Bad Boomer's Place

But sometimes it seems to march very slowly. Today is Wednesday, and the work day is almost over. That leaves me with two work days left in my entire working life (at least that is the plan). My original retirement date was going to be the end of January. Then I agreed to stay until the end of February. Finally, I agreed to come back for last week and this week. The delays were the result of my company not being able to get a replacement for my position into place in time for me to do some training. In the end, it seems to have worked out for the best (at least for the company) because the candidate finally hired is very qualified and the best one that I've seen who applied for the position. However, for me the time seems to have slowed to a crawl these last two weeks. This got me to thinking about the nature of time in general, and reminds me of one of many mind-expanding thoughts I picked up from reading science fiction. Edgar Rice Burroughs, the author most famous for his Tarzan series of books, also has a shorter series that started with a book called "At the Earth's Core." The primary premise of the series was that the Earth was hollow, and there were habitable lands on the inside, where the centrifugal force of the spinning of the Earth provided a gravity-like weight to everything living there, and a ball of fire at the very center of the Earth provided a sun. Thus, if you dug straight down from the surface of our Earth, instead of eventually coming out in China, you would instead pop out much sooner in this land of many animals, plants, people, and other species unknown up here on the surface of the Earth (including intelligent species). That concept, of a hollow earth with people on the inside, is an astounding idea in itself, but Burroughs goes on in the 7 or 8 books of the series to blow my mind with some really radical concepts. For instance, the single ball of fire in the center of the Earth not only provides a sun, but a stationary sun. This means that, everywhere in that land, it is ALWAYS 12:00 noon. No night time, no moving of the sun across the sky, just 12:00 noon all the time. Still not a mind-blowing idea that this point, but then in his story, Burroughs has his two primary characters captured and held in a city, where the older one discovers a library and sits down to do some research to see if he can learn about this world and their captors. The younger one says he will be right back and goes to explore the city. In doing so, the younger one manages to escape and the story follows him through several adventures that have to have taken weeks. Then he gets re-captured and taken to the same city. He goes to find his friend who never escaped and finds him in the same library. He comes in and yells something like "Hey, I'm back!" Then the older man turns and says "But, you just left!" Wow! The concept that my young mind here had to expand to consider is the idea that, if there is no way to tell the passing of time, time ceases to exist! Chew on that one for a while! Of course, we have all been so engrossed in something that we experienced what seemed to be the loss of minutes or hours, but weeks! Man! Burroughs also managed to slip in some pretty radical social comments once in a while as well. If I remember right, in this same series, the younger man is on an ocean and gets captured by a tribe of black people who are isolated on an island. They have never seen a white man before, and immediately assume that he is inferior! LOL! Consider that this was written around 1922, and you can see that this might be a controversial story! BB