The Dog Isn't Behind The Television

How We Already Defeated Fascism & Burning Yourself Into Eternity

It was October 1979…

Two British couples, Len and Cynthia Gisby and Geoff and Pauline Simpson, were enjoying a two-week holiday. They were on a road trip through southern France on their way to the Spanish border. After a long day of driving, they decided to find a place to get dinner and spend the night.

They pulled into the town of Montelimar late, around 9PM, stopping at a busy hotel with lots of bustling fuss. To their disappointment the hotel was booked solid, but the Concierge suggested they continue down the road. There were other places to stay on the outskirts of town. Thinking nothing of it, they thanked her and got back in their car.

They drove on and noticed the streetlights growing farther apart as darkness took over. Soon they were back in the true countryside, rolling past tree-lined roads. They saw a wooden sign for an inn in their headlights and made the turn.

The road became narrower and the cobblestones were hard on the car, but they all understood country places like this weren’t often upgraded for modern traffic. They slowed down enough to notice posters for a circus in a delightfully old-fashioned style.

The road opened up to a pleasant two-story inn with warm lights inside and the sounds of people. Not seeing the parking lot in the dark, they parked across the street on a layover near a stone wall and headed inside.

What they walked into was as breathtaking as it was welcoming. A real old-world atmosphere. Candles and fireplaces, people laughing and drinking in loud French accents, charming as hell.

Soon the owner of the hotel came to greet them, and to their relief, spoke broken English. They explained they were going to Spain and wanted to know if they could book two rooms and get dinner? He understood and gestured towards the dining area while his staff prepared for their stay.

The couples were hungry and they happily sat down to the simple, but impeccable, dining room. The dark plank floors were so polished they shined, at least around the boot prints. All the furniture looked well made and expensive, dark wood like the floor. The plates were heavy, the utensils were too. There were no tablecloths. They had a hearty dinner of steak and fries and all the lager they could drink, which was served in metal tankards, not pint glasses.

After dinner they retired to their rooms, noting how the theme continued. The furniture in their lodgings was also sparse and simple, but expensive looking. The mattresses were perched abnormally high and the beds didn’t have pillows, just bolsters. The sheets were thick calico and the shared bathroom between the couples’ rooms had an old claw-foot tub and grated shower with soap attached to an iron rod.

It was delightful! They all commented on how cool it was to be able to visit these odd corners of rural France, and how quaint it was that this inn was retaining a historic theme.

How historic? The staff was all dressed in old-fashioned clothing, without so much as an orthopedic sneaker under a maid’s skirt. There were intricate wooden shutters, but no glass in the windows. The doors to their rooms didn’t have locks, just a wooden latch. Nothing of the modern world was anywhere to be seen, besides them.

The two women had their pictures taken by the shutters in their rooms, wanting to show them to friends back home. They took more pictures of the woodwork and attention to detail. They soon fell asleep, exhausted but content.

Breakfast was your basic continental, an array of breads, toast, and assorted spreads and jams. The coffee was hot but tasted horrible (they all agreed this was the low point). While eating they watched a lovely young woman come downstairs in a chiffon dress and buttoned-up high boots. She held a small dog against her chest and was talking to two police officers. They were clearly gendarmes, but had on the old fashioned high hats and capes of the early 20th century, nothing like the uniforms they saw patrolling Montelimar yesterday…

One of the Brits walked up to ask the officers for directions back to the autoway. The men didn’t speak English and seemed confused at his meaning, but were eventually able to get him pointed back to the main road. It wasn’t very helpful but they felt once they got back on the freeway they could get better directions.

The couples settled up and were amazed that the rooms/meals/drinks only cost 19 Francs. Even for 1979, two rooms and two meals for roughly the US equivalent of $20 was crazy cheap. They tried to argue but the Innkeeper insisted it was correct, so they paid.

They left, got in their car, and enjoyed the rest of their vacation in Spain.

On the drive back they wanted to return to that odd place, both for the commitment to the time period and the low prices. Other nice hotels with restaurants were more like $125 a night per couple, and they wanted to both get a better look at the place and save some money. Who wouldn’t?

But when they pulled off on the exit, towards the same tree-lined roads they drove past a week earlier, there was no wooden sign. There was no Inn. Just forest and trees.

Convinced they were lost, they headed back to that same hotel in Montelimar, the one that told them to head down the country road towards the inn. When they talked to the person at the front desk he had no idea what they were talking about.

Flabbergasted, the couples drove around and tried to find it. They couldn’t. They found the turnoff, the tree-lined road, but the inn and the stone wall they parked by were missing. They passed the same landmarks, the same distance, the exact same turnoffs and driving time, but the inn had vanished. It was as if it never existed.

Two weeks later they developed their pictures. The photos came out crisp and perfect, save for the ones taken at the inn. None of them developed.

Had they imagined that place, all four of them…

The Time of Our Lives

These are real people and they swear the story is true. I have no idea if it is or isn’t, but we hear about folks seeing people from the past all the time. They call them ghosts. Plenty of people would consider this an unsettling paranormal experience.

Others think we live amongst endless alternate dimensions. That the reality we are percieving is just one version of endless possible futures. If you subscribe to that, then these travelers weren’t dealing with ghosts, it was a metaphysical mindfuck.

All of that is above my pay grade. I’m a pig farmer. Take what I’m saying with a grain of salt, but I think we don’t understand time.

This isn’t a fresh take. Scientists can’t explain time. The best they can do is say time is defined to make motion look simple. Which I had to read three times to even start understanding, but it’s best explained by the cosmos.

We (humanity) relate time to the earth’s rotation. We observe the daily change from light to darkness and annual cycle of seasons. As these things keep happening, our bodies grow weaker every trip around the sun. So I guess that’s time, but we have no idea what the hell is actually going on.

English-speaking folks see time as linear, and timelines flow left to right, because that’s how we read, how we take in information. The Chinese see time as moving top to bottom, because that’s how they read. To them, the past is above and the future below.

There are older cultures that see time forever going east-to-west, because they understand daylight begins in the east and fades in the west (which honestly makes the most sense) and if you sat these people in a room they would line up cards arranging historic events in order of east to west, changing how they lined them up based on what direction they were facing.

Andean cultures saw the future as what they can’t know or see, it’s out of their line of sight and therefore directly behind them. What they do know is what they experienced, right in front of their eyes - so the past is in front. These folks literally have to go back to the future.

Astrophysicists understand that time isn’t motion at all, just the thing that measures it. It’s possible time doesn’t even happen in order. It’s just as likely it all happened at once. Which means our British friends may very well have slipped from their experience of the present to the present of people in early 20th-century France.

How did they do it? I have no idea. Like I said, I’m a pig farmer. But I do think perceiving time less as a published story with a fixed beginning and end and more like a manuscript in progress is helpful.

We can’t look at what’s happening to the world around us right now and believe we’re powerless to change the story. It’s still being written.

We still have time.

The Dog Isn’t Behind The Television

Our concept of time is about as sophisticated as showing your dog another dog on TV. The first time he sees this stranger, he doesn’t understand he’s safe. He only knows what’s happening to him in the moment.

He sees another dog, hears another dog, believes what his eyes and ears are telling him. He barks, panics, and hairs stand on end. To you, the human that understands everything happening, this is hilarious. You laugh as he darts behind the TV desperate to find the dog on screen, but nothing is there.

Turn off the TV and give your pet a level of cosmic horror H.P. Lovecraft couldn’t handle. He doesn’t know if the strange dog he just saw wanted to hurt him, where that dog went, and doesn’t understand how to protect himself.

I think we’re about as good at understanding time as that dog is at understanding broadcasting. We see it change us and the world around us but have no idea how, just how to react when it feels threatening.

Did those British people experience the impossible? Did they look behind the TV and see the dog? Who the hell knows, what matters is the metaphor. Let’s agree, for the remainder of this essay, that time is swirling mess overlapping like an eddy. That everything that ever happened or will happen exists in this amorphous mystery we occasionally witness and bark at.

I think that’s what “ghost hunters” are doing. Hearing sounds and seeing things they can’t understand and making ridiculous claims about the nature of eternity and the human soul.

I can’t stand these ghost shows:
Okay Zach, you saw a woman in old-timey clothes pass by you on a staircase and then disappear? You saw that for 30 seconds and concluded it’s the magical reappearance of a dead person from 400 earth rotations ago… and she’s appeared to you in this dive bar in Cleveland because she needs you to solve a crime…

What’s actually happening is beyond our comprehension, especially in regards to time. We want to believe our souls live on forever, that justice can be achieved even long after we’re forgotten. We want to believe the dog is behind the television.

It’s childish thinking, but here we are. Simple thinking that comforts the ignorant and ignores the warnings of history and science is the most dangerous thing in the world right now. We’re living it. And it’s not the job of time slips or ghosts to fix this world, it is ours. And if thinking like children is what got us into this mess, perhaps it’s also what can get us out of it.

Never Growing Up

Tried to change the ending, Peter losing Wendy

You’ve probably heard of Peter Pan Syndrome. It’s what we say about people who never want to grow up and take on adult responsibilities.

If you don’t remember the story, Wendy Darling and her brothers are shown another world by Peter Pan. An alternate timeline that seems magical, but still has real problems. There’s an evil pirate (whose enemy is time, by the way) trying to control Neverland. Captain Hook is in power and blinded by vengeance. He wants Peter to pay for the hand he lost, for his inability to be governed. Hook kidnaps Wendy as a trap, and Peter and the Lost Boys fight and win. They save the Darlings and keep Neverland safe.

I am not a J.M. Barrie scholar, and I am well aware of the sexism, racism, and exhasting misogynistic tropes in the original novel. Peter, in the original, isn’t some revolutionary. He wants Wendy to raise the lost boys for him until he can replace them with yonger followers. It’s honestly pretty fucked up. To be clear, I’m speaking in broad strokes about this tale and basing more of it on the beloved Disney classic and our more wholesome interpretations.

That being said, at the heart of this story Wendy is saved because an idealist never gave up. Peter’s world, one that was portrayed as childish, was the one capable of justice. It was the reality where tryants fell.

Despite what Wendy saw, she returns to the London she knows, to the conformity she was trained to particpate in since birth. It was easier to accept a less magical world.

The story ends with Wendy losing Peter, her choice and Peter eventually accepts it. Peter returns years later, finding Wendy is 25 years older and a mother herself. She no longer returns to Neverland but agrees her children can give it a try. There’s still hope a younger generation can accept a better world.

At least that’s my take.

We don’t understand time, we’d rather believe the absurd than deal with consquences, and the only ones who seem willing to do anything about it are the youth bold enough to believe in a better world.

Darling, we all have Peter Pan Syndrome. None of us want to grow up, and not because we don’t want to be accountable, but because time makes it impossible. There is no future to grow into. All you’re doing is slowly deteriorating in the present while the earth rotates. That’s not an excuse to let the world burn.

We’ve built a country where if you aren’t constantly earning money you’ll become homeless and starve. A world people would rather spend their one life doing what they were told out of fear instead of changing the systems they’re victims of.

This isn’t weakness of character, it’s tryanny. It’s the problem we are dealing with right now. So many of our fellow Americans have been trained to not look behind the TV. To accept what they see, obey it, and not ask questions. It’s easier to believe in comforting lies than fight for uncomfortable change.

Most Americans are dogs barking out of fear. It’s not their fault, they were conditioned to fear the stranger. They can’t even begin to believe there’s a better world just past the second star to the right, it’s been beaten out of them. And those of us with the will to fight for something better, to save the goodness and progress that remains, are considered foolish children.

So which kind of person are you? Are you going to accept the real world happening now—with all its horrors and injustices—and spend your short time with us trying to make it better? Or shrug it off as something out of your control?

Who’s avoiding responsibility now?

Folks, we are living in a present on fire. It’s terrifying. It’s going to get worse. And if these weirdos have their way, they’ll succeed in making you stop believing in a world where Captain Hook loses.

Please use your time wisely. Don’t waste it on conspiracies and ghosts. Don’t believe there’s a dog behind the television because that’s what you were told and you’re too afraid to look. And for the love of all that is decent, never believe that growing up means giving up on a better world.

Back to our Brits: Did they accidentally time travel? I don’t fucking know. I’m a dog just starting to understand how television works. But I’d like to think they did.

I’d like to think the science is good. That all that ever was or will be already exists, that there’s a future waiting for us where we buried fascism for good. We set aside our pettiness and hate and stood side by side to fight for a better world. That in a time yet to arrive on our screens, we understood who the real enemy was and saved Neverland.

I Don’t Believe in Ghosts

We’re in a culture that believes ghosts are real and Peter Pan isn’t. Both are ideas, neither are real, but things have become so desperate and cynical that we’re telling our children that growing up means no longer believing in beautiful fantasies unless you’re dead, and then ghost you can fight for justice. Living you is too tired, too apatheic, too lost to ever find the Lost Boys.

I’m not here to take away your fun. I don’t argue with anyone’s ghost story, I have several of my own. But ghosts are like rollercoasters, something contrived to feel threatening when we know we’re safe. Can I get you to consider that perhaps what you’re seeing isn’t the soul of a dead person, but Time sloshed when you weren’t expecting it?

I’d like to think those of us who are tied to a place, leave part of us behind forever. Our mundane routines burn into eternity like a tired computer monitor left on too long. Maybe that French inn was a place of intensity we can’t even fathom. A place where those people’s energy, their love, their loss, their passion was so beautiful it cauterized in time. People stumble upon it like a sinkhole or a rainbow, something natural, hell, inevitable if the circumstances are right.

That’s what I’d want for me, for Cold Antler. I’d want to live my life so hard and feel so much it becomes part of the mystery. In a couple hundred years will someone see a string of lights slowly appear at dusk where my forest path once was? Will someone standing where I once stood, feel the brush of black fur beside their calf as an unexplainable black dog appears, trotting past them towards the line of lanterns as my stout frame can be seen calling him to back me? I hope so. I hope there was never a version of time in any reality that I wasn’t always going to land here.

I want to fight for a world where we all find our place like I found mine. Somewhere safe and holy to burn into. Somewhere that our energy can’t leave and those looking for it, open to it, may find themselves walking into a campfire at Cold Antler Farm like those people’s night at the vanishing inn.

A night with friends laughing with wine and pot smoke. A night that feels safe and warm, nearby horses swishing their tails and lambs bleating for their moms in distant hills. Even if the stream is long dried up under concrete, they’ll hear it again and join us for s’mores and stories in summer 2024, sharing an oddly comfortable evening by a fire because they tumbled into my frequency.

Nothing in nature ever truly leaves, it just changes into something more necessary for the living. We think we’re so powerful or helpless, but in the end what is correct will perservere. Bodies decompose into soil, water erodes mountains, and wars and hate come and go, splashing along the same banks of possibility as Neverland and Love. It’s up to us to believe that good isn’t just possble, it’s inevitable.

I don’t believe in ghosts.
I barely believe in time.
I do believe in us.