I've Come Unstuck In Time
Like Billy Pilgrim, I've come unstuck in time. And I think I like it.
For years now, I've woken up & not known what day it was. Or where I was. Or even who I was. And yes, that last one in particular can be a bit frightening, waking up & in your mind's eye your mind's hands are racing through filing cards with names on them, Dewey's Decimals doing their job, but none of the names seem to fit, though you're sure you'll remember _____ ____ when you see it. But usually, it works.
Coming unstuck in time is actually reasonably OK with me. For starters, these entire past 40 years felt to me like they were outside of history anyway. From when I was a kid & they shot Bobby Kennedy, back in '68, it seemed like I was in the middle of a dystopian movie, stuck in the part where the complete bastards were in control, and the idea that this was a workable state of affairs just seemed ludicrous (as well as being a complete-downer), and I couldn't wait 'til the later chapters, when the good guys would come through.
Funny, just now I opened good ole Kurt's Schlachthof Fünf, to remind myself of how Billy Pilgrim ended up, and here's how Kurt starts that final chapter. "Robert Kennedy, whose summer house is eight miles from the house I live in year round, was shot two nights ago. He died last night. So it goes."
So I guess I picked a good time to come unstuck. 1968.
Anyway, this Christmas seemed to be an especially strong season for bouncing back & forth in time. More than back & forth, I regularly hit all the Noughts & the 90's & the 80's & the 70's & so on... and now & then I let go & floated all the way back, back, to the 1920's or the 1750's or the 1010's & so on... but most interesting was that sometimes I'd be hurled long, into the future, History's own Hail Mary, little Doug Flutie chucking for Heaven now, and my mind has - at last - become the ball. In short, I found myself landing on various possible future timelines, and sometimes they looked like they were being offered up as is, while other times they looked like they were there for us to shape if we wished - like Neil Stephenson's Anathem & its Mathic heroes. Yes, there were paths where we rewired the economy & laid down some smokin' green infrastructure & did hearty community stuff. But also, there were times when I got tossed deep into the End-zone, paths that all pretty much ended with us freezing in the dark, ambitions no higher than to keep our heads out of the sights of Mad Maxian militiamen.
You know what I mean. Help me here, work with me people.
