Time For A Confession

Coming out in this way may cause some schisms in my friendships, due to it being so 'off the wall', but it feels right for me to confess now. I am a Time Traveler. Not in a Bradbury sort of way, but as real as anything else about me.

It's a power that I almost always have no control over. I can recall a relatively recent attempt by me to deliberately take a trip back a few decades, that was met with nearly disastrous results. It usually comes all by itself like the wind, which appears out of nowhere and blows where it will. Music is the vehicle, or shall I say catalyst, almost every time. It's a gift which is both a blessing and a curse.

In this body, there beats the heart of an artist (in the form of a singer/songwriter/musician) and therein lies the very root of the reality of this power. For instance, just hearing a certain song on the radio in the car or at work can propel me back to a time in my early teens where I am hiding behind the bowling alley smoking a cigarette. The song will then take me back to the last time I heard it and drop me off there. Fortunately, I have no problem returning to the present time from that point. These experiences are full of wonder, but quite often they are accompanied by deep feelings of longing or heartache. Again; a blessing and a curse.

The movie "The Time Traveler's Wife" is the closest example of this phenomenon that I can think of. The big difference between the traveler in the movie and me is that he has a totally physical experience, whereas I do not. One thing we do share is that we don't have the power to change anything, but can only witness the Past as it happened. The reality of this is most stark when I hear a song from the 1940's or earlier, and find myself in a time before I was even born.

As I continue to reflect on all of this, which I will probably always do, I think I may have been to the Future a number of times when I was a lot younger. Normally, it has always been the Past that I visit.

Lyrics to songs often play a large part in the intensity of the experience, and very lately I have come to regard a specific song recording as the most powerful and expansive version of what I am attempting to describe. The song "Wicked Game", as penned and sung by Chris Isaak--and it's lyrics--causes the greatest breadth of travel along my timeline of any song before or since. I am whisked back to a time that is nearly before my earliest memories and then deposited back to the present moment on every occasion.

As often happens to many of us, a song can get "stuck in my head". Currently, the song "Wicked Game" crowds out almost every other thought.