Time
Here’s a real sad story about time and the psychological torture of children. So skip it if that’s not for you.
As I’ve noted before, l was moved out to an outdoor porch when I was 5, and I was often locked outside the house in that tiny shed. There was nothing in this room other than my bed and a 20W light bulb I had been warned must last until I moved out, so in addition to being alone and without access to water or hygiene or heat or physical security or human connection I was often expected to entertain myself without external tools or props for long periods.
One of the ways Mother hurt me with this room was to gaslight me about when I could get back into the house. She would tell me I could come out in an hour, or after 11 AM or when she was done with her current task. And then through a combination of malice and negligence she left me in there for hours. I of course was not allowed to prompt her to check on me, and she was always willing to lie to me about the time when she did interact with me.
On my first day of kindergarten Mother bought me an alarm clock. Literally before I got home from half-day school. She had decided she would never get up for me again for a whole slew of narc reasons, including not wanting to wake up early and feeling bad about being late the first day. But I was elated. She didn’t know it, but she gave me access to a tool that lets me measure and communicate about physical reality – a clock. I could know how long an hour was, and when it was after 2, and I could at least demand a better lie when she wanted me to stay outside.
The clock also had a radio, which of course I was not permitted to use, and which I kept de-tuned so that she could check to see I wasn’t using it. But I did use it. To hear a human close enough to walk to in the next few days, and know that they existed and were talking in real time. But most importantly to get the The Time. Not Her time but the one other humans agreed upon and that her endless appeal to authority demanded she respect.
A couple of times after I got the clock Mother interrupted the power so I would lose the time. But this was not very effective and it required her to go into the basement, which seemed to scare her. The clock had a battery backup, to keep the time in a power outage, but I wasn’t allowed a battery for it. For a while that aspect of control was why I couldn’t have batteries, but eventually it just became the status quo. To the best of my knowledge that clock is still in Mother’s basement and never did get a battery.
I lived a life as a 5-year-old where I didn’t even have access to time to keep me sane. Where the concept of time was used as a tool to hurt me and withheld from me where I might have used myself. And it made me obsessed with time keeping for years.
More recently I have freed myself from clocks, and felt relieved to know that I no longer needed time in the same way. Obviously I still use time, but I am satisfied with my own internal clock, and confident that better time keeping would not make me more secure, at least absent extreme conditions.
I think it’s time to take one step back toward what used to be a passion and buy myself a real time reference. GPS-trained oscillators are like $100 and work reliably even with only a single bird occasionally in view. My next network build will include one, and I will once again have a radio connecting me to a local cache of time.
ZiB
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Sent from a phone.
