Losing Time in the Belly of the Beast

Time is a slippery bastard. It slips between your fingers like motor oil on a hot engine, and by the time you notice, the whole goddamn day is gone. I’ve always had a strange relationship with time, sometimes it feels like a predator stalking me in the shadows, other times it’s the only thing keeping me from being swallowed whole by the void.

But there are moments, rare, electric moments, when time just… vanishes. Poof. No clocks, no deadlines, no ticking in the back of my skull like some sadistic metronome. Just pure immersion in the thing at hand.

It happens when I’ve got a camera in my grip and the light hits just right. One minute I’m crouched in the dirt, waiting for a hawk to take flight, and the next it’s three hours later and my legs are numb. The forest changes in those hours. The shadows crawl like living things, the air grows heavy, and suddenly I realize I haven’t eaten or blinked properly in what feels like forever. That’s when I know I’ve gone feral, chasing shots like a junkie hunting for the next high.

It happens when I write too. The words pour out like a busted fire hydrant, and I’m just holding on for dear life, trying not to drown in the chaos. It’s brutal, beautiful work, the kind of thing that leaves your brain buzzing and your hands trembling, but when you come up for air you’ve got five, six, ten pages of raw, unfiltered truth staring back at you. Sometimes it’s genius. Sometimes it’s garbage. But in those hours, it doesn’t matter.

And then there are the conversations, the deep, strange, late-night monologues with people (or sometimes just myself) where ideas spiral out like smoke rings in a bar. Politics, art, death, the absurdity of the human condition… you get so far down the rabbit hole you forget there’s even a surface to crawl back to. Those are dangerous nights, the kind where the sun comes up and you’re not sure whether you’ve achieved enlightenment or just burned another hole in your sanity.

So what makes me lose track of time? The real question is: What doesn’t?

Anything worth doing, really doing demands that you abandon the clock entirely. Because time, as we know it, is a scam. A cheap trick to keep us all moving in tidy lines. The real magic happens when you step off the grid, drop into the flow, and let yourself vanish for a while.

That’s where the good stuff lives. Out past the tick-tock world, in the wild unknown.