I woke up at 5:47 this morning instead of the usual 5:00.

I looked at the clock we keep by our bed…the one we can set to make a loud sound when we want to wake up…the one we use to time ourselves….to give us the time…to tell us “when”….and thought, “Gahhhhhh…I’m late! How will I ever get my blog written this morning before I have to get on the highway at exactly 7:30 to go to work?”

I’m like some kind of freaking punctual robot.

I’m a “Time Nazi”.

That’s a funny term my wife’s family uses…now it’s a funny term my family uses.

I’m a part of the family, you see.

How did all this happen? I wear a wristwatch. We have clocks all over the house. There’s a clock on my car radio…and if there wasn’t, the announcers would keep me up to date on what time it was.

I can’t stop running into clocks everywhere I look.

And then people talk about how time might be running out…how we’re all getting older…how we’re burning the candle and running out of time and using up what we have and how it might not be enough.

So we set up and reinforce this awareness that time is fleeting…and then we spend all day monitoring it with all these timepieces.

I have a better chance of watching a cloud float by than I do of seeing time pass.

Where is all this “time” that people keep talking about?

I can see the hand on my watch move around the dial…and I guess that I understand time. If the hands are moving, time must be passing.

If someone tells me “it is”…well, I guess it all must be a fact.

That’s a law of nature…it’s a measurable fact.

And just so that the planes land on time, all over the world, it darn well better be a consistent “measurable fact”.

That’s something to shoot for….consistent measurable results. Where would we be without a clock to measure with? What would we do without “time” on our hands?

So I woke up “late” this morning.

Going on the trusted measurement that rules my life, I woke up exactly 47 minutes late this morning.

Less than an hour of time on the universal measurement, and I felt like I’d made a mistake somehow.

I felt like I’d messed up.

My timing was off.

I guess that what I’m meandering towards is the thought that it’s kind of strange that we let some kind of mechanical/digital/organic measurement affect how we feel about the day.

That’s pretty weird, that when someone says, “You want to go play?” that we might find ourselves responding that we just “don’t have the time right now”.

If we don’t own our time, then who does? What the heck? How’d that happen that we owe somebody any of our time?

How did we get to the point that we’re willing to trade time for some money so we can go to Fatz restaurant and eat some crappy fish?

Or trade it so that we can get Health Insurance because at some time in the future, we might get sick.

It’s good to have some kind of system, I suppose…but how’d this whole “time thing” ever get to this point? How’d TIME get to be so powerful? It’s like we were all sleeping…and then woke up one day and thought, “THE TIME!!! LOOK AT THE TIME!!!”

I need to stop wearing shoes, make myself some weird hemp jewelry, get a suntan, and stop wearing a watch….do more artwork and learn how to play again.

Someday, I may just do that.

But right now, I can’t.

I’m late.