Draft #1

Here it is, raw, barely edited and completely pulled out of my ass - a mash-up of reality and fiction. God help us all.

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Our story begins at the 2022 Burning Man Taylor Swift meet-up, known to the rare breed of local Burner Swifties as Live Your Wildest Waking Dreams or Burn It Down ’22 (the front-runners of the two titles). Aside from the conceptual novelty, there was a functional novelty that’s essential to timeline jumping in an Everything Everywhere All At Once-type fashion. This story is going to make a lot more sense to you if you’ve seen the film, and if you haven’t, what are you doing? 

Anyway, the Swifty meet-up, which would’ve been called Get Swifty if I’d had any say in it, was a legit portal due to the high-novelty-quotient created by the sheer quantity of Taylor’s super-fans who managed to make it to the very edge of human expression and fun without falling into despair. Burning Man is a place so far outside of most human comfort zones, it effectively marks the edge of duality - it’s the blurred, dusty line between pain and pleasure, radical self-reliance and total systemic dependence, unfettered self-expression and crippling social conformity masquerading as true individuality. As 100 strangers united by happiness, cheesy music and total transcendence of cool screamed “Red” into the blistering blue sky, we were creating what amounts to a timeline trampoline, bouncing each other into more expansive experiences, opportunities, and frankly better luck. 

Luck is perspective-driven in my opinion, and in that sense we really do make our own luck. I’m Molly, your lucky, mostly reliable narrator, and this is Timeline Jumping For Dummies.

* * *

Holy shit ok - so, the Taylor Swift meetup was in full swing and I knew I was in a pretty high-frequency timeline when I arrived just at the start of my favorite song, “Wildest Dreams,” also the theme of the party, also Waking Dreams was the theme of Burning Man soooo, yeah. It was my third time, second official (I’d been at the renegade, no-parents Burning Man in 2021), and first Taylor Swift fan meet-up and dance party. Please let me paint a picture for you - grown women dosi-do-ing in the blazing sun, everyone wearing red lipstick and Lolita shades. An otherwise reasonable straight guy, also wearing the lipstick, belting out every word. He came with two of my Swifty girlfriends, who brought their own karaoke microphones. I performed “Getaway Car” into one flawlessly, and when a techno-blaring art car came by during the bridge, the Swifties turned primal mob, myself included, chasing it away with middle fingers in the air. Very meta.

To be at Burning Man is to be in the world’s most novel novelty ripple, as Terence McKenna calls it. He believed that both the universe and evolution itself rewards novelty over stagnancy with wild opportunities to shift to timelines where we live our dreams that would never have been available to us if we were just doing the same shit day in and day out. This is based on the multiverse theory, the theory that every possibility exists at the same time and we’re constantly moving between these different timelines containing infinite expressions of possibility and that’s what “life” is.

Because there are so many different people and thus timelines colliding out there on the (gentle cringe) playa, there’s a kind of magic that happens when our natural resonance takes us where we need to go, and then we get the opportunity to make choices that bring us closer to ourselves or not. The choices that bring us closer to ourselves yield dream opportunities and continually unfolding synchronicities. The choices that take us further away from ourselves yield a shit-show of hardship. 

And the minor choices we make in between all become variables in the equation that adds up to our perspective. Quantum mechanics says observing reality is effecting how it behaves. If we put that next to the whole novelty rewards us idea, perhaps being inside the most novel center of the most novel ripple novelty ripple is fertile ground for timeline jumping, because it’s impossible to retreat into a default perspective aka lower vibrating timeline-land when we’re in the thick of such rich novelty. Due to its unexpected inclusion in the official Burning Man programming (it was the only shamelessly uncool, utterly mainstream party to make the list), Get Swifty was actually the most novel place to be the whole week. I hadn’t intended to use “Our Song” as a catapult into the timeline cluster of my actual wildest dreams, but if you run the math on the whole situation, you can see how it could accidentally occur to me, given the variables. 

Lucky for me and everyone else at the party, we didn’t have any super negatively polarized or chaotic-evil energies in our group, so our jump was high and clean. What I mean by that is we didn’t have anyone whose energy field created too much of a wobble on our metaphorical timeline-traversing trampoline, so we were all able to land in more expansive clusters littered with insane opportunities aligned with our truest expression of selves. Hot diggity!

Not only that, but optimal timeline clusters are usually characterized by far less logistical hassle and personal anguish. In my experience, getting there is one thing but staying there requires us to point our attention at being grateful for ease and lack of calamity as a practice. To get there requires making choices that bring us closer to our true selves, and doing so from the center of a massive novelty ripple like Burning Man is like pouring rocket fuel on your timeline jump.

I realize that I haven’t explained the novelty ripple yet, and am wondering if you, the reader, will have the patience for a non-linear, highly referential meta-modern love story that, I’ll warn you, is likely to be a bit rambly and unstructured. And love stories can be so hokey with their definitively happy or unhappy endings, their terribly point-A-to-point-B plots with the tiresome boy-meets-boy-meets-girl– meets-they-them set-up. I’m of the mindset that we can’t even get close to the truth of the human experience until we get to paradox, so for me, Schrödinger’s romance playing out across the countless timelines we move between intentionally or unintentionally, is far more interesting. 

Ok, The Ripple:

As Terrence explained in his last interview before transitioning out of that particular human form, 300 years ago when it took weeks or months to send a letter and most people lived in small communities, the number of so-called connection points any given human being had were quite few compared to today. Most everything we learn in life comes from other people, so this meant the rate of evolution was relatively slow-paced. But as technology has exponentially increased the number of connection points most humans experience, our species has been able to evolve more efficiently than ever before. A novelty ripple is found in a situation characterized by an influx of diverse connection points, and symptoms of being in the throws of such a ripple include wild coincidences, impossibly advantageous outcomes and a continually reinforced sense of right-time-right-placeness. In other words, an increase of luck.

    * * *

So back to Get Swifty - “Our Song” was what got me on the springboard aimed at an entirely new, never-before-reached zone of optimal timelines and inspired a conscious leap. It was standard issue vintage Taylor, neither a huge pop radio hit nor a deep-cut, but the chorus summed up the anticipatory FOMO everyone at the party was experiencing as the moments of glorious, real-time singalong reverie slipped through our fingertips. My girlfriend Gail and her otherwise reasonable, straight male Swifty fan friend whose name eludes me were screaming into her wireless, amplified mic. Our other best Swifty pal Amber’s attendance was uncertain as she was teaching a twerking class that overlapped with the meet-up. But the first time the chorus played and Taylor asked God if he (eyeroll) would play it again, Amber marched into frame with her wireless mic and every person there felt an electric jolt of joy, whether they knew why or not.

We fucking murdered that party, as we do every party. It’s probably some form of neglected child coping mechanism, but my friends and I are always first on the dance-floor, first in the pool - the life of any worthy party. The Swifty meet-up hostesses were in tears watching us all dance and sing together. “We didn’t know if anyone would show up,” one of them confessed. “We can’t believe it.” Towards the end, there was a group hug on the dancefloor that made me cry too.

As I was leaving, I knew I’d anchored into a super dense optimized timeline cluster when “Wildest Dreams,” the song playing when I’d walked in to, played for a second time. I felt the reassurance of knowing I was in sufficient alignment to command undeniably divine timing and could feel the energy of this new timeline boosting my energy field. The scorching sun didn’t feel so miserable anymore, and I wasn’t dreading the long bike ride back to my camp and decided to keep my antenna up for new connection point humans that might have the next piece of the puzzle. It’s not like I know what I’m doing here, I am completely making it up as I go along - both in this story and in life. As I left my favorite party of the week, Taylor sang, “Nothing lasts forever… but this is gettin’ good now!” 

Indeed.

* * *

As I pedaled into a dusty breeze, high on myself and my friends and the party and Taylor’s catalog, I saw a girl I knew from Miami, a dancer and aerialist at a club called Space, doing the limbo on the side of the road with a bunch of shirt-cockers (elderly Burner men who wear t-shirts and nothing else). She was dressed like Tinkerbell with kaleidoscope shades and was kicking everyone’s ass at limbo, “Kat!” I squealed, leaping off my bike to run over to tackle her.

“Dude, what the fuck is up? Come to this party with me right now.” 

I didn’t hesitate. “Let’s go, I’m ready.”

“Great, it’s at Elon’s camp.” I let out an audible snort.

“Elon Elon?”

“Yes, Ma’am. Friends of Miami friends.”

“Do you care if I get kicked out?”

“No, but can you not?”

“I don’t know, I feel like I’m bound to go off.”

“Well wait awhile, will you? We’d need time to distance ourselves so people won’t think I know you.”

“Totally fine.”

“Why though? Why do you want to get kicked out?”

2021 was a good year for me, I wrote a novel for an aging rock star who paid me incredibly well and bought my first new car ever, a Tesla Model 3. About a week into driving it I noticed two panels, one under the steering wheel and one in the back seat connecting to the trunk, were not properly connected to the rest of the car and thus flopping. If I wanted a car without floppy panels, the wait was many more months, and I’d already driven the car over 100 miles so I wasn’t eligible for a trade-in anyway. No discount, no apology, no explanation - even the T in the center of my steering wheel is off-center! Nothing devastating but inherently, shamelessly janky. 

“I’ve been saying for a year that if he keeps hanging out with hipsters he’s gonna run into me and hear about my floppy panels. Demand exceeds supply, I get it. But it was a big deal for me to be able to buy that car and I feel like I bought a piece of shit..”

“So not it’s not the ties to all the potential human rights violations or allegedly killing the high-speed rail in Cali, it’s the floppy panels you’re ready to speak truth to power for?”

“Doesn’t sound as great when you say it.”

“If you feel like that’s worth getting kicked out for, be my guest.”

“I literally am your guest, that’s why I wanted to check in with you about it.”

“Well thank you. Good check-in.”

“It’s probably going to be a bore anyway, don’t you think?” I asked, wondering if the shitty tone of my own voice was going to drop me out of this super ideal timeline.

“Maybe, I haven’t been yet,” she replied whilst handing me half a tab. Kat always has a good attitude, she sees the best in people and I think it’s really brave. It’s a quality I do my best to tamp down in myself because it can get me into trouble.

Speaking of trouble, my attitude needed an immediate adjustment before I created any problems for myself, so before getting on our bikes, I jumped up and down and reminded myself out loud, “The world has saved the best for me! For us!” It’s a solid mantra I feel like anchors in timelines with even more to be grateful for and reminds me that nothing cool is going to happen if I’m being neg. 

“Hell yeah!” And with that, we were off - barreling on electric bikes neither of us could really afford but bought anyway because life on an electric bike in the sprawling desert is a breeze with two e’s in the middle. Because I’d remembered about the world saving the best for me-thing, a cool and magically not-so-dusty breeze picked up and propelled us. It blew up the long, sheer, billowing sleeves of Kat’s sparkly green leotard and her little iridescent wings were so exaggerated by shadow she looked like an angel. I followed her gleefully to Billionaire’s Row, a block buried out at the edge of the city where shiny silver and white RVs as far as the eye could see were stacked behind elaborate fencing. It was meant to look decorative, but you could tell the utilitarian function of keeping people out was paramount.

* * *

In the least shocking shock ever, when we arrived, Elon wasn’t there. The camp was a trip though - shade structures so large and tight they looked like looming skyscrapers. I did not see a single zip tie visible anywhere, which is insane to consider because every temporary festival structure on Earth is held together with zip ties. You could tell who was staff and who were party guests by the sheer level of cleanliness - the staff’s clothing, even if stylish, was caked in dust. But the guests looked freshly showered and freshly made up - some had obviously brought a hair and make-up team with them. 

“I know you’re bent about the panels and I mean, I get it. But you’ll never become his homie or his ghost writer by talking shit to him,” Kat offered as we walked in. “And you’ll never be able to positively influence him if you can’t get access to him and what better access than someone telling you their life story? Even if it’s all bullshit, you’re in the room. Right now, you’re in the camp and you’re trying to get kicked out - I don’t get it. No getting in the room from there.”

Since giving up my own writing career and shifting exclusively to ghost-writing, I have been able to get in the room with some crazy influential people. Mostly I was just trying to get them to vote for Bernie Sanders, which was adorable in retrospect. “You’re assuming I want to influence him.”

“You are at least trying to influence him to have better quality control of his cars, no?” she asked. Once again, I had no idea what I was doing with this plan. I’m only ever just following my gut and showing up, hoping I know what to do in the moment. Could this floppy panel flex be a momentary ego satisfaction that ultimately brings me further away from myself? If so, to fall for it could mean getting knocked into some frustrating lower frequency timelines. By that logic an action that brings me further away from Elon brings me further away from myself in this scenario and that idea was good for a serious chuckle.

I turned to Kat in all seriousness, “Did we take acid?” 

“Yes, back at limbo we split a tab.”

“Makes sense.” Now I felt less awkward and more awake and honestly, that’s my biggest complaint about Burning Man - the elements are so harsh it really requires substance to tweak my physical settings to any sort of stasis. Having to manually manage my perspective like that means this party is getting between me and my happy-fun-time personal-questing chemicals, and I don’t like it one bit. 

“I’m not feeling it yet.” Kat’s eyes suddenly widened as her gaze shifted to something behind me. And then, suddenly there he was - the wealthiest man on Earth. A round of applause broke out as he arrived, fresh off a private jet I assume, with a backpack, wearing Crocs. Kat gave me an eye.

“For the record, I’d like it if you didn’t get kicked out. But if you’re going to, can you wait an hour?”

“Absolutely.” When Kat was dancing one night in Miami the week we met just before Covid, she told me she was going to come to California and meet everyone she needed to meet to figure out where her niche was to positively impact the world at scale. It wasn’t a life-goal I expected to hear from a go-go dancer, and I immediately felt ashamed for having had that totally absurd thought. All of us are going to have to start thinking and living this way as a survival trait if we want a liveable planet to exist on, and paradigm-changing ideas can come from anyone who really gives a shit.

To her credit, she’d done exactly that, as evidenced by how close I was standing to the richest guy in the world, and simultaneously the most beaten-down, barely operational pair of Crocs I’d ever seen. She’d found her way to the cult of deluded billionaires via a club owner she briefly dated and was figuring out how to funnel their money towards organizations actively un-fucking the planet. She joked about her fundraising work like it was a grift and not the most fundamentally responsible thing anyone with access to excess resources could be doing.

Kat is one of the most inspiring people I know, and she operates much the same as I do - on constantly accruing social credit earned by being first to dance, first to crack an off-color joke and first to be genuinely interested in others around us. And talented, yes, talent and general likability are the thresholds to even be in the game, but there’s an initiatory energy we both carry. I envy her perspective though because the world hasn’t told her no enough times yet for her to be discouraged. I wasn’t too many years older, but she wasn’t jaded like me, an idea I uncomfortably sat with that idea as the party coalesced around the delightfully fallible, potentially insane but undeniably brilliant Elon Musk. 

Scratching the surface of my jadedness (it’s mostly Bernie Sanders-related scar tissue), and I found a surprisingly deep well of hope around the fact that the richest man on the planet is partying with the same people I am, doing the same drugs and liking the same memes. To me, that’s a reason to be hopeful - it means power hasn’t consolidated with completely insulated sociopaths. He’s still accessible enough to be influenced, positively and negatively of course, but that’s got to be a far better position than being completely divorced from humanity.

When Elon talked shit to Bernie on Twitter, I immediately responded by having a custom decal commissioned of Bernie as Calvin from Calvin and Hobbes pissing on the Tesla logo. I could never bring myself to put it on, lest I end up in a timeline where someone pissed on my car or worse, but it was objectively hilarious. It occurred to me that he might find it hilarious. All these opportunities for genuine human connection and my ego was prattling on about the floppy panel betrayal. 

This is why I have to keep friends around that ask me to dig deeper and care more. As this thought came through, I grinned wildly at Kat, so proud to call her my friend. The acid-brain chimed in to let me know that, ‘caring less is a useful survival tactic when deployed intelligently. And we haven’t gotten anywhere near the truth of the human experience until we get to the level of paradox, so try caring more and less or both at the same time. Right on, brain,’ I thought to myself, ‘right on.’

That moment must’ve been a timeline shift, because suddenly the thick crowd began to inexplicably thin and Elon walked right over. “Hey!” Kat said warmly. “Thanks for having us.”

“My pleasure,” he smiled. Kat is extremely beautiful. I do alright, but she is super-model level, mid-90s Posh Spice-gorgeous. “Make yourselves at home, I’m about to do the same.” He seemed genuinely friendly and surprisingly not greasy. I didn’t feel like he wanted to get either of us pregnant, at least not right away.

And yes, while it was true that my brand new, not-at-all-cheap car, appeared to be cheaply made, and that was understandably frustrating, it was equally true is that it drives like a dream machine and every time I’m singing some anthemic pop song on autopilot I feel like a god. I’ve sung Elon’s name and thanked in some of those moments when I can look out the window a little bit longer at something beautiful while mobbing up and down California. If I point my perspective away from the floppy panels and towards these equally valid truths, suddenly I’m a god again instead of a sucker.

Then suddenly I knew just what to say,“I’ve just got one question for you.” Kat winced in preparation for what might come next, meanwhile I was smiling like a madman, “Have you seen the new season of Rick and Morty by chance?” It wasn’t due out for a few weeks and I know he’s a superfan too. 

He immediately dropped his backpack and took a deep breath. “I’ve seen it, most of the episodes more than once and it’s…” he paused, really taking a beat to think about what he was about to say. Rick and Morty has had the effect of uniting the most maniacal creative minds on the planet and making the whole concept of timeline-jumping mainstream, so I am forever personally indebted to its scathing, heartfelt genius. In that moment I could feel he cared as much as I do, and it gave me a rush of hope for the world I hadn’t felt in many years. “Your heart is going to be so full when you see it, truly the best it’s ever been. ‘Real season two vibes,’ as they say.” 

I thanked him profusely and with that he was gone. And instead of being high on the quick-burning ego-trip of having said something negative to be self-righteous, and thus shifting to a timeline that reflects a shitty, friction-generating attitude, I found myself high on a slam dunk of elevated self-awareness and action. If the world has saved the best for me, what have I got to give back? It better be the best! And bridging the gap between knowing something intellectually and putting it into practice is so awkward, but I could tell by the tremendously uplifting exchange that just occurred I was reaching the far side of that gap. And my newfound timeline positioning reflected the upgrade.

* * *

Kat and I hopped on our bikes after the sun finally went down and sailed off into a sea of neon lights. Riding deeper and deeper into the (re-cringe) playa, we finally started chasing this rainbow giant slug of an art car. Faster and faster we’d pedal to keep up with the deeper sand and the blaring house, 100 others on bikes around us in a mob, riding below a drone show of a swirling geometric pattern morphing into a giant blue human face. I laughed out loud at the sheer awesomeness of the scene, and I was still beaming from awe of the human race and hope that the guy with all the money might be kind of at least a little bit on our side.

Suddenly, two familiar faces and bikes appeared in the crowd - Gail and Amber! “Hey!” I screamed into the bass-riddled wind. Now this is what I love the most about Burning Man - riding around this epic novelty ripple, we always end up stumbling into what our hearts are most aligned with. They could not hear me shouting at them, so I pedaled faster to get ahead. That was a more challenging task than I’d imagined with so many people riding so close together and I found myself wishing the slug would stop. I wasn’t trying to make it stop, but it’s even easier to shift timelines efficiently from optimized timeline clusters because they’re characterized by such a lack of friction. So when the slug ran out of gas not 30 seconds later and ground to a dark halt, I got a sharp reminder to be careful how I’m using a power that’s clearly a form of real magic.

“What the fuck is up?!” I exclaimed when I finally caught up to them. 

A resounding, “Yes!” came from both of them as we threw our arms around each other. I introduced them to Kat as we stood in dark silence in front of the momentarily dead slug, realizing I needed to get this party turned back on. Then suddenly there was pressure, a deliverable, and had to remind myself not to take it so seriously, which is horrible for jump momentum. 

Gail and Amber knew me from back in my early raving days a decade ago in LA and had watched me morph from poser attorney to full-time weirdo writer and professional party monster. Gail was a girl scout who never broke the rules but always had the best ideas and no sense of shame so she was virtually fearless in every moment. Amber was a certified baddie who broke every rule as a matter of course, it made her fearless in a different way, and I felt strong being around them and Kat.

I have a lot of empathy for people who spend all their time and money trying to be something we’re not because it seems like the right thing to do, and it’s not lost on me that all four of us are past that phase in our lives. A lifetime of societal, institutional and familial conditioning goes into making us hellbent on living this way, so it’s a lot to undo. At least my loosening of that Gordian knot got me a law license, which excites and frightens people in conversation in a way that seems to be generally advantageous. And it stopped me from going to creative writing graduate school, which might’ve turned me into a pretentious, over-cooked, over-stuffed turkey of a writer. Instead I became a precisely-worded woman with years of inspiration accrued while rebelling against being a lawyer.

“We gotta get the music turned back on,” said Gail. “How do we jump to that timeline together?” I grabbed her and held her tight instinctively - no one is interested in my inter-dimensional psycho-babble the way she is. The idea of an intentional group jump was interesting to me, it could be super -charged and mad efficient if everyone participating has a stabilized energy field, but potentially messy if there’s messy energy within the group. We did not have that problem here. 

“Let’s do something random all of us together to initiate the jump while feeling the feeling of the lights and music turning back on. Imagine ourselves dancing?”

“Easy, what should be our random act? And should we do our own random thing or synchronize?” Gail asking the right questions - I really love my friends.

“Synchronized, definitely, to set the tone for a synchronized jump,” I pondered. Amber was better about humoring this endeavor than Kat, but I noted and appreciated her making a concerted effort in the moment to not be a neg. Even a little bit of negativity might be enough to create a wobble in the jump and end up dealing with some amount of unintended variable generation. 

“Maybe we charge the slug, storm the castle, climb up the side of the rig and awaken him,” Amber suggested, always eager to break even soft rules of basic decency. She was raised extremely Catholic, and we all know how that ripples back when kids grow up enough to figure out the control drama and being a baddie heals the trauma of having to hide your true self to be a slave to the rules. 

“How about a game of four-way patty-cake?” I suggested. “Let’s get a groove going and sing “Oh Say Can You Slug” over it? To the tune of “Oh Say Can You See,” obviously.” 

“Obviously. And then we embody the feeling of joy for the dance party we’ll get to have together when it’s back on as we patty-cake, right? Anchor in the new timeline?” Gail clarified. It really hadn’t occurred to me until that moment how much she’d absorbed from me prattling on about this shit over the last few years, and it gave me a warm, gooey feeling of absurd, LSD-amplified gratitude. 

“Right!” so we stood in a circle and began, thirty-year-old muscle memory kicking in to propel the patty-cake momentum. “Oh say can you slug! By the dawn’s early light, what so proudly we slug, by the sluggy’s last gleaming.” Everyone but Gail had burst out laughing by then, but that was all we needed. Suddenly, someone cried out from the dark:

“Hey, do you guys need to borrow a generator?!”

“Ayyy!” we howled in response, a wave of cheering rippling through the crowd. In less than three minutes the slug roared back to life, its rainbow panels flickering as the optimal timeline-sourced generator turned over. And the crowd went wild. 

“You’re welcome!” Gail shouted over the blaring music. “We did that shit!”

“Do you think our jump bounced everyone or folks experiencing some kind of personal friction are still back at the dead slug in the timeline we just left?” I attempted to ask. Gail didn’t hear a word I said, which was fine. For the first time ever, in this life at least, I finally felt like I wasn’t the only person I knew who cared about hacking reality. It can get weird and lonely doing this shit by myself.

As we frolicked in the slug’s light, laughing and hugging and basking in what we’d just done, I noticed even Kat’s skeptical ass had bought in. She might say something lame later like it was such a coincidence, rather than a divine synchronicity indicating that our jump had been successful, but in the immediate afterglow of the moment I could tell she was fully onboard with the magic.

* * *

I know what you must be thinking by now, besides ‘WTF am I reading?’ which is, ‘Molly, how did you become such an accomplished no-age weirdo ripper?’

The answer is simple, I got jaded in my 20s about the world being a giant soul-grinding grift, and retreated into monetized hedonism in a way only a natural timeline jumper could. The more I divorced myself from what I should be doing, and instead stayed out every night dancing while slowly failing at the associate’s job I’d killed for, the more I chose myself. Then I started writing about electronic music for fun, my favorite old hobby which I’d long since put down to pursue more “practical” matters, married with my new favorite hobby, raving. That choice had the inadvertent effect of showing the right people I know how to tell a story in my own absurd and heartfelt way.

Sometimes these moments of choosing myself were challenging to pull off since they typically defied all reason and basic decorum, but they always landed somewhere better than I started. In 2013 I launched my own electronic music tabloid journalism career (full-body retro-cringe) by interviewing a few women who’d had threesomes with Diplo to see how it was. Reviews were mixed, but I cornered him at a festival to ask him how easy it is to arrange such an encounter with him. He gave me a very honest and hilarious interview, which I knew I could use as bait to get into Vice. It worked, they hired me, and we immediately published ‘Five Pro-Tips For Having A Successful Threesome With Diplo.’

I didn’t know it all the way back then of course, but that one ridiculous move was a huge jump away from what I didn’t want towards a life beyond my own wildest waking dreams. It’s the life I now lead, and I do acknowledge it and celebrate that everyday. At some point I imagine I’ll be content where I’m at and stop timeline chasing, but I’m not exactly sure what that threshold looks like. 

Except... that’s a total line of shit. I do know what it looks like, it’s just embarrassing AF to admit. 

* * *

As I was leaving the Burn, it was further reinforced that I’d arrived in a super optimized timeline cluster and made it to a gas station right outside of Reno just as my tires shredded and my truck completely ran out of motor oil. Everyone has these horror stories going in and out of Burning Man, but I pay special attention to the people who are spared dire consequences - those are the folks who are anchored in optimal timelines. The timing of my arrival at Love’s Service Station as my rig fell apart was impeccable, saving me a tremendous amount of hassle and personal risk. Something else happened there as I noticed myself effortlessly resisting the normally irresistible pull to buy a pack of cigarettes, or worse, pick up a half-smoked one off the ground - I got a call. 

It was a butt-dial from someone I’d loved long ago, who I didn’t even know was still alive. And as I spoke into his butt, “Hello? Michael?,” unbeknownst to both of us, our eternally entangled energy fields were doing a victory dance. The celebration seemed premature, but I’d lived how many lives to learn how to consciously navigate the multiverse so I could get so much as a butt dial from this guy?

The escalating Mandela effect makes it increasingly apparent that we are moving further and further away from the timeline cluster we were born into. I mean, Febreze?! It was Febreeze, it was Febreeze when the Skrillex and Diplo song came out in 2015 - I can remember dumping out a bottle and filling it with water so I could spritz and delight people at their party, I remember what the song title looked like in my Spotify and it was not “Febreze.” I left Michael behind so many timelines ago, but as I’ve become more conscious of the patterns in my life, I can see how he only shows up during massively positive timeline shifts. He seems to serve as a marker of my arrival in a more fruitful and personally advantageous timeline. But then…

The trouble begins… I can remember us being at a fancy house party together that I’d invited him to, also in 2015, and him getting so drunk at the open bar I had to drag his unconscious body down a hill to our Uber so security wouldn’t see him. He remembers us missing our flight home from a weekend partying in Miami. I’d become feral and paranoid after three days without sleep, trashed a hotel room and failed to leave in a timely manner. The police were called, and he had to middle-man it. Those are just the substance-induced incidents. I also accidentally flooded his apartment by taking a phone call that got really juicy after turning on the bathtub, then he ran my car into my living room during an argument and I had to move. 

Seeing his name pop up on my phone at the Love’s Service Station while kicking the swollen, shredded tires that were about to pop, I felt a supernova of “oh fuck - here we go” swell up inside me. My heart felt like those fucking tires, lame as it might sound. When I say I didn’t know if he was alive or not, it’s because when he disappeared from me, he disappeared from everyone - from LA, from music, from our group of friends, from socials. I always thought it was a little meta how he ghosted right as I started my first ghost-writing gig. Doesn’t that kind of shit make you feel like the multiverse/simulation/whatever you want to call it is in on some kind of cosmic joke with you? 

I can’t shake the feeling that consciousness is having an awful lot of fun playing us, this human game of duality, even though it’s pretty fucked up. I’m having fun anyway. 

* * *

“Let’s not say something we’re going to regret,” is what I said as I got out of his car for the last time in 2015, of course only after saying countless things I immediately regretted. It was at the end of a long summer of the most fun ever mixed with total disaster, and it was the third time we’d tried being together in six years. Our friends usually saw it coming before we did, apparently Amber and Gail had a side bet going for at least four of those years, which Amber eventually won when I got out of the car that day for what really seemed like once and for all.

I’d just gotten my first ghost writing gig in Vegas for an old lady comedian out there, literally the plot of the show Hacks five years before it was made, and was stoked to get out there and get myself over the fucking guy. I was staying at Caesars indefinitely and some of our old friends had a weekly DJ residency at their club, which felt like partying in a luxury spaceship. Hanna and Mira, two heavily tatted Iranian DJ sisters from LA, were mostly living in the hotel too so it was an absolute marathon of comped dinners, drinkies by the pool and party drugs. The only saving grace was the two of the were health nuts as well as degens, and dragged me to the gym most days or pumped me full of smoothies and vitamins via IV drip administered by the hotel nursing staff. 

A week into my stay there, I got pink eye, which sounds gross and is, but is equally significant as a timeline shift marker. Forgot to mention earlier that whenever Michael shows up one of my eyes shuts down, and I’ve come to assume it marks an upgrade in my perception that precipitates, even just by a moment, a quantum timeline leap. Luckily I never leave home without a bedazzled eyepatch, which is endearing while eliminating the ick factor, so I was prepared. Well, prepared for a possible infection, not prepared to run into him - which I should have been given the circumstances.

And like clockwork, as I stumbled out of the theater where my boss PSEUDONYM had just performed to a half full, entirely wasted audience across the hall to the sold out nightclub with a line around the casino, there was Michael. While I was trying to drown out the haggard, lackluster performance I was having to endure night that night I’d seen on Facebook that he was now “In A Relationship” (2015 must have been the tail end of people doing that shit). So apparently he’d been seeing someone while we’d been together over summer and I’d just put it together. 

“Jesus fucking Christ,” he winced upon seeing me, “I hope no one ever looks at you the way you’re looking at me right now.”

“How can I be looking at you so terribly with one eye?”

“I’m glad it’s not two! You could kill someone.”

“Why are you here?” 

“I’m out here DJing, got a set downtown tomorrow night.”

I could barely feign a response, why in the fuck had Hanna and Mira not warned me?! “Decided to come a night early so I hit management yesterday, they listed me for tonight,” he revealed. That was a relief, at least I hadn’t been sold out by my only friends in town. I relaxed, but it didn’t last, so I asked for his vape. The rest of the night, sitting behind the DJ booth inside a spaceship pounding fancy champagne, we vaped without speaking. I made him sit on my patch side so I couldn’t see him, he was just a hand handing me a little nicotine robot dick. 

All of this happened before I learned about conscious timeline jumping or made the connection between Michael and my eye, so at this point I was unconsciously shifting all the time based on my state of being. The choice to be chill and show compassion in that moment despite my hurt feelings, to forego making a scene - it prompted an immediate shift. As Hanna got on the mic to announce the last song of the night, Mira grabbed me and shouted, “Hold my hand!” Because she was also on my patch side, her hand too was just a detached form from my perspective.

A cloud of smoke went off around us and I held onto the girls as the little platform they stood on behind the DJ decks began to lower beneath the stage. The last thing I saw before the hatch above us to the stage closed was Michael’s uniquely confused face as I literally disappeared into a puff of smoke before his eyes. It’s a good thing I didn’t get the chance to say goodbye, it would’ve been infinitely less cool, and if I’m going to be brokenhearted then it better be with style.

Shifts vs. Jumps

The difference between timeline shifts and jumps is simply awareness. 

Shifts are occurring naturally all the time based on what’s happening in our individual energy field, but once we learn to jump we can efficiently arrive at and stay in optimal timeline octaves.

For instance, in this most recent example I was unconsciously shifting, which was fine and brought me to a timeline where I had a great month working in Vegas and didn’t get fired til the week Hanna and Mira’s residency ended. It wasn’t exactly a soft landing, but at least I didn’t stay at the party too long. Seven years later at the Swifty Burner meet-up, I realized mid-situation it was ripe for a jump. It felt like we were all bouncing each other on the cosmic trampoline anyway, so I just jumped with purpose. As the energy peaked from the joy-wave Amber brought when she made it just in time for “Our Song,” I broke into a dance routine I’d memorized in fifth grade while singing G.W.A.R. lyrics backwards to myself - “Thrills your get you how comprehend can’t I.” Doing something novel is the springboard for an intentional jump, and the more unexpected, the more momentum is created.

  * * * 

Before I got fired by INSERT PSEUDONYM, she gave me a piece of advice I’ve never stopped thinking about even though I can’t bring myself to take it. And the one time I did take it I got fired! By her! “Care less,” she said, “About everything, except yourself. You care way too much about everything and there’s no energy left over to care about you.” 

We were sitting on her penthouse balcony smoking, looking out at the oddly peaceful sea of Vegas lights. The evenings there were just starting to get chilly and I’d let her wear my fur hat, so once she made that comment I immediately asked for it back. We laughed and laughed as she impolitely refused and my life seemed like it was finally on track. And it was, but not how I thought of course. Just a week later I’d be fired for having sex with her manager in her dressing room. Obviously I didn’t expect her to have cameras in there and definitely did not expect him to be so hot in person (50 is not that old anymore when you’re 30 it turns out). Obviously I didn’t know the two of them had a previous sexual relationship or I’d have never let it happen.

She wouldn’t look at me as I walked out and I can’t even remember the last thing I said because I was in a fugue state of humiliation. I think I mumbled something about what an honor it was to work with her and how truly sorry I was but it probably came out garbled. 

And this was the end of both my short-lived career of not caring and my time with THAT LADY.

 * * * 

I was holding my breath amidst the unfettered chaos of RVs and cars in the Love’s parking lot, standing in the electric golden hot pink sunset, hoping desperately to hear him say something. “It’s a marker,” I told myself when I finally hung up. This is the 6D yard line…mahfuckas. More on higher dimensional living later, you know everything you need to know right now.

There’s a confession coming I’ve been holding back for nearly 8000 words I must now make, which is that I’m debating whether or not it’s a good idea to go looking for a B.P.O. (best possible outcome) timeline where Michael and I end up together. Why would I want to do something like this for someone who wreaks such havoc in my life and vice versa? This is a time where the art of caring less could be incredibly useful, but then again I was just thinking about this and here I am getting a butt-call from him in a sweet new timeline. Because when we’re not wreaking havoc, we’re laughing our asses off, enjoying the most trascendental, insanely hot sex of my life, and having shared dreams. Not like, in life - we never got that far, but sometimes we’d meet up in our dreams at night. 

I’ll give you an example of the last time it happened, which by my interpretation was a preview of how I’ll know I’m in our shared B.P.O. timeline. We both had a dream where I was lost in the woods and he was looking and looking and looking for me. Finally I came up behind him and put my hands over his eyes and told him to guess who. He can’t begin to guess and when I uncover his eyes, we’re transported to a party in a grand hall. We hug and laugh and cry a little when he turns around. That party, I believe, is the moment in time I’m looking for.

When we woke up at the exact same time and shot up in bed I started frantically making notes, which are barely legible, but say something to the effect of: “Running faster faster through a foggy forest, barefoot, can’t tell what I’m getting away from. Then someone else is here, Michael! I run up behind him to cover his eyes. He said he’d been wandering, calling my name for hours, and that he’d just stopped to catch his breath a few moments before I came up behind him. I uncover his eyes and suddenly we’re at a grand party dressed to kill and when he turns around it’s like someone flipped a breaker and there’s no surge protector. And I’m acutely aware that we’re in our 40s in this dream/fantasy/premonition, so I feel more responsible being entangled with his energy again.

I am also acutely aware that pursuing Michael across the multiverse could be total foolishness and not an act of following my intuition at all, which would make it a decision that’s actually taking me away from myself that could risk putting me in some unfortunate timelines.

How To Stay In High Frequency Timelines

Practicing gratitude, finding ways to spend more time in gamma brainwave state, and holding neutral in a loving way are the best methods I’ve found of achieving the necessary energy to stay anchored in a high frequency timeline cluster. When we can create the space for intentional response instead of automatic response I call that the 6th dimension. The 5th dimension to me is becoming aware of and living as if reality behaves like a toroidal donut broadcasting from our perspective and we learn how to adjust our perspective and thus what’s happening in real time to optimize experience. 

Spoiler: it’s usually to be more loving, whatever that means in the moment - the theme of Everything Everywhere. A few months before it came out I put post-its of donut drawings around my home to remind myself that I’m creating reality with my attitude. You can imagine my surprise when the donut / bagel symbol revealed itself to be a quintessential element of the film.

In the 4th dimension, which I believe we got access to at the end of 2012, we became aware of each other’s emotional states in a radical new way. We gained a level of discernment that wasn’t there before, we started asking more questions and sensing when people were lying, even to themselves. As you can see we’ve been gaining access to higher and higher frequency timelines because we’re evolving at a sufficient rapid rate. When social media came to the smartphone, people started consuming exponentially more information. Of course there would be a tipping point of rapid evolution because of this, and conveniently or divinely, at a crucial moment in human history. 

So say thank you all the time, that’s the best place to start. Everything follows from there.

 * * * 

I was starting to get honked at as I hung up, wondering if this butt dial was my call to adventure or the opportunity to say no to a wildly unhealthy exercise in obsessive projection? It was unlikely anything would make sense until I’d had a shower, lest of all calling AAA to replace four tires at a tiny gas station crawling with 50 foot rigs and unwieldy art cars frantically dry-humping each other to get to the pump. I was overstimulated enough as it was, and in that glorious moment, simply had no bandwidth to ruminate over whether Michael’s re-emergence was an invitation or a test. My total presence in the moment was divine, even if it was a product of lacking the mental capacity to process anything else besides what was happening in front of me.

I watched Burners emerge from the shower stalls, some were crying, others joyously hugging one another. My hair had matted into a gnarled, dusty tail and there was a thin sheen of Wet-Wipe residue all over every inch of my body. So I bought a shower ticket even though there was an hour-long wait, ordered some chicken tendies, and posted up to watch the show and wait my turn. One hour easily slipped into two as crusty bodies languished in the religious fervor of a hot shower, and moments before my number was due to be called, I looked up and my eyes met THAT LADY.

Almost exactly seven years after we’d worked together, here was a very easy test with a very easy right answer I did not want to give. But I’d always hoped there would be something I could do to make amends to her, and as she walked in holding a just-purchased shower ticket, looking for a place to sit amidst the wildly overcrowded Love’s dining room, I waved her over.

Her face was first stern but immediately melted into joyous cunning. She saw me with my towel and toiletry bag, she knew I had the golden ticket and was going to give it to her. Slowly but assuredly, she plopped her bag down and sat down in the chair across from me. “Well, well, well.”

“Hi!” I exclaimed, unable to contain my smile. This was a gift, a karmic door opened by the multiverse I had to walk through if I wanted to stay up.  Even though our time together was short and frustrating, I was surprised by how much she made me laugh and how seen I felt by her. She was an ally I alienated because I didn’t have the emotional maturity to process my sadness in a healthy way. I could have at least taken the guy back to one of our hotel rooms and likely avoided the entire scenario! But no, I was being destructive doing what I did the way I did it, even if it was the art of unconscious sabotage. Extending the interminable wait to get clean was a small price to pay.

She sat silently staring at me, also eating a 10 pack of tendies. Without breaking eye contact, I slid my shower ticket across the table. “I’ve always felt terrible about what I did and hoped there would be a way to begin to make it up to you. And here we are, this is my chance. It’s a two-hour wait.”

“I know,” she replied coldly.

“So trade me, and you’ll be up next.”

“And this is your way of saying sorry for completely disrespecting and humiliating you?” 

“Yes it is.”

“Pretty weak.”

“Eh, I don’t think you’ll be saying that when you get out. No, I think you’ll start forgiving me right as you step in and by the time you’re done toweling off, you’ll realize I was acting out cause I was heartbroken and desperate for attention and it had nothing to do with you. Even though it did because of the venue I selected, which was wrong.”

“It was wrong?! It was a fuck you, Molly. It gives active disrespect, it gives I don’t care about this job, it gives I don’t honor a twenty-year, very fucking personal relationship that long pre-dates you.”

“I swear to you I had no idea, I’d have never gone near him in a million years…”

“I let you in, for no reason other than you were funny and he said I could trust you.” She was tearing up a bit, and I could feel how deeply I’d hurt her. She wanted so badly to be able to trust anyone, and in one very stupid act, we’d burnt her trust in two key team members. 

“Look, I know I don’t deserve your forgiveness and in all seriousness, I don’t need it. I’ve been hoping for a chance to begin to make it up to you, and that’s what this is. So please.” Like clockwork they called my number right that second, and her face lit up. She slapped her ticket on the table just before gleefully sauntering off. 

“I don’t forgive you, but I will borrow your body wash,” she said, gesturing towards my stuff. 

“Fine,” I replied flatly, handing it to her.

“For the record, I had no idea what you were going through so of course I thought it was about me. I fired him over that and frankly, my career never recovered.” 

A pang of that penetratingly mortifying humiliation I’d brought upon her now welled up in me, knowing what she said was true. The last time I’d seen her on TV it was for an Ex-Lax commercial in 2018. I spent about 35 days total in this woman’s life and managed to take a wrecking ball to her whole world, and that moment was the first time I’d really felt the gravity of it. As she walked away, I took a deep breath and asked myself how I was going to keep from falling into total despair and thus out of this timeline. “The world has saved the best for me,” I whispered to myself. “Thank you for my blessings, thank you for my healing, I’m sorry, please forgive me, I love you, thank you.” 

I must have said it to myself 400 times before she emerged from the shower looking like she’d just had the best dick of her life. And much to my total shock and surprise, she walked right over to my table. “You were right!” she exclaimed joyfully, sitting back down. “I forgave you twice.” 

“You did?!”

“Once for fucking Ian and once for fucking my career.”

“God, I really am sorry.”

“The more you say it the more I’m enjoying it,” she retorted. 

“I was heartbroken and threw myself at the first person who showed me any attention and fucked up your life in the process, so it means a lot to me that you’re sitting here with me.” 

She smiled, “Got time for a cigarette?” 

“Of course!”

“Oh yeah, you’ve got like, hours. You’re buying.” So I did, a pack of the yellow American Spirits, despite my desire to resist. We smoked out back in the dark and laughed til it was my turn to shower. There we were, both coming out of Burning Man alone, equalized by the dust. We were both still raw from some shit that happened seven years earlier we never got any closure on, and uniquely qualified to console each other. More than that, by the momentum I’d observed in this timeline, uniquely qualified to help heal one another I’d say.

And as I sat there with her smoking my sixth cigarette cackling about something, I could feel the power of her forgiveness. Her energy field was calm, clear and classy - she was unfuckwithable. Everything we learn from other people, from “connection points” as Terrence McKenna calls them, and I felt like I was plugged into the mainframe of connection points basking in her forgiveness of me. Especially over cigs behind a gas station amidst total Burning Man pandemonium! The whole interaction registered to me as a test I’d aced with flying colors, and it contrasted with the butt-dial that really felt much more like a call to action by comparison.