Time Travel

 Last week a picture was being shared across the internet on sites like facebook. It was supposedly a screenshot from “Back to the Future 2” showing that the day it was posted was the day to which Marty and the Doc had traveled. Everyone excitedly shared the picture. Isn’t it neat to live in the day that that film had tried to depict? Unfortunately, in everyone’s rush to share that fact, they failed to stop and ask if their fictional facts were right. They were about 3 years off the mark. Facebook has an acute ability to expose the suckers in the population. Sorry, suckers, but it’s true.


The world we live in today (and it is likely to be true in 2015 as well) is not like the future envisioned by the “Back to the Future” storytellers. Hey, it is an amazing world all the same, especially to those of us who remember the eighties. We don’t have flying cars or skateboards, but we do have a lot of dazzling advances and technology. It has been cool to travel 30 years into the future, even at a day-at-a-time pace. The real draw, however, is to visit the recent past. Not for long or a real return, just a visit to touch upon the good stuff. That is what nostalgia is all about.

I took a visit again just the other day. “I Just Called to Say I Love You” came on the radio and I was back in 1985 in San Jose, Costa Rica. I never really even liked the song but it is one of those vortexes that trigger a time-shift in my own brain. I don’t know what it is about 1983-6 or so, they certainly weren’t among the most pleasant of my own life (puberty!) but they are a period of pop-culture that I love to revisit. Thus, the “Back to the Future” love, for instance.