Torii Kiyomasu II:
Susano-o no Mikoto Killing the Eight-headed Dragon (1748)

"…ressurect something crutially important in me by Killing off some of my extra time."

I arrived at the venue an hour and a half early. The annual Chamber Music Festival had started the night before with a string quartet delivering Benjamin Britten, starting at six o’clock. I had presumed, without confirming, that the Friday evening performance at a different venue would start at the same time, but I was wrong. The festival organizer approached me, asking if I felt as though I’d arrived a little early, since nobody but the two of us and that night’s quintet were present, the quintet warming up with a little Mahler on the makeshift stage. He welcomed me to stay and listen to the sound check, but I ducked out the door instead, heading back to The Schooner, which I’d left in a remarkably great parking spot.

I had some time to kill. I know, KillingTime’s just an aphorism, but there are times that, however regrettably, time needs killing. When I’m lying on my deathbed, counting my last seconds, I might find time to regret all the time I will have killed by then, but in practice, every second is not precious. Some seconds sure seem like excess, just too much in that moment. The myth of life insists that we shouldn’t waste a second of it, but all time isn’t equally treasured. Some unavoidably gets left over, selvage, not really usefully employed. I suppose I could always, if I were Horatio Alger, use bits of apparent excess time to accomplish something, start writing an epic poem, or something that might further my legacy, but in practice, I could sometimes use a few minutes for nothing. I could use a little time out, so I return some time unused to the gods who doled it out. Thanks, I whisper, but you gave me too much.

Though I’ve been dedicating myself to Unscrolling, I’ve stumbled into one of the perfect times to engage in some scrolling. Scrolling proves to be the ideal time waster, if not necessarily a malevolent TimeKiller. This distinction might not matter, for the difference between wasting and killing seems indiscernible where time’s concerned. Neither yields anything refundable. Life sometimes proves fully capable of sidestepping time, of seemingly escaping its otherwise inexorable grasp. Focusing upon something mindless, or even focusing on something mindful, for a few moments, can render time invisible. A minute might as well equal an hour or an hour a second; the distinction seems and is indiscernible then. I will have nothing to show for my investment. I will leave no richer or poorer for the distraction. I might return renewed, though, refreshed from a brief break from the otherwise inexorable forward march. I dabbled in a few moments of timelessness, which, of course, can never be accurately measured in moments, seconds, minutes, or hours lost or otherwise forfeited.

Let the accountants and auditors try to determine the differences. I slipped back to The Schooner only to enter that overly familiar world I usually only enter at home. My phone provides access to the usual gang of brilliant idiots that, in other circumstances, might seem like thieves of my time. I freely part with some of mine this time, feeling a little heavy in my watch arm that evening. I toss away three-quarters of an hour as if it were a used Klennex®, then enter the venue a little lighter than I’d earlier exited. I’d reset my evening by shaving off a little lingering afternoon, leaving just the perfect amount of room for an evening hour of chamber music, performed in a winery’s huge, echoy production room, surrounded by more than a hundred huge oakwood casks stacked to the ceiling along the side. A fan kept switching on and off as the group performed, sparking the double bass player to remark that they were being accompanied by the sound of winemaking in the background. The motors seemed to operate in perfect synchronization with the music, though, time being somehow perfectly aligned across two radically different contexts for that time.

The rest of my evening unfolded swimmingly. With that time trimmed and rudely thrown away, I felt as though I’d just had a first-class haircut and shave. I felt discernibly lighter and in extraordinarily good humor. I suspect that I sometimes suffer from some undiagnosed excess of time, that it’s grown overly heavy in my hands and therefore less than useless. Then I might reasonably treat some as excess and pursue some strategy for killing some off before it smothers some essential part of me. If I can drown in too much water, I suppose that I might also be capable of smothering under the influence of too much time. Then, I might usefully revive my nascent scrolling habit and thereby resurrect something crucially important in me by killing off some of my extra time.

©2026 by David A. Schmaltz - all rights reserved

Tags: #Unscrolling, #PureSchmaltz