*tim boucher says

Last night’s unveiling of my Halloween time-traveler costume, codename:APOGEE, was a huge success. I accidentally ended up at a house checkpoint at the start of a Baltimore bike messengers race of some kind. I forget what they were calling it, but there were tons of kids on bicycles mostly dudes but a few chicks. Everybody had on costumes and was ridiculously enthusiastic because they had just biked up hill. To get past the checkpoint and get their “manifest” signed, each entrant had to eat a handful of candy corn (a peculiar traditional wax-sugar American treat served around All Hallow’s Eve), and get sprayed with silly string. Sometimes in the eye, but never on purpose.

I sipped from my flask, which features a scratched off sticker from Baltimore’s Fort McHenry, which was instrumental in the War of 1812, after Washington, DC had been sacked by the British. The peeling sticker obscured the inscription underneath, “T-Bone”, a gift from my brother because he thought everybody called me that for some reason.

I never came through on the huge old-school wraparound cataract sun-glasses. My time-traveler sense must have been wringing to collect those things though, because they don’t sell them anymore. Anywhere. Checked all the major pharmacies and general stores, optical shops, super stores and independent pharmacies. Nothing. I eventually ended up with some pair of goggles from an indeterminant tools/sporting aisle somewhere in the depths of Walmart up in Cockeysville, or whatever town it is at that point.

My actual time travel device consisted of an old phone which I’d rescued recently (IRL) from the gutted ruins of the old Town Theatre in downtown Baltimore. It’s being completely renovated over the course of the next few years for the theatre I’m working under. The phone was a classic rotary model with a big heavy handle, curled cord and hung in a frontier-style eBay trading post sometime last year, made out of mule hide. It was one of a couple elements which were meant to add a more developed historical quality to my time-traveler character. Not just look like I was from the future, but like I’d been around and all over the past too. I had a Robin Hood-style suede cap (with a feather in it, no less) which I bought recently from an antique store in Hampden, on the Ave. It didn’t seem like an antique by any means, but something which I could probably fashion myself if I had the tools as a leatherworker. I wondered as I stalked the aisles their, clutching my prize, how many of these objects were fakes, newly minted antiques. There’s a Philip K. Dick book about that, it’s a good one.

The wire coming out of the back of the rotary phone went into the bottom battery cover area of a small cuboid plastic grey alarm clock/tape player I found at the Edgewood Thrift Centre. I never lit it up with batteries, but I used electrical tape to paint in the digits 12:00 on the clock’s face. Wrapped around that in an “atomic” or “quantum” shape were two orbits of interconnected glow lights, forming a circular x-arc over the clock, which I clutched in one arm as though it were one of those orbi mundi things, or whatever those are called. You see monarchs with them, a little golden globe with a cross on it. But in this case, my equivalent of a flux capacitor.

Being a time-traveler is pretty liberating. It means you can sort of go anywhere you want and do anything you want. Although a friend pointed out that I couldn’t, in fact, time-travel to the ATM to get out $20US, since it was another location in space, not in time. I also got myself into a little mental experiment, a thought puzzle about if you were a time-traveler and you got stuck in a locked box, would you be able to leap your way out of it. Depends how your time travel mechanism works, I guess.

We ended up at the Wind Up Space up on North Ave by Load of Fun, Joe Squared, and Hour House (sp?) and that new art store that just opened up. MICA, the art-school I attended for a few sessions, has an artist studio building they put together there a few years back. Trying to make that part of the city into a renewed cultural hub. My theatre fits somehow into that plan being hatched for the city. They’re on the referendum next Tuesday for a large loan. I think they deserve to get it, having worked closely with them.

I expected the Wind Up Space to be another annoying venue with the word “space” in it with art on the walls and nothing but pretentious hipsterism. I mean, it was that, but it was Halloween, so somehow the effects of all that are muted or maybe transmuted. But it was more than that though too. I actually had a fun time there, a band played. I sat around the table with a bunch of people who all live on the same street as me. An authentic political “bloc” (as in, we live on the same “block”), a community. It’s easy, make yourself part of one wherever you happen to find yourself.

My gloves were black and silved loosely threaded things I picked up at the thrift store, salvaged pieces from some very shiny and gaudy costume in its entirety. Silver reflective cuffs came down off and over the wrists at futuristic angles, and fastened via a strip of white Velcro. Very time-travel, but the fingers were too small, so I cut off the tips: which I figured was very “nouveau hobo,” which is on the edge of being chic right now, depending on your locality.

I thought a lot about time-travel becoming sort of like the tourism industry of the future. People jumping back and forth through time to cure boredom. Maybe we’ll have something along the equivalent of it via the marriage of virtual and augmented reality technologies in the not-too-distant future. Immersive sensory environments which could be modeled to match historical environments to the best of the company’s technical abilities. Synthetic theatrical time amusements. Playful time travel excursions. The ecotourism of the not-too-distant techno-utopian Obamist future (not to pick on Obama, he’s a great symbol).

My pants I bought for three dollars. I wish there were a good thrift store closer to my community. You always just find better stuff than at a Target or somewhere else. A store full of wildcard items, instead of an endless sea of similarity and mass production. Localism at its finest. I only say that because, localism is becoming very popular in this era as an object of focus. And as a time-traveler, you notice things like that. And you notice things like synthetic fabric pants with three panels of alternating gray-tones, surmounted by 14 in long zippers running up – and down, there are zippers at both ends of the pocket – the pant leg. I wore my usual Fred Meyer brown Converse kicks, and rolled up my pants to reveal my “technical base-layer” as an old REI-obsessed roomate use to call them. It makes it sound way more futuristic than “long underwear” or even “thermals.” With time travel, it’s all about how you present things.

On my fingers, I sported LED finger lights which I picked up at Rite Aid and had on the “blink” settings for most of the night, illuminating anything I pointed my hands at in a fast or slow blinking three-source blue glow. Quite trippy. On each edge of my goggles I attached a small circular mirror I also bought at Rite Aid for $1.59USD a piece. They are supposed to go on like the side mirrors of a truck or something, so you can see your blindspot. I had them affixed on either side so that it looked like my goggles had four overlapping reflective eyes. Time travelers need good eye protection. You don’t want to get any time bits in your eyes.

Over a blue hoodie, I put my black Members Only jacket (another thrift store find from another trip where I bought a cool book for little kids about spies), with the crowning decoration of an old gigantic glow in the dark vintage RCA TV/DVD remote control. Oh, and I was wearing a dog leash for a belt because I thought it had colors and shapes which would attract probably attract a time traveler’s eye.

I imagine time-travelers, as temporal gypies, are probably pretty good traders too. Like the French-Canadian voyageurs from which I imagine myself to have descended. People like Timothee DeMontBrun, who founded Nashville and shares the same name as me. For my time-travel trading needs, I brought out a doctored set of Tarot cards, of the Marseilles variation. As a time traveler, it’s important to remember that currency can be kind of hard to come by in certain eras and localities. Always have alternate means of creating and transmitting value to other people. The circus arts descend from needing to fill this convenience. You’re stuck somewhere with no money, put on a show and someone buys you a drink, you find work, until you’re in a job, or a better situation, or whatever you’re looking for as a time traveler. I had broken this Tarot deck a while ago, sending various random cards to people I knew, with mysterious unexplained “artistic” audio tape recordings based on my life. You can see why time traveler as a Halloween costume came very naturally for me, almost as if unbidden. To further transform this deck as a meaning-conveying entity, I took the remaining cards and cribbed pithy short statements about time and its vagaries. Then I’d shuffle twice, have the person in question cut the deck (cards all face up) and then give them a card with a unique statement on the back, most of which were positive, like, “Don’t stop now, ” or “Any day now.” Stuff like that, although I also arranged for a friend to “catch the Y2K bug” – sorry, a little time travel humor. Maybe it’s not as funny outside the business.

• Time Travel Ticket – Go to the future for $19.95
• Does time travel exist?
• Day by Day
• Why the obsession with time travel?
• More time-travel dreams