Time is passing  so fast these days that it feel like I am in freefall, plummeting toward the grave and picking up speed. Here it is, Thursday night again, and I feel like I was just here a day ago. Like waiting for the computer lab to open for us was just twenty four hours ago at best.

Like last night was tonight, in a way.

I have been here before. I am no stranger to this surrender to gravity. It comes with age, so everybody says, and I believe them. The older you get, the more there is to remember, but no more room to put it in. So we compress, and the space that once held twenty years holds thirty, forty, fifty, and more. And so from the point of view of our younger selves,  time sped up.

If only we could make sure our perspectives kept up with our years.

I remind myself, with increasing frequency (and fervency), that time has not, in fact, changed at all, and the days have the same number of minutes as when I was a schoolboy. It is only a trick of memory that makes us feel differently.

This truth rings increasingly hollow, and it occurs to me that perhaps I need to take a different approach. Maybe this is a sign that it is time to spread my wings and turn this downward momentum into level flight, or maybe even use it to soar past my petty limitations and touch the sky.

Momentum is energy and energy is power.

And I want power.

(—)

I’m in Creative Writing class. We are watching a video. I would rather be working on my final project. The last step is for me to edit the audio of me reading my poem. I can’t do that while the people on the video are talking. So instead, I blog.

I really should make myself an “I’d rather be blogging” pin on Cafepress.

I hate not being able on my thing yet. Oh good, it’s done!

(—)

Home now. Got the thing done. Here it is.

It’s not much, but it took me forever to make the damned thing in Premiere. Oh how I longed for my beloved ancient Ulead Video Studio 11 back home on this computer. I would have had it done in minutes, instead of two hours.

As I suspected, the stupid animated GIF I made first in Photoshop was of no use, and I ended up just taking framegrabs of the five stanzas and treating them as photos.

That’s where the fancy schmancy page-turning effect came in. Premiere is actually a pretty good problem once you learn its ways. I decided I needed to fancy up the thing a little, so on went the transitions. I wanted them to be faster, but every time I tried to reduce the duration, the damned thing disappeared on me instead.

And yeah, they’re cheesy, but I was working to deadline. Still, I saved the movie (.MOV) file to my DropBox, so when I am bored on winter break, I can import it into Ulead and add a title and ending page and other potential enhancements to come.

When I do that, the one that’s there now will be deleted from the YouTube account, so if for some reason you think it’s perfect exactly as it is, better save a copy while you still can.

Oh, and if you are reading this in the future and the embed doesn’t work any more, first of all, hi future people! Have we gotten over oil yet? Anyhow, I am sorry that I forgot to come back to this blog entry and update the embed of the poem.

But honestly, you are not missing much. I mean, the poem is okay, I guess. I would be lying if I said I spent a lot of time honing it to perfection. More like getting it to a minimally presentable state and shoving it out the door.

As a video, though, well…. let me put it this way. It’s not the sort of thing I would enjoy watching, and that is really the only meaningful test of any art, from the artist’s point of view.

An interesting thing happened on the way home. I called a cab, like I do on Thursday nights, and practically the moment I got to the bus stop, a cab pulled up. I got in, told him my address, and off we go.

Then I start looking around the cab and I can’t help noticing that the little red-led readout that tells you your fare is conspicuously absent. So is the usual console displaying a map of where we are. And I don’t hear anything like the usual radio chatter you hear in a cab.

In fact, the dude seems to be doing his taxi business via a tablet older than mine. Hmmmmm.

The clincher was when we got here. I asked the guy how much I owed him, and he shrugged and said “Six bucks?”. Then, when I got out of the cab, I gave it a good look over and noticed that while it did say Richmond Taxi on it, and it was the right shade of red, the Richmond Taxi logo was the one from ages ago, when the words were in gold in a fancy serif font.

So here is my theory : this guy totally does not work for Richmond Taxi. He has some way of hacking their data signal and an old Richmond Taxi he bought off someone, and is totally steal fares from them. That’s why he arrived so fast. You have to make damned sure you arrive before the actual Richmond Taxi shows up!

Not that I care. I got what I wanted at the price I am used to, so as a consumer, I’m satisfied. I am not gonna narc the guy out.

But he better watch it, because making money off a taxi service without giving said service a cut is a very big no-no in the world of short distance auto travel. If they catch on, the law’s the least of his troubles.

So move fast, Clone Cab, and don’t get greedy!

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.