Hesher

Here’s how time is (or, at least time periods are) an illusion: If you’re doing the same things, talking about the same music, and modifying your consciousness in the same way as you did half a century ago then, for all intents and purposes, now could be then.

If you didn’t know that it was the end of the first quarter of the 21st century rather than nearly the beginning of the last quarter of the 20th, you couldn’t tell merely by observing when what was happening and who it was happening with was happening.

Sure, there would be clues: the bicycles would mostly be sturdy gravel bikes instead of scrawny ten speeds; the conversations about the music would be informed by being able to listen to it anywhere, all by yourself, piped directly into your years instead of having to be in someone’s bedroom sharing the vinyl experience together, and the consciousness-altering delivery system would be hash-infused pre-rolls purchased from a retail establishment rather than seedy ditch weed rolled in American flag papers at your high-school desk, but if you removed all those frames and simply examined the shared consciousnesses, who could tell?

And frankly, who would want to?

If we can time-travel by bicycle back to “simpler times” (that, really, weren’t all that simple what with way more street crime, lakes so polluted they caught fire, a US President resigning for complicity in a crime and its cover-up, plus bike tires that weren't nearly so flat resistant as today’s, even for those who have yet to make the conversion to tubeless), then shouldn’t we take that opportunity?

Even if it means that the “fire” is made from aluminum cans and Girl Scout water instead of driftwood and deadfall; even if it means that the ultimate expression of the irrational number is arrived at too late to do so.

Because that still means that then is now and now is then and all there ever is is.