FUTURE, PRESENT, PAST -- HOW MUCH? SAYS HE!

Look at what I got from a very deep thinking relative.  Here I was talking about "when" and he comes at me with this: "So, what is there more of?  Future, Past, or Present.  Everything that is Future will eventually become Present and everything that is past was, at one time, Present.  Are they finite or infinite.  We could get together with the Dion brothers, Ray, Al, Ed, Norm and Don and discuss this for all eternity, which is, of course, infinite!  OMG!"

I actually sat down and thought about this.  How much?  I liked the above suggestion because I know that the Dion brothers would like nothing more than to be able to discuss a philosophical topic for all eternity.  I think that's why they all died so young.  They wanted all eternity to hash things out.  

So, all day long I tried to work it out and here is the result.

I figure that in this life we have different quantities of different things, except for the present.  The perceptible "present" we really do not have.  In a philosophical way, we do have the future, but only as potential reality that has not yet been concretized in the mill of present to past.  Once time has passed through that process, it is real and we own it.  We name it "past."

However the measure of how much of anything we have, either in potential reality or in memorized reality also changes on a daily basis because these two realities are changing at every minute.  Until we have passed the midpoint of our life, we have more future than past.  Then, we have more past than future.  UNTIL, we finally take possession of the eternal present, in which there is no future and no past, just...infinity.

Then, we Dions are going to sit around, drinking what ever it is that you drink in eternity, and talk it all out forever.  Oh, will we ever be happy.  You all have NO idea.  We might even get around to discussing this little question, if we can ever get past the one that they've already been working on for about 60 human years,whatever it may be.  I could almost bet that it is about the eternal question, never to be settled, which is:  Fly fishing is the extreme test of the true human.  Casting tin spoons into the water from a boat is for those who don't really appreciate the art and the science of sport fishing.  I am just absolutely sure that EFR Dion hasn't sat down during this whole time defending the art form and the scientific challenge of fishing for pickerel by casting for them from an Old Town canoe.

I just know it.

Tomorrow:  Who was the first baseball player to get a $100,000.00 per year contract?  You get a bonus point if you know the year.

THE VIEW FROM THE FRONT -- OR THE REAR?

I have often been in conversations when the relative value of the past and the future was discussed.  These conversations sometimes went beyond the description usually ascribed to conversations.  A time or two I remember that they degenerated into what could politely be called discussions. Now that I am sitting here all by myself and coolly and calmly dissertating [:-)=[--<| with myself, I have to admit that I have some degree of ambivalence about this question.  I know how to talk about it through the crack of intellectual exposé.  I get into trouble when I try to process the intermingling meaning of the future, present, past trifecta.  Intellectually, I know that the future is totally unknown, mostly.  But wait!  Look up and see the future in the picture glaring back at you from the screen.  This phenomenon takes place every time we are aboard a moving vehicle.  We get to know a piece of the future before it even exists.  Isn't that mysteriously interesting?  Imagine, we have a way on knowing a piece of the future.  We don't even have to be in a vehicle.  It happens when we move, not matter how.  Hey, I discovered that all by myself and I'm not even a scientist.  Of course, we all know that the past is the reality that lingers on.  It never seems to go away.  I do have an interesting question about it though.  Does it get created in the future or in the present?  The reason why I ask that is because the present is what doesn't seem to exist at all.  I know it does, but...  What I try to fathom is how anything can ever get done in the present since it only lasts for a micro-second...a nano-second?  a pico-second?  is there anything smaller?   In that reality how can anything get done?  Even a memory?  So is it in the foreseeable future that everything gets done?  Does it get engraved in our past even before we actually get to it?  Like, I know what I'm going to write next, so it must already be a part of my past even though I haven't even done it yet.  Isn't that rather weird?
Maybe that's why there are so many traditionalists lurking about.  They seem to have an attraction to the reality that does not go away.  They cling to the treasure chest of realities that will never go away.  Oh, the money has been spent; the babies have grown up; my face is wrinkled; my hair is grey; my Cadillac has turned into a Corolla; I carry them all with me and never let go.  
That's only the beginning.  I still have speech patterns that I developed as I zipped through the present and the future.  I still have infinitives, participles, adjectives, adverbs, plus-perfects, subordinate clauses, object of the preposition, antecedents that determine the number and gender of the pronoun that replaces them.  These are all things that seem to have disappeared in the current creation of more past.  I even have subordinate and independent clauses and phrases and the diagrams to prove it.  Not only that, I can write it all down in cursive too!  I know when to place "i" before "e" and the exceptions to the rule.  Not only do I know about carburetors, but, as you can see, I can still spell them too.  
BUT, I still prefer the present/future dynamic.  That is the place where I learn new things so that I can confect a more interesting past.  Of course there will come a time when the past that I constructed will be broken up into smaller pieces and they will become decorations for others who were a part of my present/future escapades.  I don't know what use they will serve for them, but whatever it is, they should remember that it is my gift to them and for that, they should not even dare to think of crying at my funeral.