The Order of Time

What causes us to suffer is not in the past or the future: it is here, now, in our memory, in our expectations. We long for timelessness, we endure the passing of time: we suffer time.

My luggage was with the front desk while I took one more skateboard ride. I ripped through a park that was close to the hotel and then found my way out to a sea wall path that led me down past a long beach. It was about 10:30am when I saw a man with a folding chair, a small cooler of bottled beer, smoking cigarettes and basking in the hot sun. Someone knows what they’re doing. I continued on to cross the Miahama bridge and then found myself on the Surf Ocean Terrace, a wide big pedestrian path that overlooked the beach and long fishing piers in the distance. The body of water was so vast that I thought it was the whole Pacific at the time, but was actually just the main body of Tokyo Bay, the immense inlet that leads ocean vessels close to the capital city. I skated to where the path ended and then walked out onto one of the long fishing piers. There were a good number of men just hanging out fishing. This wasn’t a commercial spot but rather a place for hobbyists. There were 2 kids running up and down the pier and the 2 gentlemen closest to me nodded while I took some pictures. It was a gorgeous view and I was happy to have snuck in one last ride before I departed for the airport where I had one more night at a hotel before departure home the next day.

Like much of the past few days I was full of reflective thoughts. In that moment staring out at bay I made a decision to scrap a piece of writing that I’d been working on in the background of the trip for the past few weeks. It was a laborious over-explanation of myself, my life and my history - as if the travelogue wasn’t self indulgent enough - and in that moment I realized I didn’t need that piece. Maybe writing it had been good for me, a way to have a dialogue with myself, but I think that in that moment I was starting to really come to grips with many of the ideas I’ve expressed about self acceptance and forgiveness. I took some pictures of myself and rather than the broken and confused man-child I’d felt like a month earlier - I was looking at a grown ass man who’d lived an extraordinary life. In the past 20 odd years I’d had so many experiences, good and bad, and they’ve all shaped me in some fashion. The ups and downs of my adventures could be tumultuous at times, and while some of these outcomes could be attributed to bad luck, god knows I also often wished I was better at making good decisions, but I still wouldn’t trade 95% of it for anything else. I’ve lived a life where I’ve made decisions and done things that had other people shaking their heads in disbelief. I don’t know anyone else who’s done the things I’ve done, in the way that I’ve done them. No one else could have. Part of that journey has been learning to accept the consequences of my own choices or decisions or, in some cases, lack of decisions.

In that moment I knew that the biggest lesson that I’d learned from my fallout with K and T was that I wasn’t going to accept or tolerate disrespect in my future relationships. I wouldn’t let people string me along and manipulate me with false promises or roping me into their delusions. If people weren’t good to their word, or couldn’t take accountability, or have the hard but necessary conversations required to maintain ongoing relationships? Then I didn’t need those people in my life. I’d regained some modicum of self respect, and self admiration and I wasn’t going to let those qualities slide just so I could have some fleeting intimacy based on lies. Lies I was told by others and lies I told myself to make myself feel better. Being honest with myself and my relationships is an investment in my future.

Back at the hotel I asked the concierge what time the shuttle bus to the Narita airport came. 12:15. I still had some time to kill so I just had a coffee in the lobby of the hotel and waited. I did some writing. Eventually the bus came and I just hopped on, threw my headphones in and spent most of the hour-long ride chatting with the dudes in my Hockey Pool group chat, as well as another group chat filled with some of my other guys. Then I saw a street sign out the window that said Haneda Airport and I felt a spark of panic run up my spine. Tokyo has the 2 airports Haneda and Narita, with Haneda being the bigger one and closer to Yokohama, just South of Tokyo, while Narita is farther away to the West of Tokyo. I don’t know whether the concierge had given me bad instructions or if I just hadn’t been paying attention, but I soon realized that I was 100% almost at the wrong airport. As annoying as this mistake was, it’s exactly why I’d chosen to give myself so much leeway when it came to getting to the airport on time. I had nearly a full 24 hours before I’d be boarding my flight home and while in Chiba I thought maybe I’d overdone it, now I was happy to have given myself such a cushion.

Once at Haneda airport I needed to navigate the labyrinthine bowels of the airport to find the train station. I would essentially be taking the JR line back across the entirety of Tokyo to Narita airport. It weirdly felt fitting that I’d get to go through Tokyo one more time before the end of the trip. I had to wait about a half hour for the train that’d take me to Narita and just standing in the crowd at the station it was like I could feel the time itself starting to decondense - unravelling faster and faster with every second. Whenever I checked my watch it was like looking at sand shooting through the hourglass at an unprecedented rate.

Funny how time works - for most of the trip time was moving at what I can only describe as existing only in the now. Unlike other travels I’ve had, going to Japan involved crossing the international date line - the line dividing the hemispheres that delineates between one calendar day and the other. So for my entire trip in Japan I was existing one day ahead of everyone in Vancouver, but at the same time being eight hours behind the current day in Vancouver. So while it may have been 9:30pm for me on May 4th, it was also 1:30pm on May the 3rd back home. It was a bit of a mindfuck. I generally didn’t try to explain it to people I just told them what time in the day it was for me.

I feel like I have been obsessed with time itself for a lot of my life. As a kid when I had some level of insomnia I’d just lay in bed and think and wonder thoughts about life and the universe; whether there was a god, whether there were aliens, what are dreams, what if ghosts are real, things like that. It was always so strange how despite not sleeping, time would still pass, and sometimes it feels like night time would always pass faster than during the day. I still feel like this is true and I think anyone who has stayed out later than midnight on a consistent basis can attest to this. Once the witching hour arrives it feels like reality is playing through at warp speed, sober or not.

Had time really slowed down for me while I was in Japan? Why did every day feel like a week and a week feel like a year? It’s because it was new. It had to be learned, experienced and then processed. A friend of mine told me recently that the more new things you do the more the perception of time itself slows down because you actually have to process the thing you’re experiencing. It isn’t just a muscle memory of reacting to reality itself within the patterns of your own existence. It's obvious that this is why people love to travel, and if they have the means, they seemingly become addicted to it. You’re living life on your terms and existing only in the moment that you are inhabiting because there’s really nothing else there but the experience. You don’t have your friends or family, familiar institutions or patterns. Depending on where you go you don’t even have shared language or at least silently agreed upon cultural norms. You’re adapting, living, and constantly needing to reevaluate exactly what it is you’re experiencing in life. I love it. I would argue it’s where I’m at my best, and I’m sure many other people feel this way as well. But I can also see how for a lot of people it’s not really what they want. I think that for a lot of people it’s a jarring experience, and those without empathy or at least a logistical mind, can easily be overwhelmed, confused and annoyed when they don’t have the comforts of their day to day lives.

People wonder will we ever create time travel? And buddy, I’m here to say that we already created it. Every single way we as a species have improved our ability to move faster is us developing a new methodology for time travel. Movement that took a long time, now takes less - how is that not a body moving through time differently than is possible based on our own physiological limitations? The first couple times I ever got on planes I flew from Vancouver to Portland, then to San Francisco. This in itself was fairly revelatory. But when I went from Vancouver to Mexico City? It was a jarring experience where the flight felt as if I’d just stepped into a server lobby, or video game loading screen, waiting for the location to download. It did not feel real how simple it was to go from one part of the planet to another. On foot the journey from Vancouver to Mexico City would take nearly 3 years, and that’s with our modern infrastructure. We take our current abilities of time travel for granted. We rarely think about how the journey of such an endeavor would change us if we didn’t have planes. I’ve often thought about the terrifying but exhilarating, and probably mind numbing, process of crossing the Pacific on one of those huge fucking ocean liner cargo ships. What would that process of travel feel like instead of getting on a United Airlines airbus watching 3 movies I couldn’t be bothered to waste my time on before? I think there’s a lot going on with time, and that our very ability to perceive it is limited by our possible level of mental comprehension compared to the vast infinity and possibility of multiple laws of physics that exist within our solar system, not to mention the cosmos at large.

In his 2017 book The Order of Time, Italian Physicist, specializing in quantum gravity research, Carlo Rovelli presents a fascinating re-imagining of how to think about time. I’m going to do my best to summarize this concept as I interpreted it but would encourage anyone courageous and open minded enough to give it a ride. It, despite only being 224 pages, took me a while to read as every few pages I was forced to contend with my own comprehension of the concepts being presented to me while I interpreted it through my own small, but not incorrect, understanding of fundamental physics.

Imagine, if you will, that reality itself - everything within the very everything of the cosmos - is literally immersed in Time. That our existence, and everything else out there, is submerged in Time as though it were the Ocean. Whether this is a result of the big bang or was there initially cannot be quantified, Rovelli’s book is theory - but theory from a great mind. The big bang posits that the universe exploded outward based on some quantum event that sent matter spinning and reeling throughout existence, and this concept also posits that it will all be drawn back together at some point like an elastic band that has shot one direction and now is coming back. Central to this concept there are 2 key forces driving everything: Entropy (Chaos) and Gravity (Order). Entropy is the disorder of reality, sending things spinning outward and Gravity is the force drawing things inward to order and stability.

Time, the ocean and its tides and currents, moves differently based on how Entropy and Gravity are in constant flux and friction with each other. A sequence in Christopher Nolan’s film Interstellar explains this quite well, where the Gravity being pulled in by a nearby Black Hole is so strong that it warps the nature of time so that hours on the planet are in reality years for things that are not on or near that planet. Please watch the scene for clarification.

Rovelli’s key premise is that the very alignment of the cosmos and the flow of time driven by the constant push pull of Entropy vs Gravity literally forces the tides and currents of Time. He muses and marvels at the exact conditions of friction between these forces, and the somehow radical timing of this that produced the unique and fragile balance of stability that created our very existence. There are no other planets or bodies within our available perception to have created the conditions required to produce life as we experience it here. Perfect conditions of time itself were required to gestate and produce everything we know about our existence. Cool, but what the fuck does that actually mean?

I was in a Yoga class, with my favorite teacher Veronica, a commanding but gentle woman who was very skilled at not only providing an accessible class but pushing the breathwork and inner perception of one’s own body for those more practiced. It was at the end of one of her classes during savasana, the rest phase at the end, where I had what I can only describe as a psychedelic experience. My consciousness seemingly leapt from my body and was hurtling across the Galaxy passing through asteroid fields, clipping moons, catching solar flares off the edge of Jupiter and circling around the rings of Saturn before eclipsing everything and off beyond anything I could possibly recognize. I kept going and going and going hurtling off into what I no longer saw as infinite nothing but the infinite everything. Viewed from seemingly the 5th dimension the Universe became like a grand watch to me, ticking with all its complex systems and machinery in front of me - a divine timepiece driven by the opposing forces of Entropy and Gravity - the unstoppable force against the immovable object. forever in juxtaposition as they jockey for an ending that will never come. When I came to, the entire class had left. I had missed the Namaste. I was just there passed the fuck out in my dream state of the cosmos and Veronica came over and was like - are you ok? And I told her what I’d seen and she seemed rather taken aback at first but then almost very validated as a teacher. She helped me to my feet and told me to take my time and I thanked her before I went home to process the mind blowing experience I’d just had.

I’ve never been one to wholly ascribe to Astrology. Seemed silly and made up and like you can just make your whole personality about some sort of seemingly irrelevant timeline, but after my experience I was left thinking: I’d be very stupid to think that the literal alignment of the cosmos didn’t have some affect on my existence here on Earth. Whether we’re star-children coded to our energies of the universe the second we’re born, or that it’s just a vague thing that somehow makes sense to some folks: through the forces of Gravity and Entropy, Time changes and it changes us.

People always say that it feels like Time is speeding up, and there’s lots of reasons for that. Vehicles. The Internet. Media. As you age your ability to perceive Time grows and then in later life recedes. I read Rovelli’s book shortly after it came out probably in Fall 2018 and it was then, in the midst of Trump’s first term, that Time indeed felt like it sped up. 2020 sure doesn’t feel like 5 years ago. In those days I did a lot of wondering about the alignment of the cosmos and how Entropy and Gravity’s eternal duel may be affecting the rather accelerated state of decay here on Earth. Had Entropy really taken a greater foothold across the flow of the ocean of Time? Was the delicate balance broken? Were we experiencing a tsunami of Entropy caused by Gravity slipping and losing its hold like a cosmic tectonic plate? It was kinda freeing to be able to just fly back to Jupiter and look at Earth as it experienced another transformative process in its existence - to not look at our injustices as a byproduct of our original sins manifest, but rather just us being the second hand in the watch-work of existence - as our seconds tick by the minutes pass and eventually the hour changes. If what I think I know about the universe is correct, eventually things will shift and a balance will be found again. Perhaps that’s why Black Holes exist? To re-balance the equation of the delicate balance - whether that’s by some divine hand or not I can’t really say. What I can say is that my thoughts and experiences with Time have led me to a place where I feel better acknowledging that I exist surrounded by Time, rather than being worried that it is passing me by. My immersion in the flow, whether fast or slow, is my experience of being. I try to let time pass over me, rather than just letting it take me away with it, or to even battle against it. I will age. I will tire. My knees will eventually not let me skateboard anymore. My crows feet and laugh lines will turn into deep seeded wrinkles. Death comes for us all, in Time. We cannot escape it. Maybe we’re cursed by our ability to perceive it, the ticking hand on the clock, or maybe that’s our greatest strength as a species - to recognize that we are fleeting and our existence is not permanent. That in the day to day we live in Time and when we travel we get to exist outside Time. In a place where the only thing that is real is the experience, not the clawing erosion of existence. I by no means think that Travel is the only way to subvert the perception of time, for we can’t change the actual flow of it, but to be conscious of Entropy and Gravity is to live in a twilight world where time is transmutable by your perceptions of it and your choices within it.

The train slid to a stop at the Narita Airport Terminal 2 stop and I offloaded. The train ride had taken about an hour and a half, which considering the distance and urban density it circumvented was just another testament to the efficiency of the JR Line. I bustled through the crowds at the airport and made my way outside. My hotel was actually really close to the airport and if I’d been able to just walk a straight line to it I would have gotten there in less than 15 minutes. However given the nature of airport security and design I had a rather long, rather winding path to follow to get to the hotel. At first I couldn’t really be sure I was going the right way, but it seemed like it was the only way I could go. Eventually I was able to see the small cluster of hotels close to the airport and hauled my luggage down a side road to get there. This hotel was old as hell, probably built in the early 80’s, had 2 wings and thankfully a Lawson’s inside. I checked in and went to my room. When I opened the drapes the view looked directly into the airport. It was so close that if the window opened I could have spit onto the tarmac.

I went back downstairs to the Lawson’s, which looked much more like a cruddy disorganized bodega in East Vancouver than one of the prime and pristine locations in any other City I’d been to. Felt like I was almost home already. I bought a bottle of sochu and a kaku highball in a can and went back to my room. I unpacked my bags again and began sorting through the laundry based on its level of soil. I put on some music, Don’t Bring me Down by Electric Light Orchestra and Les Fluers by Minnie Ripperton if I remember correctly. After the laundry was dealt with I did a basic look around the area for what there was to eat. It wasn't much, just a couple shitty looking takeout restaurants and a 7-11. Then I noticed that there was a much nicer hotel relatively close by and I checked out their website for restaurants. Of course being so close to the airport they had a much more continental restaurant / lounge serving all the usual suspects from burgers to steaks and caesar salad. My last night in Japan deserved a meal a little bit more robust though and thankfully this same hotel also had a sushi restaurant inside that I reasoned would probably have pretty good products considering the prices were high. I finished the sochu while I had a shower and shave. Then I threw on my cleanest shirt which was the Blackor shirt that I’d been given by Mei, Kentaro’s girlfriend, back in Tokyo. I walked on the side of the road towards the hotel, the night sky pink and orange as planes took off and came in to land.

The Hotel, The Nikko Narita, was much nicer than my hotel. It was just as big but as soon as I entered it had the austere nature of a much posher place. I didn’t want to be questioned about whether or not I was staying there, but I also felt that it hardly mattered if I was there to spend money. Still I tailed a group of elderly British Ladies to the elevator once I heard they were going to the restaurants. I wasn’t sure if there was a FOB card you needed to get to the top floor where the restaurant was so it was nice to tail along with them all the same. Once I got to the top floor there was a short walk and rounding a corner I saw that there were stalls for smoking. Hilarious phone booth looking things that sat a good 15m from the entrances to the restaurants. You go left, you're in the lounge restaurant, you go right, you're in the sushi restaurant. I went right and was greeted by a waitress who asked if I had a reservation. I did not and she informed me that this meant that I would need to sit at the bar. Great! That’s where I wanted to sit anyway. It was not a bar with a bartender behind it but rather the Sushi chef. When I sat down he greeted me and asked me, in English, if I wanted something to drink and I told him I wanted hot sake and he smiled approvingly and nodded before speaking to the waitress in Japanese and gesturing to me with his head. I couldn’t see his hands which were undoubtedly working away on some nigiri. I got my hot sake and he continued talking to me, this absolute gem of a guy, asking me where I was from, what I was doing in Narita, how long had I been in Japan, what cities had I been to, what was my favorite food? Eventually the waitress came for my order and I got the mid-tier platter of Tuna, Salmon, Tamago, Sea urchin and all 3 types of Tuna nigiri, plus 3 tuna rolls and 3 avocado, cucumber and white tuna rolls. It was great. It was perfect. A modest assortment of excellent things, though I really don’t care for sea urchin. I ate slowly and enjoyed the company of the chef before eventually settling the bill, thanking them profusely and stepping out of that restaurant and into the lounge.

In my black racing jacket, shorts, beat up shoes and Blackor T-shirt I did not look like their typical customer, but was greeted nicely and then, a bit of swagger in my step, acted like I belonged there. I sat down at the beautiful bar to be greeted by a bartender wearing a full suit who first dealt with a rather demanding British couple some seats down from me before asking what I’d like. I’ll take a Manhattan. He nodded and then went down the bar to produce a bottle of Crown Royal like he was showing a bottle of 100 year old Armagnac, I smiled and nodded in thanks. It took him a hot minute to make that Manhattan considering it wasn’t that busy in there, but well I guess perfection takes time. The view from the bar was incredible, it looked out over the airport and Chiba in the distance. I slowly drank the cocktail and then just sort of sat there giggling at myself. Those sands through the hourglass just running like water down the tap and me thinking about the journey I’d been on. I was very grateful that I’d managed to keep up the incredible pace of writing that I’d done for ¾ of the trip. I knew that if I wasn’t getting every detail down as it was happening then I’d forget it, or at very least forget the essential details. The vapour of this trip will live on in my imagination for the rest of my life. By this last leg of the trip novelty details like the contents of a 7-11 or minor cultural customs were no longer noteworthy, I felt like I knew how to be in Japan. I recognized that as much as my travelogue was something I wanted to share with the people in my life, in reality it was a gift to myself. A memoir about that time I rediscovered everything I like about myself while I feasted on something completely new. I found myself laughing at the future prospect of people asking me how my trip in Japan was and me responding with: What, you didn’t read my travelogue? You want it, it’s all here.

Eventually I went for a cig in that phone booth stall. When you stepped into it you thumbed a switch that set a huge vacuum fan in motion. It was a head-shakingly funny place to smoke a cigarette. Then I went back to the lounge, ordered a vodka martini with a twist of lemon and had a good think about what the foreseeable future looked like. I would wake up at 8:30, grab a free continental breakfast and a cup of Joe, then snag my bags and leave for checkout at 10:00am, wander back down to the airport, bust my ass through security early and then post up waiting for my flight. Seemed simple enough. My flight was at 4:30pm and I was scheduled to land back in Vancouver at 8:30am, the same time I’d woken up on that current day. The Martini went down pretty quick and I stopped the host / main server as I was leaving and told him: this is a very beautiful lounge with a very beautiful view, thank you for your hospitality, and we both did a half bow as he thanked me for the patronage.

I went back to my hotel room and dumped out all my change. All the random Yen coins that had accumulated over the trip. I counted it out and there was like $50 in change there, so I threw it in one of the plastic bags I’d accumulated over the weeks and then went down to the 7-11 down the street. I bought a couple small bottles of Suntory Whiskey, some cigs and a whole shitload of candy for people back home. I got a few Kaku Highballs in the can too. To deal with the massive amount of change I’d brought along the lady pulled out a flat device that looked like a Connect 4 game board and we dropped the change into it where it automatically sorted itself based on size. The change almost perfectly covered the cost of the goods I’d selected. I went back to my room where I did my full pack while I watched some Youtube about the news. Once I was sure my things were settled and bags packed I went downstairs to the smoking area of the hotel, basically a patio, and did some texting to people back home while I hoovered back like 4 darts before returning to my room, having another shower and laying down. In the background I could hear planes landing and taxing around the runway and thought: well at least I won’t have a problem waking up.

I was up at 8:30 but by the time I made it downstairs I’d missed the continental breakfast which apparently ended at 9:00am. With this disappointing realization there was little reason to stay in the hotel any longer so I just grabbed my stuff, went downstairs to check out. Then I hauled my bags to the airport, going by the same route I’d gone the day before. At the airport I realized that I was at Terminals 2-3 and needed to be at Terminal 1. This required that I take one more train to get across the airport itself. Another half hour waited for the train and then it was no time before I was at Terminal 1.

Terminal 1 had basically its own shopping center and food court and it was my plan to ditch my duffle and luggage and then take a little stroll around before going through security. The trouble was that they weren’t even accepting the luggage for my flight for two more hours. So I hauled it all around while I went shopping around the mall but didn’t really buy anything except a carton of Marlboro’s from the duty free. I needn’t have bothered myself with any shopping. There'd be nothing but opportunity for that later. Eventually I went to a tonkatsu joint where I only slightly overpaid for a standard plate. The people working at this restaurant were probably the most miserable I ever saw in Japan. The manager was probably the most memorably rude Japanese person I encountered on the entire trip. When I paid the bill the man at the counter wouldn’t even look at me when I placed the check on the counter and in the end threw my change into the change dish with such force that some of it just bounced out onto the counter and floor. He could not give a fuck and fair enough - working in any airport sounds like total hell to me, not to mention some diner dealing with idiot tourists non-stop.

If the airplane is a time machine then the airport is limbo. A place where nothing is real and you are stranded beyond the borders of anything resembling society or culture. All there really is to do is spend money, eat junk, get drunk and wait. I’ll tell ya this though, airports show you who people really are. It’s like they devolve us to some base state of being where we’re operating on basic survival instincts and it’s here you really see who’d survive in the wild and who wouldn’t. I personally hate looking stunned or confused or like I can’t grasp what’s going on so I think there’s a part of me that bubbles to the surface when I’m in the airport and I find myself just having the worst thoughts about people who are slow, rude or generally incompetent within airports. Like the customs lineup to me is always a doozy - you stood in this line for 25 minutes to get to the place where you gotta talk to the government official, and at no point did you consider what that would entail? You saw allllll these people in front of you with their passports out and no part of you thought, maybe I should have my passport ready? But I digress.

Basically I was listening to podcasts until it was time to get my bag checked. I had to pay an additional $90 for my duffle and all the gifts inside, but I’d expected that. Bags checked and I got through security in under 5 minutes and then I was in full limbo. Basically I just walked up and down the terminal, looping through the same 3 different kinds of stores: pharmacy, duty free and tchotchke. At this point I think I had like $30 in Yen left and was looking for something to blow it on. In the pharmacy I found a great deal on the matcha green tea Kit-Kats, they were 400 Yen more at all the Duty Free stores, and I found the make your own gummy kit that had endlessly been featured on the in-house channel in the Apa hotels. I bought two of the gummy kits and shoved them in my bag. After this I tried to sit down and write for a little bit but it wasn’t happening, just didn’t have the focus left in me to have anything substantive to say. Then I started to feel hungry. It only felt like a half hour since I’d eaten lunch, but no that had been four and a half hours ago. Limbo playing tricks on me. I only had about 15 minutes left until the boarding call and hit a McDonald’s where I got 2 regular cheeseburgers and then hit a vending machine where I bought my last Pocari Sweat. The cheeseburgers went down fast, I had time to hit the head and before I knew it I was sitting in my aisle seat on the plane.

I did not sleep. I listened to 8.5 hours of Shogun on audiobook, still only like halfway through the thing. About half way through the flight I ordered some sake in the hopes it’d knock me out. It did not. Not much to say about the flight. It was smooth and quiet and surreal to think that I’d be home soon after what felt like an entire lifetime away. The flight landed at 8:30am, the same time I’d woken up that day by Narita Airport. Customs was no problem. What’s the deal with border guards? They look at you like they’re prepared to break your neck and then as soon as they’re done with their line of questioning they just stop looking at you in an automaton way. It was a very nice spring day and it felt great to have the familiar crisp fresh smell of the blossoming lower mainland enter my nostrils. I got in a cab easily enough and before I knew it I was rolling into East Vancouver and then up Commercial Drive where all the flowers and trees were starting to blossom and glow up. I don’t think I ever remembered it being that green. Then, I was home.

It was only 9:30 in the morning. I’d already been up for 16 hours, but didn’t feel tired at the moment though I was sure that I would soon. I took a shower and then went and got a coffee before I unpacked my bags and started a load of laundry while I began to re-organize and sort out my apartment. My friend Dan had been house sitting for me while I was gone and it hardly looked / felt like anyone had stayed there aside from a few items in the fridge that I knew I hadn’t bought. My softball team had a game that night and even though I knew I was going to be in no state to play I was still going to get out and watch, it would be nice to see all my friends and teammates. I ordered some takeout Chinese food. I called Devon and he said he’d meet up with me before the ball game, he’d joined the team this year. Then I just…chilled. I felt like there was vapor just pouring off me as I decompressed from the journey and all the thoughts and feelings I had swirling around in my head.

There was nothing to do but stay awake. I think I played some video games, ate more food, drank more caffeine. Around the awake for 23 hours mark things were starting to get a little distorted on the peripherals. I know I met up with Devon and his dog Kitty and we walked around and had a couple beverages before the game. There ended up not being a game, the other team couldn’t field enough players, so then I got to practice with my team. Despite feeling exhausted I was really happy. I felt loose, and relaxed. I’m normally a pitcher on my team and the previous season I had not been very good, too tense, too angry and upset. That day I got back, I was throwing perfect pitches without even warming up. It felt great to throw, hit and run and laugh with my friends. I was fully overtired at this point, running on fumes but going as fast as I could, maybe it was all the caffeine too. Eventually most of us dispersed and my friend Tim and I were the only ones left, he walked me home where we had a few more drinks and I told him stories of my adventures before, I gave him his gift - a pin from Tokugawa’s Castle, and then he gave me a hug and he was gone. I’d been awake for about 31 hours straight. I ate some of the leftover Chinese food and then climbed into my own bed, and thought about how I’d transcended space and time and even my own consciousness to arrive back where I’d started, but fundamentally changed by the warping powers of Entropy and Gravity and the current they drive which has incubated my entire existence. What a life.

I leave you here with a quote from The Order of Time:

“Because everything that begins must end. What causes us to suffer is not in the past or the future: it is here, now, in our memory, in our expectations. We long for timelessness, we endure the passing of time: we suffer time. Time is suffering.” - Carlo Rovelli