Time becomes meaningless when you have voices in your head.

So I was on time for once the other day. Unless being twenty minutes early isn't on time which I guess it isn't. This sort of thing happens to me all the time, if I am a little late on the way to somewhere the transportation I take will be slower than usual. It doesn't matter if I take a cab or the subway or even walk. I get a cabdriver who seems to be trying for the Hackie Good Conduct Medal, I get a series of trains which A) stop because of an a)train in front of them, b) sick passenger or c) absolutely no reason whatsoever, just because or B) run, but run so slowly that you can read the graffiti on the tunnel walls or C) never arrive. Okay, never is a long time, but no trains coming until the platform contains the same number of people as Yankee stadium holds - that's a long time.

The reverse is also true. If I leave for someplace a little early, I get the cab with the Jet/Assist Rockets mounted on the sides driven by a man who is incensed that there is anyone else on the streets and that they would have the nerve, the gall, the disrespect, to try and be ahead of him. I arrive at the restaurant, movie, museum gallery at least thirty minutes ahead of everyone else.
At a restaurant you can get yourself an early drink, you still look like a loser, but you can have a sip or two before anyone else arrives You look at your Palm, write something down about cabs and being early, look around at the tvs and realize this is why no one is ever early in this town. At the museum, forgetaboutit, you hang around in the lobby, near the tickets booth, while the matrons give you the nervous eye or you wander back to the coat check area hoping to eat up some time or you actually look at the stuff that is so unimportant that it is hanging on the walls near the coat check area. "Wow, here is a portrait of a man who made a lot of money importing flax. um. And here's is another one of the same guy." It occurs to you that you may have said this out loud and you don't have any type of electronic device shoved up against your ear so you put your Palm near your mouth but by this time the other museum visitors are giving you the same radarscan looks and holding on to their children's hands until the kid starts shaking it in pain. You walk briskly back to the tickets booth area and continue to stand around like a bird on a wire. I left a museum in Paris once and walked around the block, twice, rather than stand around.

That was before I discovered Audiobooks. Now I lean against a wall and listen to the novelist or the scientist or the politician drone on about love, intelligence or er, intelligence. Time becomes meaningless when you have voices in your head. Pi tries again to sleep with Richard Parker lolling in the lifeboat inches away. The backpacker's partner reports he has pitched and ditched most of the good foodstuffs on his way up the hill. The brain's ability to use memory patterns to recognize and relate to new patterns is explained. Anton Scalia intones his view, sour, of children thinking that the Constitutional is a living document.

Oh, the train.