One of the great privileges of my life has been living in this apartment. As apartments go, it’s kind of run down, but there are two very special things about it: it has a built-in washer/dry combo, and it is positioned on the space-time continuum so as to ensnare time travelers.

First, the washer/dryer combo. It is made by Equator and it has a 14lb. capacity, which is just right for the amount of clothes I wear in a week. It has nine wash settings and they all work great. You can imagine how nice it is having a washing machine of my own, considering all the hassle it was to use laundromats in college. Even if I forget to take the clothes out of the dryer, there’s no one to complain, because I’m the only one who uses it.

And talk about saving money! You know how much it is to do a load of laundry at a coin-op? It’s anywhere from $1.50 to $2.00 for one load. Since I do about 3 loads a week, that’s twenty-four dollars a month just to get the “luxury” of clean clothes! That’s more than my entire monthly electric bill in the summer, and it doesn’t even factor in detergent and fabric sheets. It’s a racket. Man, if I had some money and wanted to make some more money, I’d start a damned laundromat.

Now, on to the time trap. I’m not entirely sure how it works, but there is a section of tile about three by five feet, right in front of the sink, that acts as a road block to 4th dimensional travel starting at about 6:03pm Pacific every night. It lasts seventeen minutes, and during that time anyone trying to time travel will get caught there and have to patiently sit out the duration.

I’ve just let one of the time travelers read this article, and he wants me to point out that it doesn’t block all time travelers, only those that are proceding in four simultaneous dimensions along certain pseudo-orthagonal nodes with a finite set of beginning and end points. I was just about to say that… honest!

They can travel backwards in time, but, for seventeen minutes, they can’t go forwards. It’s great, because most of them just stay there and chat with me for a while. Almost without exception, time travelers are excellent conversationalists. I have the dining room table set up to face that spot, and I’m there waiting for a visitor every night at exactly six o’clock. Usually, I have some drinks and snacks available for them. Some of them are very surprised to suddenly find themselves in my kitchen, but others are used to it. Most of them see it as an inconvenience, which I guess I can understand, so I try to make it as pleasant as possible.

Honestly, six o’clock is the perfect time, because that’s when reruns of The Simpsons are on, and if the conversation runs dry, we can just watch that. I’ve got a little 13-inch TV set up on the counter.

One impolite thing that time travelers do a lot is press the button on their belt which activates the time machine. I keep explaining to them that they can’t leave until at least 6:20, but some of them just keep pressing the button every couple of minutes anyway. Not all of them do this, just the rude ones.

We talk about interesting things. You might expect time travelers to obey a certain code of conduct, not telling people from the past about what happens in the future. Not true at all. For instance, I know exactly the date and circumstances of my death (suicide, bank lobby, six years from now) thanks to a database one of them had implanted in his fingernail. I also know what species is going to be running the world in two thousand years, and in what type of mine the remaining humans will be put to work.

Here is a conversation I once had with one of them:
Me: “Do you ever, you know, get tempted to try out some of those time travel paradoxes? Like the Grandfather Paradox, or the.. well, you know, the one where you step on a bug and suddenly Dinosaurs are walking around in business suits and such.”
Time Traveler: “I never worry about that, because the universe is actually pretty sturdy. You can’t like cause the collapse of all reality or anything. You can even create paradoxes, but the universe will just ignore them and procede as if nothing happened. Sometimes this causes some pretty weird things to happen in and of itself, though, like… like… well, why don’t I show you?”
Me: “Ok.”
Time Traveler: “Ok, I just went back in time and killed your grandfather before he ever met your grandmother. Now, you see what I mean?”
Me: “There must be some mistake, I never had a grandfather. My dad was a virgin birth.”

What always puzzled me was why I only ever saw time travelers in my kitchen, and not walking around all over the place, or at least congregating at important historical events, taking photographs and such. A couple of months ago I asked one of them, to satisfy my curiousity. He was about seven and a half feet tall and covered in sort of armadillo plating. He spoke out of a microphone implanted in his face. Perfect English. Nice guy.

Me: “If I could travel through time, I’d be the ultimate tourist! Rome, Egypt, the Cowboy days, I’d see it all! Why aren’t time travelers a more common sighting throughout history?”
Time Traveler: “Oh, I guess there are a couple of reasons. Can I be brutally honest?”
Me: “Absolutely.”
Time Traveler: “Honestly, nothing really interesting happens until about the year 15,000. Most of us just sort of go there and stay, unless we need to fetch a particular haiku to bring back to the mind-cloud. They have the best mind-clouds in, I’d say, 15,580 or so. Way better than the mind-clouds they have in this millenium.”
Me: “I’ve never heard of a mind-cloud, actually.”
Time Traveler: “Really? This millenium must be horrible!”
Me: “You shouldn’t judge this millenium based solely on my apartment.”

Which is true. It’s just not fair. Especially without taking my Equator combination washer/dryer into account.