- I have a small number of memories that are false. Nothing sinister (nothing too sinister), just things that I now know are impossibilities but which were held to be truths by a much younger me. My grandfather could not, in fact, make a stuffed dog appear in the middle of the floor. However, at one later point I was so persistent in trying to get him to "do it again," that he went up to the attic, got the stuffed dog, and tried to smuggle it into the rec room by hiding it up the back of his sweater. I couldn't figure out why he wouldn't just do the magic.
- Via the Dumpster TV, my warranty-serviced Xbox is playing the premier episode of a comedy series made for British television that first aired on October 5, 1969. Almost 40 years ago a small group of stoned people in an intricately wallpapered British flat watched a Pepperpot proudly declare, "I can't tell the difference between Whizzo Butter and this dead crab!" They were inexplicably well-off mod types with fabulous boots and wonderful trousers, and they watched a television designed by Zarach of London. Mounted on a chrome pedestal shaped like the bell of an inverted tuba, it was a sphere made from smoky transparent plastic that displayed the electronic guts of the 14-inch color Sony Trinitron set within.
- Almost 40 years from then, an ocean and a continent away from Great Britain, I watch the same thing on a 40-inch, transistor-powered plasma television. I can't see inside it. But it's six inches think. Also? My cellphone flips open like a Star Trek communicator (the proper communicator).
- Sitting in my room here, with the low and unseen sun throwing its painterly mountain light against the unflowered jacaranda lining the street outside my window, I mimic an aural and visual background element of swinging London.
- Therefore, I ought to be able to step outside my apartment and onto Carnaby Street wearing well-heeled boots and draped with paisley, then stroll past Timothy Whites and Take Six, looking above the shops for the telltale flicker of a spherical television through a window curtained with sheer batik.
- This, however, does not happen.
There's an alley between two rows of townhouses which ends perpendicular to my back yard. The alley is lit by one short, old-fashioned street lamp, similar to gas ones which might have been found in Whitechapel. Whenever i sit out back in the wee hours of rain fogged nights, water gathers in long wells along the alley. Those dark wells of rain join perfectly with shadows cast by other objects, together becoming a figure walking away -- dark trousers beneath a gentleman's evening cape. There are nights when that cape fairly billows as Jack hurries to keep his next ghastly appointment.
Magic happens any time one believes.
See, if I believe enough to put on a ridiculously mod outfit before before opening my apartment door and stepping outside, I think I believe enough to end up on the corner of Carnaby and Beak. But I don't. I just end up standing on my porch in stripey pants that are a bit too tight, feeling like a knob.
Perhaps you need more of a Somewhere in Time approach?
Well, that was sort of the theory with the whole sights-n-sounds of October '69 thing and the mod wardrobe, but redoing the *entire* apartment is a colossal pain in the ass and the only good hypnotist I know is in prison. The other alternative is slipping there dreamwise, but I haven't woken up in quite the right state of brain yet.
Entire apartment? Couldn't you simply go into the closet?
Right now I'm renting that space to Larry Craig, Ted Haggard, and Zombie Hoover, so I couldn't possibly.