The hack science fiction writer, as I call him, had written a book, by the way.  It was called A Hero For Our Time, and it told a bit of life as he experienced it, but it was not a particularly readable book, nor, certainly, a marketable one, though one might have thought, perhaps, a young man's perspective at the dawn of the Me Too Era.  A sensitive kid, really, who was not particularly a take-charge aggressive type, and rather a bungler.

Life itself, in the age of Apple, Google, Amazon, Facebook, in human's obvious accelerating impact upon the planet Earth and its climate and environments, had become a science fiction.   So advanced have things become that the most outlandish of stories come from long ago, and not on some far away planet, nor some space ship traveling at the speed of light, nor on Mars, but on our own planet.  Science fiction could be more honestly and reasonably applied to the stories of Buddha, of the Old Testament and its prophets, of the New, and also of a whole tradition in the human being and the propensity for myth and systems of understanding day to day reality in a deeper form.

The hack science fiction writer, with only one actual book to his name, a pretend one at that, was by now fifty three, and the strains of many bar tending shifts week after week, without much a vacation, but for his own strange Dostoevsky night hours, had caused or created a certain sort of life, an odd one.  A very private one.  A sad one, in many ways.  But, he had a sort of vision.

The whole thing was rather like, I must admit, the story of a certain Don Quixote, as told by Cervantes.  The handless wounded old Spaniard concocted a tale.  And in the tale, a certain sort of noble character reads books, and reads them too well.  They are books of chivalry.  Old noble tales.  El Cid, tales of knights chivalrous, of ladies and round tables and the like, mighty foes, mysticism of the knight errant's journey..  Old Cervantes himself was a certain character.  And his take on a hack science fiction writer doing his thing was a storied tale, with an interesting angle.  One wonders if, even knows, of course, that he, Don Quixote, has twisted reality into his own noble tales.  To read  the whole thing, the very idea of meaning and reality has been tossed up in the air.  Perhaps one of the earliest recorded takes on Relativity.

The human creature, ever since evidence of the crudest art, has of course been capable of understanding all these things, such as we moderns have crafted into higher math and the poetry of the tiniest constituent pieces of even matter itself, for which there then has to be an understanding of dark matter, dark energy, on and on and on, just like the atoms in your fingernail which within have their own atoms, their own little genies, if you will.  The human creature was created in God's image, one just might as well say, and as soon as there were humans they were as knowledgable, as clever, as humorous, as circumspect, as ingenuitively curious as we are with all are modern accomplishments and scientific methods.

And here comes the necessary idiot, who looks the other way, and who sees truth, truths in different light.   Thus I call him, in this time and age, and in this culture, the hack science fiction writer.  To reduce this to a useful shorthand I will henceforth refer to him, for the most part, as that writer of the original work, loftily titled, playing from Lermontov, from Hemingway's early short story collection, A Hero of Our Time.  Jamie Tranowsky.  He is to credit.  He is to blame.  And while not a good writer, or a particularly useful one at doing the job of writing a readable book that would then give him the means to to write more books, his efforts, little musings here and there, in this form of science fiction, deserve some measure of respect, however you might be willing to measure it.


But I can not be so clear in this vision.  The highest of thinkers, such as Buddha, the Awakened One, regard the Self, in the sense of a fixed solid self, concrete, as utter illusion.  And we literary types must acknowledge that the collected thoughts in our heads often come from elsewhere, from things we've read, heard, somehow thought up out of unconscious echoes...  Was it his mind or my mind that crossed the street, carrying four bottles of wine, one for the night, one for reserve, two for the dinner one might be invited to, a plastic bottle of soda water, a hangar steak, a large zucchini, half a cooked chicken, thinking all its thoughts big and small, feeling increasingly sad after leaving the avenue with all its people doing social things.   He had a sense of work to do.  It would be cheaper, by far, to stay in and take care of his dinner and his wine.   And back home, he would finally have the satisfaction of doing his work, something he had indeed waited for patiently, serving the other cruel master, a physical brute who drove him to various edges on a nightly basis, even as he had to smile, grinning and bearing it, asked to play a song.

What can you do.

Was it in his mind or my mind what I seem to have forgotten in a moment of distraction.



If you understood time, would you know that you understood time.  Would you be conscious of that understanding...  Nope.  That's why they call it time.  Sorry.  We all still have to go through it.  But on some gut level, think, or at least suppose for sake of argument, let us say that we do understand time, even as our conscious minds fritter away about everything.

Consciously, you could only understand it mathematically, as in on a chalkboard, but not in any effective way.  You would still have to wait it out, for whatever was coming, and then, probably, you would have to deal with it, or accept it, or whatever, as far as any term that could be applied.

You know all along that your parents will die.  In understanding time, in the deeper sense, you might try to spend as much time with them as you can, balanced of course with your own direct personal concerns.  But you'll never be ready for the day when you find yourself standing just after that cusp, with the thought, "that is all you get."