Time Travels
In 2005, my best friend Jake found this letter from a Time Traveler.
But before I get into that, a dream from 2002:
“I am out on the street sifting through my belongings, but not alone; everyone up and down the block has been commanded to clean out their homes — to empty each and every building of all its furniture and possessions. Neighbors out on the streets, lawns and sidewalks piled with cardboard boxes and household items like infinite dunes of yard sale. Each home is empty, stripped of all decor.
I am not sure who is ordering this Great Clean Out, nor why, but I can feel the necessity to go along with it. I ruffle through some clothes and stack some books. Then I look down and see a Folgers coffee can full of bottle caps.
Looking down the street I notice an older black woman three houses down who is setting up a display using bottle caps mounted onto cardboard. I walk over and offer her the can. I dump the contents onto her table and out spill all of the caps along with a severed human ear.
I am shocked, but calm. The woman says : “I gave you that ear years ago so that you could hear, but it looks as if you’ve never used it.”
The woman walks away, and the perspective of the dream changes like a camera shot backing away and up into the sky. The neighbor woman walks, climbs up a wooden fence and mounts a horse. From this out-of-body perspective, I watch as my ‘Garrett’-self follows behind the neighbor woman and gets up on top of the same horse. The woman then stabs this other-Garrett with a long sword through the center of his Garrett body.
Then I find myself back in my body, but in a tunnel gliding forward. I look down and my chest is radiating gold light. I float slowly down this tunnel and look from side to side — everywhere I look I see versions of myself in every identity from every stage of life — old men Garretts talking to 13 year old Garretts. When they look up to see the glowing light, the Garretts bow down their head or modestly avert their eyes.
This dream took place in Washington, in an unfamiliar home.”
I had this dream while living in Arcata — a college town in the old-growth redwood forests of Northern California. I had just graduated from Humboldt State University with a Religious Studies degree and had been farting around town for a few months, working graveyard shift sweeping popcorn & cleaning urinals at a movie theater. I was 23 and deeply engrossed in the “film-making” of a hilariously amateur documentary about the visceral experience of “being on the planet Earth” that I expected to be my “masterpiece”. Pain and pathetic existential crisis were already part of my daily regimen and now I found myself unable to stop obsessing over this dream.
Eventually, somehow, I got myself out of Arcata. Though not because of the dream (more a long term obsession with anything grunge). I was naturally led to Seattle by 2005, living in Washington and bouncing around “unfamiliar homes”.
It’s 2015 now, and as I search back through my old archived emails, I can see that one of the first things I did when I got to Seattle was send this dream to an Islamic Sufi who lived in my new city — someone I had never met but who I had connected to through my college studies. He sent me the following interpretation via email:
“Dear Zakir (Your mystic name- one who remembers Allah).
This was a very good dream. It shows the emptying of the self and the black woman is the founder of our order. She is “the surgeon of the heart,” and you experienced this via the sword. The resulting light of the heart shows this has been received and that you are “getting it” on different levels of the self. This is a dream with initiatory transmission.”
I loved this interpretation and its revelation of my “grand cosmic plan”. I was definitely honored, but to be honest, I never connected fully to his evaluation of the dream — I wanted it to be true, but I couldn’t shake the feeling that this version was biased towards trying to proselytize to a young wide-eyed kid flirting with the religious practice. Still, the stabbing of the heart had felt so painful, powerful, and special …. and if I close my eyes I can still see vividly that image of all my previous and future selves lining the long heavenly hallway. Was I just eating too many spicy gas station burritos, or could there be something more to it?
I need to setup what I am planning to share with you — I’m sitting on a whole host of what may or may not be intersecting stories. What we’re dealing with here are shards of dreams, memories, paranormal occurrences and possibly some good old-fashioned time travel. Due to the nature of this content, we both must be sensitive to the fact that it is not entirely conducive to a traditional timeline. I want to share this with you, but it might feel like I’m jumping all around. That’s sort of the nature of what I’m getting at anyhow….
We must start somewhere though — so let’s just scan ahead to “September, 2005”, and return to that first year I found myself in Seattle, WA. This was sort of a ‘low point’/‘down in the dumps’/‘dear god what happened to him’ time period as I had just moved away from most of my friends back in California. One thing I hadn’t left behind was the the nightly malt-liquor drinking habits (now long since excised from my daily regime). I was living in the basement of a nice house in the Fremont area with my friend Jake who had also ended up in Seattle after exiling himself from Arcata.
This was not an ordinary basement apartment — the space I occupied was definitely not meant for human habitation. Behind my bed one could see the exposed underpinnings of the house including mounds of straight-up dirt. My boogers were 50% dust shrapnel. I shivered on a painful futon next to a space heater and worse, was forced to go out and around to the front of the house whenever my apparently pea-sized bladder needed something. If it was particularly cold, I just relieved myself in the back yard. It was an alright spot nonetheless.
It being 2005, I relied on a service that provided a free dialup connection to write berserk blog posts on a pre-myspace social network my friend Brent had built himself (it was called artmockerz.com).
I saved these blog posts, and I will be using them as my primary source material. Reading them now at this current point in space/time, it becomes clear that this was a period of my life when I was consumed with two seemingly disparate topics. Night after night, I chugged Mountain Dew and typed obsessively about anything and everything paranormal (Mothman, a cryptozoological sighting in Green Lake, strange encounters with people on the street late at night, orb dreams). Interspersed with these mad posts, I wrote about my love and affection for my small group of friends I had abandoned in Arcata. It is only now that I can begin to see how these things may have been two sides of the same coin.
Over the years I’ve called this group of friends by many different names: the “Goners”, “Dinosaurs”, my favorite: the ‘Boont Dusties’. Unofficially, I acted as the historian amongst my friends, collecting boxes of paper scraps, diary entries, hand-drawn scribbles, treatises and song lyrics stretching all the way back to High School. I’ve always wondered if it was possible to put these artifacts into some sort of coherent storyline for an outsider — extract and discuss the specific rituals and mythologies of our group like some sort of gonzo anthropologist.
I’ve pretended to myself that I would want to do this to try and convey it to an outsider, but really, I’ve known it was just an excuse for me to pour over the documents again and again; to try to and wring just one more drop of meaning out of these memories of friends.
I find myself forever caught up in that past. And now I wonder: has my obsession on those people and that time in my life morphed into a specter that is literally ‘haunting’ it?
Jake always had a bit of a Midas Touch to him, so it was not much of a surprise that he would find a letter from a Time Traveler in a suitcase. Not an ordinary suitcase — a special one that had been transformed by an artist to serve as a patio chair, setup out front of a coffee shop called Katy’s on 20th and E. Union in Seattle. I still have the letter in my deep archives of my friends belongings; the note is written on a piece of paper ripped out of a Jehovah’s Witness leaflet. When Jake nonchalantly brought the letter to me I shook with awe. Did he know what he had just found? We had to do something about it! Write him back obviously! But, I am well-known for being physically quite lazy and always without a car and 20th & Union seemed like such a long way from where I lived, so I ended up just filing it away in my box of archives, and we left the letter unanswered.
Now, in hindsight, it is incredibly strange that Jake would find that letter. Not just because it was from a literal Time Traveler, because yes, that’s still simply outrageous. But especially strange because the place Jake found that letter is half a block down from the current location of a community radio station that I would eventually start with my wife Amber only a few years later— Hollow Earth Radio. Must have been a “coincidence” or whatever.
So I have a dream in 2002 that I will live in Washington, be pierced through the heart and will see a fractal of all my selves. Then, a few years laters, I do find myself in Seattle. Have I already been peirced? Where are the multiple ‘Me’s?
I encounter a letter from a Time Traveler and a few years later, by chance/circumstance/fate whathaveyou, it becomes an area of town that is my second home and an almost daily reminder.
A reminder that it has been 10 years since Jake found the letter. A reminder that I have not yet responded.
I have no excuse not to. And yet, I wonder, why have I not written back?
