Clocks
Heavy rain. SA is napping; SE is swapping out our modem.
I like clocks. I always have. I like the way they look, the way they work, and the way they sound. Ticking doesn’t cause me anxiety; instead, it gives me comfort. Maybe that’s because a clock is never going to run faster than time, whereas your mind is capable of lying to you about how quickly you are running out of it. A ticking clock is like a heartbeat. I know it won’t last forever, but it will last as long as the life of the vessel, and that’s good enough.
Part of the purpose of this journal is so I can work on simpler writing. I heard Paul Ford talking about how he’d like to design software not to maximize a user’s time within it, but to maximize a user’s time outside of it — to help them get things done quickly so they can go back to their lives. Kind of the antithesis of the current state of software, which seems to be designed for us to live in. When I heard this, I thought a similar approach to writing would be good: to write so that readers spend less time with my words and more time with my ideas.
Written by Christopher Butler on
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