I see absolutely no advantage to living in the present.
Sure, it has a few benefits, but for the most part the present is not always my friend and should in fact be avoided at all costs and the future is almost always waiting to sucker punch me when I'm not looking.
Thankfully we have any number of time travel portals available that are ready to whisk us back to the land of square one, in order to return us to the origins of our feelings.
The radio tends to be my first choice for luxury, first class time travel. Instead of seeking the latest news or music I often seek out the soft conspiracy of voices of the invisible wise people who have gathered at my local PR station, whose transmission sounds like a gentle fairy tale that is being read to me by the most caring, loving parents.
Sure, I can lose myself in the story and I often do. But most of the time I just want to listen to the sound of the gathering that makes me feel like I belong to an enchanted society of electrical impulses.
The illusion is that I'm the only one who can hear them, as if they're sharing their most precious secrets with me and me alone.
The reality that thousands of people are crammed into this massive publicly supported pool with me, doesn't distract me from my own ability to quietly float, wade and drift in any direction that I chose.
If I turn to a musical station like The Jonathon Channel for example, the best part is that I get to go way, way back, visiting eras that existed long before I did.
This kind of aural archeological dig thrills me with the discovery of each new bone or long ago dissolved into mist yet miraculously still beating heart.
Frank Sinatra, despite his less than angelic ways, visits me like one on a regular basis. His sandpapered loneliness and soul lacerated longing have gotten me through more wee small hours of the evening than I can possibly imagine.
Every radio station on my iPhone is a lightly tethered boat, with crew and provisions,that is ready like a rich's man's impulse, to sail me off to the horizon, where the longing of memory sits, untouched, pure and alive.
And even further, somewhere across the universe, are the songs of the Beatles.
Immediately following World War Two and to this very day, London in particular has continued to feel the shell-shocked bewilderment of bombardment loss that we in America did not share until JFK was viciously mowed down like a Sandy Hook first grader.
The blissful innocence of Camelot was suddenly gone in one blinding, nuclear flash, that left us all scorched and exposed, as colorless as that icy and mournful November winter sky that now seemed to have wept away with the sun and all it's warmth.
We were orphans now. Staggered. Rudderless.
And then, a month later (which felt like a hundred) literally out of nowhere, from the tiny speakers of our tiny transistor radios, came this rocking and rolling wave of joy.
The Beatles were a massive global rescue effort that began simply with them offering to hold our hand.
No one had offered to even touch us since we lost our radiant Pompadour patting President (maybe he took the sun with him).
And now here were these alien beings with Tolkien Middle Earth hair, elfin, Cuban-heeled boots and space age collarless jackets who in hindsight, were the framers and founding fathers of our collective declaration of independence.
In a stunning bit of irony, this British Invasion was all about freeing us from our own tyranny and we all felt instantly liberated from the very first sounds of those oh yeah, come on and join us handclaps to that other worldly, jangly guitar twang that threw opened the door for all the endless melodies and lyrics to come.
This was the next step in our evolution.
This was our wheel.
This was our fire.
But it wasn't all blissful.
Lingering somewhere just below the Cha-Cha, toe tapping melodies and sex obsessed boy lyrics was a well of loss and sadness.
Yesterday, Eleanor Rigby, Help and Nowhere Man, Penny Lane and Strawberry Fields were all written by two boy men who had lost their mommies at a very young, tender age.
Today as I move closer to when I am 64, each time I revisit a Beatles album feels more and more poignant. Holding a vinyl album in my hands once again reawakens all of my senses, which are the ultimate filing cabinets of our most tangible and treasured memories.
Any drawer which has been carefully filed by the wisdom of our experience, immediately transports me to the ether filled cloud universe that is the temporary secret trance of absolute, fully detailed memory.
TV of course is another portal. The Twilight Zone was my greatest inspiration and once a year I sit down and watch every single episode. Color is meaningless in those shows as there is such an abundance of it in the deepest reaches of the imagination of Rod Serling.
I forget, while watching that it's all in black and white. I find myself transfixed and comforted, like I've just gotten off the train at Wiloughby and the barefoot boys with their fishing rods are just so glad to see me.
Museums are the most powerful time machines.
The Met in particular has become hugely important to me as I often feel when I am there like I'm flying from room to room on a magic carpet of holy appreciation and awe and even a Goldfinch sized explosion could not blow me off course.
So feel free to not be present and accounted for.
You're always seconds away from anywhere that you desperately need to go.
And God knows you have all the time in the world.