Relativity of Time

                 Watch! It is a command from the pale, yellow screen. It bids you pay attention and concentrate on what you are doing. Like most attention deficit males, my span of concentration lasts for less than thirty seconds. Then I feel the need to look elsewhere, think about something new (preferably female) or fidget in my chair.

I remember the "melting watch" (Remembrance of Time) from one of Salvador Dali's surreal paintings and wonder if time is still relative while it is being cooked? Is heat an added dimension that the scientists hadn't considered? Maybe that is what's behind that whole "hand on the stove" analogy that is so smugly used to describe the relative passage of time? As opposed to the length of time one is put on hold on the telephone or time spent with the in-laws, that is. Perhaps the frost there is an ingredient as well.

I wonder how that would translate into climactic zones? People in the tropics would have lives flash by in an instant while we in the temperate zones have time to be bored silly. Heaven forbid the perils of the Innuit! They must speak in term so slow their words freeze and fall onto the ground in great heaps of frozen verbiage. Can you imagine an Innuit politician? The weight of his frozen words must crush the ice around him and create a huge ice floe of verbiage that will drift South across the Atlantic and resurface as television programming somewhere in France or Spain.

Still I watch and nothing happens. This is like the watching the old late-night reruns. You never really see what's on them through somnolent eyes. You may as well be watching a clothes dryer window, mesmerized by the repetitive motions of the spin cycle. The content is probably just as educational as well. The need to watch is riveting. Perhaps the red under drawers will only circle round twice this time instead of three times.

Okay, time for me to fidget or think about the fairer sex. Now there is watching.

                                           -30-

                                (350 words)

                               Joseph Xavier Martin