Back to the Future

I returned to the Holiday Inn — where they have a swimming pool and air-conditioned rooms — to consider the paradox of a nation that has given so much to those who preach the glories of rugged individualism from the security of countless corporate sinecures, and so little to that diminishing band of yesterday's refugees who still practice it, day by day, in a tough, rootless and sometimes witless style that most of us have long since been weaned away from.

--Hunter S. Thompson, Gonzo Papers, Vol. 1: The Great Shark Hunt: Strange Tales from a Strange Time (1979).

This is Mission Control sending our greetings from Los Angeles, where the weather is quite pleasant, and where we are twiddling our thumbs and playing table hockey with quarters while we wait for our trajectory analysts to divine the logic and/or intent behind the Evacuee's latest, and somewhat inscrutable change of course.

Of course, we can already hear the Evacuee asking the inevitable question: "Like, what's the big hang-up about forward progress or continuity anyway?". Nothing, nothing, of course she's right. What's "forward"? Why must journeys have a "purpose" or "destination"? Do we not, instead of moving into the forbidding blank of the future, always simply move sideways? Is the TDBP not a powerful refutation of the false concept of the linear narrative arc? What if the TDBP has already left its destination?? And, yes, why can't we all just get along?

Okay, we apologize for blowing your minds. We can't help it: we're scientists. We realized long ago, in our youth, that time probably didn't exist. Time, we saw, was a form of tautology. We build a clock or hourglass, the materials move, and we call that time. We measure the rate of atomic decay, and see a more perfect way to measure something we believed in from the get go. Putting aside the Evacuee's willingness to adopt a fashionable intellectual position when it's expedient, the TDBP and the Evacuee help to show us the illusory nature of linear time, and of eschatologies of all brands.

We do think a visit to Maine would be nice.