Epilogue

I’ve been back in the world for a while now. My leap forward was not instantaneous as planned; a plane of glass has separated me from the world and is still dissolving. For about a week, I never felt tiredness; I slept because I thought I should, usually sometime after dawn. The feeling now is like this: my head is poking through time into the present, but my body stretches across my whole life. My time machine is underneath me somewhere- I can almost wave to a past version of myself. I am permanently a time traveler- time now seems like a set of coordinates, a map. Looking at a clock is locating my position, and my velocity seems steerable. Still, since I have returned to your present, I have been plagued by the feeling that something truly momentous is due to happen, and it is not in sight. Does everybody in the future feel like this? How do we feel elation and not dread from deja-vu? We are all time travelers, and nobody is moving at exactly the same speed. I’ll keep searching for the moment where everyone is present, and until then, I settle for messages. End transmission.

Steeling myself for the leap

Strangely, as I look at it, I will have made as many posts as days are supposed to have past on the outside. Maybe my literary mind cannot be deceived by the altered flow of time. i am reduced to the act of waiting, now, the comfortable modern person's default and most unfortunate state. I cleaned up in here, I'm worried that it smells weird. I can feel the tension in the bow of time stretched to furthest point, just before release. I'm steeling my mind for the leap into the future, while it should be physically painless, I have not idea what awaits me. I guess I get this feeling anytime I travel long distance- but I always land in an inhabitable place, where my previous worries seem silly. I've added some pictures from the chamber in operation, pictures from the past, if you will. Thanks for keeping me company from the future, I can feel that you are there. I can feel that I am not alone.

Jamie O'Shea

written from within the time machine at 11:28 am, January 13th 2008

the past is crumbling

This is one of my last posts from the deep past. I’m feeling ready for my leap across the void- to become a citizen of the not-very-distant future. For anyone in the Omaha area, in the area of Saturday January 19th, I will arrive instaneously from the past at about 8:00 pm in The Bemis Underground. Please come and tell me about all the miraculous things that have happened in this grand cultural narrative during the time I’ve skipped. I miss you, future present.

a regular pair of pants

Time is not actually passing, anymore than space is passing. The vastness of space doesn’t negate the existence of tiny people on a tiny planet, and the vastness of time is no different. Death is a concept invented by culture, an abstraction that, by its nature, no one actually experiences. Things I miss in here, with a pleasant, aching clarity: the smell of dirt, a breeze. A girl’s hair when she rests her head between my chest and shoulder, a regular pair of pants, drinking and listening to music in a friend’s kitchen. Someone yelling “whore” in mock frustration. Driving a moped over a city bridge, standing outside a restaurant after a meal, sitting by a lake, feeling the sun as the seasons start to change, leaning down in a car at night so that you can only see streetlights gliding by. Putting on a ton of high tech clothes to go wade through knee-deep snow, swimming underwater, getting off work, drinking coffee in a shitty diner, people talking. But maybe I usually miss these things. Other people whose lives most be a bit like this all the time: prisoners, soldiers on a submarine, night shift security guards, My desire to be a famous weirdo is diminished somewhat, losing leverage to the desire just to be present. The vacuum I’ve created in here is a lens to see my life, an upside-down glass bottom boat in time. I am floating below all moments because all moments are the present. I am drifting underwater in silence, looking up, waiting to surface.

the event horizon

I’m approaching the event horizon of my project, the point at which no news from the present will reach me until I get out, on January 13th at 1:20 pm my time. Somehow, without moving left right up down forward or backwards, I have found myself alone among the people of the future. My mind is quickening a little bit in here- I’ve turned to crackpot theories of time and space and endothermic engines to keep me company. My attention to sound and detail is becoming sharper too- I can hear plastic bags slowly unfurling across the room, I know the sound of all the computer fans and I can tell when one isn’t on, I get a little joy whenever the refrigerator or heat kick on. I can hear the coffee maker when I’ve left the burner on. I watched some apple turnovers for almost the entire time they baked. Suddenly the slow rise of the dough, the sizzling of the butter, and the gradual development of golden brown across the tops was enough detail to hold my attention. Sorry if it doesn’t hold yours in a blog entry, I suppose this is quite navel gazing.

the perfect record collapses under it's own wieght

The last few days of webcam images just evaporated into the ether, one of my computer drives failed under the exponential weight of perfect surveillance. Perfect surveillance, apart from being super boring, is not really possible. A culture of people entirely devoted to the reciprocal monitoring of their peers, a nation of ever vigilant security guards. But as soon as somebody gets up to pee, somebody else is for that instant free to plot their escape. While that person plots another person has a window, until one tight-ass with a full bladder is trying to watch everybody on a stadium of TVs the size of the planet. This last guard’s computer drives are brimming over with the whole past, tape after tape that he’ll get to next week or next month, until the tapes weigh more than the present does, every atom of the present devoted to the record of the past. Jill Magid says that security cameras are just modern gargoyles. My webcam is equally benign, an inside-out fishbowl. By imagining that someone from the future could be watching me, I watch myself. But neither of us is policing me. I think we are both just waiting for something to happen.

coasting

Good morning world. I’ve leaped and tumbled into Sunday the 6th of January, rising at the positively geriatric time of 4:45 am. Today I actually feel like a time traveler, as I approach the halfway point in my journey to the future, my machine feels like it’s coasting, we’ve made it through the acceleration. My mind has stopped creaking like expanding metal under heat. Today has been so long, so incredibly long. I am experiencing a relief from the feeling that time is passing too quickly, for one of the first times since being a kid. It is quite beautiful.