Chunking not Chung-King

 Chunking not Chung-King




“Quartering the topmost branches of one of the tall trees, an invisible bird was striving to make the day seem shorter, exploring with a long-drawn note the solitude that pressed it on every side, but it received at once so unanimous an answer, so powerful a repercussion of silence and of immobility, that one felt it had arrested for all eternity the moment which it had been trying to make pass more quickly.”

― Marcel Proust, Swann’s Way

     This was an ongoing joke Greg and I passed back and forth during the last decade we were pals on this earth. The concept is called chunking and our perception of time began to shorten and major events or milestones seemed to take place every other week.  "Research suggests that people tend to chunk more as they age, potentially contributing to the common feeling that time speeds up as we get older. "Processes that accelerate time, like chunking, may also increase the appeal of nostalgia, prompting us to reflect on significant moments in our lives." So as we replayed the memorable happenings in our mundane lives while sitting in the front room at Francis we were really trying to slow down the great mandala and attempt to decelerate the hands of time. Especially, in the past few hundred visits the "old South Gate yarns" began to be taxing to Lissy's still active mind since she was not around South Gate in say 1971. Lissy would retreat to the den (?) and watch political shows that might have caused her to wake up at 3 am ready to take to the streets with a rifle. She might have heard shouts and curses as we railed about a baseball coach who cut Greg in 1965 or loud guffaws as we repeated the words of John Sheehy uttered in 1961. So, the running joke we repeated often was a statement made completely out of context relating to short-term plans. In the dog days of Summer I would ask him what I should bring for Thanksgiving dinner next Thursday or tell him I needed to put up my christmas tree on Monday. He might let me know about a Super Bowl party in September with srimp and California dip. Time had begun to fly by us rapidly and we knew it was happening by looking in the mirror and seeing the gray hair, the broken blood vessels on noses and the stabbing pains in the lower back as we stood to shuffle over to take another piss. Mortgage payments, car insurance, cable bills, and dental apointments seemed to occur every week and birthdays popped up in annoying frequencies. The possibility of a Bone trip always rushed up on me way too fast and Christmas was just a monthly celebratioin that flew by way too fast just like our lives. As the anniversary of one of the worst days in my life approaches in single digit days ahead I can't help but find that those hands of time are a lot harder to hold back without my good friend.

 

                                       Christian Marclay's "The Clock"

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