My Current Read:

Salman Rushdie - Midnight's Children

Wednesday

Meaning From A Calendar


I have a quote-of-the-day calendar from George Carlin. One of those deals where you pull off a page each day, reading something the dearly-departed comedian had to say while contributing to the environmental crisis by sacrificing nine square inches of paper for each day's quote.

Sometimes I think that if Christmas didn't fall right before the new year, the calendar business would have imploded...
many many years ago. Either that, or the new year would be forced to begin the month after whenever the new Christmas was, in order to keep the calendar industry afloat. Friends, do not allow yourselves to be taken as a dunce. The new year could just as easily begin in April, for all I know. In this generation of fools, April may well be a more appropriate time to begin a year.

This aside, the point I am making is that there is no check-point in our orbit around the sun, which we pass at the stroke of midnight on January 1st. Simply the fact that 2010 will begin in Madrid when you are having dinner in Miami should set off your suspicions instantly. Those damn Mayans with their freaking drop-off calendars... all that probably happened is that the People took time-keeping back into their hands and drove the Calendar Kingpins right off the Yucatan Peninsula. Eat your heart out, 2012.



But I have got carried away from the original point: I wonder, as I mark the passage of each day by pulling another sheet off this conspiracy-stimulator, whether it would be fair to make judgments about the world and about others based on the selected George Carlin quote for that day.

Obviously, the con-men behind this whole calendar business have quite a bit of weight to throw around in their influence of our entire year, so perhaps they have some {insight+wisdom} into their choice of quotes to put on certain days. For example, if your birthday fell on April 9th, George would have had this to say:
If someone says, "Have a nice weekend," I never say, "You too." Because I never know if, perhaps, by the time the weekend rolls around, I will have other plans for that person. Come Friday, I may wish to have them slain.
So what could I take from a thing like this, if a person near to me had the birthday of April 9th? Would I be correct in making assumptions? People take literally far more obscure instructions every day (see: the world's problems), so might I be half-reasonable in assuming my Aries co-worker may have a somewhat malevolent disposition?
Or at the very minimum, an issue in maintaining a consistency of opinions?

Perhaps deeper meaning could be derived from George's August 6th quote saying:
Do you ever fall asleep in the late afternoon and wake up after dark, and for a moment you can't figure out what day it is? You actually find yourself thinking, Could this be yesterday?
I, for one, would find myself drawn to an individual with such a convoluted and curious line of inquisition. Maybe this early-August born comrade even is hiding a Flux Capacitor in a shoebox under his pillow and I would do well to ransack his home to find these hidden treasures. Huzzah!

Finally, there was my birthday:
You will be ruined by copyright infringement, you delinquent. You cannot post my quotes on your blog without paying the Calendar Kingpins dearly for your use of their work. A pound of flesh, a limb, or your soul...
I had no idea what in tarnation George meant by that until today.




1 comment:

  1. wow. you're a special guy, Jordan Mandel.
    hehe ... was wondering what you were up to the other day. glad you sent me an email. now I know!
    just kidding, hope all is well with you.
    I'm in town for the holidays. You still in T.O??

    ReplyDelete