One of the great bullshit hypotheticals, used to justify medieval barbarity that is both immoral and useless: the ticking time bomb scenario.   In this fantasy you have captured the insane fanatic who’s planted a powerful bomb somewhere where it will imminently kill thousands.  Make it a dirty bomb, or a suitcase nuke, even better, poised to take out two million innocent citizens in a major city.  You have the undeniably guilty guy, handcuffed to a chair, smirking, the bomb ticking away somewhere: what do you do?  You spend five seconds consulting your lawyers, who nod grimly and turn away, and then you do whatever it takes to get the insane fanatic to tell you where the bomb is hidden.

Of course, if it’s planted in Grand Central Station he’ll tell you St. Patrick’s Cathedral, send you up to the Bronx where the President, the Pope and dignitaries of all nations are visiting Poe Cottage.  It’s such a bullshit scenario it’s not even worth thinking about– if the guy is ready to die for what he believes is his cause, and knows the bomb is set to go off in twenty minutes, what’s his motivation to tell you the truth just because you’ve attached electrodes to his testicles?  The real terror of torture is that it will be endless.  Most fanatics can take twenty minutes of the worst you can dish out standing on their heads, naked in an icy room full of hissing snakes.

The real ticking time bomb is us, our lives.  Not that we’re going to explode, necessarily, the end, in the words of an immortal anti-Semitic poet, is as likely a whimper as a bang, but our personal extinction is certain.  That suspicious mole on my left leg just above the knee?  Too bad you didn’t have it looked at six months ago, the dermatologist will say, we could have saved the leg, your life.  Melanoma is treatable when it first appears– now you’d better start going through that mass of papers in your apartment, there may be time for a cruise with Sekhnet, if you schedule it today and make it a short one.  

A week stealthily turns into three weeks, to a month of Sundays, to the limit of human endurance.   Your great idea, the unwritten novel, the memoir…. pffffft.  For some the certainty of an unknowable end drives them to make the most of every moment.  For others, the vague dread causes them to steer as far from the heart of it as they can.  If I do not think about my death, well, maybe… oh, you know, I’d better stay busy!

I listened to another interview with a famous writer yesterday.  They very matter of factly discussed the prolific author’s bouts of depression, uncertainty, paralysis.  The lot of every creative, introspective person, it would appear– a certain amount of torment and self-doubt.  Most creative people are troubled, it seems, the greatest comedians are often tortured souls.  Are you surprised when a great poet puts her head in the oven?  The only surprise is the lack of a farewell note.  Not to bring up a sore subject, but, Bill Cosby, at the height of his fame, when he was a handsome rock star with a killer wit who could have any woman in the world, and in the years that followed, preferred his women unconscious.  I mean… what?  

The trick, I suppose, when trying to ride this impossibly high horse– the view from which often makes old friends invisible, they can’t be expected to understand the things that drive someone to practice arts they do not even try to sell– is to maintain a kindness toward oneself, toward the world.  Remain interested in others, be mild, do not complain, do not raise the lash over your own back for failures to move an impossibly heavy boulder endlessly up an endless hill.  

The clock is ticking, true, but it ticks in any case.   Set reasonable goals, take human bites.  The clock may well run out on you, as it does on us all, but succumbing to the pressure of the relentless ticking… as good an option as futilely torturing that sick fuck in the chair who smiles as you slice at him.  He ain’t telling you where the goddamn bomb is, Dick, no matter what your lawyers tell you about the tortured legality of the unspeakable things you are doing to him.