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The 4th DI-mension Daniel P. Beckmann, Moderator of Letters 02.05.03-Denman, NSW AUSTRALIA & Kyoto JAPAN |
Right now we’ve got 4, count em’ 4 DI-mensions on planet earth: Length, Width, Height, and Time (the 5th having gone up, up and away in a beautiful balloon).
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We Humans generally only focus on the first three dimensions, because these are the ones that a single person can see by themselves without the aid of any additional smoke and mirrors. I would like to spend some time, on time, the often misunderstood, yet equally important 4th DI-mension<-(echo…echo.. |
Let me clarify: Every person has this 4th DI-mension, and it is the part of you, that often others can plainly see, but you just can’t. For instance, the 4th DI-mension is displayed for Janice when her friend Yolanda questions:
Whether Yolanda’s right or wrong, she is referring to Janice’s 4th DI-mension, and the answer to her question is that Janice can’t possibly see that side of her for herself firsthand.Another:
Again %25 of all DI-mensions, the 4th does exist. If everyone could see their 4th DI-mension in real-time, oh, what an interesting place this would be, but they can’t, at least not naturally or without the aid of some foreign object. The most kid-tested and mother apporved(R) method of viewing this lost DI-mension acurately requires no telescope, stethoscope, nor any ascope. No, viewing simply requires enough time to ponder in retrospect and/or forward guessing.But the 4th DI-mension is in reference to time, and from my vantage point, looking down the life lines of most Americans as a 22 year-old from the old to the new, I can’t help realizing a phenomenon that was first realized in my 9th grade. My good friend Mark and I, this time along with some other rif-raf, were sent out to Mr. Rotundo’s room across the hall to be sequestered from the class of which title I can’t remember, for a reason that-for some reason, presently evades me (Something that may be of interest is that this sequestering was the exact same way that my friend Mark and I originally met back in the 4th grade which helped to produce the early tomarken object of The Robots Vs. The Programmers , if the judges only knew that their sequestering would create so many future tomarken exercises-when I have kids I may just cut to the chase and favor sequestering from the beginning).Mark made the comment that a day seemed to be taking up a lot less time these days. I recalled a time in the 1st grade when it felt like a school day took like an entire week or possibly much longer. Now a day of school seemed to just take a day to finish. You see the 1st grade was indeed the first time in my life that I had to be up an entire day with no naps we had postulated-days before then would fly by as I would sleep at least half of them away. Regardless, as our conference was coming to an end just before the 11:10 AM chime-chime for lunch, all of us generally agreed that indeed time was moving much faster for us-this agreement confirmed by K.C. Colwell, of whom always waited to throw in his affirmation to make sure that he was agreeing with the popular sentiment of the crew at large, thus casting the measure into stone (on another topic, Mr. Colwell during these days had a striking likeness to that of an Idaho Potato?we were in Ohio-also the "K" in K.C. stood for Kirk {after the captain} of which you were never allowed to call him, the "C" of course was redundantly for Colwell).
Recently I tested our convention’s premise again to see where I was at. I already believed that I was at the point where time was moving so fast that even if I stayed up 24 hours, it would be impossible to come close to getting all of my ‘stuff’ done, but I wasn’t quite sure if time was actually speeding up now since the 9th grade. So recently I booked a slow, almost cross-continental train trip across the smallest continent of Australia from Perth (pronounced Pith) to Adelaide that would take 2 entire days overnight in one seat for the whole entire time. There’s only one track running across the island continent which meant the train stopped whenever a more important freight train had to get Vegimite® to some Vitamin B deprived Aussie kids with smiles. There would only be three stops on the whole thing, one of which was in the town of Cook, population 4, that was only a stop to pick up water and these moderately tasty yet stale corn chips with nacho cheese and salsa combo packs for the train’s commissary (I won’t mention the other two stops that were not worth the mentioning).
The train rolled out of Perth East Station late at about 10:55 AM on Friday and into Adelaide North Station at around 6:15 AM. I sat in my chair most of the time, and with the exception of reading some pages from my George Stephnopolous book entitled "All Too Human" as if deny that he is indeed a Martian and hangin’ in the smoking car at the back of the train to endure some Aussie nonsensical nonsense that you can always find one of them blokes somewhere engaging in somewhat patriotically….The whole trip felt just about as long as flying three hours down to DisneyWorld® in sunny Orlando, Florida when I was four years old. Sure, it wasn’t too comfortable, it took a long time, but eventually it just ended and I hadn’t even finished the past the part about George and Monica Lewinsky!
So what in-THE-hell is going on here? Is the universe contracting to the point where the 4th DI-mension is getting crushed so much that we all are experiencing this phenomenon of time moving faster no matter what age we current reside in?
While this is probably the truth which means it must have been real s-l-o-w for those who were reared in those fabulous fifties…I would like to humor a different theory and here goes it.
I was the smartest when I started out on this planet and over the years of assimilation, my life, as well as the lives of many others have become less interesting. There are less events to be recorded with such awe as our days on this planet grow greater in number, cause we’ve been told "we’ve been there done that", and "git back to work."
In the end, it is youth that has any time to see the 4th DI-mension anymore. Oh, there may be a time sometime later down the road, I think we all might hope, when things will start to slow enough to the point where we may again see that 4th DI-mension again too. We can ask the old people, with all their wisdom, if that’ll ever happen, but maybe it just gets to damn fast by their point, that they can’t even grab a hold of whether they’ve told you about the 4th or not, heck they may even need notes to remember their 1st, 2nd, and 3rd.
So I walk around this ancient city of Kyoto-I just got to ride naked in an elevator going up in a bathhouse of which I was the only one who spoke English (they were worried that I didn’t adequately wash before going in the tubs and they were probably right to be concerned). It’s a cold February day. I’m 22 years old and when I return to the United States after traveling around the world heading east in search of all the new senses that one can have in such a trip, on the only planet in this collapsing galaxy that us smart humans are capable of sensing and having the opportunity to maybe live to tell about it, I will have concluded my streak of formalized assimilation of Length X Width X Height which began 19 years ago. 19 years from now I will be 42 years old.
You wanna see the 4th Dimension?
People who are older than me right now seem awfully stupid to me. They see this world in terms of Length X Width X Height and most can only see as far as the 3 Dimensions directly in front of them. They seem like they can only talk about that world-the way in which they only see it and they like to repeat their version often as if that’s all the script they were given. Their little piece of the world becomes their total reality and they may try to suggest sometimes–even forcibly upon others–that their perspective of the Length X Width X Height is most worth noting…worth assimilating into others through means of their factories many of which in the Great Lakes regions, are often fashioned of red bricks.
As opposed to familiar faces, what may indeed greet me when I return to the shores of the United States is that starting at age 24, which is when I believe the cells start to reproduce less and less and I stop expanding, I may too develop what some scientists believe to be actual physical ruts of routine pathways in my brain. After a 5 month absence, I may find that these ruts may have already started to form in noggins of many of my contemporaries.
I will fight them as I always have. Experience has shown that some have fought already, others haven’t tried, yet results of results of these efforts on either side of the battle are surprisingly and fortunately quite varied. Still, in the doctrine of our esteemed leader, let this be my notice to the world as to where I stand and the world shall have to take my position as is–like it or not. I’m not only going to fight 3 Dimensional viewing, I’m also currently looking to enlist some other fellow compodres in my struggle for the life-long exposition of the essential 4th.
The world moves fast enough as it is, I can’t bear to think of what it might be like when a week’s a month, a month’s a year. So now I hope you will now understand why it is that I run 7 to 15 minutes late.
-Contributor’s Note-
If you can tell by the date that this has actually been posted, you will see that I have held this object for more than four months while I have been back in the United States. In that time I have traveled coast-to-coast, looked at my contemporaries that I knew before I left and how they’ve developed during the five months that I was away-most of them when I left were at a similar crossroads to the point that I was at when this was written, although some are behind, others are of course, ahead. I asked a lot of questions as I always do–the most recurring was that of whether or not most believed that our brains were indeed about to start shrinking and that we were doomed to repeat the same stories that we knew over and over again like so many displayed in front of us. During my assessment of most of my contemporaries I came to the conclusion that while the brain may indeed begin to start shrinking(not necessarily physically mind you), it is a person’s lifestyle choice as to whether or not this will have dramatic effect on them(since apparently humans don’t use most of their brains anyway and Dr. Yarrum says humans have Too Much Brain Power to know what to do with and he’s a lot more experienced than most of you and I). The individual results in each case truly depend upon what makes a person feel comfortable and at this point, irregardless of their past, some run for the umbrella of monotony. The conclusion that I have come up with is that when your patterns do indeed begin to freeze at around age 24(for most with cell production beginning to slow down), you have the choice to freeze in a manner in which you always produce different and unforeseen variables out of your mechanized process or you have the option to purchase the patterns of your life at your local K-Mart®, either way, the process for each individual is as easy as its always been. I hope that the preceeding has given you some DI-rection
06.13.03-(Georgetown) Washington, DC
