Restless Times

"I keep looking for a place to fit in where I can speak my mind." - The Beach Boys, I Just Wasn't Made for These Times [buy the album]

The thing you have to know about time travelers is that they talk funny. Something about temporal shifting convinces them that words like poncey and trainers are acceptable, that phrases like fair enough and good on ya are usable in contexts that make no sense, that a hot affirmative like "sweet ass" really is "sweet as" suggesting it needs a subject to be completed.

You will get used to this when they rejoin your time. In fact, you'll find it charming.

Time travelers love the little things. A good beer, a smoke free bar, a lack of mosquitos and mosquito nets will send them into moments of delight and ecstasy even as they attempt to scratch their swollen and bitten feet right off.

Time travelers leave bad reggae shows in clown cars with American lawyers.

Really. They do.

Time travelers will break out their le box for any reason. You will marvel at it's compact size and attractiveness. They will tell you how their le box costs more in other lands than it does here. You will ask to see their le box again and again because it is so mesmerizing.

Something about the future brings about a change in the time traveler. They appreciate the simpler things in life: a hammock, clear water, hermit crabs, a smog free sky. Time travelers might enjoy a brief respite at home but they dream of being off on adventures at every moment. In the future they are at Mardi Gras, in the mountains of Tibet, meeting other sliders at a bar in Scotland, in secret European enclaves plotting to overthrow the German and Swedish sociocultural maladies that make them terrible tourists and guests.

You keep your eye on time travelers when they are in your presence. You expect them to shift at any moment, dissapear just as unexpectedly as they arrived, leaving a hole in the space-time continuum...and in your heart.

While watching this time splitter in particular, though, you notice something that wasn't there before: a brighter smile, a brilliant glimmer in the eyes, a spark.

It is the agitated restlessness of someone truly living. She is with you, present in the now, but she is also reveling in her recent past and her amazing future to come.

Time travelers are timeless.

Sharing moments with them are a gift.

Welcome home, HSW.

Or as they say in the future...konichiwa, bitches.

Peace out.