by Douglas Lain
The mannequin in the second hand store’s window had peach colored lips. She was wearing a paisley patterned Sari and had several beaded necklaces around her neck. She was lit by the neon logo for Phillips 66 to her left and a Hamms Beer sign to her right.
My Time Box blinked at me in the dark. I glanced at the photographs of Chomsky, of a slice pizza, and then at Saddam Hussein. Each image flickered across the touch-screen.
I went back and asked Chomsky again and again. I tried several approaches:
Chomsky ate a pizza slice with sundried tomatoes. He took a bite and got some tomato paste on his glasses as I approached his table. When he put down his copy of the Financial Times I opened an umbrella and put it down on the tabletop between us, covering his plate and knocking over his bottle of Moose Head.
And then I brought him a box of chocolate candies.
Then I tried saying everything he would say the moment before he said it, but Chomsky held his ground. He could not be moved.
The new features of the Time Box didn’t help me either. I did not think to take a picture with the camera feature, or transcribe the moment to digital video. Why would anyone ever use those features? Why take a picture when you can just go back and see the same damned mistakes over and over again?
CRAWDADDY ONLINE
Jeff Morris
January 2nd, 2014 - 3:17 pm | 3,225 views | 0 recommendations | 25 comments
The Timebox: Same as It Ever Was
What if some day or night a demon were to steal after you into your loneliest loneliness and say to you, “This life as you now live it and have lived it, you will have to live once more and innumerable times more; and there will be nothing new in it, but every pain and every joy and every thought and sigh and everything unutterably small or great in your life will have to return to you, all in the same succession and sequence …” Would you not throw yourself down and gnash your teeth and curse the demon who spoke thus?
—Friedrich Nietzsche, The Gay Science, 1882
Before Christmas I argued that Time Box Incorporated’s troubles cannot be addressed at the level of branding or by adding features. The trouble is intrinsic in the device itself. The Box brings the consumer into a frozen past, a history stuck in amber. Since then I’ve had a chance to experiment further with the device, and I’m compelled to continue in the same vein.
The second time out I typed in Noam Chomsky again but added the name Terence McKenna to the search.
McKenna was a minor celebrity in the nineties. Famous amongst stoners and closet new agers, he was sort of an updated Timothy Leary. He promoted drugged out passivity as a panacea, taught at the Esalen Institute, pushed Human Potential and anti-ideologies, but, unlike Chomsky, he did dare to offer a remedy for our social ills. Even if his career was a symptom of the boomer’s retreat from political engagement, there was an element to his spiel that I wanted to keep. McKenna argued that the human imagination could be our escape hatch. I typed his name next to the name Chomsky and pressed return.
On November 16, 1971, Chicago O’Hare International Airport was less antiseptic than it would be forty-four years later. The plaster walls were off white, the ceiling was lower than it would be, and so, despite the fact that Gate 23 was mostly empty, the space seemed cramped. The metal mesh wall panel behind the check-in desk communicated some of the authority inherent in industrial technology, but was too physical and intrusive to truly impress. The check-in desk itself was just a simple box with the logo for TWA, the interlocking globes and the red lettering, knitted into nubby blue fabric. All in all the scale and design created the sense that the airport was run by human beings. Chicago International came across as vulnerable. It made me smile.
I arrived inside the gate, past the stainless steel rails, past security, already sitting in an orange fiberglass chair facing the plate glass. Behind me and to my left a forty-four-year-old Chomsky stood with his wife Carol. They were patiently waiting in line to check-in. Terence McKenna was closer to me, leaning against a white pillar on my side of the stainless steel rails. A young woman sat next to him on a steamer trunk.
Chomsky and his wife were both well dressed. Chomsky wore a grey wool suit and dark blue tie, while his wife wore a dark blue floral skirt and a black turtleneck. McKenna, on the other hand, looked a bit unkempt in blue jeans and a brown and white flannel shirt. His beard was scruffy. His hair was long, but not long enough to be a conscious choice. The woman with him looked cleaner in her jeans. Her long blonde hair was partially obscured by a straw cowboy hat.
The Pentagon Papers had leaked to the New York Times five months earlier, in June of 1971, and Chomsky, who’d helped Ellsberg release the documents to the media, was flying to a speaking engagement about the document at UC Berkeley. McKenna was waiting for the same flight after spending many months in the Amazon. While Chomsky had been composing scathing essays about both LBJ and Richard Nixon, Terence McKenna had been hallucinating in Peru.
“Flight 2012 to Berkeley, California is running behind schedule this afternoon,” the brunette stewardess behind the ticket counter told Chomsky. She smiled at the air in front of her face, but when she made eye contact with the professor her smile faltered. “We don’t have an ETA at the moment, but I will let you know just as soon as that information is available.” She was uncomfortable in her pink and orange polyester uniform, and attempted to straighten it by pulling down on the uniform’s short skirt. She stepped back from the counter and adjusted her pillbox hat.
I fiddled with the dials on the Time Box, used the temporal uplink to search for information on McKenna’s trip to the Amazon and Chomsky’s essays on the Pentagon papers. This was probably the only moment in all of space/time wherein these two men could be found in the same room, and I decided that my goal, the way I could change things, would be to get them to argue. I’d arrange it so Chomsky had to listen and fully comprehend the terms and assumptions behind McKenna’s hallucinations, and I’d get McKenna to pay attention to Chomsky. But before I did anything I’d see how the moment had originally played out. The first time through I’d just listen and watch.
In the twenty minutes before the boarding of Flight 2012 began Chomsky barely spoke. Carol offered to get him a copy of the Financial Times at the newsstand and Noam stared out at the jet planes on the runway as he waited. He barely moved. McKenna, on the other hand, never stopped talking, even though it was apparent that the young woman he was traveling with had lost interest in what he was saying. McKenna described Nixon’s America as a dream that people needed to wake up from, and he wondered if the illusion could really last another four years. “Everything is changing,” McKenna said.
When Carol came back and Noam turned away from the Tarmac to read the New York Times and the Financial Times, McKenna seemed to feel a need to take over this staring out at the horizon. He pressed up against the glass, first looking out at the orange stripe on the 747, and then examining his own reflection. McKenna looked at his mirror image and then moved toward the glass until it appeared that he had only one brown eye, right in the middle of his forehead. His girlfriend, who I later discovered was named Wendy, brought him a half eaten apple she’d scavenged from the trashcan by the gift shop, and Terence ate it, core and seeds included. Wendy was pretty with her long and very straight blonde hair and straw hat. She kneeled down next to Terence and threw I-Ching coins onto the tile floor. She tossed out the I-Ching hexagram for disruption, and then put her hand on her hip as she read the hexagram’s meaning aloud from a small blue hardback version of the Book of Changes:
“The Chinese character ku represents a bowl in whose contents worms are breeding. This means decay. It has come about because the gentle indifference in the lower trigram has come together with the rigid inertia of the upper, and the result is stagnation. Since this implies guilt, the conditions embody a demand for removal of the cause. Hence the meaning of the hexagram is not simply ‘what has been spoiled’ but ‘work on what has been spoiled,’” she said.
> Sitting between McKenna and Chomsky in the airport, noticing the metal mesh panel erected between the passengers and the TWA desk, noticing the cool November light streaming in the huge pane glass windows, I considered the Ku Hexagram. This past moment required work. I adjusted my Time Box, turned the dial back twenty minutes but did not reset.
I watched Terence and Chomsky board their plane, and then, when the moment was over, I pressed the reset button.
CRAWDADDY ONLINE
Jeff Morris
January, 5th, 2014 - 3:52 pm | 1,226 views | 0 recommendations | 14 comments
Seeking Disruption
Six in the beginning means:
Setting right what has been spoiled by the father.
If there is a son,
No blame rests upon the departed father.
Danger.
In the end, good fortune.
—The Gnostic Book of Changes, Hexagram 18, Line One
I tried with Terence first, partly because I thought he would be more likely to believe me, but also because I wasn’t as afraid of him as I was of Chomsky. I sat down next to him, reached over and grabbed his knapsack, dumped the contents onto the tile floor, then explained that I was quite sorry, and excuse me. I gathered up his possessions quickly, lined them up: one cassette recorder, a pink towel, an empty baggie that once held cannabis, a paperback edition of “the Naked Ape,” yellowed copy of a June 5, 1968 edition the New York Times, one pair of dingy white boxer shorts, a pair of olive colored socks, a pair of leather sandals that smelled like sweat, a pair of cut-off blue jeans, and a plastic poncho that smelled like a campfire and which was rolled up tight and secured by two rubber bands. I got down on hands and knees, took the Time Box out of my front pocket, and took a picture of it all. Then I reset, and approached McKenna again.
I was from the future. I was there to talk to him, to change history, and I could prove it. I described the contents of his knapsack, but Terence wasn’t as easy to convince as I’d expected. For one thing, he wasn’t sure what he had in his blue nylon pack, so my explanation just came across as speculation that he could neither confirm nor deny.
I tried resetting the Box and bringing back my own knapsack. I told him I was from the future and then dumped the contents of my own bag for him to inspect. I showed McKenna a copy of his book True Hallucinations, an old copy of Mondo 2000 from 1993, Daniel Pinchbeck’s “Soft in the Head,” a netbook computer, an iPhone, and then the Time Box itself. I did not tell Terence that in my future he was dead, but did tell him that I was from 2013, and that nothing had happened, nothing would happen, on December 21, 2012. Terence held the glossy magazine. The copy of Mondo 2000 was an antique from 1993 and Terence gingerly traced the wavy lines that were emanating from a cartoon JFK head. Instead of getting his head blown off Kennedy was depicted, in cyberpunk collage style, as getting his mind blown. McKenna’s name was on the cover next to the Lincoln convertible, but he just shook his head at this and asked to see my iPhone.
Terence’s girlfriend was about six feet away and leaning against the pillar with the white courtesy phone. I approached her, informed her that I was from the future, and described the contents of Terence’s knapsack for her.
“What do you want?” she asked.
I didn’t really know what I wanted. Terence was playing Tetris on my iPhone, his girl was holding I-Ching coins, looking at me suspiciously, and so I told her the only thing I could tell her. I said that I’d come back in order to save the world.
The three of us ended up smoking hash from Wendy’s knapsack in the airport parking lot. Marijuana makes me a bit loose lipped, maybe a little captious. Getting stoned with Terence and his chippy I found that I wanted to tell them everything I could about the next forty years. I’d tell them all about computers, Ronald Reagan, Barack Obama, tell them anything if it would keep them from leaning on each other like they were doing. He had his arm around her waist and was playing with the button on her jeans. I’d told them everything I could think of about the decade ahead of them. I told them about Jimmy Carter, Pet Rocks, and the Osmonds. I told them fifties conformity would reinvent itself as hedonism. I wanted them to see how far away they were from the root of their problems. They could trip out as much as they wanted, but the multicolored chaos they brought back would either be bleached out with Clorox or slapped on the Clorox bottle as a part of a rebranding campaign.
“When were you born?” McKenna asked.
“March 20, 1970. In Pittsburgh.”
“Have you gone to Pittsburgh? Have you seen yourself as a baby? Have you visited your mom and dad?” Wendy asked.
“I want to tell you about the Rubik’s Cube,” I said.
But McKenna wouldn’t let go of his point. “You’ve come back to the O’Hare airport in 1971 in order to change history. You think I’m central to that?”
“Yes.”
“Have you tried anything else?”
“Ummm. Yeah. No luck.”
“Did you try killing Hitler?”
“No.”
“Have you tried to stop the bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki?” Wendy asked.
“No. The Time Box won’t let you do that.”
“What?” Terence asked. “Why not?”
I handed him the manual, let him read the disclaimer for himself, but then tried to backpedal.
“It’s not as hopeless as the manual makes it sound. You can change the settings,” I said. “And you can think outside the usual box of history.”
I told them that we needed to go somewhere to talk. We would fly to Berkeley the next day and confront Chomsky there. We needed more time. I’d explain everything, and then we could come up with a plan. I’d tell them how badly the world needed to be changed, all the reasons why: Donkey Kong, Bill Gates, the Internet, Osama bin Laden, and all the other reasons. But, once we got somewhere, when we arrived by cab at a Best Western near the airport, they booked a separate room for themselves. They told me that they’d see me in the morning.
“What about the Rubik’s Cube?” I asked. “What about my glasses. See? They’ve got red ink in the frames.”
“We want to be alone,” McKenna said. “We’ll talk over breakfast.”
I went to my room and considered what it meant for me to be stoned in 1971. I lay down on the baby blue coverlet on my single bed, and looked up at the textured plaster ceiling. I sat up and hunted down the remote, found it velcroed to the dresser.
I watched the Tonight Show with Johnny Carson on a television with a fake wood panel under a channel dial.
“Did you know Richard Nixon is the only president whose formal portrait was painted by a police sketch artist?” Johnny asked the audience.
I stared at the yellow floral wallpaper, and then switched the Time Box off. The past blinked out, it was like turning off a light, and I found myself sitting behind my desk in my office. The yellow wallpaper was gone, as was the brown and white television.
The glass tabletop of my computer desk was smudged from where I’d kept my hands folded during my trip. I’d been in the past for hours. It was well past midnight, but the lights were still on. My wife had gone to bed without me, but she’d left the lights on so I wouldn’t stumble over our son’s legos in the living room. I tip toed across the orange carpet and found that along with a well-lit path she’d left a pillow and blanket for me on the living room sofa. When I lay down I found the metal bar underneath the cushions was bent. I sank into the couch, felt the metal bar press into my back, and considered what it meant that I was still stoned in the year 2013.
I sat up, searched for the remote, turned on the set, and found the Tonight Show with Conan O’Brien.
Next time around I was more proactive. We took Noam Chomsky out of the airport while his wife was in the restroom. Terence injected him with Ibogaine and as the visions came on we led the professor to the escalator. We descended past a travel poster that featured a blonde Eskimo with shapely hips under fir trimmed pants and Chomsky started to laugh un
controllably. The poster featured a phallic airplane in the left corner and the jet was aimed at the blonde Eskimo’s crotch. The slogan on the poster read: “Alaska! It’s not cold inside.”
I explained what was going on once we were in the back of a cab. I held out the Time Box for Chomsky to examine, told him who I was and where I was from, or more to the point when I was from, and then introduced McKenna and Wendy.
Chomsky must have decided to humor me, or maybe it was the Ibogaine, but rather than object to the premise he seemed to take the idea of time travel in stride.
“Have you tried exposing the Gulf of Tonkin incident?” he asked.
“No.”
“Have you tried killing Hitler?” McKenna asked the same questions every time.
“You can’t do that. The Time Box comes with a ‘you can’t kill Hitler’ disclaimer. History can’t be altered like that. The past is fixed.”
“You didn’t tell us that before,” Wendy said.
“You didn’t ask.”
“I …” Chomsky paused. “I believe I may be sick.”
“Do you see spots?” Terence asked.
“Orange.”
“He’s going to throw up. Better roll down the window.”
“Your friend going to get sick in my cab?” the Italian taxi driver asked. He turned to look at Chomsky and didn’t like what he saw. We skidded to a stop.
The linguist huddled on hands and knees and let out a stream of green foam. He complained about snakes when he finished, and then rolled onto his back and stretched his arms out across the grassy median.
“Let me look at your time machine.” Wendy took the box from me and then held it out, at arm’s length, as though she were considering whether she should throw it.