Have a Coke, I guess
Although my mother insists this can’t possibly be true, when I was a kid, whenever I got home from school, I would have a Coca Cola. In my house the soda was always stored in the garage and came out of those big cardboard 24 packs. Garage soda is powerful because it’s a calendar. I could for example tell we were in the warmer months because the soda was nice and room temperature. And although all soda was at least basically effective as a primitive time-telling tool, Coca Cola measured time with greater precision because of all the different stuff they did with the cans and bottles. If the soda was coming out of bottles with yellow caps, I knew it was Passover; if the can had a bear on it, it was the holiday season.
I don’t live in a house any longer, so the soda doesn’t come out of a poorly insulated garage. That does not mean, however, that it stopped telling the time.
Like a year ago I was sitting in a cafeteria with a friend of mine and we were debating the broad strokes of human society. I recall a moment of erudition where I pointed over to the Coca Cola vending machine.
“Just look at that– you just have to know it’s never going away.”
My buddy wasn’t so sure, but when I ran into him an hour later he was drinking a Coke. What you need to understand is that while you’re busy trying to tie yourself to a makeshift raft built out of old windbreakers you zipped together, Coca Cola is a supertanker moored a half mile off the coast. The sea can do whatever it wants; that soda isn’t going anywhere.
This is not to say that anyone’s life can reasonably be defined as the time between Coca Colas– that would seem to imply that it even notices when you deign to drink it. What I’m actually trying to say is that you can discern where you are situated in time based on your proximity to Coke.
You age and love and then you die and then eventually your great-great grandchildren drink the same fizzy poison that never changes in any meaningful way. You’re not the center of anything.
If time is a human construct, doomed to sputter out along with the last gasp of the last man, I suspect that man will be clutching a can of Coke.