www.markreed.cjb.net - The Prison Of Time

THE PRISON OF TIME

It’s everywhere. It’s in the air that we breathe. In the electricity. In the ground beneath our feet. In the poetry of our weapons. It’s in the concrete. It is in all these things and more. There’s nothing else to do. There’s nowhere else to go.

As we clutch tickets in tiny fists, cramped together on trains, our clocks ticking on, this life, it seems absurd, as absurd as any life can. A life where there is little to do but what we are told, few places to go, we just react, creatures acting by reflex, prodded and pushed and pulled into various places by the demands of life. It’s a grand design this, a world where each of us must work to maintain a place in a world, a world where we may not necessarily want to be, but where we have no choice to be. There is nowhere else one can be.

You can’t exist outside of these things. There is nowhere else in the world, because you can’t escape what is everywhere. There is no other place you can go.

With our tickets stamped, we force ourselves onto vessels, travelling endlessly in circles, between places, in endless circles, always travelling, never arriving, never settling, always moving from one place to another, to another, until we reach the final destination.

So these vessels, these cramped bullets, shooting down grooves and barrels and rails, through cramped suburbs, through barren wastelands where there is nothing to see but grass and snow and a featureless mass, and around us, this is our world, not the world we made, but the world We, the human mass, made.

And this is it. On these trains, the sign says that Our Staff Have The Right To Work Without Fear Of Assault. Sadly, nowhere does it give the most important part of its business anything equal. Nowhere does it say, Our Customers Have The Right To Get To Work On Time.

We don’t even want to go there, we don’t even want to have to work. We’re better than that, and we know it. But we do it because we have to, not because we want to. So the least we can expect, the least we can hope for is a train that goes where it is meant to go, when it is meant to go there. Now, I’m nave to expect that, but if the staff have some rights, surely so do we. Surely he who pays the piper calls the tune?

Right? Wrong. We are cattle. We are shunted from one place to another, not even given an excuse, or anything even vaguely approaching dignity. We are cramped together, shoehorned into overcrowded, underventilated boxes, and we pay for the privilege. The trains run when they feel like it, often with no excuse, or even an apology for their tardiness, neglecting the fact that some of us, many of us, have places to go, appointments to keep, and we have to be at Certain Places at Certain Times, things we can’t do if these trains are late, or early. Or whatever. This is our punishment – and we have no rights at all.

I would never assault someone who works on the trains – the fact that they work on the trains is punishment enough in my book. But it’s the tone that gets me. If they can imprison frustrated commuters then we, the commuters, surely should be able to fine, to imprison, to penalise the people who hold us up, who waste our time, our hours, our seconds, for each one of those is a second lost from the arms of loved ones, from the loving hearts of our families, from the world we work all our lives just to spend those few seconds within. It’s Time. Time waits for no man. Let us get to the future, and let us get there on time. I don’t want to be late for the future. I don’t want to keep the future waiting.

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