our basic mathematical competency makes any moment more special than the last. We develop systems, routines, behavior, science. We divide our days into hours, minutes, and seconds. Everything is timed and carefully calculated. We mark off the progress of the Earth's rotation versus its revolution around the sun and call it 1 of 365. We dress this imagined progress up with titles, numbers, subgroups, and more numbers. We give each rotation it's own signifier to further the charade that every day is in fact different. Monday, Wednesday, Saturday... Fill-in-the-blank day. We reference the Good Book and group them by 7. If it was good enough for Him, we will shape our days in His image. New days. Brand new days. One entire week of them. But it's not enough. We need more ways to compartmentalize and divide and exploit our new fiction of time progression. We invent months to group our weeks and days. 365 is such a harsh number to swallow. 30 is much easier number to play with. If we can just chop it up into small enough pieces we may not ever have to chew the bullshit that we're swallowing now. January, February, November. They are so deliciously imprecise and awkward. We weigh them out like an apprentice butcher. This one has 31 days, this one only 28. We have a 25% success rate and that's good enough for us. We can't even divide evenly and we think we've actually accomplished something. Delighted with our own ingenuity we count each revolution to chart our success. 1, 500, 1999, 2005. We've come a long way now. Something ended, something began, something changed. We made something happen. What? What changed? Nothing. We imagined it all and reveled oblivious to our own arrogance and ignorance. Yesterday, today, and tomorrow. The divine trinity of time. A perception we taught ourselves to marvel. How magical it all seemed once to think there were these convenient compartments to stuff the imaginary and random segments of our lives into and desperate try to hide them behind a simple expression and a travesty of language.

To what purpose, to what real effect do we make these distinctions? Order to chaos. Things must be made more manageable. We can not allow the infinite nature of time to continue unchallenged. We can not possibly be expected to confront the magnitude of forever without some expert practiced method to simplify and degrade it. We can not possibly be expected to handle thoughts and ideas larger than our fragile lives and worlds. So we cut it all down, reduce, package, label. We take it all in small doses. We build up our tolerance until we become immune. We think less and micromanage reality. We embrace the casual expressions that mock our limited grasp of our own inadequacy. Rome wasn't built in a day, afterall. There's always tomorrow. Remember the good ole days? It's a brand new day.

Lies. Propaganda. Yellow journalism.

Tomorrow never comes. Yesterday is spent. There is only today.

[revised on September 20, 2009]