I like to think of time as the degenerative illness that picks up murderous momentum when it senses weakening passivity in its victim. Time is being punished for doing anything at all and punished even more for doing nothing. Time is like the poisonous hot sun that you cannot escape from because there's no such thing as indoors or shade and no one will give you a hat and people look at you like you're nuts for even asking for one so you just stand there feeling the emergence of fresh melanomas. I feel old when I read about an album or a novel being reissued in a new edition for "rediscovery" by a "new generation" and it occurs to me that I not only bought the original upon its initial publication but that I can remember how perspicacious and leading edge I felt in acquiring it. Flash forward a few years and the object in question is now in need of rescue from obscurity and neglect by cultural archaeologists who make it their heroic business to retrieve the musty marginal classics of yesteryear before they fall into historical oblivion. How nice. Superannuated while I slept, awakening in the posthumous present. Republication with a new preface by an appreciative 27-year-old writer who provides the necessary background information for placing the work in its proper context, that sepia-toned faraway time called the 1980s. Expanded two-disc sets featuring serendipitously discovered recordings, cleverly restored to sonic clarity using state of the art techniques, of live performances that I attended. Sometimes I wonder if somehow I can be seen in a few frames of the Zapruder film, a shadowy face in the crowd reacting to the presidential headsnap. I wasn't born yet but it still seems possible that I was there, since the present is what's happening since five minutes ago and there's no such thing as recent history at all, only the undifferentiated jumble of the ancient past of scratchy newsreels, partially deciphered scrolls, and shards of pottery unearthed on sun-baked Mediterranean islands. One day I'm going to be watching a stately Ken Burns documentary on PBS and someone in dramatic voiceover is going to be reading an old letter that seems vaguely familiar as the camera pans slowly over to a black and white photo of me from sixth grade summer camp.