2004.

It was that year that time flew into a 6/8 double jig, ditching the slow waltz of our heart-beat metronome and dragging us limply through this blank, nameless decade.

And who was supposed to prepare us for this? Suddenly, even our fingernails grew at rates we couldn't reconcile with any common biology. The rent was due hour after hour, and the 40 grand and 50,000 pages of our education were swallowed and vanished, in moments too short to be called moments, into the swamp of our gray matter. And who was the universe to demand these things of us? Who, watching us erase whole days in queasy sleep and ignored dreams, would ever think us prepared for it? Who would ever say that by nineteen we were ready to abandon those things that stay lodged at the back of the throat, unchanged and present and entirely immune? Yes, I know there was no holy mandate, but the suggestion is there and its an honest question. Who really thought we could ever leave those reeds and what we found among them, and who affixed the thousand subsequent frames that became this year to the end of the tape, and who thought it would just play on, seamless and consecutive, in rageless silence?