Glowing While The Flame Gutters

 “Out of a human population on earth of four and a half billion, perhaps twenty people can write a book in a year. Some people lift cars, too. Some people enter week-long sled-dog races, go over Niagara Falls in barrels, fly planes through the Arc de Triomphe. Some people feel no pain in childbirth. Some people eat cars. There is no call to take human extremes as norms.”

    - Annie Dillard, "The Writer's Life" -

 I stopped wearing a wristwatch years ago, probably near-on a decade by now. The reasons why are utterly incomprehensible to anyone who wasn't there and maybe even those of us who were, but made complete sense at the time. Or at least as much sense as anything did in those days.

This has nothing whatsoever to do with what I'm writing right now. Or more accurately, what I was writing till I ran across a structural problem I'm going to have to fix, and that has stopped me as surely as sudden death or a call to dinner, both on the same end of the scale of important redirections of The Flow.

As I have no idea how to fix the problem at the moment my brain did the only responsible thing and said "fuck it" and wandered off to entertain itself elsewhere until the bits that work on this sort of thing in the background come up with a solution. Perhaps soon. Perhaps in a week or two or a year.

Perhaps never.

Maybe the background bits have wandered off, too — being subconscious programs running apparently completely independently of the rest of the machine, how would I know? I never do, really, until dawdling along in the middle of a shower or sleep or work or a speech or sex or merging onto the Interstate, they suddenly appear and jam the solution into the gears and disappear again, leaving me scrambling for something to write with to get the answer down before it's shredded down into nothing at all.

My subconscious is an asshole. 

At any rate, while in this resting, or more accurately, "idling", near-fugue state a glow in the darkening room came to my attention. It was the soft radiance of the radioactive tritium gas tubes marking the lines of the hands and the dashed hash-marks of the hours on my watch, limning them in gentle bluish-green, except for the conjoined "12/24", haughty at the point of their faint orange line orienting them always at the top of the circular scale, ruling over the ordinary hours.

I don't know what happened to my watchless state. I was casually slashing a path through the deep rainforest thickets of Amazon where I'd some time back bought a military-grade tritium compass and a variety of bunker-bunny crap. For some reason, these purchases indicated to Amazon that I'd like to have a watch, too.

Algorithms, doncha know.

So they kept advertising them to me no matter what I searched for.

"Show me stuff related to physics."

"OK. And also, here are a selection of spiffy physics-related watches with tensor calculators and radiation detectors."

"Asshole. Stop that. I don't need a friggin' watch. Show me the latest Stoic-related books."

"OK. And here are also a selection of combat watches probably worn by ancient Greeks at the Battle of Thermopylae."

Most of what they advertised were the studly/macho special-forces, do-everything including blow you when you're lonely kinds of watches. The idea of spending a giant wad of money to buy a four-pound lump of metal with 38 little multi-colored dials and with buttons and crowns sticking out all over it like Spielberg's alien ship from "Close Encounters" was not appealing. I could NOT imagine why they kept ramming the damned things into my face. Do I actually NEED something that's waterproof to 1000 meters, counts down my coffee boil AND tracks barometric pressure for 20 years? Who the fuck buys this stuff?

"You're right," said Amazon apologetically, "you aren't some half-wit bunker bunny who needs a watch he can use to club a bear to death. You just need a shock-proof analogue watch, waterproof to about 6 atmospheres so you can swim with it that just TELLS THE FUCKING TIME. Like this one."

"Oh, piss off," I replied, "I don't need ANY kind of….oooohhhh, what's that?"

And down the rabbit hole I went. So, after chasing around a bunch of websites I wound up on Marathon's web site (https://www.marathonwatch.com/collections/air for those of you playing at home).

And there it was; I was shortly the owner of a more-than-familiar Government-issue Marathon Pilot/Navigator watch. At about $300.00, this thing is probably more expensive than every other watch I've ever owned combined but is, in fact, nearly bulletproof, very lightweight and ONLY JUST ACCURATELY TELLS THE TIME which is visible at a glance. My concession to fancy-pants-ness is the glowing tritium indexes which, as I am a night person, is actually a frequently-used utility.

I've had it for a couple of months now, and I'm inordinately pleased with the freakin' thing. I had no idea how much I missed having a watch, nor do I know even now why that's so, but there it is. I'm slowly learning to just take pleasure in things that give me pleasure instead of analyzing why they do until they don't.

That last sentence makes sense.

And now I see that the Muse has yet to return. Didn't much expect she would, the fickle bitch, and when she does I anticipate she will wander me off in a completely different direction which will turn out to have nothing to do with my structurally-challenged piece at all.

So in the meantime I'll go eat something and waste away for awhile in front of the TV. Maybe later I'll come back and stare at the crippled piece until I get bored and go see what Amazon has decided I need next. Probably a helmet-mounted FLIR combat monocular with artillery ranging and on-the-fly Russian translations.

Algorithms, doncha know.