Time

Time is a problem that humans have failed to solve, but mended like duct tape on a busted water hose. Adapting new technologies to overcome the hurdles of time has built empires and destroyed civilizations. The introduction of horses in North America by the Spanish shortened the time taken to travel long distances, enabling some Indian tribes to expand their territory while conquering others. Trains crossed North America like an iron horse filled with settlers ending the reign of the North American Indians. In a need for speed people replaced their horses with automobiles that harness the power of 8000 horses, while screaming on top of concrete highways from point A to point B in a fraction of the time. If you save time to do this you’re buying time to do that.
It’s as if time is an extension of our mortality and by saving time we are saving ourselves through cursed technologies that are bogged down with lame animals, traffic jams, broken circuits and blown radiators that consume our lives and result in wasted time. In all the madness of modern technology it was the replacing of the French press that brought me to the realization of time. I watched a steel machine use a piston to reject spent coffee grounds through a cylinder in the center of its shiny box like body. Watching the mechanical French press at work brought about visions of Jack Kerouac’s, Dean Mariorty, peering through snow goggles with his head wrapped in a scarf sticking out a car window while driving through a blizzard in the American night. Underneath the polished chrome and between the soldered connectors of high tech gadgetry is an unlearned lesson of time.