Episode Transcript
[00:00:02] Speaker A: Colorful living tip of the day. Ask a nearby five year old if he or she can tell time. When they proudly proclaim they can indeed tell time. Glower and try and summon the spirit of Moses from the ten Commandments and say, foolish mortal, you think you can tell time? One day you'll realize you cannot tell time. Time tells you.
Hi, I'm Chris Rodell. Welcome to season two, episode five of use all the Crayons, the podcast that tells you how we're always keeping it colorful right here in Lake Trobe, Pennsylvania, the vibrant heart of the lovely lower highlands.
And this week, we're going to be all about time. So if someone asks you what you're engrossed in, simply tell them it's Rodell's podcast, and it's all about time. I know. I know. It's about time.
In 2013, I wrote, it was finally time for the NFL to acknowledge not just one homosexual player. It was time for them to field an all gay NFL team.
I had two questions when I heard that Jason Collins of the NBA was coming out of the first openly gay athlete. First, who was Jason Collins? And who gives a crap about the NBA? Only in the numbskulled realm of professional sports could this visit possibly be hailed as big news.
But yesterday was all anyone wanted to talk about. Everyone wanted to know how Collins announcement would go over in the locker room. Would there be any tension? Would there be anger? Would there be ridicule me? I'm hoping there will be romance. I'd like to see one of Collins's Washington Wizards teammates tell reporters that. And he'd been confused when he heard it was biologically possible for any professional athlete to be homosexual. I went to confront Jason over his sexual orientation in the shower. Our eyes met, we embraced, and our teammates all went as one. Aww.
And they lived happily ever after. Now that would be a story. I'm opposed to discrimination of any sorts against anyone. But I hope I live long enough to see a day where people tease and berate men for being stupid jocks. I love professional sports while being pretty sure I wouldn't be like any professional athletes except Arnold Palmer.
It's the tendency toward meat headed bullies that gets to me, and historically, there's been no one greater target for them than the ones they suspect of being gay.
Yes, our biggest and strongest often pick on the small and the weak. It appalls me every time. So I do admire Collins for making this one small step. If any seven foot tall man could ever be said to take a small step, nothing in our history can match the rapidity of american gays going from social pariahs to being accepted, celebrated, even just for being who they are. Collins was hailed for the decision to come forward and fielded congratulations from presidents, senators, leaders of communities. It has me wondering if I get to chat with any of my big, cool celebrity friends. If tomorrow's blog I announced that I was gay, I'm gonna have to sleep on it. But there's no denying in 2013, being out is in. Collins announcement led to time spent, a good deal of it thinking about Craven, greedmeister, Roger Goodell. And I'll try and forgive Collins for that. I guarantee. The NFL commissioner is right now scouring his files, and the FBI should be so efficient to find out if any of his homosexual players are brave enough to come out. He wants the NFL, not the NBA, to be the forefront of social issues. He believes America should look to professional football for its cues on what is right and what is wrong, and in this regard, he is absolutely correct. Damn it. This won't be big news.
The confession will make me seem small, but the Steeler fan in me prays it'll be Tom Brady. Me, I'd like to go further than Goodell. I won't care if one player comes out. I want an entire team of ass kicking gays.
I want one courageous owner to say, for the good of America, he's going to field an entire squad of homosexuals. And I want that team to play tough, smart football, and I want that team to win. Imagine the stereotypes that would shatter. My experience tells me about 40% of the seats at any NFL game are filled by bigots and homophobes. Seeing a team composed entirely of talented homosexuals would open the eyes and shut the mouths of idiot fans who reflexively yell, I can't even say the word anytime a player misses a tackle or drops an open field pass.
It was once a commonly used word. It will be monumental. It will signal America is finally becoming the place it's always boasted it was, a place where no man or woman is judged by how they look, who they worship, or who they love. Could I still be a good progressive if I say I hope the team is not the Pittsburgh Steelers?
Sometimes time just drags. I remember the time one of my daughters called me up and said she was having a boring time at her grandfather's. I advised her to set something on fire.
The great Henry David Thoreau is famous for the quote, most men lead lives of quiet desperation. Better still is the one about killing time.
Who has never killed an hour, not casually or without thought, but carefully. A premeditated murder of minutes. The violence comes from a combination of giving up, not caring, and a resignation that getting past it is all you can hope to accomplish. So you kill the hour.
His quote about men leading lives of quiet desperation leads me to believe he once attended one of my classes, creative nonfiction, at Point Park University in Pittsburgh. It was where time would have been an innocent bystander in the slaying of an adjunct professor. Meredith.
Oh, I had it coming, all right. Despite my theatrics, I once did tell time. It lasted about 20 minutes. It was 2014, and I had a class of about 20 grad students in the school of journalism communications. That sentence carries a whole lot of serious weight with it. These mostly young adults, one I recall was 52, wanted desperately to have a writing career much like I had, it's fair to say. I'm sure they read my bio, and most of them worked two jobs to afford to come hear me talk and talk and talk and talk.
Each class was 3 hours long. 3 hours. Now, I can sure talk, but no one should have to listen to me talking for that long. And this here is about where I stop time. To this day, what I'm about to reveal is one of the funniest things I've ever done. Prankish in nature, I'd suckered them all. First of all, I decided to show up ten minutes late for the first class. It's highly unprofessional and suggests no respect for the students. Then I made the calculated decision to show up and appear drunk.
I know it's quite a long shot. A real stretch for me, wasn't it? I had my long winter coat on, the trench coat, a fedora, gloves, etcetera. At this point, they were seething. If one of them had made a move to kill me, the mob would have taken over my demise. Insured, I threw the hat and gloves in the corner and fought my way out of the coat like I was trying to shake a second skin. Then, with hands shaking, I seized an index card from my pocket, and without once looking at another soul, I began to read a shaky monotone, but with five second pauses between all the words. When I heard, I'd be, and these kids were getting more and more furious, would be teaching a three hour class.
I thought the only way I could get through it was if I put really, really long pauses between all the words.
By the end, I was looking up, making eye contact, and smiling, and the students were roaring with laughter and relief.
[00:08:23] Speaker B: I'd killed time and somehow left eternity unscathed.
Took those students about 40 seconds to go from rage to rapture. Oh, they knew it was going to be fun. And it was.
Here's the audio from a YouTube video I did about ten years ago.
I was asked to speak to about 200 members of the WVU four h club.
Knowing it was going to be filmed, and knowing it would be a while before I had another audience with that kind of rowdy demographic, I decided to have some fun with it.
[00:09:13] Speaker C: Can I ask you one favor, too?
I'm taking this for promotional reasons, and I want to film the greatest ending ever. So I'm going to do the last 30 seconds again. And this time, I want you to go out of your minds.
I want you to pretend that I'm Oprah. And I just promised each of you a brand new cardinal. Here goes. Ready?
I'm now going to do something you've never seen John Grisham, JK Rowling, or any of the other famous authors do. I'm going to tell you how my book ends.
It ends with number 501. Learn the fine art of knowing precisely when to quit. Thank you.
[00:10:42] Speaker B: You can check that out under the title the greatest author ovation ever. Use all the crayons on YouTube.
[00:10:51] Speaker C: This has been the dream of my life. To buy a farm, move away from the city, plow my own fields, plant my own soil. To get my hands dirty.
[00:11:02] Speaker B: They say time can heal all wounds. I'd like to see it fix a broken watch.
I wrote this in 2022, and I know what you're thinking. It's about time.
I'm a guy with plenty of time on his hand, so I wonder about the passing of time pretty much around the clock. Speaking of clocks, historians say the first one was built in the year 20. No, excuse me, in the year 1270. Catching a bus before then must have required infinite patience.
It sounds simplistic, but I wonder how they decided clock hands ought to go clockwise. Really? How would they know? If anyone has time to study time, it ought to be me.
It's not like I'm one of those guys who has to punch a clock, a phrase that always reminds me of Henry David Thoreau, previously mentioned, who wondered? Or should it be pondered on Walden Pond? Pondered? Is it possible to kill time without injuring eternity? Remind me to invite him to my next seance.
If I could only find the time. It just goes by so fast, like in an instant, a moment, a jiffy. Each of those examples, by the way, is an actual unit of time. A moment is a pre clock medieval time measure that lasts precisely 90 seconds. I wonder how in those pre clock days they time 90 seconds. I guess it all could have said a one Mississippi, a two Mississippi.
But knowing a moment is 90 seconds is useful to me. And now, I hope to you, you can tell an annoying caller you'll be one moment and then really take your time. I thought a moment was like four or 5 seconds, like within the realm of a winking flirtation.
In fact, an open minded couple could go in 90 seconds from perfect strangers to being partners in an act that could conceivably result in the birth of a child. I've seen it done. A friend of mine in college made meaningful eye contact with a girl he saw on the sidewalk and asked her if she would like a house tour.
I wondered later if she was from a different country where house tour translates to instant sex, but he really did get a girl in bed in 90 seconds. I doubt he could have accomplished the same feat in a jiffy. From Wikipedia to physicists, a jiffy is how long light takes to travel a distance of one femtometer, which is a.
[00:13:23] Speaker A: Millionth of a millionth of a millimeter.
[00:13:26] Speaker B: That means there are about 300,000 billion jiffies in a second.
Yet it takes at least 30 interminable minutes to get a basic suite of services at a vehicle maintenance shop called Jiffy Lube. As for two shakes of Lamb's tail, I become uncomfortable speculating about the origins of the phrase. That certainly involves prolonged staring at the hindquarters of these gentle beasts.
I've heard too many stories of love starved men succumbing to the carnal temptations of cattle, and round these parts we understand bedlam is an uproarious situation, but bedlam is a rural, scandalous I'd like to see a judge sentence a bestiality convict to 50,000 shakes of a lamb's tail.
Do sheep do time, or does time do you? It's kind of like one of my favorite lines. Remember this, foolish mortal? You think you kill time. Time kills you.
It can be time for a change. Time goes by. You can call time out and be just in time. You can spare time, but can you save time? You can try to make time, but will eventually run out of time. Because time flies. It just never lands.
And that's that. I've been doing these blogs since 2008, but this is the first one that ever directly took on the topic.
It's about time.
I'm Chris Rodell, and over the past 40 years I've spent my days chasing more than 3200 of the most compelling human interest stories on the planet. I guess that means I know a thing or two about what interests humans.
Speaking of time, how do you think we're doing timewise? Here is ten minutes good 15 2030 an hour, for Pete's sake.
I think the sweet spot should be between 15 and 30 minutes. Maybe going a little longer some days. But if you're comfortable with this either way, I hope you enjoy what we're having here and we'll tell friends about it. And I'm going to shoot for trying to get these ready for every Tuesday.
Check out my new www.chrisrodell.com website. Very snazzy. Very pleased the way it looks. Hope it'll lead to lots of speaking engagements and sold books. Hey, a little poetry there. That's for Predez.
[00:15:45] Speaker A: If you ever want to get in.
[00:15:46] Speaker B: Touch with me, I'm easy to find. I'm at storytellerrisrodell.com dot. Thanks for checking us out. I hope you'll be back next Tuesday when we're going to bring a new topic.
And let me know if you think we should have more guests. I think now's a good time to quit. What do you think, John?
John Jamison, retired sheep farmer Crabtree, Pennsylvania my colorful living tip of the day.
[00:16:17] Speaker C: Is learn the fine art of knowing.
[00:16:21] Speaker B: Precisely when to quit.
[00:16:23] Speaker A: Thank you.
[00:16:24] Speaker C: Yes, gentlemen, this has been the dream of my life. To buy a farm, move away from the city, plow my own fields, plant my own soil to get my hands dirty.
