Time Portal

By the grace of Herman I finally somehow managed to rig up an elementary time portal.

I know it doesn’t look like much.  But it’s a start.  And it works.

And here’s how it works.

(This is going to get complicated, so buckle up and settle in…)

That door you see in the picture leads into the drum room of an old recording studio where I live.  The Christmas lights got nothing to do with the time portal by the way in case that’s what you were thinking.  Or maybe they do.  Hell, I don’t know.

There is no known science or technology built into the time portal.  It exists entirely in my imagination.

Or maybe I should rephrase that.  Because although it exists entirely in my imagination that doesn’t mean it wouldn’t work for you should you inadvertently stumble through it.

Because it totally would.

Because that is the way I imagined it.

You see, the trick about Time Travel isn’t about building a time machine and doesn’t have anything to do with science or technology or anything like that.  You just have to believe you can time travel.  So whatever it takes to help you believe is essentially your time machine.  Or in my case, time portal.

So here is the way it works. You step through the door into the drum room, and as you step through you and everything on your person are instantaneously transported through time.  You just jot your destination time and date down on a little yellow paper tablet before you step in.  For it to work you have to use a #2 pencil.  Then you tear off the top page so you can take it with you as a reminder/souvenir if you want.  This also covers your tracks so nobody else knows when you’ve gone off to.  I really couldn’t imagine anything simpler than that.

For now, whenever you step back out again you return to your own time.  But I have a button I can push before I go in, and that disables the return mechanism.  So then you’re stuck whenever you’ve gone, unless and until you can find or build another time portal of course.

But here’s the thing: You can only travel to years when the studio actually exists.

Which interestingly leads us off on another tangent.

So the house I live in is really old.  Like so old you can skip right over the last century before this one if you want to get to the date when it was built.  But the recording studio part where I live was built much later so it isn’t that old.  It’s only a half a century or so.  And it hasn’t been used in at least a few decades.  But for awhile there after it was built it was rockin’ and rollin’.

So the consequence of all this is I gotta be careful when I go back to.  Because the way things are going there’s no way in hell I’m going forward.  So in one of my trial runs I accidentally popped into the middle of a recording session for a musician whose name I’m not going to tell you but if I did and you have been an American for the past 40 years you would know already.  Needless to say everybody there including said musician was shocked.  So without missing a beat I turned around and walked right back out the door and into oblivion as far as they were concerned.  And now I finally know why everybody always said this old studio was haunted.

Back in the old timeline I could just jump whenever and wherever I wanted and it didn’t take any imagining or self-convincing.  I just did it.  Because that’s how I was taught.  I guess things work a little differently here.  But you’ve got to work with what you got I guess, and what I’ve got now is a working time portal.

And that, my friends, is as exciting as shit.

Because maybe, just maybe, one of these days I’ll just push that old button (it’s literally just an old copper coat button I sewed onto a pillowcase, no need to get all fancy when you’re dealing with imagination you know) and travel back to the beforetimes when people were still clueless but happy and just walk right out that door into a whole new world.

Old world.

Whatever.

That would certainly seem a better time to live out my remaining years than now and the future.

But the problem is I just can’t go far back enough to make damn good and sure I’m dead well before now comes back along.

Not without risking another encounter with musicians anyway.

Maybe if I brought along an instrument they wouldn’t notice.

At worse they’d just be like, “Hey, where’d that trombone player come from??”

And I’d just be like, “Hey, hit this joint I just happened to bring with me just in case this happened, you musicians!”

And while they were all passing the joint around I’d be outta there.

Or maybe I’d stick around first for a toke or two.

After all they say when in Rome, do as the Romans.