How I learned to Time Travel.
Many years ago, long before the internet, I had an odd, quirky habit of reading the personal ads in the LA Times. It was the social media of its era and contained truly sad, emotionally heavy, fun, bizarre, and pathetic expressions of the human drama written in short blurbs and printed in black ink on thin white-gray paper.
It was in the back pages where the real people lived. The front pages of the paper were for blood, gore, man bites dog stories, and political fantasies.
After scanning the daily disappointment of the headlines, I often jumped to the classifieds.
You would see hundreds of small print ads like this inside small boxes. Row after row.
1967 Buick Skylark blue 87k $500, like new 5551212 Dave.
If you needed a used gold fish bowl or a stolen 35mm camera, that’s where you went.
The classifieds.
After a half dozen pages of this sort of thing. Then personal ads pages began. A dozen pages of cryptic splashes of pathos and drama.
Things like this:
Alice come home all is forgiven Mittens misses you love Chuck.
I don’t recall the price, but you were charged by the word and how many issues you wanted it to appear in. I bet the Times made a bit of revenue from these ads because there were a lot of them. Every day, even on Sunday.
One day, I stumbled on a personal ad that caught my eye, and I have never forgotten it. If you saw it, you would have cocked your head and read it two or three times yourself, too. It was just…
Well, I have forgotten the exact wording, but it went something like this:
Looking for a partner to travel back in time with me. No sex. Need to provide your own weapons. Previous experience not required. Return trip not guaranteed. I have only done this once before. Serious applicants only. 10 AM, main entrance, Forest Lawn Cemetery. Wear a red hat.
What is a fellow supposed to think?
It was either an elaborate practical joke or a super-secret coded message to a Soviet spy.
Time travel to the past? And then (maybe) return? Return to when?
What the hell?
I had to go for a 45-year walk and connect with reality after that one.
Life and time moved on. But I never forgot the strange personal ad I read sometime in 1977. Maybe that was the person's point. To never be forgotten. Because they vanished into the past. Now he or she may be a famous figure from the past we all admire and love. Perhaps from 1899? (That’s where I would go…) Who knows?
We may be living in a world created by them. Are we being directed to live exactly like some random mad genius wants us to live? Are we all in a matrix (for the lack of a better word) of someone's world-shaping desires? A person who discovered the secret to time travel and wanted to go somewhere exotic with a random stranger. Or maybe their traveling companions were known to them, and the “no sex” qualifier was a special message to them.
I have thought about this incident all my life. The memory comes up, I ponder it, I consider the reality of it, I fantasize about it. Hell, I even wrote a short story about time travel because of that small blurb printed in a newspaper from 1977. It’s called “A Trick of the Light”. My first attempt at fiction. It’s OK for an amateur writer.
Now, let me share my secret about time travel. I discovered it one day when I was reading about quantum mechanics. Fascinating subject. The math is beyond me, but the overarching concepts are understandable if you break them down slowly.
The author described a strange function of subatomic particles called ‘spooky action at a distance’.
If you want to read about it:
How Bell’s Theorem Proved ‘Spooky Action at a Distance’ Is Real
Quantum entanglement. Subatomic particles separated by a vast distance seem to be connected, and if one is influenced, the other reacts. Spooky indeed.
We are made of Subatomic particles. Did you just scratch your nose? I did that for you.
You see, the trick is inside your mind. That’s where the time machine is. Your memories, your precognitive powers, your ability to reason. You, we, are time-traveling ALL the time. Hmm, that’s another paradox. We never stop moving in time, do we? Even when we are gone from this veil of tears, we live on as a memory echo. True, the echo gets fainter and fainter until it can hardly be heard. But somewhere our souls are entangled. That thought comforts me.
So here we all are, a bunch of entangled time travelers ripping through the space-time continuum, oblivious to what damage we are doing. So, try and love one another. It makes the tangles tighter.
That’s the secret to time travel. It was right there in my cerebellum all along.
You are welcome. See you in the funny papers.