Days Go By

Excuse me for a moment while I go all meta on you here. A lot of what gets written in this space has already happened. It is the nature of things. It feels a little current, since I happen to refer to events of the world and I reflect on them as they happen, but of course if I hadn't already witnessed them, I probably couldn't assay them as accurately. That is why one of the earliest collections of these scribblings was titled "Nostalgia Machine." That's what we all do. Unless you happen to be The Amazing Kreskin ("The" to his friends). The Amazing Kreskin's blog should be full of things anticipatory. What do we have to which we can look forward? What should we prepare to dread? Instead of looking back on lives that have just ended, we could build tributes to those who are still around to recognize how beloved, or in some cases, reviled they are.
My perceptions remain primarily sensory, and so I continue to plod away in this corner of Al Gore's Internet, looking back over my shoulder at what has already gone by. This means I will constantly be in a state of reportage. Which may be why, when asked by my wife to come up with a few New Year's Resolutions or something that I am eagerly anticipating in 2017, I faltered. What lies in front of me is such a mystery. I can be counted on to be quite smug when I make any kind of prediction that comes true. Most of these prognostications are made primarily on events and occurrences that have gone down before. Repeatedly. I don't really need to predict anything that happens with any kind of frequency. Those are trends: events that repeat. Inevitability.
A week ago, this page had a countdown clock on it that was keeping track of the time left before the 2016 Presidential Election. Both of those, the clock and the election, are part of history now. For a month after the results had been broadcast, discussed, and painfully accepted, that clock sat there at the bottom of the page reading all zeroes. Time was, for the purposes of this blog, standing still. Last week I found myself staring at that clock, wondering what I should do with it. So with the words of Firesign Theatre in my head, I chose to go forward into the past.
This year, 2017, will see the seventy-fifth anniversary of the release of Casablanca, one of the greatest films of all time. The election is behind us, and I don't have the powers of Criswell to see how quickly the new regime will come tumbling down. So I'll have to look forward to the things that I know already. Here's looking at you, kid.