Anyone of a certain age knows that time, like some maniacal driver, accelerates as it passes. This year went by in a blink even though every worst-of-2025 horrible event seemed to last forever for a hot minute, until eclipsed by the next headline. Looking into my ProphecyMeter™, an AI app on my immobile device, I see a blur in the year ahead, so I know it’ll be quick.

I confess I feel more chronopathetic than ever as I enter the late innings of life. I’m grateful to still be in the game, a grizzled veteran who makes up in smarts for what he’s lost in speed, but when you’re slower than ever, everything else feels faster, the hands of the analog clock are sweeping more swiftly, more slippery than the sticky digits on the clock radio — I look up from the Times and it’s time for more bad news at the top of the hour, which I can’t wait to miss.

But it’s not news that’s consuming all the days and nights of our lives, it’s the timelessness of time itself, its illusory linearity when in fact it is nowhere and everywhere at all times and moving in all directions. “Time is a river without banks,” according to Marc Chagall in a painting I saw at MoMA maybe 60 years ago, when I was almost as young and bemused as I am now. A painter’s brushes may try to stop time, but it can’t be kept from rolling along like an old man in the middle of a Mississippi so wide he can’t see a bank on either side.

When I was little I had a hard time waiting for game time. I thought if I suited up a few hours ahead of time, it might come sooner — I couldn’t wait for the first pitch, I was a leadoff batter eager to get on base — but those hours slowed down somehow, until the game itself, which was even slower, or so it felt in the timeless bliss of the diamond.

Now time is running low and I don’t have time to talk to robots on the phone or waste time watching some video, downloading some app, clicking on some link that somebody sent, some antisocial media drain that will sink too much of my time. There’s too much to do in real life and not enough time to do it, too much to see on the street, too much to read and write and not enough hours in the day to make a dent.

Sometimes a stranger can briefly stop time with a smile, or a short-order cook can get your scrambled eggs out quicker than you can read the front page and take a few sips of coffee. What does slow time, for a while anyway, is a leisurely conversation over a meal with a friend. A lyric poem can put time on pause as you linger in its lines. A photo can give the illusion of freezing time. And a song you never wanted to end can be played again and again until you are lost in the time it takes you back to against all chronological laws.

You see where I’m going with this? Neither do I, but it’s about time, and at the same time extemporaneous, outside time, off the clock, scatting or rapping or rhyming or rambling or riffing nonstop until even the chatbots are lost for large languages to ransack because the data centers are aflame and have sucked up all the water that could’ve put them out.

Nothing moves in a straight line because the Earth is round, and the rate it turns makes the clocks run and brings the deadlines on. The game is a race against time, the scoreboard clock is counting down — but is time running out, or did it never run in and was there all the time, biding its time before the buzzer? If all time is eternally present, what time is it now? Half past late as I write and I can’t quit because I’m chasing something I can’t catch, what words can’t touch but I can’t stop, young as I am in geologic time, and old at the same time, working overtime, keeping time and also losing it, being time, living in the worst of times but the only times we have to make the best of, with plenty of time, all the time in the world, nothing but time.