Correspondent John Dee forwarded a spam he received earlier this week, concerning the need of a time traveler for certain necessary pieces of equipment to whisk him away to his temporal point of origin.
I’d seen a similar spam some time ago, and I must admit I rather relished it, although I took it to be the work of a genuinely schizophrenic individual. Many years ago, I lived with a man who had very extreme schizophrenia, and he had a very well-developed suite of theories concerning the disconnects between his perceptions of reality and the perceptions of reality that most of those around him had.
For example, he was a physically healthy male who was attracted to females; yet, for obvious reasons, he was never able to enter into either a loving long-term partnership or even into a casual, physical expression of sexuality. His obvious insanity creeped the ladies right out, lemme tell ya. His interpretation of this undeniable, consistent, frustrating fact?
God (or Yahweh) and Jesus, working together, had given him a disease which made it impossible for him to have sex with a female. How can you argue with an interpretation like that? He was clearly correct.
At any rate, recognizing the Time Traveler’s spam as the output of a similarly distressed mind, I had filed it away and more or less forgotten it, when Mr. Dee reminded me of it. I googled a bit to see what I could see.
The always-alert N!kke has a roundup of posts on the topic, including a long correspondence with the apparently-Massachusetts-based temponaut.
Here’s Sean’s creepy account of actually waiting at a Time Traveler specified teleportation coordinate and time. Hard looks from a man in a minivan! Cell-phone toting, laptop-using men in a car that leaves when observed! A man in the woods! Pretty good for a ten-minute lunch break.
One futher point I found intriguing. Several of the websites that post experiences or research about the poor Time Traveler identify him by name. At Sean’s post, someone signing “todios” claims that the Time Traveler has been sent home. “Todios” bears a high degree of phonemic similarity to the last name of the person identified as the Time Traveler here. Of course, it also can be understod to mean “to God”. Multiply-layered meanings and coinages such as this are extremely characteristic of the writings of schizophrenics that I have read.
In the same comments section, “Octavian” posts:
Please do not assist this person. I am from about 200 years further into the future than he is (That’s about how long his DWG has been obsolete)and have been hunting him acoss most of human history. Now that he’s trapped in your era, he must be subdued by whatever means necessary. He knows I am after him, so it’s very important that he be stopped before he can kill my great-great-great-great-great Grandf
Ha ha ha, right?
Check this out. The post is dated July, 2002. Scroll through the comments (including a Chat log with TT). Look! There’s the same comment, also from “Octavian,” dated August, 2003. And look, todios is back too.
It seems odd, also, that the Time Traveler has not set up a website, as he seems conversant with domain acquisition and management.
In fact, googling for “time travel spam” yeilds quite a few results. One wonders – could the Time Traveler and the Time Cube Guy be brought together?