Excuse me, Carl.
A short prose piece, and one of the most personal and lightly playful entries in the corpus, addressed in its title to Carl. It sits among the writing on the Artwork page, brief and occasional, closer to a personal note than to the theoretical work — a small aside with a wink in it. Its presence in the archive is a reminder that the project has room for the offhand and the affectionate alongside the systematic, and that the same voice which builds the framework can also stop, mid-stride, to say something short and human.
Its place in the archive is a small argument in itself: that a body of work can hold the offhand and the affectionate alongside the systematic. Addressed with a wink to Carl, it is the corpus at its most human and least formal — the same voice that builds the framework pausing, mid-stride, to say something short and warm.
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Part of the open Legible Traces archive — every piece free under CC BY 4.0. The PDF here is byte-for-byte the record deposited on Zenodo; the DOI is the canonical citation.
Excuse me, Carl.
Two men stand in a nowhere — no walls, no clock, no hour to keep. Both are named Carl. One spent his life measuring the universe; the other, the soul. One of them asks the time.
Excuse me, Carl. Do you have the time?
No one has the time. We borrow it from a star eight minutes away. You're asking me for something that left the sun before you finished the question.
I didn't ask where it's been. I asked if you have it. Now.
Now is a rumor. By the time my voice reaches you, it's already memory. We only ever speak to each other's pasts.
Then we're well matched — I've spent my life listening to people's pasts. But the now isn't so empty. A man waiting for news weighs each second like lead. A man in love can't find the clock at all. The soul keeps a different calendar than the sun.
…And yet you asked me. The man with the wristwatch.
I did.
Then the honest thing is to look. It says 12:12. Though I should warn you — the hand already moved while I read it. I've handed you a snapshot of a river and called it the river.
I never wanted the number.
Then why ask?
Because we're both named Carl, we met in a nowhere with no clock between us, and the question simply rose in me — the way a dream does. That was the experiment.
So you didn't want the time.
I wanted the moment.
And I gave you a number that was already wrong.
And I gave you a question that was never quite a question.
…So. Do you, or do you not, now have the time?
What time did you say it was?
It was 12:12.
Was. You see? Already gone.
CC BY 4.0 · ORCID 0009-0009-8618-398X · DOIs MINTED ON DEPOSIT
© 2026 JAMISON TODD JOHNSON · LEGIBLE TRACES LLC
Banner artwork Katsushika Hokusai, Dragonfly and Bellflower (c. 1833), The Metropolitan Museum of Art. Public domain or CC0 — full list in the image credits.