Admittedly, this column has undergone an incredibly slow build-up toward "the point" that it wants to make. And somewhat uncharacteristically it's done so in a primarily linear fashion, even if the connection of "the point" at the end to the ideas dealt with in the beginning aren't necessarily, or at least obviously, logical. A more "standard", or traditional, Boidem column would be filled with considerably more asides that would take the reader (or at least the writer) down alternative paths. Certainly there are an awful lot of possible ways to play with issues of time which shows up in the title of this column but doesn't seem to be particularly prominent throughout most of the text.

So instead of a title that clearly delineated what would be discussed here, the title of this column asked a rather simple question which almost immediately, and for the bulk of the column, seemed to have been abandoned. It was only toward close to the end, when readers perhaps truly started wondering whether I'd even made a mistake and posted the wrong content, that the extended digression which fills most of this column finally succeeded in getting back, though not necessarily successfully, to that opening question.