I.

For arbitrary reasons on a day like any other I decide to write sideways—the wrong way, down the spine of my notebook, transgressing some fundamental axiom. 

Some small part of me cheers at this brazen escape from the oppression of symbols.

The left-to-rightness of time feels rock solid. But what if there were (are, will be) other angles of approach to the dimension we call time? 

Prose, poetry, fact, fiction… Every string of words I ever put my name to is an arbitrary length cut from a continuous flow moving through me, a claim staked on nothing but air. My intentions are immaterial.

Writing in landscape mode seems fit for prose, for slow, unraveling sentences à la Foster Wallace, Rushdie, Proust—hatefully pretentious but then again, a full sentence in absolute control of its strengths and yet painfully aware of its shortcomings is the kind of tour de force that made me want to do it at all, this writing thing. Do it like they do. Do it better.

II.

The lens of poetry, ground and polished around the shape of my writing hand, wants in turn to shape everything I ever write.

It wants to line-break compulsively. It wants the world to be a metaphor.

Each grain of sand takes a toll on this body I carry (left to right) into the future. 

Sisyphus had just the one angle of approach: uphill.

Atlas had just to conquer the Y axis. It’s a good question. What about the X?

Time is oxidative stress. Cell death. Nerve damage.

The worst thing that time ever did to me was make me look fat and middle-aged.

That’s the real gut punch, says my ego; it’s all downhill from here, says my ego; I should get a gym membership or maybe just that fitness app recommended by my algorithm, says my ego.

Rage, rage, rage against the dying of the light, says Dylan Thomas; rage against the machine, say Rage Against the Machine; write with every last drop of H2O in my blood, sweat, and tears, say all the dead writers I ever worshiped. 

The worst thing time ever did to me was to hide behind the horizon and pretend the world was flat like the page of a book.

III.

Milk every last drop from the temple stone you call body. Rage by crunching multivitamins and quitting carcinogens; swing those lumbering simian fists to cheap EDM in that overpriced gym; clear a path if only to damage that body further down the line; howl as you throw that body with even greater force into the abrasive shards of the sandbox we call time.

Sure, build your silly little sandcastle if you really need to.

Write, dance, howl into that dying light. Rage to your boiling point against climate change and the heat death of the universe. All this heat made in the belly of a star so you could one day spend yours trying to make a lover laugh.

Time is killing me so softly while eroding my brother so fast it makes me want to scream. 

The worst thing time ever did to any of us was to take us apart morsel by morsel rather than all at once.

Dance sideways. Fuck diagonally. Rage in code. Write yourself into a hole so deep you forget why you feel the need to write at all because

time is not the substrate you are traveling through, you egotistical monkey.

We do not travel through time, it travels through us.

Time happens to you. It rushes over you, standing still in the eternal now, like a raging river overhead. You are the stone being eroded to dust and swept away, merged into the substrate that is this expanding cloud of periodic elements.

To think you are moving through time is to watch another train tear from the stillness of the background and creep past your window and believe in that moment, with every atom of your being, that you can move at all.

That you can matter at all.

Remind yourself to hold still sometimes. Tap into that deep stillness as the water rolls over you like the barrel of a killer wave.

IV.

But what fun, as Alan Watts said, to get attached, to fall in love… It’s a balance trick.

To catch yourself poised on the knife-edge of that stillness canted ever so slightly forwards, catch yourself falling, catch and release as time folds up and around you, closing over your head like dark seawater on a moonless night.

To let it burst like a tesseract from your chest over and over, enveloping you, punching through the stone stillness of you, taking you apart atom by atom.

Hold space for that stillness, that hidden third of every breath.

Meditate now and then. Lose yourself in the deepest flow state you can find. Blind yourself with orgasm. Flirt with danger on wheels or wings or with your fingertips. Pick your poison and kiss death right on the lips. Go so deep into your trips you return more or less than the sum of your parts but never the same.

Write backwards, sideways, without words. Without a sound. Devolve. Take one step back. Dance two steps forwards. Fail. Love. Suffer. Scream. Rage. Relent. Rage again. Do it harder. Do it better. Because under the crushing tank treads of time even a single fingertip raised against the tide is a monumental act of self-love.

This moment you call a life is just one fully fleshed-out sentence in the string of words that is every book you will never write. Make it a good one.

Rage with renewed strength. Swing those simian arms while you can, while you still hold the heat of that dead star in your musculature, while you even care to.

Because nothing matters. Because nothing else matters while you have time.