The Bishop and the Butterfly: Murder, Politics, and the End of the Jazz Age
    quinn esq's picture

    I've Come Unstuck In Time

    By quinn esq on Mon, 01/05/2009 - 5:54pm |
    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.

    Music often does the trick for me - pops me out of time. It's my drug of choice. I like it because I can pretty much control any unexpected speed or direction of time travel, so long as I avoid Classic Rock Radio & Muzak & anyone who looks evil enough to download a ringtone. Sights can transport me as well, but I find drapes in the house, tinted windows in the limo, and a Cards ballcap when on foot, pretty much lets me minimize any visual surprises.

    But this Christmas, the surprise was that the kids were able to pop me out of time. Like they'd finally crossed some threshold & were now tall enough to go on the ride. Worse, it seemed like one of their moire hormonally-challenged friends had taken over The Ride's controls, and cranked the setting from Sedate to Insane, from Whip-lash to Warp-lash.

    Like the nephew, K, who's just finished his sea-faring thesis, on how the Labrador Current drops silt as it flows into the North Atlantic, and these silts form ocean sediments which contain variable amounts of air bubbles, and form in different little spiral patterns, depending on how strongly the current's flowing, and that, in turn, tells us how much global warming there was at various points, like 12 or 13,000 years ago during the Younger Dryas period, when the Earth's overall warming - as it came out of an Ice Age - suddenly reversed, and plunged us back into the Big Freeze, a 10-30 degrees F downshift in a single human lifetime.

    Now, being a climate change kinda guy, that interested me & made me proud of him & all, but I'm no sooner hurled back 12,000 years than he skips back to the present & I'm finding it hard to keep up as he's talking about working for a mining company up North to make some money for a while & so I try & focus, which is hard, and my brain hurts, when I remember that his Father once worked in the very mine the son's interested in, and clearly he & K had never swapped these stories, so I focused my attention, concentrated, pried the top off the appropriate memory tin, and out whooshed all these stories, back almost 30 years, to 1980-81, tough bloody Recessionary years, and talk about steel rods & aching arms & drilling stories & how being a musician can help you avoid beatings in hardrock towns. And there's 7 or 8 of the kids listening & talking, they're hard to count when they keep moving, but I felt at home when the dusty stories once cast aside as too boring became suddenly more relevant, and the old man sounded pretty damned cool talking about cave-ins instead of mandolins.

    But making the connections between times, between 12,000 years ago and 1980 and 2009 was tough, even though I knew the connections existed. But just as I go to say something more, K's talking about just having worked in some big U.S. city (that shall remain nameless but rhymes with Kenver), where he was selling chocolate & candy, and he's telling us about how his buddy - the natural salesman - would shout offers of "One Bag for $2" and offer a "Two Bags for $5 Special," which apparently worked quite often, the lure of a Deal always more powerful than Mrs. MacIntosh's Grade 5 Math.

    But overall, K said, the candy business was down at Christmas 2008, because of the economy, and that made my Sister mention that a lot of kids coming out of school now have no personal experience or memory of what a real recession feels like, like in '80-'82, when K's Dad had to leave her & travel thousands of miles just to work in that hellhole mine, and how the alternative - an extended lack of work - busts your confidence & scars you, and I'm scrambling now, running hard across the ice floes of time and my memories are bobbing & slipping away as I leap, unstable bastards, 'cause I spent some hard time back then, and don't much want to stand there with that cold water rising back up around my legs ever again.

    But thank God my Sister downshifted instead, and told the kids to pay close & sharp & special attention to the new jobs the Government would hafta create for students this Summer, and told stories of how these programs were often tough to get but paid better, except you had to choose carefully, because you didn't wanna be Summer Slaves for some old bastard farmer wanting cheap brawn to break land & haul brush, but instead should aim for jobs that smelt of "research," 'cause a lot of us had used those jobs to work up new businesses & books & ideas we'd later put into play, even if they had nothing to do with what the government was originally paying us to do. So the connection got made, and I was happy just to get out of the early '80's. Again.

    And I'd been DJ'ing while we were all talking, some mix off my "iPod" (a freaky new piece of time-portal management technology - TPMtech - I'd picked up from a street stall in the future), which I'd been using to modulate timeflow. But when I utilize it in social settings, especially around the kids, I notice that it produces variable effects. For instance, the same songs that trigger very specific time-space shifts in me, can produce a whole range of responses in younger people. 

    I may punch in a direct flight to the Summer of Love, but the kids respond like they've been set down on Nasty Street, and they walk carefully around the long-haired old dude baying his blissful re-membering of 'Treetop Qloud' by the Q-Qhoir. Other times the kids respond inappropriately, their access to the song seemingly jammed by some shitty old video, so all they see is the hair & the flare. But then, oddodderoddest, some songs leapfrog right up ahead in time & sink hooks into them, reborn, and whole new sorts of memories seem to get forged. And since the kids insist they're still right here in 2009, my working hypothesis is now that songs themselves can become unstuck in time. Just often not the ones I'd expect.

    Lynyrd Skynyrd's songs, for instance, should be firmly embedded in the muddy delta where the Southern River meets Classic Rock, but my nephew - K, the Sediment & Candy Boy - walks over, dons the helmet, takes over the controls at the iPod, and pulls up this song. Which suddenly has every single person - of all ages - laughing & singing & head-banging, and all seem to feel as if they've been transported to that same 'damned tight spot' the song describes, though now... overlaid for each with their own memories, of Northern mining towns and Burmese brothels, each feeling that tremble you get when innocence meets fear meets nasty violence meets talk-fast-kid-or-this-might-be-all-for-you, and we're all shouting the chorus of... Gimme 3 Steps, Mister. 


    And I'm baffled by how these children now know fear. Fear of other people. And I shift from thinking about my own life's tight spots, alleys & gangs & bars & knives, and how I got out in one piece, or two, as the case may be, when my mind starts wondering what the hell their parents were doing letting these little kids head off around the world, because the kids are now telling their stories too, details changed, but themes the same, like my niece, A, talking about the women she just worked with, women who escaped from the Thai sex trade, and ran away back to the Burmese border region, except that I'm seeing A at 6 with a basket full of strawberries & cheeks redder than a strawberry bruise... and again, A at 16, the drop-out, full-on Goth, buried in black, hidden & silent under her hair... and again, A today, exploding into the world, revealing that the real difficulty all along had been having an IQ turned to 11 in a world stuck on 7, and she's teaching & leading & talking like... well, like some of those old Suffragettes you see in documentaries of the 1910's and 1920's, or that big mural about Nellie McClung that's here in town, showing her leading the way to Women's Suffrage in Canada in 1918. And my niece? Well, I think she wants it for Burma. Suffrage, that is. And a few other things in the bargain.

    So you see, that's the kind of place where I get lost, unable to follow, and the evening has just begun, because first I'm back in '80-'82 during that recession & feeling the cold water & the not having work & empathing the mines... and then I'm seeing my niece who is 6 & 16 & 26 and then she's melting melting, but in a good way, back into the 1920's & the 1880's & all those women adventurers & activists... and then damn it all to bloody hell, I've gone & been blown completely back, back into the Younger Dryas period 12 or 13,000 years ago, when the Labrador Current absorbed this massive slug of extra-fresh water, like somebody spilt a Perrier the size of Pennsylvania, and the record's there, right there in my nephew's ocean-bottom bubbles, of the water getting carried by the current right round the ocean, pretty much stopping the North Atlantic Conveyor, which in turn kicked nearly the whole world, within just a few years, back toward glaciation & an Ice Age, a terrible case of Abrupt Climate Change, which is what I work on a lot, and I can tell you Britain & Western Europe are shit-scared of this happening again, and so am I, and yet that climatic shift probably precipitated the beginnings of agriculture amongst the Natufian people as the Levant turned to drought 12,000 years ago, Natufians like that tiny woman shaman with the bad leg and those two familiar Weasels I learned & posted about a while back.

    So I'm thinking, ok, maybe good can come from such terrible-seeming events, and then a weird thought, that the Earth pulling out of an Ice Age was reversed by the Younger Dryas Big Freeze, and that was triggered by a sudden influx from the Labrador Current, but trace it back, and here I'm flying back over the tundra in time, trace the water back & you can see that it came from giant Lake Agassiz, which isn't there now, 'cause it bled out then, and it had only been a lake because of an enormous ice dam, which got broken somewhere around 13,000 years ago, probably triggered by a meteor impact, and I know you're not listening, it's like I'm humming now & you've turned back to the Vikings game, but tell me it's not weird that the house I'm sitting in today was, at that time, precisely on the bottom of then-Lake Agassiz... and weirdest of all, that my nephew's digging on an ocean-bottom thousands of miles away, from the spot young Lake Agassiz ran away to, when it went On The Road, a lake time-traveling the way the songs travel, and like Billy Pilgrim & I do, but somewhat more unusual for a lake to travel than a person... and I'm wondering if maybe the lake came back to tell me something, the way Lynyrd Skynyrd's songs come back with their advice, and maybe they're both telling us that you can think things are going one way, but then abruptly, they snap around & go the other way, and that seems to be the theme here, if you need a theme to connect all this up, which I don't, at least not right now, 'cause I'm still in transit.

    Are you with me? I should hope not. Because like I said, most mornings I'm not with me. Most days, in fact, I'm sleepwalking. Ever since '68, I've been waiting for this 40 year story to take its inevitable turn for the good. Waiting for how we're gonna do that Natufian Triple Salchow & get the hell out of this post-'68 desert. Or at least, learn to live here properly.

    And now it's New Year's Day, well, the night of the 1st actually, and I'm walking through a blacked-out town during a white-out storm, all the power down, the wind & snow blasting, coating my glasses within seconds so thick I can't see, and the only light & sound in town coming from the massive generators that keep the Senior Citizens Center glowing white hot for the old cold bones inside, and I have to go get candles 'cause the house I've rented has none, and so I leave my honey warm in bed, and head off into a scifi walk through a storm off the North Atlantic that's reached that stage where any sensible person starts to get scared, which means I - like my unsensible brethren & cistern - am out for a walk, hunting for candles.

    You'd think it'd make me think of the storms we weathered as kids, like the February one that time that was so strong it blew the barn down, but it doesn't, instead I get blown out into the future, and I can see how little these homes will be worth on the path where the money-storm blows harder & longer than we're planning for, and I can see which homes house the skills to survive in the cold years & the smarts to have put a generator in already & the strength to hold off all comers, and this is a path, yes it is, I'm telling you, and we do not wanna get on it, and I wanna get off it, 'cause the paved road turns into gravel & then an old logging road & then a rabbit track & then we're lost I'm telling you, and even though I got the last remaining candles this time, there's no guarantees for anyone, even for the smartest rats in this race, and the guy who just passed me in the storm has a black balaclava on & a little miner's helmet casting fierce light into the black night, and I take one look at his eyes & I know the predator is up in him, that's why he's out here, and I don't wanna have to handle that shit. And neither do you. Because on that kind of a timeline, this stormy future timeline, it takes an hour to walk a mile & you're thinking the whole time about the expenditure of energy & if they're ok back home & how much cold is seeping in & can you make the roundtrip, and you're not hiking in the mountains this time, this is just walking to the store in your own hometown, and it's not good when hard, hungry, survival crawls up from your gut & you can taste it in your mouth, or when the wolves come down from the hills & start frequenting built-up areas. Savvy?

    Things fall apart. There. I should've said it that way.

    I mean, I just saw a very small & civil version, at the airport on December 22nd, when the flights were cancelled & planeloads of talking turkey-killers were told they were gonna miss Christmas dins, and the college kids kicked into discussions of whether to drive-hitchhike-bus-train instead... and the wealthy strode to the front of the 5 hour deep queue, because somehow their lives & their Christmas dwarfed ours in importance, and surely Executive Class didn't mean their plane couldn't overcome the force of gravity & fly, and one lady wrapped in a fur coat & her two stunned sons, argued, even though rich, over an additional $74 rebate, for one hour, while hundreds stood & waited, and old people in wheelchairs bound for Seattle kept quiet because they knew what tough times meant, what it meant when you had to depend on others... while for 5 hours the rest of us groaned & sang carols & shared chocolate & told jokes and - eventually - found the nerve to heckle the $74 rich, offering to take up a collection for them, before we turned back to the more useful task of helping the kids choose their travel options, because 3 days on a bus to get home is a world of hurt in Winter, and I've done that 1,000 mile trip every way there is, only thing worse than a bus is hitching, which I did & nearly died, froze to death, 'til I threw myself in front of a 16-wheeler, right on the highway, begging the Gods of Peterbilt to take me I was that cold, but the Quebec cops got me instead & threw me in the drunk tank, full of French sounds & warm blankets 'til dawn when I frapped the rue encore, and trains are the far far far better choice anyway because they're both warm & you get to walk around in them.

    I know you think this is a Christmas tale, but it's not, because Airports are usually out of time, or - better - Airports have Gates not just for all places, but also for all times, and the difference was that this Airport was locked up tight, the only thing on display being a film about what an industry & its employees, when they've been hammered down to jackshit sole-bottom residue, look like when they front Moscow supermarket-style empty shelves & face all-day-queues of grim, gray, angry shoppers, which the Airport was telling me can happen, even in our consumers paradise. Even with all their fancy 18 inch wide seats to fit more bums in & overhead lights that don't work to save money & repulsive recycled food on sale to make money & recycled aerosol sickness thrown in free, for special friends only, even with all that, the airlines are screwed because they have no reserves, no back-up planes or pilots or excess capacity, so when something goes wrong around Christmas, you're pulled for 4 days out of your time, and lodged firmly in the netherworld they've constructed, and when that includes the 23rd, 24th, 25th & 26th - well, those are all bad days for people to have to miss, and if you think I'm not talking politics & economics, you're not paying attention, because this is what all companies & industries & markets look like when they're squeezed & in decline & up against it & the shit has most definitely hit, and this future could include not just our airlines, but also our car repair places & the linemen turning our power back on & our teachers & doctors & the clerks & the Greeters in our stores, poor sods having to face the customers' cold wrath on a good day, and the bottoms of their hot stampeding feet on a bad one.

    And yes, there's a future for us on this path, if we choose wrong, or Lady Luck grows Snake Eyes, or we get hit with an asteroid, or the banks continue to be managed by Epsilon B's, and the Russians know, are ya hearin' me, they know Abrupt Reverse, think empty shelves & the Lada, or if you can't climb that wall, think Saigon in April 1975, or cast back to the 1930's, or maybe just visit the Airlines at Christmas, or a Walmart on Black Friday where the predators don their balaclavas & full court press the Greetings right back down the Greeters' throats - and I'm just sayin', when you're out in a blacked out town during a white-out, or at an airport full of grounded people, this is what your world looks like, and our world can be. If we continue to work at it like we've been.

    But I make it back with the last candles, and they're the expensive kind, with Hot Apple Pie & Warm Oatmeal & Butter Cream scents, and that sets me to traveling, but thankfully, only in dreams, and the next night the kids are back, and they must be tougher than me, or walking some sunny meadow I managed to miss, 'cause they're laughing at the storm, and at the economy, and it's a cheerier place to be in time, so I stick around, but I only snap fully awake when I hear them all laughing at me, because my lover's revealed that when we watched Mamma Mia a while back, it seems I was... ummmm... crying. Odd behavior, I know, but I put it down to the coming unstuck in time thing. Billy Pilgrim had the same problem. The tears came not because I loved Abba quite that much back in high school, it was more that the movie was about having lost a love 20 some years ago, and then they come back, and you're feeling all those dreams dashed & dead, and also other ones, surprisingly bright ones, coming up new through the soil, and in the movie they're all dancing & singing under sunny skies & fruit trees, and me watching it beside my beautiful blonde full-of-fire Scotswoman, M, my long lost fiancée, lost for 20 some years, which is a much longer time when you have to live through each & every hour, and not just skip back quick & remember it, but she's there, here, with me, come back, and Dancing Queen is playing making me think of the first time we met, when we simply looked at each other across a dance floor, this is true, not a movie, I've got the scars, a love-at-first-sight-so-you-walk-right-away-from-whoever-I've forgotten-now-that-I-was-dancing-with-and-instead-into-the-arms-of-the-one-you-now-know-you're-in-love-with-forever... and then to lose that, her, in the real world, or maybe she was just lost on that one timeline, that one path, and now there's another one opening up, after all that, to see Mamma Mia, and hear Dancing Queen playing, a man shouldn't cry, but after my flight home had been cancelled at the airport, she came & picked me up, pulled me right out of Airline Hell, cancelled her own plans for Christmas with her family, and chose to be with me instead, and in addition came down to extend the holiday with me & mine, and you see, when time jumps back & forth, or when you do, and then the music does too, and then whole other people start skipping through time as well, disappearing & then showing back up in your life, landing on the same ice floe, them now equally unstuck in time, and Mamma Mia's playing... well... what would you do?

    Well, what I did was to take the mockery like a man. In short, I ran to my room, had a good - but brief & manly - cry, reapplied my mascara, stuffed the cigs back up the T-shirt sleeve, and returned to the party. After which, I sat down with my Evangeline, and my Ice Weasels, and I looked around at them, and the world, and at time, at all the times - times past & times to come & especially time right here, right now... and I laughed.

    Because I can tell you that no matter what happens, no matter how tight the tight spot, no matter the storm, whether black-out or white-out, no matter the body, whether Jewish or Natufian, Burmese or Alabaman, no matter whether it takes 25 years or 12,000... I've got company. Which is worth remembering.

    And it makes coming unstuck in time.... not so bad.