What Is Time? [Part One : Killin' Time]
The opening essay in a series where I search for an answer and stumble into many.
-🏴☠️-Short Story-🏴☠️-
“Killin’ Time”
Between Topsham and nowhere, I found myself driving the long way home.
My classic country playlist was rolling, straight 80s and 90s, back before hick-hop and radio glitter took over. Just steel guitars, heartbreak, and whiskey wisdom holding a mirror up to a life like mine. I haven’t had a drop in years, but the memory still lingers. Beneath the lyrics was the hum of fresh mud tires on pavement and the occasional tick of gravel pinging off the undercarriage.
The road curved through pine rows and fields lit up with that blinding spring green, the kind that still looks wet with life. Sunlight flickered through the trees like a busted film reel, broken, but still playing. I didn’t mind. That kind of road’s always been my reset button.
Doesn’t matter the zip code. Could be Africa, the Middle East, Europe, Texas, the Carolinas, Montana, or here in Maine. Give me a back road cutting through open land and I’m good. Rolling hills or baked desert flats, either one. No crowds and quiet. That’s where I can breathe. That’s where the noise in my head has room to stretch its legs.
The girls were at school. My wife was at work. I had a few hours to burn and no one needing anything from me. It was me, the road, and whatever memory decided to take the wheel.
There wasn’t a sign. No big moment. Just a song. Clint Black’s Nobody’s Home1. One of those tracks that hits too true if you’ve ever looked in the mirror and seen a stranger staring back.
I was singing along like I always do, voice somewhere between karaoke cowboy and truck stop philosopher: “Move slowly to my dresser drawers,
Put my blue jeans on, Find my cowboy boots, my button down, Strap my timepiece on my arm...”
Then it hit. That subtle shift and slow drift where a lyric stops being a song and starts being a starting point of a rabbit hole. The kind of thought that starts as a whisper, then hijacks the wheel and reroutes the whole day.
I started thinking about how many country songs are honky-tonk philosophical masterpieces. Simple words, deep cuts. That line, “my timepiece on my arm”, got my mind going. Here’s this guy going through his mindless old routine, marking Time by habit. The album’s called Killin’ Time. It isn’t even subtle.
That’s when my brain cracked open. Like Hank Williams’ ghost showed up riding shotgun, flask in hand, passing it back to George Jones, whispering, you see it now, son?
Yeah. I saw it. And just like that, the race is on: “And here comes pride up the backstretch. Heartaches are goin' to the inside...”2
And I started to wonder, what if all I’ve been doing is killin’ Time?
Not in the poetic sense. I mean literally. A slow spiral where a single thought takes over, and you’re along for the ride.
I couldn’t explain Time anymore. Not with any confidence. Not without sounding like I’d inhaled too many burn pits or read too much Camus.
Ask me what happened between 18 and now? Hell, ask me to map out all 41 years? Good luck. It’s like someone ripped half the pages out of my book and taped the rest out of order. Some parts? Crystal clear. Too clear. Like they never stopped happening. Others? Static. Blank tape.
Then I laughed. Out loud. In the truck. My dog, Dixie, gave me that slow side eye like, not again, here we go.
Have I been floating this whole Time? Just a vessel counting ticks while the world moved on? What if memory is all that’s left and even that’s a shifty bastard?
This wasn’t some passing thought. This was me, sitting in a truck with scars older than my... wait, how do I know they’re older? Older implies Time passed. Shit.
And that’s the thing, my memories feel more like time-capsules than time-machines. I can’t go back. I can only replay the parts that stuck.
Some memories come back too sharp, set off by a scent, a sound, a flash of light through the trees. Sharp enough to cut. Others? Birthdays. Conversations. Whole blocks of life… gone. Like I never lived them at all.
People fill in the blanks. Show me photos. Tell me stories. But if I wasn’t present, if I didn’t record it myself, how do I know Time really passed for me?
Sure, it passed for someone. But was I there? Did I lose Time? Or did Time never exist in the way we think it does?
And right there, on that half empty highway, I realized I didn’t have an answer. No mission brief. No sitrep. No tidy summary. Just a question that hit harder than I’d anticipated.
Was Time stolen from me? Was it buried deep for my own protection?
Or was it never mine to begin with, just borrowed and slowly fading?
Maybe memory is the only evidence I was ever there. Maybe it’s not about the seconds or years, but the weight a moment leaves behind. And maybe that’s why some memories won’t die, while others vanish like they were never real.
I pulled off onto a turnout, let the truck idle, windows down.
The hum of the engine, classic country music twanging, and the sharp quiet of the pines.
The kind of quiet that doesn’t fill you, it hollows you out, makes space for something authentic to take hold.
I watched the trees bend slightly in the breeze and thought:
What if Time isn’t passing?
What if it’s waiting?
Waiting for me to name it.
Waiting for me to make sense of it.
Waiting for me to stop running from it.
Just the same damn question, folding in on itself:
What is Time, really?
-🏴☠️-Essay-🏴☠️-
Over the next month or so, I’m diving deep into a question that’s haunted me quietly for years, and hit like a freight train on a back road not long ago: What is Time?
Not in the classroom sense. Not in the Instagram cliché, “time is a flat circle” sense. And definitely not in some recycled academic jargon. When it comes to the scientific side, I’m not claiming originality. Those ideas belong to the physicists and neuroscientists. But I’ll make damn sure it’s interesting. This isn’t about sounding smart. It’s about pulling Time down from the clouds and dragging it through the mud. A full spectrum, boots on the ground dive through lived experience, personal scars, and actual research. I’ve spent weeks digging through studies, asking the questions most people avoid, and dragging my own story into the light to figure out why Time feels like both a thief and a gift.
I’ll be writing through the lens of a veteran who’s lived on borrowed Time. A father trying to slow it down. A husband trying to stay present. And a man who, more often than he likes to admit, wonders how much Time he has left.
You’ll see influences from Absurdism and Stoicism, not as buzzwords, but as lived philosophy. I’ve bled through those pages, not just read them. These ideas helped me survive what came after chaos, when structure collapsed and the clock kept ticking anyway.
We’ll hit the science too, but don’t worry, I won’t talk to you like a TED Talk dropout. Just enough to crack open some big ideas: entropy, relativity, quantum clocks, the way trauma rewires memory and perception, and the idea that maybe, just maybe, Time isn’t even fundamental. Maybe it’s emergent. Maybe it’s us.
Then we’ll hit the philosophy. Camus. Marcus Aurelius. Heidegger. Nietzsche. Maybe even some lesser known ghosts with real teeth. Not to name drop, but to wrestle with the same questions they did, questions we’ve all felt but never had the Time or guts to ask.
From there, I’ll shift into metaphor, because sometimes metaphor tells the truth better than language does. Time as terrain. As a warden. As a place. As a ghost. As a thing we carry in our bodies and memories. Something we age with. Something we bury. Something that never really leaves.
Then it gets personal. Time that stretched forever during chaos and disappeared during the quiet years that followed. The veteran lens matters here, not because it’s mine, but because it breaks the illusion. It shows you what Time really does to a mind that’s been rewired by chaos. The holes. The loops. The missing pages. That version of Time isn’t on a syllabus.
Eventually, I’ll try to offer my answer. Not a definitive one. Not a tidy one. But the kind you arrive at after walking through the fire and coming out the other side with your eyes open. I’ll talk about how I see Time now, how I’ve come to understand it, misunderstand it, and maybe, finally, make peace with it.
And if you’ve ever felt like the past still has its hooks in you, or that Time moves differently when you’ve seen too much and survived too long, then you’re not alone. We’ve got space for you here, Under The Crooked Tree.
So tell your friends. Share it if it stirs something in you. This isn’t about algorithms or follower counts. This is about trying to make sense of the world and what comes after. This entire series has helped me understand things I’ve wrestled with for years. And I believe, with everything I’ve got left, that it’ll help others too. Not because it’s soft or comforting. But because I’ve stared down what Time becomes when it wraps around your throat and I’ve tried to rip the teeth out of it. By the end of this, you’ll feel emotions you thought were buried, and you might even laugh at how ridiculous Time looks through lenses that still don’t make sense to me. But they’re real. And sometimes, leaning into the absurd is the only honest thing left to do.
And I’ll leave you with Clint Black’s reminder:
There's no time to kill between the cradle and the grave
Father time still takes a toll on every minute that you save
Legal tenders never gonna change the number of your days
The highest cost of livin' is dying, that's one everybody pays
So have it spent, before you get the bill, there’s no time to kill.3
Spread the Word.
If anything I’ve written here or before has made you stop and think, share it. Tell your friends about Under The Crooked Tree. Share the series, share the questions, hell, share the confusion if it helps someone else feel less alone in it.
This isn’t about chasing algorithms or building a subscriber count. It’s not about baited guilt trips or clickbait headlines. It’s about building a space where we can wrestle with the chaos, the quiet, and the questions that never quite let go.
I’m not here to sell answers. I’m here to search for them. There’s plenty of shade Under the Crooked Tree. Pull up a chair. Let someone else know it’s here too.
Just hit 40. Not sure how I'd define time. Interested to see what you come up with. From this inflection point I aim to stop looking back searching for explanations and intend to look forward seeking to add to the hope I have been given so far. :)