86, 2026 ~ Timeloop

    During my drive to New Orleans, Louisiana before the 2026 New Years, I saw this off-beat gas station stationed a little ways away from the main highway. It was pretty nondescript, stuck firmly within the border of a wetland forest off some miscellaneous sideroad. The only thing that really stood out to me about it was its name: TIMELOOP.

    It was emboldened on the top of the gas station in blue capitalized letters. No other moniker, no other adjectives alongside it, nothing. It wasn’t even called “Timeloop Gas” or “The Timeloop”. It just read TIMELOOP.

    It just really stuck out to me. I mean, what a grand and mystical name to call your gas station! It sounds like something straight out of a Richard Kelly film. 

    “A Gas Station called Timeloop.” Sounds like a place to be. 

82, 2026 ~ Structure

    I’ve already decided that life is really incomprehensible, and it doesn’t make a lot of sense at all. Even physics and the laws of reality seem really convoluted. Not the “This is too complicated for me” kind of convoluted, but the “This is… needlessly convoluted” kind. Is this really the best way a universe could be put together? Exotic matter? String theory? Black holes? Good grief. Whoever designed this place should really go back to the drawing board. Atoms were an obviously good idea but clearly gravity messed some things up in this little reality-building project.

    I'm being mean. I obviously love the universe we're in. We wouldn't have water and light without it, of course. But there's a lot to reality that seems... flimsy? I mean, black holes are an obvious thing to point to. A huge, gigantic collapse in the fabric of reality, that which only seeks to collapse things even more as it drifts across space and time. Oh gosh, and don't get me started on time. Time really does feel pretty flimsy, I feel like any amount of tampering with it would just collapse the universe, (or, whatever's near-by, at least.) I actually do think that metaphysical time travel is an inherently hedonistic act.

    Maybe the Greeks did have a point in viewing nostalgia as a mental disorder. Nostalgia is all people seem to have these days. Shit, kids these days want to live in 2016 for Christ's sake! I could've sworn that everybody thought that that year was the absolute worst. Is the powers-that-be (Whoever controls the media now) trying to take the piss out of us by forcably making it trendy to be nostalgic for a time that we all knew objectively sucked? Hell if I know.

Something flickers across the walls

    There, in the darkness and humidity of the hotel room you're standing in, the only light that shreds through the room's jet-black and thickly-woven curtains is an electric blue light. It appears to you analog, and the outline between the electric mint-blue light and the darkness of the hotel room's walls is razor sharp. The television isn't on. The ice in the bucket next to the liqour cracks a little. You're standing perfectly still in the middle of the room, in-front of the bed. Your arms are locked to your sides. Your mind is blank. Your focus is zeroed in on that sharp light spread across the hotel walls.

    You stand still and upright for several minutes, no thoughts come to you during that time. You fail to even realize how long it's been, you're so focused on the electric light as it shifts up and down the mint-green walls of the hotel room you're staying in. You trace the contour of the light with your eyesight as it moves across the room, peeling through the architecture, dancing on your body.

    You eventually sit down on the side chair, dodging the light and allowing it to cover more of the room you're supposed to be staying in. It's no longer your room, you internalize. The room belongs to the light now.

    Below you, a disembodied voice speaks what sounds to be French, startling you, snapping you out of the trance. You bend over your seat to find a small radio, hidden behind the chair, you pick it up and press your thumb on the button beside the reciever.

    "... Hello?" You utter somewhat awkwardly. You clear your throat and let out another, much more legible "Hello?"