This is the first essay in Austin 52, a collection of 52 writings on these five years of The Barking Crow in Austin. The original date of publication for this essay is January 3rd, 2023.
I keep my old planners around. Partly because I keep most of my passwords written in the backs of them (a disaster waiting to happen, I know), but also, as such things go, for the sentimental cause. These notebooks hold cue cards for memories.
Every now and then, I take in the planners’ weekly pages. It’s a visit to the past, but I’m not checking in with what happened. I’m checking in with what it was I was trying to do. The notebooks are a travel log—things done, appointments kept, places gone—but they’re also an itinerary. They contain not only what occurred, but a broader category of life: The intent. Or often, the attempt. Ambitions are wedged in there, slid in between each other, sometimes slashed out (when the thing was canceled) and sometimes squiggled out (when the thing was changed) and sometimes run through with a straight line (when the thing was completed). It’s a two-directional diary—what I tried to accomplish headed one way, what truly transpired opposite it. That is, in the early months. I have a habit where my planner usage slips when March rolls around, then pops in and out sporadically over the rest of the year.
It was New Year’s Day, and Barret and the Helotes Boys were up from San Antonio. We met at the Kerbey Lane in Mueller and I think the air was monochrome, the sky styling itself to match that block of concrete. The meal took forever, highlighted by a grave confusion between Kevin and the waitress, and I’m not sure Connor ever got his eggs. Or maybe it was only the eggs that he got? Whatever the table received, we ate it, and we debriefed on the night before and we sketched out a half-a-joke Leap Day party idea—highlighted by hallway leapfrog races—for which the still-Texans would allegedly come back up in two months’ time (Barret was living in California then). And then we left, and they went home, and I went out to try to do a dozen different things on that spanning, open first day of the year.
Planners are an aspirational thing for me, and that year’s aspiration was to work eighty hours a week—forty on making money, forty on making progress. I’d started tracking those hours a few months prior, dividing them up through the money-progress dichotomy to separate what I was doing to support myself in the immediate term from what I was investing in all the creating I was doing: This media project and the retail project and the rest of the garden. I don’t quite remember how I landed on eighty hours, specifically. Was it what I thought I could, at a maximum, do with consistency? Was it what I thought it would take to get where I wanted to go? Was it intended to be temporary, or was it to stretch on for years? I don’t know. But I know it’s what I wanted, and I know that to have achieved it I’d have needed to work roughly ten hours that Wednesday on various things, and I know—because the planner tells me—that I only worked for about six.
This, as I might expect, became a pattern. I didn’t work eighty hours a week that year. I worked about sixty, on average, maybe fifty, given I took nearly a whole week off for the wedding and honeymoon and then there were holidays in the later months, as there often tend to be that time of year. It wasn’t the worst exercise, though, scratching 13’s and 12’s on weekdays and often a 10 and a 7 on the weekend, lining up the hours Monday through Sunday until they summed to 80. Track your time enough, you learn how you spend it. More importantly, you learn how you’re capable of spending it—what your limits are and how and when they bend. Time is the most finite of the resources, less reproducible than oil or trees or even stars. More stars are being formed, astrophysicists say. But the closest that discipline has come to getting us more time involves instructions to travel a long way at the speed of light, which is something for which I have neither the accelerative capacity nor the time.
Sunday was New Year’s Day, and Barret and the Helotes Folks were in from San Antonio and Dallas and up on 51st Street. We met downstairs, below our apartment, and the air was letting itself relax between the fog and the afternoon clouds. El Chilito doesn’t mark which tacos are which, and El Chilito usually doubles one taco and leaves off another, so we opened the foil and the tortillas both and sorted the fare as best we could, and we ate what we’d received, and we debriefed on the night before and every few minutes one of us would come back from the bathroom and another would have to get up and walk across the room to get them, the door locked on the outside for those without a key-fob. Tyler says he’s going to do a triathlon in September, down in Kerrville, where the first HEB used to be. He says he’s not going to drink until then. He made a note in his phone titled, “How to stay sober,” with the first and only entry reading, “Mocktails.” And then we left, and they went home, and I went upstairs to try to do half a dozen different things on that spanning, open first day of the year.
I bought a new planner at the end of November. Decided to start it early. Started it early, lost it early, back to it again today, like a quarterback who threw an interception when he knew he’d drawn an edge rusher offsides. I’m not tracking hours this year, though when I’m most on top of it I’ll sketch out a rough schedule for the day (forcing some preemptive culling of day-to-day ambitions). History says I won’t keep up with the planner for 365 days. History’s probably right. But it’s aspirational. It’s a prayer. It’s an attempt to wrangle this bucking mustang by which we count our days.
The foolish errand, then, begins again, accompanying me on this next blessed rotation around the sun. And as it always goes, I strive to make it less foolish, with this year’s flavor of that as follows:
Maybe the goal should not be to break time, to bring it to heel. Maybe the goal should be to voyage through time. You can lay the best of plans. You can chart your course. You can mark your milestones, and pack your provisions, and trace the path on the best map you have. But time is not a bag of sugar, there in certain quantity to be measured and divided and portioned out in accord with your design. Time is the horse, and time is the sea. Either will surprise you. Either will knock you awry. Treat time like the latter, and maybe I can ride its waves. When I treat it like the former, I find that it fights back.
