About time

I am falling short of the aspiration to produce a story every two days. This is because ICT glitches have captured attention. I could write about the glitches but that would be nerdy and boring.

My preference is to witness and subjectively write about interesting insights from the unconscious. Some recent ones include:

A feeling of anxiety, fear and anger when I am faced with an ICT glitch. From my writer's point of view the technology and its tools should be invisible means to an end. I have no desire to stick my head into the workings of the tools; that is the job of nerds and geeks who generate the idiot-simple, user-friendly packages. There is division of labour and, from my point of view, a suspension of disbelief in coding magicians.

The lack of fine motor control of my fingers remains a problem for writing, typing and using the mouse. Handwriting is very small and often illegible. I have to type it while it is still fresh in my brain. The problem using the keyboard and mouse is that my fingers freeze and twitch and this causes typos. Luckily I graciously accept the condition and word process with equanimity.

My submissions to the Portsoy Past and Present columns in the local newspaper are edited stories from Findlay's research notes. My bits are about the past. Paulina and Colin do the present. But when does the present end and the past begin? There are different ways to look at this. My present thoughts and feelings move to the past when the next present ones appear. The time scale is from a fraction of a second to several minutes. OR – “give me the child till he is five and I will give you the man” – or at least a unit of stuff upon which to allow confirmation bias. OR time and thus the past began with the big bang 13.8 billion years ago.

And here ends a wandering story – about time!