Time is Broken (journal)

Graduate school feels like last year yet 2018 feels like a lifetime ago. Trump’s election and Covid both shattered our sense of time. Twenty years ago used to feel like ancient history. Now it feels like yesterday. Yet 2020 feels like last century.

Things don’t change much visually anymore. Is that normal, or is constant visual change normal? Like, how visually different was 1830 to 1860, really? But from the 1950s to the 2000s things evolved at a pace never before seen. Maybe that was the anomaly. The rest of history changed gradually. You didn’t have decades separated by fashions, for example. We had that for a little while and now we’re back to not having that. If I time traveled to 2005 nobody would know I was from the future based on my clothes.

The show COPS has been on the air forever. When I watch it, sometimes I see an episode from the late 2010s and sometimes I see an episode from 1999. It takes a while to notice. Even the cars don’t give it away so much. When I see the production year in the end credits I go holy cow, that was 24 years ago. A whole generation. Somebody born in 1999 is more than old enough to buy booze, cigarettes, vote, they’ve probably graduated from college. Grown-ass adults. That is so jarring to me. People born in the nineties shouldn’t be adults! Yet they are.

It was a nonstop party during our post-war prosperity, and we put off the bill as long as we could. Now the bill is overdue, the party is over, and we’re looking at each other saying who’s gonna pay for this. The answer is: all of us. We turned our face from God in our times of plenty; we did not thank Him for what He did for us. And so we face the consequences and cry aloud that He deliver us from this pit.