Time travel

When we motorcycling time travelers left on our twentieth century machines for life on distant roads, we did so without regret as pre-modern men with a missin’ link or two. Sorta somewhere between ape and modern 21st century human beings. From our motorbike portholes looking onto the road, everything looked different. Time bent, and space, initially boundless, became constrained and sometimes claustrophobic. The road squashed our egos, but unseen by us the rising moderns’ sense of self grew infinite.

When we returned from the road, moderns no longer saw themselves as mere motes in the eye of eternity. They were no longer nagged by doubts or limits of what they knew. Their webbed hive minds made them feel omniscient yet strangely fragile and vulnerable to hurt like snowflakes in a mid-summer heat wave.

We travellers came back from the road chastised, respectful of our doubts and full of marvel towards humanity and its glorious paradoxes. Moderns were capable of creating world wide, mind-connecting technologies while at the same time joining their elders in letting their neighbor’s children starve and their parents go jobless and die from a foreign made plague of illegal opioids.

We two-wheelers and moderns had been traveling on very different roads. Their digital time clocks’ numbers spun wildly towards an unknown future, while our analogue ones slowly ticked and tocked in the present. Their water was pure and scent free, while ours was briny and tangy and a bit off smelling. Our food was made by hand, theirs was delivered to their front porches as if by faeries.

Our when and where were no longer theirs. There was no scientific instrument or know-how to determine how great this divergence was.

Our environment on the road was simpler, almost Spartan. There were paper books and maps but little to no techie bric-a-brac in ours. Moderns have no tape recorders, cameras or other pre-modern equipment or devices. All of that had migrated to these thin wallet sized pieces of plastic. They were leashed to them as they thumbed them furiously. For the most part we two-wheelers had no such leashes or collars.

None of them could write in cursive just printed letters. Long hand was dead. So was snail mail and email. Cross generational communication was difficult.

But still we both pressed on across this divide along the road — just in separate parallel lanes.

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