Author: Kathleen Bryson

We only travel at night and we only travel in a small pen. The pen is an invention that means we can keep our time travelling in a small place so we can’t create anomalies. We only travel at night is a phrase that popped up in a dream of my mine and now it is our motto. We explore dinosaur worlds but we cannot explore the future as it has not happened yet and it has not happened yet. We explore Ming dynasties and the less salubrious. We keep inside these little KFC buckets we call pens so it is not much fun so far despite how much we paid for the series of individualised vacation packages. Also everything is dark. Because we only travel at night.

Last week we travelled to 2006. The craze back then was big cities like Rome, London, Berlin, Budapest creating fake beaches and people coming out in bathing suits and umbrellas on the sands poured over concretes. It was just that it was so dark because we only travel at night and it was like entering a house party after its peak; people overdrunk and the floor sticky.

There was a flyer amongst the grains for a new floating pool named after Josephine Baker based on one in 1973, so we took inspiration and also travelled to Paris in 1973. There was the floating pool in the nighttime Seine and like the fake beaches the floating pool was community-minded, set up with lap lanes. No one was swimming at the late hour but we bobbed the pen around for a few floats to see the concentric circles rising, to make a mark upon this old time, but the circles on the water just grew and then faded. And like the fake beaches the floating pool in the inky river was a fake on a fake, an elaboration on something already curlicued. Like the previous sentence. We only travel at night.
We only travel at night. We are meta upon meta. We are the sunless thing that reflects the thing. We hate metacomments on the process, as pure evil as critiques of 1) one’s creative process or 2) good sex. We watch these other times like television shows. So we cannot claim Baudrillard is wrong. We consider however Baudrillard’s own writings on simulacra just reflections themselves too, the fractals spoiling. Or, worse, the water circles fading, we never were and really we never weren’t.