Back In The World

Time travel has become a familiar enough subject to us by way of innumerable fictional treatments that we're all pretty conversant with the (contrived) ins and outs of it, the various scientific gymnastics and logical liberties taken to account for the obviously insurmountable paradoxes present in any discussion of temporal elasticity, and so most reasonable people have concluded that it is in fact a permanently fictive proposition. Oh, now again some deep thinker will posit a set of theoretical principles arguing otherwise and revive the discussion, but these generally have value only as thought experiments. In the absence of any other evidence we are sticking to the model governed by the 2nd Law of Thermodynamics in which entropy rules and time's arrow flies strictly in one direction. Right?

Wrong. Sorry to burst your bubble, but time travel is real, achievable, and happening right now.

All you have to do is rob a bank, and you don't even have to go that far. You can do mayhem on somebody (not recommended), or bring a truckload of illegal drugs across the border, or hack into government websites and create havoc in the administration (the morally preferable method). The idea is to piss off the authorities enough so that they sequester you away from society long enough for technology to advance significantly. Hey presto! Time travel.

After seven years, my phone alone was enough to Marty McFly me into a condition of baffled amazement. Televisions are not only smart (-er than me, judging from the complexities of the remotes), but someone has managed to actually improve on reality. Cars are loaded with a bunch of interesting distractions that are mitigated by less interesting driver-assist functions which I suppose cancel each other out and make driving more or less as safe or dangerous as it ever was. Call that one a wash.

The whole experience has been rather shocking and frankly, I resent the whole lot of you for just freely carrying on without me. For now I find myself in the unfamiliar role of slack-jawed yokel craning his neck to gape at all the tall buildings as daily, the technological innovations of the last seven years continue to gobsmack me. This is not a comfortable place to be, for an information junkie. It is important to me not only to know things, but doubly so to get the goods before anyone else so as to appear blasé when some breathless laggard comes at me with what he believes is a piece of blistering scuttlebutt.

"Yawn," I'll say. "Yeah, I sent you an email about it a couple of days ago."

It's as good as bad sex, which, like bad pizza and bad Nic Cage movies, is still pretty good.

So, time travel is a thing, sorta, and I'm here to tell you that it is not worth the trouble. Yes, being able to jump from iPhone3 to X in one fell swoop is thrilling in the extreme. Meeting Siri and Alexa was a singular pleasure and more than anything, emblematic of the future I now occupy. Not having to do the twist while backing out of parking spaces is pretty damned nifty, but on the whole I wish I'd stuck around and experienced progress incrementally, the way God intended. Mucking around in the space-time continuum can only lead to trouble, as generations of sci-fi writers have warned us about.

I also got a few nastier surprises in the form of dead friends. Five total, which averages out to 0.71 dead friends per year, not a terrible average considering the company I keep and their manner of living. Four of them were, if not expected, then at least not entirely shocking. If you lie down with dogs you're going to get fleas, and if your social network is composed of degenerate dope fiends you're liable to be attending a few more memorial services than most people find comfortable.

I have devoted at least two columns over the years to the exploits and adventures of Crystal Knight and mentioned her in several more; her impact on my life, as with everyone else who ever loved, hated, or was violently assaulted by her, was considerable. Had I handicapped the field and assigned odds to the relative likelihood of my various acquaintances succumbing to the perils of the life, Crystal would've been a long shot on the order of a goat jockeyed by a spider monkey vying for the Preakness. Being a genuine force of nature, it's difficult to imagine anything short of a biblical plague or nuclear event taking her out, but in fact it was the entirely pedestrian and ruthlessly indiscriminate scourge of opiates that felled that little giant.

Crystal and I went through the Ford Street program together twice, and together with our staunch ally Beaverhawk left our mark on that place with some truly epic shenanigans. It was there that she met her ex-husband, my friend Conrad Whetstone, a man so mellow he makes Jack Johnson look like Daffy Duck.

Given Crystal's dynamism, volatility, and contempt for weakness, you might expect such a pairing to follow a praying mantis-style relationship model wherein the female bites the head off her mate once the reproductive necessities have been addressed, but they were better suited than anyone imagined and got on quite well when she wasn't trying to murder him. Although circumstances precluded a happily ever after for those two, they did produce Asher, a child of uncommon charm, intelligence, and potential.

Crystal was one of the people I most looked forward to seeing when I got out and it was a real punch in the gut to get the news, but I'll just say I'm richer for having known her. I know she is deeply missed by many and left a substantial hole on the skin of this earth. Rest in peace, little warrior.

Temporal modifications and disappointments notwithstanding, I'm adjusting nicely to the brave year 2018, drinking coconuts and cucumbers and chatting up Google like we were old homies. Prison recedes further daily into the dank recesses of unpleasant memory and it won't be long before it takes on the character of an overlong and tedious movie I vaguely remember seeing.

Mendocino County seems, on the whole, healthier and more prosperous than when I left, although the robust economy doesn't seem to have diminished the number of tweakers infesting the streets or the vagrants plying the tracks. There may even be more of them, leading me to the conclusion that they are either immune to economic variance or simply responding to the upswing with predictable growth patterns, like Apple building a new headquarters. If there is a general distribution of more money throughout the population, it stands to reason there's more spare change to be had and more opportunists out there to get their hands on it.

I am currently parked in the latest incarnation the Ford Street Project, the Ukiah Recovery Center, inoculating myself against the possibility of returning to drugs and prison, an untenable alternative. Onward and upward, I say, in the traditional day-to-day manner; no telling what kind of changes I effected with that time-travel nonsense.