Tag Archives: time

He stood outside the US Naval Observatory at Flagstaff, lifting a sign handwritten on the back of a flattened box: “FREE TIME,” it said in blocky black letters. He preached his point of view to all the people passing by, crying the injustices of subsidized time. “Don’t let the government control our clocks!” he’d shout, occasionally tweaking his rhetoric for a personal approach: “Late for a meeting? Well, you wouldn’t be if the government didn’t already decide the time for you! You could be early, but some suit in Washington decides to start regulating, and you have to listen, because the system is broken and we can’t even tell our own time!” He was sick and tired of the government taxing his time, taking all his hard earned moments and redistributing each instant to those bored, lazy mongrels, the stoned slacker sycophants who bummed around the blocks downtown, with nothing else to do but complain of being bored and keep on waiting for more time to pass. But he knew he could use that time, the way he uses all of his, to keep working and accomplish more, instead of letting it waste away as welfare for the apathetic masses.

Of course, at this point, he’d been spending all of his time lobbying for the government to cease their systemized and unconstitutional mismanagement on minutes and seconds — so he himself didn’t necessarily have a job either. But, that being said, he would have a job if he had more time, because it’s not like he wasn’t doing anything with the time he had, not like he didn’t need it. He used that time well, made the most of every hour, understanding the simple truth that time is money, time is of the essence, on his side. But the men in suits had somehow found a way to tax that, too, and despite the odds, he just kept losing time with every gamble.