Tick, Tick, Tick, Tick, Tick, Tick

Time. Ain’t it funny, sang the singer, how time just slips away? No, it is not. Time has begun to escape through the hole in the ozone. Time is in dangerously short supply. Time is money and time, like money, does not grow on trees. This is the season that proves it.

If time flies when you’re having fun, then I must be having a ball. On the day after Thanksgiving, I hung lights around the house and congratulated myself for getting such a good jump on the season. The celebration was premature. Time snuck out the back door, vanished. What should have been a month instead was compressed into, at best, one honest day.

Now time is up. The stores are picked clean, the deadline for safely sending off presents in the mail has come and gone. All those clever notions about catalog shopping are moot. At this point it’s probably wise to cut and run, to forget about this Christmas altogether and start preparing for the next: Only 372 shopping days left.

The same can be said, for that matter, about the entire year of 1996. It’s over, finished. The buzzer has sounded. No more time-outs. As the football analysts say, it’s another example of bad clock management. Anything that hasn’t been done yet simply won’t be done at all. Not this year. I’m looking at this list of half-baked column ideas I carry around. These were subjects I meant to explore this year, but did not. Don’t blame me. Blame Father Time, the stingy old coot.

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This was the year I was going to step free of the Yosemite rut and visit Sequoia National Park. Yosemite is an almost irresistible dateline on the California beat, an ideal venue for writing about natural, environmental trends, all sorts of things. Say the federal government shuts down. The roving columnist has options: He can (A.) slog down to the Lemoore Naval Air Station and interrogate PX vendors or, (B.), take a room at the Ahwahnee Hotel and tell the story from beneath the splendor of Half Dome. A tough call.

There are, though, other outposts of natural wonder in California. A couple hours south of Yosemite is Sequoia. I am told it has big trees and waterfalls, just like Yosemite. I assume it has its own intrigues and controversies, just like Yosemite. And one of these years--alas, not this one--I intend to go there and write something about the place.

Next on the list is “old cars,” a reference to the clunkers and old pickups that some car-loving folks keep for pleasure and others drive out of simple economic necessity. A campaign is underway to exterminate this mechanical species. It is what Smog Check II is all about. It also is what’s behind those radio commercials in which charities implore old car owners to donate their iron sleds and gain a nice tax-deduction. Business lobbyists have long fingered clunkers as the fountainhead of smog--as opposed to, say, factory smokestacks. Could there be a whiff of class warfare in the air?

Holtville, the list says. I don’t know why. A carrot festival maybe. Next: “Colored cotton,” a reference to an exotic dispute raging on the west side of the San Joaquin Valley. “USFL,” goes another entry. Last spring was the 10-year anniversary of the United States Football League, the brave little spring league that took on the mighty NFL and got crushed. Behind the crushing is a tale that goes to the heart of what has gone wrong with sports in this country. Sadly, the moment for telling it has passed. The window won’t reopen for five years: The peculiar, unspoken conventions that govern newspaper coverage simply don’t permit 11-year anniversary pieces.

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This was the year I was going to interview a Hollywood mogul, any Hollywood mogul. I have never met one, and now I read, post-Ovitz, the species is endangered, same as old cars. This was the year I was going to check out Gram Parsons night at the Palomino Club--two decades dead, and still an L.A. country music legend.

This was the year I was going to spend the Fourth of July at the new National Cemetery, stuck way out in the weeds near Los Banos. Does anyone brave the triple-digit heat and dust storms to visit their buried veterans there? How long can the flowers hold up in July?

I wanted to write about the coming New Millennium. Now don’t tell me I still have three years left to do so. I know how time works. What got me thinking about 2K, as the hipsters like to call it, was my new driver’s license. It came last month in the mail. Printed in red over my picture is the expiration date: 10-31-00. It looked so strange; made me feel like I already had crossed that big bridge to the next century. Come on over, pilgrims, the natives are friendly and the water’s fine.

The list goes on, and so would I. Except. . . . Yes, the reason is obvious. I am out of time. With this column done, I’ll be on vacation for a couple of weeks. I expect the time to fly by real fast.