Time Goes Sideways - Brendan Hughes

Time Goes Sideways Lyrics

So...I’ll do these one at a time; time is that which allows us to recognize change. Think if you will the picture, I’m sitting in a restaurant in Columbus, Ohio, with my mother, in 1993. We’re chewing upon entrees, talking about the big themes, which is our want, and she turns to me and she says, “Brian...I’m sorry...Brendan...time goes sideways. Everything is happening right now; your birth; your death; your high school graduation; the dinosaurs; the invasion for the planet Meepzorp…it’s all happening right now.” And for one fifteen earth second period - I got it; but then the universe slammed its door shut again, and I was stuck back in the concatenation of daily events because our feeble brains can only experience one moment at a time - we are the hourglass ourselves.
But the thing is; I’ve had embarrassing moments with people who are dead now...but I’m still embarrassed about them. The only other eyewitness has been eliminated, yet those have to be happening somewhere in the world right now. And so, I’m convinced, I’m convinced about this sideways situation, and many people have actually been arguing about this for a long, long time. One is ,time is a thing; this was espoused by Sir Isaac Newton, who was knighted and wore his suit of armor all over his laboratory. And the other school of thought that time isn’t thing; and this was espoused by Immanuel Kant, who overcame a very discouraging last name - to become a philosopher who is very renowned.
So humans, I’m gunna tell you a little story about our feeble attempts to mark time. Time has bedevilled many, luckily there is organized religion to sort the entire thing out. Back in, pre-46 bc, or so, you had the Romans they were marching around declining things and conjugating things everywhere they went. And the only people who knew what day it was were the priests, who were a little corrupt. They use the moon for the calendar, and sometimes there would be fifteen months some years, eleven months other years, it was chaos - no one knew what day it was. And they would have friends who were senators, and there were term limits, and they’d be like ‘no, no, no, no, no...there are two more months in the term!...and I happen to have this legislation I’d like to run thru.’ Or they’d be like ‘well, it’s the first again...you owe me rent...again...’ Again? Jesus Christ...or rather, he wasn’t born yet - ‘Great Caesar's Ghost!’; he wasn’t dead yet - for fifty years, no one could exclaim anything. And finally, Cesar had had enough, and he named the year 46 annus ultimatum confusionis, the final year of confusion; there was going to be no more confusion, he was just like, ‘I’ve had it!’, and he threw his napkin down - and he's like I have some announcements to make. A - Someone go to Denmark and get some canned fish and put them on my salad. B - everyone stop looking at my perfectly round head, I wasn’t a vaginal birth...
...Which reminds me of an interesting story, actually. My friend Lewis is a c-section, and uh, he has like a basketball, it’s like a perfect sphere. And he has a friend who is an OB.GYN and they’re in the balcony of some concert and his friend was like, check this out, lean over the balcony...he’s like c-section...c-section...c-section, c-section, you can see it everywhere, and you start becoming obsessed with it, and you hug people and you’re like, ‘we’re you a c-section?’ And then, if you really start thinking about it for a while, people will be like, ‘Hi, this is my mother…’ and you can’t not see the negative impression of their mother's vagina as the shape of their head. Can’t unsee it - you’re welcome. And then he was like see, get all the IT guys, we’re gonna solve this moon shit, once and for all. So he sends them off to an island, they come back - a time later; and they’re like Mr. Cesar we have crunched the letters, and it turns out, that it takes the earth CCCLXV days to go around the sun. And he was like, uh, ‘wonderum!’ And then they said, uh, there is a little problem though, we found that it takes VI extra hours. And they all started scratching their heads, until one kid looked up from playing Angry Aves on his iScroll, and he said, uh, ‘Why don’t we just add another day every IV years, VI times IV equals XXIV. Piece of leganum!’ And they’re like right, ‘let's have some millenia!’
Fantastic! Fast forward a bunch of millennia, to the 1580’s, the Julian calendar is in full swing, but the problem is those IT guys in Rome were off by eleven minutes, it actually takes 365 days, 5 hours, and 49 minutes to get around the sun. And over the course of fifteen hundred years, that adds up to ten days. And so for Pope Gregory XIII people were showing up to easter fest with like floaties and peeled noses, and so he was like no that will not do, get all the IT guys together we gotta figure out what the fuck is wrong with this Julian calendar - he was a lawyer, popes spoke like that back then...but, the point is they figured out the eleven day thing, and then he was like, ‘Attention catholic countries, October 4th, 1582 is going to be followed by October 15th, 1582.’ And, uhh, France and Italy we’re like, okay...but, Germany and England were like, what the fuck? And Queen Elizabeth was like O.H.N. oh hell no, that’s not happening in England. And so then for three hundred years all over Europe it was either eleven days ago or now. So if you went to the École Normale and your paper was late you dash over to Germany and get it postmarked eleven days before it was due!
And so once they got the days sorted out we still had hours and minutes to figure out so in 1967 they got the atomic clocks going but the problem is the atomic clocks are more accurate than the earth itself so they have to keep readjusting the atomic clocks in order to keep up with the planet, which is an inaccurate thing. So this is where official time and atomic time split off off because official time was like, we’re just going to stay whatever it was in 1967. And then navigational time is a third time scheme that exists on the planet - GPS; so that set itself in 1980 and never looked back, which has led to a 13-second discrepancy - which should be totally fine, despite that in air traffic control towers the computers are on one time and the plane's navigation system are 13 seconds later...13 seconds is the blink of an eye on an airport runway, so it should be fine.
Oh, we are on a hundred millisecond delay, like the Grammy because the musicians swear during their speeches, our brain does that to ourselves. Like if you tap your nose and your toe at the same time your toe is far enough away from your brain that it should you should feel the signal at a different time, but your brain sets you back from the present, we aren’t even in the present, there’s no telling what’s actually right now, we just catch up and we’re like, ‘I wonder what happened?’ Because of this…and actually there is science to suggest that the taller you are the further back in the past you are. And people are always, I don’t know if you read that Malcolm Gladwell article, I’m 5’8” which is a bullseye for average. I am the most unthreatening height you can be. Gladwell pointed out that for every inch over 5’8” an American man makes another 750 dollars, a year - not for this guy...I’m infuriated by it. I walk into a room and people are like that man is being paid the exact right amount. So that’s just infuriating, there is, we aren’t even in the present, the membrane between the future and the past, is not for us and time is really just an address in space, this is why time-travel I hate to say it can’t be possible or it is but the problem is you die instantly because you travel back in time but the earth is like thousand of miles away in the galaxy, and then you’re just like 1857 - I mean 8! And then your just a frozen skeleton...floating thru space. Time...time is a fucking disaster.
Lyrics Submitted by heliumdream