hours

i could live in a store

give me a hammock

is there air conditioning? i'm there

i won't bother any of the customers. i'll stay put on my hammock and read. i'll probably be so still they'll think i'm another one of those mannequins. yeah they make 'em unshaved now, the sales clerk will say.

one day i'll get bored and walk outside to the parking lot, look out at all those old sedans. boy, they really used to know how to make a car back then. not like these cheap plastic pieces of crap you see twisted up on the side of the beltway. sure, the new ones are nice to be in at night, but that's because you can't see anything. give me the old cars, that's what i say.

malls were built on such flat parcels of land. what i'd like to know is, were there ever any built into cliffs or tucked amongst rolling hills? maybe it didn't matter; after all, the eye candy was all inside the building.

the point is, i could be content, there in the back of the store, in a corner, in my hammock. hell, put me on a cot in a storeroom in the back. i can read my books and stare at the cieling.

if this invention has taught me anything, it's that you're bored no matter where you are. the heart still hurts, the days still seem to last forever, the silences still seem to drive you up the wall like they always did.

ground stop

do things seem strange in the "past"? in that movie where the guys go back in time, their ears bleed and their handwriting gets worse...

there are several very noticable differences about "past" times. i have past in quotes because i can't really be sure that they are the actual past. it might look and feel like 1940; people might talk like they're from 1940, but how can i be sure it really is 1940? anyway, that's fodder for an entirely different discussion.

when i first used the machine, i took a very, very small sip of the crystal pepsi. probably about .25 ounces if i had to guess. subsequently, i didn't go very far back at all. about seven years, actually. to july 20, 1998, i realized upon further inspection.

the first thing you will notice is the green sky glow. during the day you don't see anything abnormal. the sky remains blue, birds fly, cats meow, all that good stuff. night is a different story. i was astonished when i emerged from an abandoned department store to find green stars and a lime haze tinting the night air. i was initially concerned that i'd jumped into the future by accident, and that rather freaked me out because it went completely against the plans and schematics. had i held the blueprints upside down?

i came to realize on subsequent travels that the green glow was constant. i can't explain it, of course. stars shine green and there's a green glow. that's all i can tell you. it happens in "past" times and it doesn't happen in our "normal" night. i couldn't exactly go around asking people why--if someone asked you why the stars shone the way they do, wouldn't you think they were batshit crazy?

over time i noticed other quirks of time travel that i will share in detail in future posts. most notably, besides the freaky green night, i was floored by the immediate physical feeling you get after transporting.

it's hard to describe. take the exhilaration you feel right after a near-collision in your car. you're fine but your heart is racing and the adrenaline is pumping. take the feeling you have hearing someone tell you they love you for the first time. take the feeling you get when you're in a quickly descending elevator and multiply it by 20. mix these feelings together and that is what you feel coursing through you for approximately 45 minutes after jumping into a different time.

it's a great feeling. it scared me at first. that night, i walked through a vast, empty parking lot and worried briefly that the crystal pepsi, as old as it was, had poisoned me. that i was still in 2005 and i was about to have a heart attack and that this is what death must feel like.

well, now i know i was kind of right. this is what death feels like, this is what life feels like, this is what being born feels like. i think the feeling is really just the essence of something much bigger than we can comprehend. it's sort of god's way of letting you know that you've gone beyond the daily routine; you've flexed the universe and its constraints and gone beyond. do i sound like a hippie yet?

one of my favorite experiences was in 1940. i was walking down a crowded sidewalk in downtown los angeles. it was around 5:30 in the afternoon, golden sunlight shining down on everyone in one of those shafts bursting forth from the clouds, like a ramp to heaven. i was walking along, big grin on my face, through all these crowds, feeling it. it was exhilarating. i wanted to laugh thinking about the absurdity of it all, being surrounded by so many people from the past and was it real, was it really happening? oh fuck it, i said. just enjoy the feeling and keep walking in the light.

some other small quirks i've noticed:

cigarettes are made of meat
dogs are waiters
90 foot tall andy griffith
incense replaced by lasers
scalding hot piss
delicious arby's sandwiches abound
national holiday where your dad sings INXS on live television, no matter what the year
beer is hot pink

okay so maybe i'm joshing. time travel will make you want to joke around a bit.

pull

what are some other places you would like to go, ones from your personal history?

well there are a lot. i was stranded in beaufort with my dad on halloween night, 1999, after the two-seater plane we were piloting back to chapel hill blew out a front tire on takeoff from the tiny airport by the coast we'd been visiting. that was a pretty fun night.

i would go back to one of the many afternoons i wandered around vancouver sober and numb from the events of that summer just listening to the same cassette tape in my busted old walkman over and over again. you had to hold down the play button to get it to work. by the end of the summer i had a big blister on my thumb; i guess i was too aloof to think to use tape. i should have brought more cassettes, too.

what about that day in the summer of 2000 when my best friend and i sat on my back porch and got my dog high? everything was a slowly spinning blur of leaves and sun and somehow we managed to drive over to that amphitheatre where he was to direct a bunch of 10 year olds in a production of macbeth (or something like that). how vigorously nervewracking it was to see cyndi after all those years and give her a hug and oh man she probably smelled it all over me, how embarrassing. you can make mistakes like that when you're 19 years old and it is summertime.

but if i were to go anywhere now it would probably be that day in autumn, 1999, when i had just entered college and was simply a 6 foot tall vessel of meat and bones that went around spending my student loan money and inhaling whatever came my way. sarah and i were driving on market street and listening to "marketplace" on npr. as i got to the light for walker ave i pressed the brakes but lo and behold the car wasn't stopping very well. almost creamed into the back of one of the 1,039,940 buick station wagons driven by little old ladies at any given moment in the city of greensboro.

when we got back to the apartment i threw the keys down on the dining room table and said "well those brakes need to be fixed". then i chugged a beer and had a smoke with my roommate and picked the keys up from the table, saying "well i'm off to midas". no one felt like going to the repair shop with me so i strolled out into the sunny afternoon on my own, enjoying the leaves slowly changing their colors like old men preparing to go to bed. got to midas and spent the next 2.5 hours sitting in their tiny little waiting room, nursing a cold can of pepsi and watching judje mills lane on mute as the sounds of air wrenches and car engines wafted in from nearby.

finally they gave me my receipt and my car back and i headed home. by now it was dark and when i got to the apartment the lights were all off. raul was laying on the sofa in the blue glow of the tv. he was asleep. sarah was asleep, a book opened at the foot of the bed. i was wide awake and i wanted to tell someone how nice it had been, sitting there by myself for a couple of hours in the midas waiting room. i thought about going back there the next day with a few beers for the mechanics to see if they'd let me sit some more. but then i realized that too much of a good thing always ruins it.

so that's where i'd go if anywhere. back to that midas waiting room, back to that apartment, back to that age, just for a taste.

this is another way

nyquil isn't time travel, rather it's interdimensional. i've been traveling for the past few nights and i've had some interesting experiences. here's what happened last night:

well, everything was ordinary enough, as far as nyquil travel goes. i was in what i realize now was my parents' house, but it was laid out completely different. rooms were there that don't exist, but true to life the whole place was covered in shade from the tall trees overhead, and the windows shone forth with yellow lamp light visible from the road as they always do.

i was living with max jones, a large black fellow who i don't know, and some italian kid who was nice enough but i knew inside would be trouble eventually. he just made me uneasy, watching out the back window as he walked in the backyard in the pouring rain. something didn't seem right.

i had forgotten to do my math homework, so i was in high school again, i suppose, which is a recurring theme when i do these travels. luckily max had copied the answers out of the teacher's edition, so i sat down and set to work copying from his paper onto mine. interestingly enough, i did feel a twinge of guilt, leading me to believe that conscience and emotions are fully present in this parallel world.

after returning my math work to my backpack i went into an adjacent room where max and the black fellow were playing PS2, minding to step carefully over the cords. my time in the room was brief, however, as i knew i had places to be, and so after a brief conversation and the emergence of the fully soaked italian kid, i set off.

by now it had stopped raining and was bright out, i'd say mid-afternoon. i was on a winding street not unlike those off tottenham court rd, but not as narrow. cobblestone with a lot of granite buildings about. no cars. could have been an alley off of dupont circle somewhere, it looked somewhat similar to that. but what happens further leads me to suspect it was london.

i stopped into a crowded and noisy pub. lots of office workers, all white, in their early 30s to mid 40s. i definitely stood out, especially with my large duffel bag. sidled up to the bar and waited patiently for the barkeep to take my order. an old man with glasses on the bridge of his nose and a black polo shirt looked at me and i started to speak, but he cut me off and pointed to his left, to a younger man wearing the same polo.

"what'll it be, then," he asked and i hesitated before replying "umm, an IPA..." he looked impatient so i said "umm a Bass IPA please." my accent was somewhat surrey and not the least suspicious.

as he was pouring it struck me that i left the backpack with my math homework at the house! i slapped myself on the forehead and began to panic. i was running out of time and i desperately had to turn in that work but i so didn't want to go all the way back to the house. i briefly considered asking the barkeep to watch my duffel bag while i ran back, but then i laughed thinking "right, i walk into crowded pub full of white folks at 5pm and leave a giant duffel bag there and exit, that won't arouse suspicion at all." so i was out of options.

well it's foggy how that was resolved because next i knew i was sitting with my father in a light rain on some concrete pylons blocking a driveway. we were across from a sloping block of townhouses, each set about five feet apart from the other, each distinct in their masonry and exteriors. i couldn't believe we were in india. my father confirmed that they were. "although it looks more like 18th street and park road," he said, and i nodded enthusiastically because that's precisely what it looked like. as i scanned the view across from us i noticed a corner store sign in english and i thought to myself "who'd have thought india looked so much like the US?" i then asked about appliances and electricity and all the modern conveniences.

soon enough i was sitting on another pylon at the end of a driveway, this time in pouring rain. i had a stinging injury to my left hand; the skin was removed from about a quarter-sized section of the top of my thumb. i held out the raw flesh to the falling rain to soothe it.

the deceased canadian journalist and former ABC news anchor peter jennings came walking up through the downpour and examined my hand. he then began admonishing me, in rather profane fashion, mentioning that i didn't really know pain until i'd "used a knife to cut out a box full of slugs shot into your leg by an italian soldier." i couldn't help but agree with him.

at this point i found myself back in our normal world, the one with which i have this website to share these experiences with you.

inside hurt

another common question:

did you get the machine working on the first try? how long did it take to build?

i guess i'll be upfront and honest: it took a long time to make the machine. once i realized crystal pepsi was the fuel, i went through months of experiments just trying to figure out how to utilize it properly--remember I was doing this blindly; there's not some guide out there.

i spent a lot of afternoons in the apartment trying different things. went through an assload of crystal pepsi, too. and that stuff ain't cheap, let me tell you. among the things i tried:

bathing the dog in it (no visible change in space-time continuum)
basting cucumbers with it (again, no change. interesting flavor though)
firing it at innocent pedestrians via a supersoaker ($200 fine + court costs and now i can't fly anywhere because i'm on some "watch list")
singing "old time rock and roll" into the bottle as if it were a microphone (just for kicks)
clutching the bottle tightly and rolling around in a grassy field with it (i think maybe... maybe? no i just fell in love, no time travel)
grilling the bottle on a foreman (major fire)
grilling the bottle in a small interrogation room, actually my closet (major dad)

finally i spent six weekends in a row creating a super light-weight, titanium and alloy encased vehicle with tiptronic steering, maglev propulsion and hybrid ethanol backup energy systems. i called it the radmobile and it was sweet. but i couldn't get it out of the bathroom, the door was too narrow. so that sucked.

anyways a few weeks later i was tiptoeing around in circles in my bedroom to "Everybody Do The Dinosaur" and i fell and busted six of my front teeth out. it was around then that i figured out how to appropriately utilize the Crystal Pepsi as fuel.