This may sound like some stoner shit, but bear with me here. People like to talk about “constructs,” whether gender or the indica/sativa binary. Yes, sure, that’s all accurate. But to me, TIME is the biggest construct of them all. Lots of people in New York sometimes get wrapped up in “hustle culture,” blocking out our calendars with hour-by-hour tasks, and late capitalism/globalization/etc. We tend to forget time is an abstract thing we’ve all embraced. It may be a dimension, but its societal function is still made up! Time rules my brain and my OCD stuff is deeply entrenched in things pertaining to seconds, minutes, hours. So it’s a huge relief to remind myself that this organizing principle of human life can be bent and molded. My buddy Dan and I have this ongoing project that documents instances of traditional EST time being warped. Years back, he worked at a salmon cannery in Alaska. He claims that one day he went into his boss’s office and saw either a 60- or 100-hour clock because the workers would have something like 60 hours on the clock, 40 hours off. It supposedly had a psychological effect that made shifts feel shorter, or prevented employees from losing their marbles and killing the foreman with one of those big serrated knives they use to gut fish. Over the years, we’ve found lots of instances of time being messed with, from this Wikipedia page on calendar reform ideas, this odd clock, and this 28-hour watch, to Val Kilmer flat-out saying he doesn’t subscribe to the idea of time. I also think about this drug delivery service I once copped from in Mexico. You have to plan your day around making an order because the dealer is “not true to time,” as my connect warned. But that makes sense, since it’s considered a “polychronic” country and dealers don’t operate within a 9-5 work structure. Anyway, there are definitely like-minded time benders out there.Finally, I would be remiss not to mention the Norwegian “Island of No Time,” which declared itself a “time-free zone” because Sommarøy doesn’t have sundown for something like three-month stretches. The townspeople said they wanted to opt out of the global clock because locals “cut the lawn at 4AM” anyway. The whole thing was mostly a publicity stunt to attract more tourism, but one day I intend to visit the Island of No Time and make some sort of project about all this stuff I’m describing. I will prove that time flies when you’re having fun!!!
