The Interminable Wait For a Bus

MTA bus (photo:trainrider10)

It’s interesting that seemingly long distances which require concomitantly long durations of time to traverse are all mere flashes in the pan when looked at in a cosmic setting. The force of dark energy which is causing expansion is, for example, making the multiverse an increasingly dark place, with the light from distant bodies taking ever greater periods of time to reach any particular point in space. Compare that to waiting for the bus on one of those freezing cold February days when every minute feels like an eternity or trying to get to sleep when you’re suffering from insomnia and time itself becomes an agent of unrest, if not insanity. Recorded history may account for 5000 years which, if you imagine time as a yardstick, would not earn a visible notch and yet no one can believe that it’s taking so long for a simple order of spaghetti to come, when the kitchen in the local Italian place is working at capacity. When they’re happening travails that turn out to be inconsequential and are largely forgotten seem like the voice of a great tenor who commands the stage. A charismatic personality can take the air out of a room though the building in which they're contained will itself one day fall into disrepair. “Look at my Works, ye Mighty, and despair! Nothing beside remains,” says Shelley’s Ozymandias. Relatively speaking the seas are never wide nor the time it takes to cross them interminable, no matter how unending the voyage may feel like. And then there's Keats’ Grecian Urn, which is timeless.