A Cure for Being Ordinary
TIM ECKMAN : It's about Clocks.
When I was a child, the Clock in my room made me think that It was alive. How could I think anything else? It moved on it's own--every time I opened my eyes It was moving! It was always watching me. If the Clock was going quickly, I had to get out of bed, but if the Clock was going slowly, I had to lie in my bed, very still, until the Clock began to move quickly again. And if I disobeyed the Clock, my parents would become angry with me. My parents always obeyed the Clock.
It lived in our house with us, but It didn't need anything from us. Our cat needed a lot of things, like love and attention, but not the Clock. It was a superior being, and my parents taught me to treat It with reverence.
INTERLOCUTOR: So you saw the clock as a kind of God?
TIM ECKMAN: Exactly! And people worship the Clock. They carry a small Clock with them on their wrists, and they use the Clock if they are feeling bored, or lonely, or agitated--maybe you want to look at your Clock right now
INTERLOCUTOR: No, I don't.
TIM ECKMAN: When I was 16, I worked at Harvey's Hamburgers in Penticton. I got to work on the "front line", which meant that I could customise customers' hamburgers. Time is different at Harvey's. That Clock went more slowly there than I have ever seen a Clock go since. It was a living hell. On my break, I went out the back door and walked home with my Harvey's cap and apron still on. I asked my father about the Clock at Harvey's, and he said "Everybody has to have a job".
After highschool I went to college to study computer programming. That's how I got the job here at Scotiabank, at Scotia Towers. I realised while I was working at Scotiabank that my inability to deal with the job-place wasn't because of the usual problems. It's not because of the triviality of the work, or the upside-down power structure, or the happy-cheerful face I'm forced to perform every day. It was because I had an incorrect relationship to to time--a relationship fostered and encouraged by capitalism!
So I decided to live here, in the rafters. During the day, I watch my replacement working in my cubicle. His Clock is very different from my Clock. His Clock runs in a perfect, mechanical order; the same constant speed all day.
After I moved into the rafters, I started to realise that while I was employed I saw time as blocks, or chunks of time. I would work for a chunk of time and then have a "break" for a chunk of time. Even my breaks were not my time. But I've found my time! It is between the chunks--like on TV, when you have a cut? The space between them, though you can't see it, it exists. It is the free place. It is where I try to live now.
Between chunks of time, I am free.