A common phrase. “We have all the time in the world.”

Of course we know that isn’t true, no one has, and it isn’t even possible.

The notion is that “the world” in this context means infinite, and time is infinite.

We all know that isn’t true, and by “we all” I’m referring to the time when people, everybody, knew things because they knew how to think, and did. They also knew how to read, and did, which gave them something to think about. We used to read books. Now we have the internet.

Ideas can go in several directions sometimes at once, which keeps your head spinning. We use phrases like clichés. “Time is running out.” What does that even mean? Is time like gasoline in the tank and we’re running on empty? Is time “like a river,” “over the dam,” like water “down the drain”?

Or is it “a race for time” and we’re losing? Is there a stitch in it?

Even Buzz Lightyear, not known for perspicacity, uttered his catch phrase as he flew into it, “To Infinity, and Beyond!”

Did he know what he was saying? Was he “smarter than he looked?”

If infinity is really infinite, then it’s endless and there’s no beyond. Time is like the universe, which is everything there is or ever was or ever will be or could be.

But then we have the notion that someone called God is outside the universe and time and got lonely all by Himself and created the universe so He would have something to do and someone to play with.

We talk about “multiple universes.” Do we “know what we’re saying?” Do we mean what we say?

When I wrote a poem about “Black Holes” and sent a copy to Stephen Hawking and he wrote back through his secretary that he found my poem “interesting,” I realized that we were both on the same wavelength.

Are we little bobble heads, do our heads keep spinning as we look at all sides and possibilities?

No wonder people say, “It only hurts when you think,” so they stop thinking.

I, myself, am often the victim of introspection. Too often. Not often enough.

But, “when you think about it,” you think about it.

Can you think too much? Oh yes, I think so. Like people who drink too much, and have to “go on the wagon.” In times of temperance (we do have a temperate climate), it’s the “band wagon.”

I was going to say, “I digress,” except that I not only “haven’t gotten to the point,” I haven’t identified what the point is.

Oh, yes, now I remember, the point is fleeting as if it has wings, so the point must be…

Time.

Which, apparently, I own, since people say, “Take your time,” and “Your time is my time,” and “If I only had the time,” and “Do you have the time?”

And…

Memory, that search engine, “takes me back” to the beginning of this ramble scramble. I was thinking about TV.

Specifically one program in particular.

Back in the Old Days, when everyone except me had a TV, so I wasn’t part of my own generation, and they went from black and white to color, multi-color where everything looked more beautiful but the edges weren’t as sharp, I’ve “made up for lost time” by watching re-runs.

They say, “Everything old is new again.” For me, leave out “again.” I’m a first-timer. I’m experiencing “déjà vu.” I myself am a “contradiction in terms,” a walking talking cliché.

Those early days of television gave us so many thought-starters, like a talking horse, when my Mother was a Car.

And Sci-Fi leaped into the breach from print to screen and we had whole series of “The Outer Limits” and “The Twilight Zone.”

People who thought and wrote could now put it on screen. Rod Serling had a name so close to mine by one letter that we were almost brothers.

People were learning science. Like electricity. It was everywhere. Paranoid old ladies covered the wall outlets at night so electricity couldn’t get out while they were asleep. Some put bowls of water on the floor so when electricity came out it would drink and go back in, because everyone knows about electricity and water.

Before AI was born, still in the egg, Sci-Fi people gave us beaucoup episodes, like the one where all the electric appliances in the house decided they were being mistreated and ganged up on the owner, the telephone, the TV, the lamp, the kitchen blender, the electric clock, all went after him and the program ended in screams.

Or that famous episode on The Twilight Zone. Our Hero, Burgess Meredith, who finally got top billing because there was nobody left on earth after a nuclear war and he was “the last man on earth” and liked to read and was a bookworm with thick reading glasses and was in the basement on lunch break when the bomb fell and came out and found everybody and everything was gone and he was on the steps of the New York Public Library where the books are and said happily now he had (the title of the episode) “Time Enough at Last” to read, and then he dropped his glasses and they broke. The internet says this is the most popular episode of the series, a lesson to “be careful what you wish for.”

If I was still teaching, I would show the episode to my class as an example of “irony.”

Then the Old School Teacher Lady next door who follows the rules and teaches to the test, would rush in and say, “You’re showing movies in the classroom?!?!”

And I would say, “That’s the way the world is.”