Made my usual Back In California visit to an IN-N-OUT burger joint to see if the burgers and fries as still as deathly bland as I remember.

Yeah…same old same old completely tasteless food. Especially the fries. How hard to you have to work to make fries taste like nothing? Why this chain is so popular out here I will never know.

Milkshake was pretty good though. They will need to work on that.

On the left of Nico is (I think) Persephone, and on the right is dad (Hades).

I’m back in California and the ancestral Garrett Family homeland for the month of December. Neighbors, the alarm company, and all the remote gizmos I’ve installed are watching the house for me. During the winter and summer months it’s really nice to be able to remotely monitor the house and control the thermostat. 

I took the train this trip. Probably after I retire for the second time, and have more free time to myself, I might do more road trips out to here, but the other side of that coin is the political situation and my Maryland license tags might make that somewhat dicey if I have to go through places like Texas and Oklahoma. Plus ICE on the roads. I would never have believed when I was younger that someday I might need to have my passport with me when I go on a road trip.

Initially I was going to take the Amtrak Cardinal from Baltimore to Chicago, but I got bumped off it, despite having made my reservations many months ago. I didn’t get any notifications and only found out about it when I was double checking my ticket for departure time, and saw I was on the Acela not the Cardinal. That was confusing (the Acela doesn’t go to Chicago), so I looked closer and saw that the Acela was taking me to DC Union Station so I could connect with the Floridian.

The Cardinal is a small train with only one sleeper car and it only runs three days a week. The thinking among the Amtrak crew I talked to was they’d overbooked it and I, being a solitary traveler, was easy to bump. But Amtrak made it up to me. When they put me on the Floridian they gave me an upgrade to a full bedroom, and refunded me nearly 500 bucks. So…okay…not complaining about having to make an extra connection to DC Union Station. Also, the Floridian is a bigger train that takes a much quicker route to Chicago.

The snow storm in the midwest worried me. Last train ride back home the Southwest Chief had to turn around in Albuquerque due to a big snowstorm in Kansas and instead of getting to Chicago I went back to Los Angeles and back up the coast to my brother’s house. I didn’t want to get turned around back to Chicago because then I might just as well have gone back to Baltimore and cancelled my December visit altogether. But the weather cleared up quickly once out of Chicago and I made it all the way to Oceano with no trouble.

The three day three night train ride is a lot of fun…at least I think so. Provided of course you get at least a roomette. With a sleeper ticket you are a first class passenger and your meals in the dining car are included, and you get to use the first class lounges in the connecting Union Stations. (The one in Chicago is Super Nice!) One other nice thing about going to bed on a rocking moving train is I don’t have to worry about my self winding watch, winding down when I take it off for the night.

It’s nice to be back in the land of my birth, with family that gets me, Old Juan’s Cantina, and that lovely Pismo Beach to walk.

Here’s something a little fun. Going through the “Science” folder I found this BBC Where Do You Fall On The Male-Female Brain Continuum self test I’d taken back in 2006. It used test questions that it purported to relate to sex differences in the brain, but also in our physiology. That ratio between ring and index fingers for example (mine are equal).

So I bit and took the test. Here’s my score.

Unsurprised…

Also…this:

Totally unsurprised.

I’m going through a bunch of old files…newspaper and magazine clippings from a time when paper was the default means of communicating news and information…and running across some oddities and memories of a past life. Let me bore the rest of you with some of it today.

This was in my “Rightwing Mindset” folder. I remember driving past this on my way to Walt Disney World. Basically all you could see from the Interstate was the large faux Roman Colosseum, where I assume they held daily reenactments of Christians being thrown to the lions, or some such. Not sure how they would have enacted the lion’s part of the show.

I never went, not even out of curiosity. Too late now. 2001 – 2020. They couldn’t make it work and the COVID epidemic apparently finished it off. And now it’s gone to its heavenly reward. Here’s the thing…’Christian’ is big word that compasses a Lot of belief, any random quarter of which is probably not completely on board with the other three.

There’s an old Dutch joke about how one Dutchman is a theologian, two Dutchmen are a church, and three Dutchmen are a schism. And of course, the best God joke ever by Emo Phillips. The point being you are not going to bring in the crowds you think you are, just by branding your attraction as a Christian thing.

Especially if it’s Northern Conservative Baptist Great Lakes Region Council of 1912.

This news article came across my feed today…

Top Trump officials Miller, Noem and Rubio adopt bunker mentality with housing reserved for military officers: report

Top members of Donald Trump’s White House are reportedly living in homes typically reserved for top military brass in Washington, D.C. as they pull back from neighborhoods where their presences were often targeted for protests by the many Democrats who make the Capital region their homes.

Stephen Miller and Secretary of State Marco Rubio recently joined a growing list of Trump Cabinet secretaries and advisers who’ve chosen to live in reserved military housing, with Rubio moving onto “Generals Row” in Fort McNair and Miller also living in the area after abandoning his digs in Arlington, The Atlantic reported.

They join Department of Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem, who moved into military housing earlier this year, and Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth, who is alone among his compatriots in finding some precedent for his decision to move onto Generals Row alongside Rubio.

This had me remembering this recent post on BluSky by Mrs. Betty Bowers (The World’s Best Christian):

People claiming that the Epstein Ballroom™ is really just a cover for a bunker has me fondly recalling what Hitler did in his.

Heh.

Listen…I’m not about to downplay the peril my country is facing now, but for all the warnings about how it was in Germany in the 1930s, it is well to remember that this is not Germany, it is not Italy, it is not Spain, it is not Chile. There’s a reason it is a nation of many sovereign states (and a few Commonwealths) plus Puerto Rico and the Northern Mariana Islands, gathered under the umbrella of an overall federal union.

The powers not delegated to the United States by the Constitution, nor prohibited by it to the States, are reserved to the States respectively, or to the people.

It was the only way. The diversity of the states and the people within them made no other form of self government possible. The British King tried to impose one and could not. By that time we had become Americans. Diverse, and a bit unruly. Civil War historian Shelby Foote famously said, “Before the war it was always the United States are; after the war it was the United States is… it made us an is.” But either we are or we is, it was the only way to make a thing out of that patchwork quilt.

Listen to an American you MAGA fascists…Fascism demands total control and conformity. You failed to get it from Germany, close as your kind did come, and even then you needed the help of the Treaty of Versailles and the hyperinflation of the great depression. You failed to get it from France…they kept killing your soldiers all the way to the end of the war and maybe you don’t want to recall what they did to the collaborators afterward. And those were small, pretty homogenous nations which America is not. You are not getting servitude out of all 46 states, the 7 commonwealths, Puerto Rico and the Northern Mariana Islands. Maybe you get a significant fraction of those…for a little while…but you are not putting a collar around all of it, yanking its chain and demanding obedience. It’s just not happening in the country a Russian general once spoke of, saying that the reason Americans are so good at war is because war is chaos and Americans live in chaos.

It is the way…

I think the bunkers you want to be in are somewhere in Putin’s Russia…not here…

Clickbait article this evening, about a youngish straight guy browsing Tinder, getting matched with this beautiful young lady who turns out to be an aspiring singer/actress/model with thousands of Instagram followers, and the meeting she arranges with him turns out to be an outdoor pop up concert that several dozen other men also show up to, who she’d also invited via Tinder, and she gets up on stage and announces they’re all there to compete in a contest for the prize of dating her.

Poor guy is angry for some reason. Says he’ll never trust anyone ever again. Let me tell you about having trust issues: I’m reading this and wondering if this guy is another one of her scams and his sad clickbait story is only another way she’s trying to get her name out there.

Mind you, I’m 72 and still remember everything from Nixon’s The One, the Pentagon Papers, the 18 and a half minute gap, and Expletive Deleted, to Donald Trump.

Hey guy…if you’re real then I apologise, but listen, those dating apps won’t do anything for you except make you feel even more unworthy and unmatchable. I have some experience here. Think about it. If they get you matched up then you leave and then they get no more money from you and what kind of business model is that?

What you want is a business situation that involves getting you close to a lot of people with the same sexual interests as you, but isn’t actually interested in matching you up with any of them. I speak from experience. In the 90s I spent thousands on gay dating memberships and I am still single, but people I know who spent thousands on ex-gay therapy when they were younger (or were forced into it) are now in happy, loving, same sex relationships that have lasted decades. Some of these are even married now!

Not sure if there’s anything like that for heterosexuals… apply to a religious college that emphasises sexual purity maybe… but look into it.

From the Facebook feed this morning (and I wonder how long ZuckerTrump is going to allow people like him to post…)

Remember during oral argument on the presidential immunity case when conservative justices scoffed and mocked at the hypothetical that a president with immunity could just start killing whoever he wanted and there was nothing that could be done if he has immunity?

I submit they weren’t mocking the idea a (republican) president could kill whoever he wants, they were mocking anyone who might object.

This came to me via email just this morning…

Safe Holiday Shopping Tips:

Be aware of your surroundings at all times, and know where the exits are wherever you go.
   
If the crowd gets out of control and you feel you’re getting pushed:

 “Stand like a boxer”, keep your arms in front of your chest to create space between you and the person in front of you.

If you drop something:  leave it, don’t try to pick it up.

If you fall:  lie on your left side to protect your heart and lungs when being trampled.

May I please go live on another planet…

Sartre was right…

Surprisingly enough since I was born in southern California, I’ve only been to the original Disneyland only twice now, and just in the last few years; the last time a little over a year ago. I’ve come to really like the new California Adventure park. It has elements of Hollywood Studios in Walt Disney World, plus some California specific stuff and it really appeals to me, more so than the original Disneyland, which I went to more as a pilgrimage. I’m going again for a few days this December and really looking forward to that, and a month with my brother in Oceano. At some point I should probably blog about getting my Disneyland annual pass, then losing it, then getting it again. 

You walk into the Disneyland parks on the west side entrance by way of its Downtown Disney zone, which is between the Disneyland Hotel and the two parks. This is different from Disney Springs in Walt Disney World, which is a completely separate from the parks area. Both are free to enter shopping and dining areas. Disney Springs is large enough (like everything else in Walt Disney World) that it also has dedicated entertainment venues like House of Blues and Cirque de Solari. Downtown Disney is crammed into a small space because that entire original Disney park is crammed into the only available space to it in Anaheim. Walt Disney was taking a big gamble when he built it in 1954-55 and he bought as much land for it as he could afford. Then it became a big hit and all sorts of other commerce began nuzzling up to it to get a piece of the action and he couldn’t expand. So he went to Florida. But over the decades they’ve been buying a piece here and a piece there in Anaheim and they’ve been able to add new things to it. California Adventure was made out of what was the original parking lot, after they got space enough to build a huge parking garage nearby.

So everything in Anaheim is on a much smaller scale to those of us who came to know Walt Disney World first. I suppose people who’ve only known Disneyland are awed by the scale of Walt Disney World.

And so…burying the lede…as I was saying, if you’re entering on the west side, you walk into the Disneyland parks by way of Downtown Disney. Walt Disney called it the Happiest Place On Earth, and the parks are definitely some of my happy places, along with Ocean City New Jersey, Oceano and Pismo Beach. And the open road. I am expecting, hoping, Needing in these stressful times to enter my happy space, at least for a little while, to remind myself from time to time why life is a great adventure, and worth the static it often throws in the faces of us gay folk.

I’m all smiles as I’m walking into Downtown Disney. Then I look to my left and see this…

There…in the upper left…two boys on a scooter…

Two boys who are trying hard to keep the townsfolk from knowing they’re really sea monsters…

Yeah…that movie.

I’ve said pretty much all I want to say about that movie in that blog post. But can you appreciate why it was the first thing my eyes locked on as I walked into that happy place. Oh well…it can’t be all pixie dust and magic.

I’m bringing this all up again because apparently that movie is being re-released, and we’re already beginning to see another round of run up to the (re)release publicity. This appeared in Epcot Italy…

It’s temporary chalk art that they put around Epcot for the Arts Festival. Which is good because it can be easily washed off before Ron DeSantis gets mad.

I can’t even look at these characters just…just being happy together…without knowing how that pure and wonderful first teenage crush (they’re 13 in the movie) has to be smothered and denied if it’s two boys, for the sake of not rousing the howling bigots. But then they’re not boys, they’re monsters, and monsters don’t have teenage crushes, let alone fall in love.

It gets better this time around…apparently. The run-up t the (re)release let’s get the gays interested and increase ticket sales publicity that is. This came across my Instagram photo stream the other day…

This makes my heart ache. I did a little digging and found another…

This is art from the story lead on the movie director Enrico Casarosa was pleased to assure everyone was not about a teenage crush, but rather the “pre-romance time in boy’s lives”. I’m guessing they didn’t get the memo.

And digging further, I found some fan art…

Is it too much to wish that maybe this time, just maybe, this time, there won’t be any more tut-tutting from the director Enrico Casarosa over the suggestion that these two are in love? Because the goddamned story lead sure thought so, and I’m pretty sure they weren’t the only one on the crew who thought so. Is it too much to wish upon a star that a budding romance between two teenage boys is treated honestly and everyone be happy for them?

Probably.

[Update…] I found this link to a story with the headline “Disney’s Luca declared ‘canonically gay’ after spin-off director shares ‘Luberto’ fan art”. There was a spin-off short I never knew because I’ve been avoiding anything to do with this movie: Ciao Alberto. The director of that short shared some of the artwork posted above and that’s given fans grounds to declare that Luberto is canon. For those unfamiliar, this is a fan thing now, where fictional couples have both their names joined together a’la Solangio (Nico di Angelo and Will Solace from the Percy Jackson novels) and Percabeth (Percy Jackson and Annabeth Chase, also from the Percy Jackson novels).

On the one hand, this is very gratifying to see now in the younger generations. The heterosexuals among them get it, they see the love between same sex couples, and they recognise it as like their own. I am so glad I lived to see this.

But on the other hand…

In fact, Casarosa said that when they were making the movie they were thinking more about race than sexuality. “Because like, hey, how many different ways as kids we can feel like outsiders. It’s so various. And my version was certainly we were two geeks, losery, and so it’s not where I was coming from but it’s so wonderful and even more powerful for the LGBTQ+ community who has felt so much of as an outsider, right, where this is so real and stronger than my experience, I’m sure to have to grow up with that kind of a difference,” Casarosa said. “I felt really honored and I don’t like to say yes or no. I can say, well, that’s not how we wrote it. It wasn’t my experience, but I love that that metaphor is reading in all these different ways.”

Okay…I see where this is likely to go and it’s so tragically familiar territory. He is so honored. And gay kids are still so much on the outside looking in. And they are still throwing them into ex-gay camps in some parts of this country, and in some parts of the world they are killing them.

Is it too much to wish…too much…too much…

…only the targets ever change, and then only for a while.

So there is apparently a new survey MAGA is waving around that shows a decline in the number of people identifying as transgender. Elon Musk and Matt Walsh are celebrating it as a victory over “transgenderism.”

Oh really?

I was drafted, not entirely against my will, into the gay civil rights struggle ever since I fell in love back in my teen years, and I have seen how this game is played over and over. The idea is to minimize our numbers, as if that makes our demands for equal rights seem unreasonable and excessive. Oh you don’t want equal rights, you want Special Rights. But when you question people for a survey about sexual orientation, in a climate of hate, you are unlikely to get a lot of honest answers. Combine that with people’s own misunderstanding of their sexual orientation because they’d grown up with nothing but myths, lies, and superstitions about it, and a good many of your respondents will give what they think is an honest if completely wrong answer. Then add to that the spectrum of sexual orientation. There’s a reason Kinsey’s scale goes from zero to six, not zero to one.

I would have answered incorrectly about my sexual orientation if asked, before I realized I was in love that first time and saw that everything I had been taught about homosexuals was wrong, even though I was crushing madly on the object of my affections. I was 17…what did I really know about it back in 1971? And even knowing I was gay at that point, I would have been unlikely to publicly identify as that, in a time when almost every state had a sodomy law on its books, and you could be discriminated against in jobs, housing and services. I’d like to think mom wouldn’t have thrown me out of the house had I identified, but lots of gay kids had that happen to them.

What does it mean to Identify As? Being willing to stand your ground and say publicly Yes I Am…or is it a private Yes I Know.

So no surprises, they’re doing the same playbook now against transgendered people. This from comments in a thread about the new survey…

“It’s raw data of those who took the survey. Going just on that, it’s much more probable people are less likely to say they identify given the hostile politics. And when it’s actually weighted correctly, the data shows a 9% increase, not a decrease.”

There is nothing complicated about this. Transgender people start coming out of the closet and asserting their own true identities. A vicious backlash ensues in the commercial press, political campaigns, and social media. Hostile billionaires throw tons of money everywhere they can to demonize transgender people. And then transgender people find themselves facing a torrent of threats against their lives and livelihoods. And surprise, surprise, they start ducking for their own safety and mental well being. And the bigot industrial complex declares victory when their surveys show a decline in the number of people identifying as transgender.

My people have been there too. We know how this game is played.

And understand this: they don’t think the actual number of transgender people has declined. What this survey is telling them (which it actually fucking isn’t) is their expensive hate mongering is working. Transgender people are afraid.

Victory.

I had to defrost my frostless refrigerator overnight. 

Defrosting the fridge is an operation I remember from kidhood, when most refrigerators in rental apartments didn’t usually have that auto defrost cycle feature. But it’s something these days I’ve come not to expect having to do. The little chest freezer in the basement, yes. But I don’t think they even make frostless chest freezers since the defrost cycle bounces the temperature up and down somewhat. And the small cube fridge I used to keep in my STScI office before I retired (the first time) and which now I keep in my den. The mid Atlantic states are very humid and without a self defrosting feature they will ice up fairly often.

Some time ago when the fridge that came with the house began to fail I opted to buy a smaller, simpler new one. The one I have now is scaled for a solitary grocery shopper and is simple enough mechanically that it has the old style radiator on the back of the unit, which means you can’t push it up against the wall, you have to give it some space for air flow around the radiator. They all used to be designed like that.

This makes the thing simple. All there is to it mechanically is the compressor and a thermostat to maintain temperature. The frostless designs add a small heater near the evaporator coils and a timer that periodically turns off the compressor and begins a heat cycle to melt frost off the coils before it starts to accumulate and block them off. That’s one of the things that happened to the fridge that came with the house, a too large for me GE (the previous owner of the house seems to have had a thing for GE appliances…everything in the house was GE except the InSinkErator).

Thing is, in the frostless refrigerators the cooling coils are usually hidden behind a plastic panel and a fan blows cold air from the coils into the freezer. So when the defrost cycle fails and the coils get blocked off with ice you have to disassemble the area around the back of the freezer to get to them. I have a blog post about how the fridge that came with the house failed and a photo of the coils totally, I mean totally bricked in with ice. I was stunned.

Yesterday I began to suspect something like that was happening to the fridge I have now, when I pulled a bottle of ice tea out of the fridge and it wasn’t very cold in my hand. So I checked the thermometer in freezer compartment and the temperature there was right where it should be. I hand checked some bottles in the lower compartment and they didn’t feel cold enough. So I put the thermometer down there and instantly it began to rise out of the refrigerator cool zone. Last time that happened with the previous refrigerator, it was a sign that I’d need to buy a new one at some not distant enough day. I’m still paying off my December California train and Disneyland tickets.

Dear German Who Doesn’t Read My Blog…Disney should be paying you a royalties…

So, anyway, something was wrong with the fridge, but not with the evaporator coils since the freezer compartment was okay. So I looked deeper into it.

In older refrigerators, the ones I grew up with, the evaporator coils formed the freezer shelf and cold air from them just fell into refrigerator half (and you had to be super careful defrosting them!). In the newer upright refrigerators, the evaporator coils are tucked away inside a panel (it is actually laying flat between the freezer upper and lower refrigerator compartments) and a fan blows air across them into the freezer compartment and another fan blows into the refrigerator compartment below it. Thermostats connected to knobs control the fans, and how much air goes into which half of the fridge, and also the compressor cycle. Since the freezer was maintaining temperature and the lower compartment was not, I figured it had something to do either with a fan not working or something, probably ice, blocking air flow into the lower refrigerator compartment.

I dug into the freezer compartment. And here’s the thing: I had it stuffed full of recently bought food most of which, in retrospect, I should have just put into the chest freezer when I got it home. I have a sort I do when I get back from the grocery store: stuff to be kept cold but not frozen goes into the refrigerator, frozen stuff that needs kept frozen long term goes into the chest freezer (that’s usually bulk stuff I get at Costco, but also items I buy for long term storage), and frozen stuff that goes into the fridge’s freezer compartment because I am likely to use it soon.

I had the refrigerator’s freezer compartment nearly full for some reason I can’t recall now, but most of it was stuff I’d bought at Trader Joe’s just to try out and see if I liked. I don’t usually keep the refrigerator freezer that full. When I started looking into it I saw that all that frozen food was blocking air vents I hadn’t really noticed before, and they were frozen over with ice.

Okay, thinks I, here’s the problem. I tried chipping away at the ice but that’s risky business if you don’t know exactly where the evaporator coils and refrigerant lines are, and in the newer units all of that is tactfully hidden away from the owner in favor of how it looks to the eye of the buyer.

So I took everything out of the freezer and put it in the chest freezer downstairs. Having a plan B when the fridge is giving you trouble is one reason to keep even just a small chest freezer in the house. Then I took all my freezer packs I keep frozen for travel and emergencies, put those into my travel coolers and put the “keep refrigerated” and the “keep refrigerated after opening” food into them and what was left of the ice from the ice maker on top and closed them up.

Then I unplugged the refrigerator (I’ve never seen one with an actual on/off switch) and opened the freezer compartment door, figuring I’d just let any ice in the way of air flow warm up and melt off.

That was yesterday afternoon. I kept tabs on progress until I went to bed, and at my usual early morning insomnia hour and checked again, decided it looked completely clear of ice, turned it back on and went back to bed.

This morning everything seems back to normal. Both halves of the fridge are maintaining temperature. But I need to get another fridge thermometer. I had two, one for each compartment, but when I bought the chest freezer I moved one of them into that, which left the fridge with only one that I kept in the freezer, figuring if anything went wrong I’d see it there first. But…no. So I need another one for the refrigerator compartment.

The ice in my coolers is still solid so I figure the food in there is still good. I will restock the freezer compartment, but not so much it blocks those air vents.

Adventures in home ownership…

I have strange vivid dreams sometimes. And sometimes they become scenarios for stories that I will likely never write because while I’m pretty good at imagining stories I just don’t have the head of steam to write all of them. Plus whenever I do and I put it out there I get no feedback anyway. Which leads me to believe I’m actually pretty crappy at it. But it’s baked into me to do art and get this stuff out of me somehow someway.

This is cobbled together from a dream I had the morning of October 11, 2025. In it I dreamt I was working in a beautiful but old Victorian mansion that was converted to office space. Lovely wood carved walls and richly patterned wool carpeting. Office desks were beautiful and solid old wood. We seem to have added more comfortable modern desk chairs but made them look like chairs from the period. The computer workstations looked like something out of a steampunk graphic novel.

I had to be careful which doors I used to go in and out because if I wasn’t I might find myself back in the days of Queen Victoria…where it was not a good time for gay men, I would look way out of place, and I couldn’t use my credit cards to buy food anyway.

Sometimes I would see office workers walking around in the hallways who looked to be in period costume, but they weren’t ghosts, they were in their own time and the building just had phase issues with the two timelines that it was touching.

I remember looking out a window to see if the outside was my time or the building’s time…and I woke up.

So I wrote this scenario out of it. I give it to you. Make something out of it if you want…I probably won’t.

It is London, during the reign of Queen Victoria, but in a different timeline from our own. A moment of time compassing Oscar Wilde, Sherlock Holmes (in this timeline he is an actual person, as is Watson), Tennyson, Dickens, Darwin, Faraday.

A three floor brick and stone building located somewhere in London is home to an old and well established company (the exact nature of the business need not be specified, only that it employs many men and women as clerks and secretaries in multiple offices). It is a beautiful old Victorian building, with intricate wood carved doors, banisters, and carved wood paneled interiors, solid floors covered in richly patterned woven wool carpeting.

The business seems prosperous on the outside. But unknown to the public and its investors, it is slowly falling into hard times. Profit margins are down. Competition has denied them new opportunities to grow. If they cannot find a new source of revenue, they may eventually have to declare bankruptcy. Not soon, but eventually if the trend is not reversed.

A letter is received asking for a meeting with the board of directors, to discuss a proposition that might prevent their falling into bankruptcy. The board is alarmed. The financial state of the business was a closely guarded secret. The letter asks if they agree to the meeting to post a notice in the Globe personals, addressed to a Mr. Peabody from a Mr. Sherman.

A discussion ensues…there is worry that a criminal enterprise is making a move on their business. But it is agreed to meet with this Mr. Peabody, and learn what his proposition is.

At the appointed time a gentleman is ushered into the boardroom. No, he says, my name is not Peabody, it is Smith. He tells them he is a time traveler from the distant future.

After the laughter dies down, he pulls out a tablet computer, and proves it to them.

Time travel in the sense that it is depicted in the pulps is not possible, he tells them, and relates the paradox of the grandfather. What the time travelers of the future, or more specifically of our timeline have discovered he says, is what appears to be time travel is actually a kind of sideways jumping into alternate universes. Anything I do in your timeline he tells them, does not alter what happens in ours, nor does anything we do in ours alter yours.

We come from a timeline, he tells them, far forward in time from yours, in which London has become very prosperous. So prosperous in fact, that office space in the heart of London is now almost impossible to find, let alone afford. We desperately require more office space in London, close to our customers so we can grow our business. So we have a proposition for you. We would like to rent your building, in a time swap.

He explains: During your business day you will occupy your space in this building as usual. Ten hours per day will be yours, after which your people must vacate the building…which is usually the case anyway. Then, at a predetermined time, we will swap out your business for ours.

All your business property, the contents of your desks, file cabinets and safes, will be swapped out. We will not have access to into your private business matters in any way shape or form. It will simply exist in a null space between our timelines, perfectly preserved. Then our business property will be swapped in…the contents of our offices and desks, our file cabinets, our safes. Our people will then occupy this building for ten hours.

From the outside your building will seem dark and unoccupied the entire time, but no one must go inside or they will find themselves among our staff, and in a world of tomorrow unknown to them.

At the appropriate time the process will be reversed, such that when your people enter the building the morning of the following day, all will appear as normal. They need not even know this is happening. But you must tell them not to try and enter the building after business hours, or before normal business hours.

To our people it will also seem to be a normal day. They will not be working in the dark of your night, but in the daytime of our own timeline. Though our current office space is very small, we can manipulate the view outside every window of your building to reflect the view outside in our timeline. Our personnel will seem to be working in a lovely old Victorian building, with plenty of space. They of course, will not be allowed to go directly outside until their day is done, otherwise they will enter your timeline. But they will be completely aware of what is happening. This sort of time travel is well understood in our day and age. We will provide our staff the means to reenter our timeline to meet with our customers as needed, and for lunch breaks and other needs.

The important thing for us is we will then have enough office space where we need it, in the heart of London, near to our customers, and in what many in our timeline agree is a beautiful victorian office building (it really is very lovely). From the outside in our timeline it will appear that we have but a cramped one room office in a narrow building among many others, where once long ago this magnificent structure stood, but was demolished in favor of more modern and up to date (and in the opinion of many, sterile) offices. Many regretted deeply when this building was torn down, but money talks in every universe it seems. Once our staff enter that little office place they will be transported here to do their work, in a much nicer place.

We get ten hours each. This will leave four hours every day for your housekeeping or ours to do their work while our staff are away. We can discuss ways and means for that later, if you agree.

We will need to upgrade some of the infrastructure of this building, to make it suitable for our purposes, but this need not be visible to you. The electrical service will need much improvement, but we can do that such that it is unnoticed by your utility company and your staff. There will be vastly less risk of fire with our improvements. Also the plumbing and sanitary services will need refitting. Our staff would want better heating and cooling, and also for our computers…

Computers?

General purpose tabulating machines that in our time have been pressed into multiple uses. All of these improvements will be discreetly hidden from view. Your staff will notice no changes whatsoever. We can instruct certain absolutely trustworthy members of your staff as to what is going on, and what changes we have made in your building’s infrastructure, and the hazards of untrained staff attempting to utilize them. If your staff were to notice anything, it would be how much more comfortable their working conditions are.

Here, Mr. Smith passes a small slip of paper to the chairman of the board.

As to the rent we shall pay you for the use of your building, here is our offer for a ten year lease.

The chairman’s eyes grow wide. He passes the paper around to the others at the table and they see it will put the firm on solid ground for the entire decade of the lease.

Mr. Smith provides the chairman with an envelope containing many papers.

Here is the full text of our proposed agreement. Please look it over. If you agree to the terms please post another notice in the Globe to Mr. Peabody from Sherman.

Thank you for your time gentlemen.

And he takes his leave.

They eventually agree, with minor tweaks to the agreement. And for years it works to everyone’s benefit.

And then one day a clerk who has forgotten something enters the building late at night, breaking the rules and hoping not to be noticed…and enters a world of tomorrow…and is seen by another clerk working in what is his office during normal hours.

This is just a background story for a possible series of stories about two businesses in two different timelines occupying the same building back in the days of Queen Victoria, and what happens when one of the worker bees from that time, discovers others from the distant future also working there. And they fall in love with one of them…

[Update…] Thinking about this a little more…actually this could be a setting for any number of short stories and/or novels, along the lines of C.J. Cherryh’s Gates of Hell stories or Robert Asprin’s Thieves’/Myth World stories, or Don Sakers’ Carmen Miranda’s Ghost Is Haunting Space Station Three.

Could be fun…

Growing up, we didn’t have a car in our household until I was fifteen. So how did we get our groceries home from the store? Mom had a two wheeled foldable grocery cart.

These were pretty common back in the day, at least among our economic class, but also the timeframe. Back in the 50s/60s most households only had one car and that was dads for going to and from work. Seeing mothers with small children tagging along in the grocery store was nothing remarkable, nor is it today really. But nowadays you tend to only see older shoppers with these grocery carts, who live in nearby senior housing.

At the store this cart would be folded up and fit under the shopping cart while mom enacted the ancient rite of hunting and gathering among the isles. She (or I usually) would slide it out at the checkout counter, unfold it, and the baggage clerk would helpfully put the bags into it as they came from the register clerk (grocery stores used to have one clerk to work the cash register and another to bag groceries).

Being the “man of the house” my job was to pilot the grocery cart back home. It wasn’t that much of a chore and I happily dove into it so I could pretend I was driving a car, making sound effects along the way, and thereby fulfilling the line item on a young boy’s job description that reads embarrass mom. Small as I was, the only way a lot of heavy groceries mattered was the inertia you had to overcome to start it rolling. Once you got it rolling it wasn’t much effort to pull or push it along. That said, obviously we didn’t live where there were a lot of steep hills,

Time passes, the universe expands, and now I have a car of my own, and also two Very Nice grocery stores in easy walking distance from my house. But I’ve often thought about that old grocery cart I used to pilot along when I was still in single digits, because I dislike having to use the car just to drive a couple blocks when I knew I was buying more than I could carry. It just seemed ridiculous. The advantage to city life, in a good neighborhood, is you can walk everywhere. I have a good backpack I often use to go grocery shopping with, but even that has its limits. Plus, and alas, some places here have signs on the door saying “No Backpacks”. This is why we can’t have nice things.

I would see folks from the senior housing in my neighborhood, piloting their own grocery carts along and it kept reminding me to look into getting one of my own. But most of the newer ones strangely have four wheels, like a lot of roller luggage now too, and I just don’t grok that. To push one of those along upright on all four little wheels just looks unstable to me, especially when navigating cracks in the sidewalk and curbs. And I suppose all those years piloting a grocery cart way back when probably gave me some muscle memory for the task of balancing things on two wheels. My good Briggs & Riley luggage is like that with wheels that are a tad oversized compared to other makes.

So a couple months ago I looked into it, thinking I might just try to find a “vintage” grocery cart like the one mom had. But it seems these little grocery carts have had some serious rethinking since I was a boy, and I ended up with what you see in this photo… 

This design might be very new since I’ve never seen it being used before on the sidewalks around my neighborhood, and I see the folks from the senior housing here using them lots. But it’s really Really nice. Well made, well thought out.

The bag is detachable, holds as much as I remember mom’s cart holding and folds into a small space, as does the frame which is Way more substantial than the one mom had, or any other ones I’ve ever seen. And that weird arrangement of wheels on it actually makes going up and down steps and curbs a snap.

I’ve used it a bunch since then, and just this morning when I brought back a bunch of stuff I would never have been able to carry otherwise. Now the car can sit peacefully until I need to go to Trader Joe’s because that’s too far to walk.

So goes the voice of The Moody Blues. John Lodge has passed from this life at age 82, suddenly and unexpectedly according to his family. Never assume you still have more time on this good earth, no matter what the doctors tell you.

I’ve no idea if The Moody Blues ever intended it or not but some of their songs really spoke to the gay youngling I once was, and to the love lost adult I became, and I still listen to them longingly.

Beauty I’d always missed
With these eyes before
Just what the truth is
I can’t say anymore
And I love you…

Knock on my door and even the score with your eyes…

I wonder if you care
I wonder if you still remember
Once upon a time
In your wildest dreams…

…and now that voice is gone. But no…it will always be there to sing those songs to us, and the one in my heart. Nobody spoke to it like they did…like he did.