I Am Become "Billy Pilgrim"

I have become unstuck in time. I blame it, like everything, on the media.

Here's my logic, follow along. I'm driving down the road, and I have my XM sattilite radio running, and I'm jumping through the channels, listening to standards, listening to music from the 40s, listening to music from the 90s, the 80s the 70s - And it is ALL relevant to me in some way. I turn to a themed station and the Police "Don't Stand So Close To Me" that came out the year BEFORE I graduated from high school is playing. I listen, and am transported back to the year one of my favorite teachers was the subject of lurid rumors that mimicked the song.

I've become unstuck in time.

I'm watching Casablanca at the Orpheum Theater in Memphis - folks of ALL AGES are there - and enjoying the hell out of it, I'm about Bogey's age in tha film now, so I relate to it far better. (Maybe I should find a cause and run some guns or something - no damned romance.) Anyhow, the whole film is absolutely contemporary.

Nothing changes.

I can no longer remember what decade it is. (I know intellectually what decade it is, I can do the Deja-Vu check and KNOW that I've never been here, at this time, with this MacBook Pro, in this yellow shirt, and this black jacket, in this airport - I'm in Charlotte again.) I look through a magazine while sitting here waiting for my plane. Esquire - it goes through the decades, the styles change, but the patterns all come back around, to the point where the 2000s seem to rehash every decade before into a singularity style mashup.

Sure it's an IPhone Now, and a 8mm camera then. Hat, no hat, one button, two button, red button, blue button. I've become unstuck in time. My 30s and early 40s are a blur. My children have grown overnight, I've passed the point where my father is over twice my age - I'm catching up.

Maybe Kurt Vonnegut was embroiled in Mid Life Crisis when he wrote Slaughterhouse 5. He would have been in his late 40s - dreaming of another time, a HORRIBLE time in his life, and getting it out on paper, through the lens of a science fiction plot line.

My novel will be "Searching For Tralfamador". Or maybe just Vallerie Perrine.