The time god will have his way with us all someday
I lie on the wall all day, tick-tock, tick-tock. Time is not only an abstract concept, but also a living part of me. It rules my movements, mercessily trudging on into eternity. But what happens when you break? What happens when the evil time god, whose physical form is more or less like a gremlin from the classic 1984 movie of the same name, decides to date your sister, even though you had explicitly told him not to, since we clocks are not eternal beings like these petty gods, and the age difference would never work?
Well I’ll tell ya what happens: The time god will decide to wage an endless war on the only purposeful function that you have: to tick. Why does the time god hate me? Is it because I use double colons casually in sentences? Is it because I told him not to bang my sister? Is it because he relishes the suffering of mortal ticking beings? Fill in the bubble for the right answer: it’s all of the above: good job you did well on this test.
I look out at the puny human students in my domain. They write, they type, they sleep. Ah, if they even knew a little bit about the tiny gremlin that ran their lives, they would cease to sit here in lecture and ramble about the ways in which “Gatsby is like, so much like, relationship goals. Like I would give it up for Gatsby ‘cause like, he knows how to treat a woman.” They would cease to speak in such ways, because not only would they realize that they misunderstood one of the most central points of that novel, but also because they would become aware of the fact that the only thing that rules their short and meaningless lives is a time god that looks like a furby crossed with a gremlin that has a second-hand fetish.
My soul: it is separate from me now. When the time god has chosen to wave his little tiny wand (which comes with furbies, sold for $9.99 at your local Target, or perhaps even Amazon. I understand that the one-day shipping is a great convenience. It’s really only a matter of time (get it?) before most brick and mortar shops are fully replaced with websites. That’s just the stage of capitalism we are in, which is why I liquidated most of my stock in Target and Walmart and moved it to more abstract investments like Amazon and PornHub) and strike your puny, mortal souls out of existence.
Think about it, the only thing between you and the grave is a tiny lil’ furby who likes to bang clocks.
Written by: Aaron Levins — adlevins@ucdavis.edu
(This article is humor and/or satire, and its content is purely fictional. The story and the names of “sources” are fictionalized.)
