No time to think of a title

I think it's impossible to describe the sensation of time without using the word "time" to describe it. We have only physical analogues to the sensation of duration, with the result being that if these are avoided in the hope of being precise, anything written merely sounds obvious and self referential. So I'm going to stick to analogies. And anyway, they're more fun to make up.

So, it's October. And it's been nearly a fortnight since the last post. Weeks are moving so fast at the moment, and I have only sporadic moments of realisation that time is flying past, like I'm a stone skipping across a lake. Time has been flying like an arrow, and the fruit flies have been quite happy with their bendy yellow thing. Or maybe someone tried throwing one as some sort of biological boomerang and found that you can never, in fact, get it to come back.

Why do some times feel like this? It doesn't really seem to me to be connected to particular enjoyment of life - relationship matters are going fairly well, obviously, and health and exercise efforts are proceeding apace, but work is really quite boring and unsatisfying at the moment. I'm wondering about moving on, but with my nuptials brewing (that sounds like a bodily function, doesn't it?) and a mortgage impending, it might not be quite the time. Incidentally, I looked up the etymology of "mortgage" - it comes from the Latin for "dead pledge". I have to keep paying until I'm dead?! No wonder I feel a vague sense of doom.

I think a balance is needed to ensure that a required personal velocity in time is maintained, enough to prevent an irrecoverable slowdown that results in sinking into the murky depths instead of skipping over it. However, move too fast and there isn't time to contemplate that which you're moving across and connecting with in random accidents and nudges.

I don't think I'm going to solve this one now. And ironically, or possibly appropriately, or maybe both, I can't stick around to write about it any more. But my aim is make sure I touch down (however briefly) in the wonderfully warm and scummy pond that is Blogger much more often than I have been.

One last thought - I've been doing a fair bit of riding lately, training to take part in the Half the Bay in a Day ride later this month - 100km of hills and headwind. While I'm riding I find I can relax my mind a great deal and concentrate on nothing in particular. However, I'm starting to worry about my default mental setting. I keep getting snippets of songs stuck in my head - they repeat on a seemingly endless loop until they either get replaced with another sample, or something unexpected happens that shakes me out of it. Not too much of a problem, you say? Au contraire, mes amis - the songs aren't quite random. We kept getting passed by proper cyclists in far too much lycra, and I had Beyonce's "Irreplaceable" in there. "To the left, to the left..." We started passing other pretend cyclists (like us) and I had Marcy Playground's "Coming Up From Behind". But only ever two lines, over and over. And then (worst of all), in a particularly quiet stretch, I got "On the Road Again" in my noggin. But not just any version, oh no. I got Donkey, from Shrek, doing that irritatingly jaunty "On the road again... Hm hmm hm hmm hm hmmm...", because they're the only words I know! Please - kill me now. I can't take another week of that. The risks of wearing an iPod while riding on the road are seeming more and more reasonable.