The Kitchen at Night

You know you’re onto something when it’s the middle of the night, and you’re standing over the stove in your kitchen… and the house is over 100 years old and the music coming out of iTunes is blues/jazz/country from the 1920s — scratchy, warbling, ripped from old 78s… and if you blur your eyes a little, you start coming unstuck in time rather like Billy Pilgrim — and you’re making an impromptu meat sauce to go with the spaghetti… and the French bread you made the night before will go great with this… and there’s this huge smile that keeps sneaking up on you from somewhere. It’s right about then that you know you’re onto something.

Not everyone gets it, maybe not even yourself at first. Who cares? You are time traveling, connecting past and future. It’s not the destination, but the journey. Rewind, fast-forward, pause. You make temporal connections relative to your present.

If you follow Santayana’s famous aphorism and learn from history, you are purportedly no longer doomed to repeat it. But here’s an interesting thought: perhaps by experiencing (repeating) history on purpose, you find salvation in your own story. By exploring the future on purpose, you keep ahead of the great changes most people find themselves submerged by. You are, in a sense, surfing on a temporal wave in that energetic space between past and future.

One time when I was much younger, I walked into the Midnight Special bookstore in Santa Monica and suddenly inhaled. I was taken aback by all the books, all the stories. I was beginning the process of writing a book at the time, and seeing all those others made me wonder, gave me pause: why should I write when all these others have already, when all these millions of words have already been written?

Ah, the answer came back, but you haven’t written yours yet.

Wouldn’t it seem strange to question why you should live when so many billions of other people are living? Isn’t it fallacious to ponder never speaking when so many others have spoken?

Then why not write your own history, figuratively and literally? Why not make some connections from past to future?

Why not spend some time listening to old music on a new computer, making up new recipes in an old kitchen in the middle of the night?