#fridayflash: Time Flies

I wrote a story, and it's gloriously stupid, and I was accused of fanfiction.
But I don't care. It's gloriously stupid and I like it. HAHA

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The problem with eternity is the flies. I have no idea where they come from. It’s annoying, I tell you, but they’ve just always been here and they won’t go away. It is eternity, after all, so I suppose they’re here for the… duration. I’ve raised a prayer with the Big Man, but you know how it is. He’s too busy dealing with the prayers from earth to deal with those from this side of time. After all, earthly problems are temporary, but urgent. Eternal problems are… eternal.

Still, flies. Not ordinary flies—Time Flies. Millions of buzzing little pockets of time that remind you of temporality and mortality where it doesn’t apply anymore. If you squish one, time stutters a little, which is an interesting experience. There’s no actual today or tomorrow or yesterday in eternity, you know. It’s all one long, lump of events that eventually merges into one unending… day, for the lack of a better word. It’s always been a big ball of wibbly-wobbly, timey-wimey stuff, anyway.

But time flies like an arrow—direct to the point, speeding along its trajectory, as straight and as true as the one who aimed it—so when a Time Fly hits you, it’s like mortality all over again. For a brief moment, you’re back there on earth—or whenever and wherever it was you were spying on in the universe—and I guess it’s jarring. Maybe a little dangerous if it’s done too often—it messes with your head and your grasp on reality. Elvis Presley, you know, always popping in and out of existence. You never know when a sighting is the real thing. I doubt he knows himself now, since it’s happened so often. People just launch flies at him for fun, and since he just can't help spying on any event that plays his songs or has Elvis impersonators, he often gets lumped in as his own impersonator. Ridiculous, but there it is.

Talking about mortality, back when I was a lad on earth, I hated it. I was always hoping to live forever—there’s that ‘and I will L-I-V-E E-T-E-R-N-A-L-L-Y’ song I always thought was a bit of a scam to make you learn your spelling—but when you’re alive and mortal, all you want is to stay alive. Mostly. Sometimes some people got a little suicidal, but even then, every narrow escape from death and maiming was like an answer from heaven, as if Someone Up There was saying ‘it’s not your time yet’. Cancer was the worst thing that could happen to you, like a scourge from the devil or something.

But here and now, time is a cancer. It eats at you. It grows like a tumour, with unexpected side effects. Blink and it could be tomorrow, or it could be yesterday. Yesterday, I opened my eyes to realise that I’d drifted off towards the distant past. Right then, that blasted Pratchett, cheeky bloke, launched a fair crate of flies at me and I spent an hour of earth time running from T-Rexes. By the time the effects wore off and I popped back into eternity, I was exhausted and caked in mud. Still, it was something to do so I can’t fault him. We're all bored to death here. Well, not quite to death, since we are already dead. I wonder where I can send him? I suppose if he popped back to earth in 2018 he’d shock a lot of people right there. I generally try not to blink near statues though.

If all this is a little incomprehensible to you, don’t worry. Time is a mystery, even to the philosophers, and if they can’t figure out if temporality is linear or circular, I doubt you, with your mortal mind, will understand. Honestly, I too find it hard and I have all eternity to puzzle it out. I’m just telling you as it is. As the good doctor said, it’s wibbly-wobbly anyway, and there are rifts in the continuum everywhere. How else can you explain Cardiff? Or Narnia? Or the Bermuda Triangle? Or, for that matter, Arthur Dent?

The earth is always imminently to be destroyed, if the movies are to believed, whether it’s by God, demons, Vogons, or random chance. It’s all the same from this side of eternity, because then you’ll just pop over the boundary and join us. It’s not as if you need to find the Ultimate Answer to the universe. We already know that, even if we don’t know what to do with it. I don’t quite recall what the Ultimate Question was. Time does that to you, it just makes everything so vague when everything blends together.

Where were we? Time is always ticking on for you mortals and I lose track of my thoughts so easily. Oh, we were talking about eternity, weren’t we?

Yes, eternity is great, it really is, if you like that sort of thing. You have all the time in the world to do whatever you wish because time doesn’t exist. There are no deadlines to chase, no datelines to worry about and definitely no dates to forget. I can pop back and forth whenever I wish, so it’s not as if I have to choose one over the other. Solves all your problems, you know. Back on earth, you’re always chasing time, as if it’s a thing that can be caught.

If it’s all the same to you, the bloody flies annoy me. Time flies like an arrow; fruit flies like a banana—and I wish Time Flies would love a banana so I could throw them one and they’d leave me alone.

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#sorrynotsorry :p

Theme for the week: Time; and/or the distortion of it.

Also, based on feedback this week, I'm figuring that (including the seminar leader), 2/8 have no clue who Terry Pratchett is (though I'm just mentioning him in passing for the fun of it), "Elvis sightings" are a relatively unknown phenomenon, half of them haven't read Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy, and only one  (another Malaysian, coincidentally) seems to have heard of the "Time flies like an arrow; fruit flies like a banana" quote. And mayyybe half know Dr Who, or at least appreciate the passing mention.

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Nanowrimo is starting. I don't know if next week's piece will be a nano excerpt or a writing exercise. We'll see. Also, word counter is up on the right again, if you want to track my progress.