The end was at hand. It came, and then it went. And now it has gone.

You’re leaning against the rails of the first-class deck, eyes burning from sleeplessness, tuxedo coat pulled tight against the predawn chill. You smooth your rumpled hair and brush away the last traces of confetti from the evening before.

You knew this moment would come. And though there were times you dreaded it and times you positively longed for it, you both knew from the start that you were playing with borrowed time.

Below you hear the chugging of the tugboat as it maneuvers the liner into the harbor, and you know that when the gangway comes down and you cross over to shore, you’ll be stepping out of her life forever.

This was how it felt watching the four-and-a-half-hour Lost Series Finale Event, like the bittersweet end of a shipboard romance that had lasted a breath too long.

You remember when you met that first night in the piano bar on the Lido deck six long years ago, you were so arch, so insolent.

“So you’re a new sci-fi series?” You said, peering over the rim of your highball. “Cool.

“Ah, a plane crashes on a tropical isle….” You swirled the ice cubes in the bottom of your glass, contemplatively. Then you pounced, “So the passengers are all dead, and the island is Hell?”

Her no brought you up short, but you didn’t show it. As the evening advanced and the bar tab mounted you ventured to discover her secret again and again—Hollow earth? A prehistoric jungle enclave improbably preserved in the Antarctic? Ultima Thule? Outpost of the Elder Gods? But she brushed aside your advances, one by one.

This looked like the beginning of a beautiful friendship.

You’d been around the block, and knew what it was to love a television program. Hard experience had taught you the folly of giving yourself too completely to their caprices. In college there had been Twin Peaks, whose initial quirks, offered up in Manic Panic tints and black fishnets, quickly blossomed into full-blown personality disorders; then came the slow motion accident of The X-Files, who ground your love to dust in unpredictable fits of grandiosity and paranoia.

So when Lost walked into your life, it was first names only and no questions asked. You’d signed an unspoken contract in which you agreed to make no demands and she would tell you sweet lies.

And how she delivered.

To outside eyes, it was a perfect union.

“Man, I haven’t seen a customer so happy in years,” said Isaac the bartender, setting a frothy blue drink in front of you one afternoon. “You two are made for each other: You’re a time-travel writer and she’s all about time travel.”

But Isaac the bartender was wrong. Lost was never about time travel. Not really. You knew it, and she knew you knew it. That was the secret to your happiness. The pleasure was to enjoy her artifice and not push too much. After all, what could a primetime episodic drama tell you about time travel? Or the Torah or the Eightfold Path, for that matter; or C.S. Lewis or reader-response theory or any of the other allusions Lost would toss behind her as you played your game of paper chase on the Fiesta deck.

The only mystery Lost was ever about was the mystery of storytelling itself. She was a long con, a meandering cock and bull story that stretched the rules of narrative as you knew them while stopping just short of snapping the web she wove.

Lost may have thematized time travel, but in truth she was a mighty destroyer of time. Your relationship was a type of momento mori, a reminder that the essential activity of life is merely filling up time until it runs out. That might not have been much, but it was better than hip-hop cardio and shuffleboard and the other tawdry pastimes of the S.S. Network TV.

It was enough, almost, to make you forget that Lost was merely a mouthpiece for a team of writers, closeted in a basement somewhere and transcribing koans incanted by Carlton Cuse’s black long-sleeve polo; to forgot that she was a product, a series of transactions among corporations, advertisers, marketers, executives, actors, agents, consumers, fans; and to forget that in the welter of vying priorities someone was going to come up the loser.

Those were not the exact thoughts you had as you dressed for the final Black-Tie Gala Event at the captain’s table. But clearly you had apprehensions, or it wouldn’t have taken three tries to get your bow tie right. Truth to tell, your affection for Lost had cooled. You hated long good-byes, and, frankly, the ice sculptures and the goose livers and the confetti cannons and the laser light show and the twitter channel all struck you as somewhat overwrought.

You arrived late and lingered in the lounge, nursing cocktails and munching canapes and trying not to pay attention as she flirted with scrofulous fanboys and a tableful of Mormons who were returning from a mission in Burkina Faso. A little mystery, you’d found, greatly enhanced the quality of your relationship. From across the seafood buffet you winced at her book club observations and the way she would suddenly namedrop Joseph Campbell and then pause meaningfully, gazing at nothing in particular.

And you started to question what you’d seen in Lost in the first place. Her obvious drama queen moves; the braying way she’d laugh at her own jokes; her inexplicable love for L.A.—this really was never your scene.

And you spend an hour in self-questioning and reproach, until you become aware that Lost is conjuring a hospital scene in which Juliet is performing an ultra sound on Sun—beautiful, pregnant, tearful, gunshot-wounded Sun—whose life on the Island comes rushing back to her in a jumble of micro-flashbacks. And then steely Jin leans over and touches his wife, and the floodgates open for him too—the separations, the reunions, the explosions, the baby, the near-deaths, and the real one.

Then at once you remember everything that made you love Lost, and under the spell of the hype, and the ridiculous fan tweets, and the champagne cocktails, and the trailing streams of confetti, and your irrepressible hunger for narrative—pure, exuberant, scripted narrative—you begin to forget your rules and your unspoken contract. You think that, maybe, somewhere beneath the citations and allusions and name-dropping and red herrings and dead ends and self-reflexivity there might be some substance…

Then Lost waves her nervous, pale hands, and you see Sawyer and Juliet meeting for the first time since she died in his arms 17 episodes ago. And Lost repeats that scene where Sawyer catches Juliet as she’s being pulled by the electromagnetic field into shaft with the atomic bomb in it, and Sawyer’s grasping Juliet by one hand and and he’s telling her not to let go, but he knows she’s going to, and she does, and for a moment you forget that for three years you’ve been certain that Desmond and Penny were the heart of the show, and you think you might be crying, but you don’t really want to know.

And with just 17 minutes left in your six-year romance, your cynicism finally leaves and something whose name you’ve forgotten stirs deep within you and your throat feels dry and your voice sounds strange in your ears as your whisper, “Could this really work out?”

Then Lost cuts to commercial, and when she returns she has one of the Mormons from Burkina Faso on her arm and she won’t meet your gaze. And for 12 agonizing minutes she systematically dismantles something you now realize you’ve been building together for six years. It’s a purgatory plot, just like she repeatedly assured you that it would never be. And faith unambiguously wins out over reason—and not a rich and nuanced faith, not Thomas Merton, but a simple your-dead-father-arrives-to-say-he-loves-you and now-it’s-time-to-step-into-the-beatific-golden-light kind of faith. And everyone’s making the sign of peace and waving at the camera and you kind of feel like you’re among the Raëlians getting ready for the mothership by drinking poison, and the thought makes you put down your own drink, and now you can’t even take a drink to deaden the pain because now even that’s been ruined.

And dumbstruck, searching the blogs and the twitter feeds for support or explanation—some kind of succor—you let the TV play through Jimmy Kimmel Live, and now you’ve got that in your brain, too.

So you take to the deck, to be alone with your sorrows. Nearby a drunken fanboy is crying and muttering through his tears about how it all makes sense if you connect Lost to Kafka’s Amerika, Haley Joel Osment, and “The Sorcerer’s Apprentice,” and you let him babble.

You light a cigarette and stare out at the ocean. On the horizon, you can just make out the thin industrial shadow of the shoreline, spreading ever wider, slowly sundering the slate sea from the gun metal sky.

There’s a whole world out there. Already your puzzlement over the missing Walt and the Dharma Initiative and Island-based infertility and C. J. Cregg’s terrible, terrible Latin accent is being displaced by anxiety over oil spills and double-dip recessions and Kelly Bensimon’s public meltdown.

Scripted TV is languishing. Publishing is dying, and journalism might already be dead. Where Lost has gone, you can’t follow. But it doesn’t take much to see that your feelings of loss and anger and betrayal don’t amount to a hill of beans in this crazy world.

You take one long, last drag and muse, “We lost so many threads last night; but we’ll always have season three.”

www.youtube.com/watch?v=LOcDwYQPp0Y

In the 1970s, the San Francisco Bay Area was ground zero for hot tub culture and the new tribe of people who would rally to it. It was the era when the counterculture went mainstream. Squares were turning on and hippies were selling out, and, along the coastal stretches of southern Marin County, just over the Golden Gate Bridge, a strange hybrid was observed in growing numbers. These Aquarian Age professionals brought to grey-flannel-suit careerism an alloy of Haight-Ashbury hip and New Age cant that they believed would redeem them from the Philistinism of their unenlightened peers who were only in it for the bread or the power trip, man, and who didn’t know where it really was at. They could be recognized by their high levels of education and wealth, their fearsome appetite for acquiring lifestyle status objects like Volvos, Cuisinarts, Halston, and wines with appellations more elaborate than simply “white” and “table,” and also by their overweening self-obsession, which found expression variously in psychotherapy, Transcendental Meditation, EST, jogging, casual sex, drug abuse, consciousness raising, bumper-sticker political activism, and obsessing over organic food.

In retrospect, this was clearly an early strain of yuppie. But the soft and over domesticated yuppie we know today pales before its feral ancestor. Just check out this clip from a 1978 NBC special news report I Want It All Now:

www.youtube.com/watch?v=aW7Wj-xbinE

The definitive account of this period is Cyra McFadden’s The Serial: A Year in the Life of Marin. Published in 1977, the novel is a collection of 52 chapters that had run in weekly installments for the Pacific Sun—the same Marin-based paper, incidentally, that first published Armistead Maupin’s Tales from the City. Long out of print, McFadden’s book is not easy to come by, but the 1980 movie adaptation, staring Martin Mull and Tuesday Weld, is available on DVD and enjoys something approaching cult status.

Writing from inside the beast, McFadden describes the customs of proto-yuppies, such as mingling after work in upscale fern bars, where happening professionals got it together amid lush, subtropical greenery and sipped sophisticated drinks with exotic sounding names like chardonnay and piña coladas.

And when these swingers chose to make the scene at home, the venue par excellence was the hot tub. It was natural fit: With its Zen garden associations, the hot tub bestowed on its owner an aura of spiritual depth and equipoise; but it was also fun, like playing in the bathtub with all your friends, with the added frisson of bubbles and boobs. Best of all, it was very expensive.

The story of Homo hottubiens hits close to home for me, because I was just a newborn living in San Francisco’s Marina district when Perry’s, arguably the first fern bar, opened its doors across the street from the apartment my parents were renting.  So, conjoined by sidereal alignment, hot-tub culture and I are twins of a sort. And as is the case with twins, our bond is deep and enduring—even if it has not at all times been a source of pride.

In fact, I resisted the hot tub for years, before finally succumbing in my mid-twenties. A college friend had moved into her boyfriend’s house. This was in Berkeley. In the yard behind their tiny stucco bungalow, the sole feature, aside from an expanse of dying lawn and a single, spiky artichoke plant, was a deck upon which sat a redwood-sided hot tub.

A Virginia native, the boyfriend had a less vexed relationship with hot tubbing than I did. He and my college friend became great enthusiasts, and so it was only a matter of time and the right number of bottles of syrah before I was eventually induced to shed my clothes and test the waters.

Public nudity and hot tubbing: It was a double first. But, since I’m as sightless as a mole without my glasses, the strangeness of the moment was quite literally blurred, which gave it a solipsistic quality. Gently simmering in the 101 degree caldron, I let my thoughts wonder to visions of macramé plant hangers, laden with feathery fern fronds, the bearded profusion of creeping charlies, the snaky vines of the wandering jew. The minutes were tolled by sweeping hands of a clock set in an amorphous slab of driftwood, gathered from the Mendocino coast and varnished to a glassy sheen; and the evening light took on a mysterious, submarine cast, as if someone had draped a gypsy scarf over the moon. I had never snorted lines of cocaine off an art nouveau mirror, or worn a velvet blazer, or made soulful love to a crimped-haired nymph in a peasant blouse beneath a bower of redwood branches—but I knew this legacy was mine. Like Alex Haley entering the Gambian village of Juffure, where his forefather Kunta Kinté once lived, young, proud, and free, I too had come home.

But the hot tub is not just my story. The symbol of the wanting-it-all-now lifestyle pioneered in the Bay Area now belongs to the world. If the spark that fired that revolution was the desire to seize the perks of establishment success without letting go of the arcane prestige only the counterculture can provide, then today we are all yuppies. Anyone who’s dressed their child in a Joy Divison T-shirt or taken a baby stroller into a bar to hear a friend’s band perform; anyone who’s worn thrift store clothes to the office or thinks that shaving once a week is business casual; anyone who’s ever conflated a consumer choice with political action; we all owe a debt to those insufferable Marin pricks from thirty years ago. We have inherited their freedoms. And, like it or not, we have not escaped all their vices.

If, like me, watching Hot Tub Time Machine leaves your jones unsatisfied, do what I did and rent Serial.You might be surprised to see that its representation of 1980 is much less alien than Hot Tub Time Machine’s 1986. Listen to Tommy Smother’s shamanistic sermons, which are eclectic to the point of incoherence, or Sally Kellerman’s contorted attempts to express her narcissism in the language of communal politics or ascetic spirituality, and tell me if that is any more parodic than what you can read in the Living section of the Huffington Post on any given day.

Don’t get me wrong—Serial is not a great film. It almost certainly delivers fewer yucks than Hot Tub Time Machine, but it does pack in almost as much drug use, more sex, and more hot tubs. These hot tubs might not travel time, but they don’t have to. After watching the Serial, you might discover that you’re soaking in one already.

Hot Tub Time Machine. Two common nouns preceded by two modifiers: simplicity itself. But such a perfectly pitched phrase! A heavy, initial spondee resolving into a lilting dactyl that dances off the tongue. So concise, so replete with connotation, yet so musical and light that Sappho herself might have penned it. If it were a cookie, Marcel Proust would have savored it for days, crumb by flakey, buttery crumb.

So apt, so inevitable it seems, now that someone has gone through the heavy business of actually thinking it up and putting it into words, that it feels a part of the conceptual matrix that nature provided every one of us at birth. Hot tub time machine—of course!

I do nothing more than express the collective envy of hungry writers everywhere when I lament, “What didn’t I think that shit up first?”

Sadly, it is also their collective disappointment that sighs through me when I say how woefully short Hot Tub Time Machine the film falls from the Platonic ideal of the Hot Tub Time Machine.

Don’t get me wrong—this John Cuzack-Rob Corddry-Craig Robinson vehicle is not a half-bad example of its genre, the newly emergent teenage sex farce pushed into middle age. (I can’t bring myself to write bromance.) As I might have said back in the ‘80s, Hot Tub Time Machine has all mod cons: In its frames you will see poo and barf and pee, and hear poo and barf and pee jokes. You’ll catch a glimpse of eight or nine breasts. You’ll laugh when Rob Corddry says fuckin’ and dude in every line his character utters, even though you will not understand why you are laughing. You might even feel a twinge of compassion when the starring trio of of forty-something losers begin to realize that the glory days of their youth kind of sucked too.

But what you won’t see much of is a time traveling hot tub. You won’t see much of the ‘80s, either, which is the film’s other hook.

The ostensible setting is a Colorado ski resort in 1986—which is a cheap shot, because, as I can report from my own time-traveling adventures, from a cultural perspective ‘86 was perhaps the worst year of the ‘80s. It was the period when the descending arc of DayGlo intersected the rising fortunes of acid wash; when freshmen everywhere were entering high school and thinking they would be stepping into a John Hughs film, but weren’t. It was the year the Clash disbanded and Norwegian pop act a-ha garnered six MTV Music Video Awards for their hit single, a mashup of a Speed Racer cartoon and a Mentos commercial, remembered among hardcore collectors of vinyl as “Take on Me.”

It was also the year when Iran-Contra broke and when the Reagan Administration was finally forced to acknowledge the AIDS epidemic, so there was that too.

And this works well enough, because—inasmuch as it is about anything at all—Hot Tub Time Machine is about the interior journey the characters make, back to a point in their lives before everything started to go wrong, when they were still being lured forward by their potential and not languishing under the weight of their choices. Truly a universal tale, for at every moment are not fresh ranks of golden haired Adonises embarking on that slow, sad march that leads to disillusioned, defeated, and self-doubting adulthood?

But universalism is precisely not what the phrase hot tub time machine promises. The conceit of the hot tub comes with its own, very specific temporal gravity. It is deeply intertwined with a particular historical moment, and that moment is not the ‘80s. In 1986, no teenager I knew would go near a hot tub. Doing so would have marked one as indelibly as driving an airbrushed van, or growing a mustache, or participating in an all-night D&D session. Friends who had hot tubs at home lived in mortal terror of returning one evening and finding their parents, pink and bloated in the frothy water, drinking boxed wine and getting a little too chummy with Dr. and Mrs. Padova from next door.

For children of the Us Festival, the hot tub was still radioactive from its intimate association with that most toxic of eras, the Me Decade.

Be sure to look for Part II, in which our intrepid time adventurer delves back to the age of free love and fast money and finds the origins of more than just hot-tub culture.

Large Hadron Collider, Geneva

Since that first, primordial act of disobedience, Man’s insatiable lust for knowledge has been a sickle that has reaped a harvest bountiful in tears as well as forbidden ecstasies. Even now, as the ultimate secrets of coy Nature seem at last to lie within our grasp, are we tottering on the edge our own Icarus moment, when overweening ambition will cast us headlong into the abyss; or has Hope come in a humble shape and bearing Salvation in its beak?

From an unexpected quarter, it seems that the planet—if not the space-time continuum itself—may have narrowly avoided an uncertain doom at the hands of Europe’s Large Hadron Collider (LHC), a multi-billion-dollar machine designed to unlock the workings of matter, mass, energy, and time by throwing atoms together, very, very fast, and very, very hard.

In the early hours of November 3, the temperature in sections 7-8 and 8-1 of the LHC, a complex of subterranean tunnels that lies beneath the Franco-Swiss border, began to rise alarmingly. Inexplicably, the collider had lost power, and the cooling system was failing. Peaking at a 400 percent increase—from a standard operating temperature of a few degrees above absolute zero to a balmy 8 degrees Kelvin (a.k.a. negative 445 degrees Fahrenheit)—the two lengths of tunnel were perilously close to the thermal threshold at which the LHC’s super-cooled, superconducting magnets lose their super powers of particle acceleration and become merely mild-mannered, everyday “warm” magnets.

It was Christine Sutton, a spokesperson from CERN, the European Organization for Nuclear Research, which runs the LHC, who had to announce the humiliating news that the mighty $6 billion supercollider had been crippled by a power outage caused by a piece of bread dropped by a passing bird.

“There was an interruption in the power supply,” Sutton stated, “just like you might have a power cut at home. The person who went to investigate discovered bread and a bird eating the bread.” This pano-avian intrusion had apparently shorted one of the complex’s above ground copper conductors, which cut power to the cooling system.

Dr. Mike Lamont, machine coordinator at CERN and self-described “general dogsbody” expressed the situation more alliteratively in this improvised line of ancient Anglo-Saxon verse: “A bit of baguette on the busbars.”

A press release on the CERN website later updated: “The bird escaped unharmed but lost its bread.”

As absurdly compelling as this story is, CERN nevertheless buried the real lede: In none of its statements did the organization mention the esteemed Danish physicist who had predicted that the collider would be plagued by just such freakish “bad luck” or his provocative mathematical model that suggests events like the bread-bombarding bird might be directed from forces emanating from the future—guided, perhaps, by the manifest will of the universe or perhaps even by God Himself.

Secret, volcano-based SPECTRE super-villain complex, off the coast of Kobe, Japan

But before we investigate this remarkable claim, let me offer a brief excursion into the background of the HLC. A project 20 years in the making, the HLC has gone largely unnoticed in the U.S. outside the science and tech community. But in Europe it has been polarizing. Lurking beneath the environs of Lake Geneva, like a SPECTRE super-villain base in a James Bond film, the ultra-high-tech LHC is a project of breath-taking audacity. It aims to use powerful superconducting magnets to accelerate streams of particles a hair’s breadth shy of light speed and then smash the massively energized particles together.

If all goes well, the collisions produced by the LHC will recreate in miniature the conditions that existed a trillionth of a second after the Big Bang and generate a plethora of fleeting subatomic particles—including the elusive Higgs boson, whose existence has been conjectured but never confirmed and which is thought to be responsible for the phenomenon of mass. Let me repeat that so it sinks in: The Higgs boson is the subatomic particle that’s responsible for giving mass to everything that exists. Isolating one of these would be a very big deal.

Ambition such as is evinced in the LHC never comes without a hubristic shadow side. Unsurprisingly, therefore, the scheme has engendered heated opposition—particularly once the news became widely circulated that the list of quixotic products that could emanate from all that subterranean super colliding includes such horrors as mini-black holes and explosions whose magnitudes could surpass any previously known on earth.

The misgivings of the doubtful have been by no means allayed by a series of freak incidents that have plagued the LHC since it opened in September of last year. Just nine days after powering up, the LHC was forced to close, after an accident with the magnets led to the spilling of thousands of gallons of liquid hydrogen coolant. Repairs took more than a year to complete, and the LHC was just beginning to hit its stride again, when the saboteur bird tossed a baguette in the works. In the meanwhile, a physicist connected with the collider was arrested by French police on suspicion of conspiracy with Al Qaeda.

Scientists respond that any project as massively complex as the LHC—the world’s largest machine, whose interior must be kept colder and emptier than deep space and whose energy consumption equals that of the entire canton of Geneva—will inevitably undergo teething pains. They point out that the accidents thus far have been completely harmless, and, moreover, they maintain that critics’ doomsday fears are based on a profound misunderstanding of physics.

In Europe, where social conventions do not accord the ignorant and outspoken the same solicitude we allow them in this country, scientific pushback has been vigorous. University of Manchester professor and CERN researcher Dr. Brian Cox has stated authoritatively, “Anyone who thinks the LHC will destroy the world is a twat.”

That from a man whose C.V. includes a stint in the ‘90s synthpop band D:Ream, whose U.K. top-20 hit “Things Can Only Get Better” sucks even harder than Howard Jones’s ‘80s synthpop song of the same name.

LHC is A-OK for Queen axeman Dr. Brian May.

(As befits a rock ‘n’ roll legend, astrophysicist and lead guitarist for Queen, Dr. Brian May, also an enthusiastic LHC booster, has chosen to accent the positive, rather than vilify the opposition. He has been known to refer to the LHC as the “Large Hardon Collider.”)

Not everyone in the scientific community defends the LHC, however. Dr. Holger B. Nielsen, a fellow at Copenhagen’s Niels Bohr Institute and a man who is considered one of the fathers of string theory, dismisses black-hole panic but sees a potentially “miraculous” pattern at work and speculates that what he calls the LHC’s run of “bad luck” may actually be the universe’s way of telling us that the collider and the quixotic fundamental particles it may produce are fundamentally “abhorrent to nature.” In a series of papers posted on the physics website arXive.org, Dr. Nielsen, in collaboration with Dr. Masao Ninomiya of the Yukawa Institute for Theoretical Physics in Kyoto, argues that, for reasons yet unknown, the universe cannot abide the Higgs boson. He conjectures that creating large numbers of these particles might actually send ripples through time that will cause (has caused…? will have caused…?) the future to intervene and alter the past in order to prevent the creation of these Higgs particles in the first place.

I’m not much of a mathematician and Dr. Nielsen is not much of writer, but I have read every word of his paper “Test of Effect from Future in Large Hadron Collider; a Proposal,” and the gist is plain enough: “If an accelerator potentially existed that could generate a large number of Higgs particles…then such a machine should practically never be realized!” (Yes, Dr. Nielsen is a scientist who uses exclamation marks.) The mathematical models Dr. Nielsen employs allow for the present to be shaped by causal chains that extend not just from the past but from the future as well. This may challenge ordinary logic, but it’s not forbidden by the rules of classical physics, which for the most part work as well backwards as they do forwards. Dr. Nielsen concedes that influence from the future is typically slight; however, his equations show that the sway of “reverse chronological causation” is “unusually large in the case of the Higgs [particle]. … This possibility makes it likely that…cases of the future influencing  even the initial conditions, and thus the past may occur when the Higgs [particle] is involved.” I trust Dr. Nielsen’s math is sharper than his syntax, but if that statement is somewhat muddy, his conclusion is tolerably limpid: “Thus, we predict possibly that the initial state [i.e. the past—or is it the future...?] would have been organized somehow so that a large Higgs-particle-producing machine such as the LHC should somehow be prearranged so as not to come into existence.” Or, as he told the New York Times, “God…rather hates Higgs particles, and attempts to avoid them.” Thus, “it must be our prediction that all Higgs producing machines shall have bad luck.”

As examples of this prearranged “bad luck,” Dr. Nielsen points not only to the, quote-unquote, accidents that have affected the LHC, but also to the scrapping in the U.S. of the Superconducting Super Collider, which would have been America’s answer to the LHC. In 1993, Congress voted to cancel the project, which had run woefully over-budget. Dr. Nielsen finds this act of financial prudence so unlikely that he labels it an “anti-miracle” and ascribes it to divine intervention.

The scientific community at large has not raced to embrace Dr. Nielsen’s hypothesis about the LHC. But many admire his daft bravado. Dr. Nielsen is a scientist who is not afraid to punctuate his technical writing the way a 14-year-old girl would; neither does he shrink from using words heavily laden with non-scientific significance, such as luck, miracle, or God. Although his way of paring down these resonant terms to mathematical variables can be brutally Procrustean, it is nonetheless bracing to see a theoretician confront these facts of lived experience head on and attempt to find an accommodation for them within physics.

That doesn’t mean that he succeeds. It is with deliberate provocation that Dr. Nielsen writes “one could even almost say that we have a model for God.” But when the smoke clears, he leaves us with the underwhelming and probably tautological assertion that God  “may here be roughly identified with fundamental physical influences from the future.”  —Then again, is this distant and abstract God so terribly different from the heavily intellectualized First Cause or Unmoved Mover posited by Thomas Aquinas?

Yes, I suppose it is.

When Sir Isaac Newton wasn’t quantifying gravity or inventing calculus, he diverted himself by calculating dates for biblical prophecies, so Dr. Nielsen’s incorporating acts of God into his equations isn’t exactly without precedent in respectable science. But his definition is anemic and unnecessarily minimalist—particularly in light of the vivid examples we have of the divine Will at work in the supernatural intercessions at the LHC.

Let us try our own thought exercise. “What sort of Supreme Being,” we might ask ourselves “would choose to smite His foes with a baguette-bearing bird?” It doesn’t take any complex math to reach the conclusion that the Divinity must be the sort of entity that wears a hoodie and enjoys Devendra Banhart. If I could recall my trigonometry, I am certain that I could reckon whether it is within the walls of a Silverlake bungalow or a Williamsburg loft that His beatific Tweeness has elected to dwell, and exactly how much rent His parents are paying for it.

But allow me to put aside these metaphysical speculations and return to the mater at hand. Today the LHC is once again up and running. While we here in the States were sleeping off our Thanksgiving dinners, operators at CERN were celebrating the completion of a successful low-speed collision. No Higgs bosons yet, but experiments will step up in the new year, and then the hunt will be on in earnest.

I await to see what God will have to say about that.

Well, I won’t even try to explain. If you don’t know it, go watch it now. It’s two of the most thrilling and stylish minutes you’re ever likely to see on television, and an extraordinarily lucid piece of storytelling to boot.

www.youtube.com/watch?v=HRPDO63rI1E

Part spy adventure, part science fiction dystopia, and part counter-culture influenced social critique, The Prisoner was groundbreaking television when it debuted in the fall of 1967. With surreal plots that push the limits of narrative groundlessness, the 17-episode miniseries baffled, seduced, and ultimately enraged its original audience. (Such was the fall out from the maddeningly inconclusive concluding episode that the show’s creator was temporarily forced into hiding.) In look and theme, The Prisoner became an inspiration for a generation of filmmakers, screenwriters, comic book artists, new wave bands, and nerds of every other stripe. From the Super-8 aesthetic of the Dharma Initiative to the watchdog-like white smoke to borderline brain-in-a-vat narratives, the influence of The Prisoner can be seen all over ABC’s time-travel-obsessed Lost.

And now, after decades of speculation and anticipation, of deals struck and scrapped, the British cult classic is about to become the latest pop-cultural institution to submit itself to reinterpretation. On November 15, AMC will debut its own version of The Prisoner staring Jim Caviezel and Ian McKellen. The six-hour miniseries will run for three consecutive nights, starting in the coveted 8 o’clock slot leading up to AMC’s current mega hit, Mad Men — which makes a certain vertiginous sense, because both shows complement each other, the way one end of a telescope complements the other: Mad Men is a meticulous historical reconstruction that uses the veiled tensions and uncertainties of the early 60′s as a touchstone for our current moods; the new Prisoner, on the other hand, aims to pull the 60′s spy genre into the 21st century by replacing the original series’ core of Cold-War paranoia with the brand-new set of anxieties brought on by the War on Terror.

For those of you who’ve never seen The Prisoner, it’s a simple enough story. The series follows the increasingly baroque attempts to deprogram a retired secret agent; it’s James Bond meets Roadrunner, with a light psychedelic twist. Kidnapped by unknown forces, the ex-operative is held captive in a mysterious/kitschy seaside resort, whose strangely tractable residents are referred to not by name but only by number. Using a combination of cajolery, mind games, drugs, and a succession of punch-card, color-wheel, and disco-ball activated computers the functionaries of whatever power controls the Village — the West, the Soviets, or Other — are determined to extract from the prisoner (known only as Number 6) the true reason for his abrupt resignation — a reason, which for motives known only to the enigmatic and nameless hero, he adamantly refuses to reveal. You can watch all the original episodes on AMC’s website.

Exuding an air of cramped paranoia despite its trappings of Swinging London frippery, The Prisoner is a sort of dyspeptic yang to the frothy yin of The Avengers, that other masterwork of pop psychedelia. But while The Avengers is content to luxuriate in its surrealist absurdities, The Prisoner uses them as a satirical weapon. As in Catch-22 (1961) or One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest (1962) or the movie The King of Hearts (1966), The Prisoner plays out the familiar trope of a mad world where Establishment lunatics are running the asylum and only the mad are free or truly sane.

Patrick McGoohan, the creator and star of The Prisoner, pitched the series when he was stepping down from his role as secret agent John Drake in the hit show Danger Man (shown in the U.S. under the title Secret Agent). Seven seasons of Danger Man had soured McGoohan on the spy genre, and he looked to his new series as a way of not only expanding his range but leveraging his celebrity to vent his irritation with what he saw as the depersonalization of modern life. For McGoohan, cloak-and-dagger intrigue was just the cover for a parable about the foredoomed struggle every committed individual wages against the collective. Stopping short of agitprop, The Prisoner exploits its tensions between spy parody, social satire, and libertarian screed to produce a surreal and captivating spectacle that mirrors the fault lines that fractured the late 60′s.

What gives The Prisoner its remarkable staying power is that it manages to powerfully evoke its time while also transcending it. You don’t have to be a 60′s fetishist to enjoy it. Nonetheless, I was certain as I began to re-watch the series for the first time since PBS reran it during high school days — now sadly many, many years ago — that I would be jettisoned into a Swinging London or a tempestuous Summer of Love. Capturing its historical moment with a wistful but lacerating gaze — like a Kinks’ song that can’t forgive old hidebound England her manifest flaws but cannot quite stop loving her anyway — I thought that I, too, might see with The Prisoner’s gimlet eye. In McGoohan’s portrayal of Number 6, I thought I might catch visions of button-down conservatives who turned on, dropped out, and went rogue — like Timothy Leary or Edd, the father of my college girlfriend, who forsook his job engineering weapons for the military-industrial complex and went to play the banjo and live on a commune instead; perhaps, encapsulated in the psychic assaults of the Village interrogators and the countering mental jujitsu of the indomitable Number 6, I would see shadows of the Yippie freak-outs and Situationist confrontations that counter-cultural warriors staged in the streets, seeking to jolt people out of entrenched habits of thought and into groovy enlightenment.

But time travel is a very slippery customer. It plays havoc with causality, scrambles memory, beggars reason. And it’s damnably hard to control. For all my easy talk in these columns of transportive portals and talismans, there is a mystery at the heart of mental time travel that makes it ultimately unpredictable.

Re-viewing The Prisoner, I didn’t feel as though I were looking back into the 60′s so much as I was looking at today reflected in a funhouse mirror. The Prisoner’s schizoid vision of a world split between mad institutions, which destroy freedom and corrode the spirit, and a few raging and alienated holdouts still speaks to the zeitgeist — but the political poles have flipped since 1967. The pot-smoking, radical hippie has been replaced by the gun-toting, reactionary tea bagger; in place of the Stalinist aphorisms of Mao’s Red Book, we have Manifest Destiny redux in The 5,000 Year Leap, a.k.a. Glenn Beck’s Red Book. Unlike the older generation, today’s rebel dropouts are not inspired by the spiritual restlessness of Hesse’s Siddhartha or Maugham’s The Razor’s Edge. Their motives are economic and punitively moralistic, and their model is John Galt, the libertarian hero of Ayn Rand’s Atlas Shrugged. Seething with resentment that the fruits of their honest labor are used — via the tyranny of taxation — to subsidize their less deserving fellow citizens, they fantasize about dropping out of the system, or in their patois “going Galt.”

The Prisoner reads very differently today than it did even in the Reagan era, when I first watched it, and that fact points out how much and how rapidly things have changed in this country. Over the last eight years we have passed though a very dark time, when the profound unreason of fear and self-righteous anger propelled the ship of state into treacherous straits. The darkness of that period was so palpable — and I speak here as an expert on the Einsteinian physics of time travel — that I have to wonder whether its gravity was so intense that it might have warped the fabric of space-time to the breaking point — opening up a wormhole that led out of our universe and into some uncanny alternative reality. It’s the same physics as time travel, but this time, instead of shunting us to some distant point in our past or future, the wormhole has catapulted us straight out of the time-space continuum.

We seem to have entered a parallel universe where FDR staged a socialist coup in 1932, which caused the Great Depression, and Hitler, the harbinger of political correctness, instigated the Second World War chiefly so he could impose vegetarianism and socialized medicine on a global empire of demoralized welfare slaves. In this topsy-turvy universe, a left-of-center coalition headed by the half-black son of a single mother can sincerely be characterized as a national socialist insurgency; the fractious Democratic party is the party of institutionalized repression; and howling Republicans are the beleaguered champions of free spirits and dissenters.

AMC says that their remake of The Prisoner will deal with contemporary controversies, like state surveillance and extraordinary rendition. But from where I sit, that sounds like a lonely echo from an abandoned arc of history. Those issues, artifacts of the Bush era, are orphaned anachronisms, here in our strange new home. Furthermore — if I may speak of such weighty matters in aesthetic terms — exploring the excesses of the misbegotten War on Terror is a poor fit with the original Prisoner‘s tone of wry satire. Carl Rove was called the Mayberry Machiavelli, but the policy he and Dick Cheney built was devoid of even a veneer of Southern charm. We have seen their preferred means of intelligence extraction, and that tool kit does not include sending “high value suspects” to idyllic seaside resorts to ride penny-farthing bicycles and sip lapsang souchong in Italianate gardens. But that’s the oppressively decent way “enhanced interrogation” is practiced in the Village.

Astute surveyors of the political landscape realize that we’re not in Mayberry anymore. The nation is beyond carping about tactical details, like the relevance of habeas corpus or the permissibility of wiretapping or even torture; we’ve moved on to bigger quarry. The question we see playing out on cable news, in blogs, in town-hall meetings, and public demonstrations is “Who do we imagine ourselves to be? What is the soul of America?” As is the case with definitional questions, the answer is typically expressed as a negative: We are defined against the thing that we reject. And, as is the case with family squabbles, the tone is uniformly nasty and ad hominem. Our political lexicon is distended with a list of new terms of invective, Rabelaisian in its length and grotesquerie: We are a nation of wingnuts, moonbats, birthers, FReepers, libtards, Paultards, snow-billies, nObamans, Christianists, liberal fascists….

If Patrick McGoohan, the crusty, misanthropic creator of the original Prisoner, had lived to remake his series, I’m certain he would have recognized this knotted up state of affairs, so ripe for satire — and would have relished jabbing a finger into our aching collective pressure points, sparing the fragile sensibilities of neither right nor left. I imagine him hiring Kiefer Sutherland to reprise the role as Jack Bauer — just as it was an open secret that McGoohan’s Number 6 was a continuation of Danger Man’s John Drake. Bauer — a man who understands more than most that the delicate soufflé of democracy requires the occasional breaking of an egg — would be spirited away to a mysterious resort-spa on a nameless shore, where he would be confronted by a succession of callow but enthusiastic policy wonks, political appointees to some vaguely-alluded-to Truth and Reconciliation Committee. They would offer the rogue spy white tea and cucumber water, and then urge him to make a public confession of his crimes against humanity — tea and sympathy being, as you know, the signature style of Democratic regimes. They just want everyone to play nice and get along with one another. In fact, they insist on it. Und zey haff vays of making you toe zee liberal agenda….

The self-conscious artifice of the original Prisoner and its dream-like logic allowed it to rub up closer to the maladies of the late 60′s than a more subtle and realistic treatment would have. There is opportunity in the remake to examine in cringe-inducing detail the corrosive stereotypes that both the right and left today seem incapable of setting aside. The deadlock between earnest hope mongers of the new left demanding “sunlight” and “transparency” and the dour Cheneyesque figure that accepts torture sites and covert ops as the unsavory but necessary price of freedom would be a perfect microcosm of the unsettled and uncivil moment we’re inhabiting.

But, sometimes reality is more surreal than acid visions or science-fiction allegories. If we are living in universe where political “thinkers” can seriously suggest that viewing pornography turns straight men gay, or that environmentalism is a death cult, or that discrimination is actually a higher form of tolerance (and, sad to say, we are), then perhaps the wormhole has carried us beyond the reach of satire’s salubrious laughter.

www.youtube.com/watch?v=X02WMNoHSm8

Video courtesy of Dr. Michio Kaku, Science Channel personality, author of Physics of the Impossible, and all around pragmatist.

On a hot summer day in late August 1911, a desperate and bedraggled man left his hideout in the mountains of Northern California and passed through a time warp that would cast him 10,000 years into the future. Starving and mourning the death of his solitary compatriot, Ishi — the last living representative of the Yahi tribe, Stone-Age hunter-gatherers who for uncounted generations had roamed the woods of Mount Lassen — had  decided to chuck it all in and throw himself on the tender mercy of the people who had worked so hard and so long to achieve his eradication.

The Ironic Muse was clearly minding the shop that day. The first building the exhausted aborigine happened by was a slaughterhouse, and it was here that his legs gave way and he toppled in a dead faint. Fortunately for Ishi, Injuns did not fall within the scope of professional butchery, and the startled workmen — who, like everyone else in the town of Oroville, had considered “wild Indians” an extinct species in these whereabouts — hauled the unconscious stranger off to the jailhouse. There was no particular reason to do that, except that the very surreality of the situation somehow smacked of danger.

If it wasn’t for an accidental alignment of interests, who knows what would have become of Ishi? He might have been strung up at the jailhouse; he might have assimilated after a fashion into town life, marrying a pox-marked dowager and eking out a quiet living selling carved wooden animals for children’s toys. But if the pioneering anthropologist Alfred L. Kroeber hadn’t heard of the discovery and brought Ishi to the University of California, Berkeley, the last Yani would not have died of tuberculosis in 1915, wearing a city suit and stiff collar, looking off at San Francisco Bay and remembering tram rides down Market Street and visits to music halls. And I wouldn’t be writing about him today.

What’s most surprising to me about Ishi’s story is not that a “wild man” could have lived undetected for so long, but that there aren’t many, many more Ishis in our history. America is a big place, with an infinitude of isolated pockets that can conceal most any kind of person or activity. We have, to site just a few known examples, enclaves of religious zealots; of nudists; of painters; of polygamists; of separatist gun-nuts nursing strange and inchoate grievances; we have the state of Idaho.

All around us, countless tribes of elective affinities are marching slowly to the end of their line. My father, for instance, may have been the very last man in North America to have grown sideburns and a droopy mustache unironically. It was so late in the ‘70s that even Lindsey Buckingham was about to reach for his razor. But we never thought to title my father “The Last Man to Board the Love Train.” My mother and I just laughed. We weren’t anthropologists.

* * *

To reverse Ishi’s footsteps and ascend into certain regions of the Sierra Nevada and lower Cascade Mountains is still to step backward into time. You leave behind the big box stores that clutter the Reno-Tahoe International Airport and follow Route 395 into a featureless expanse of desert, substantially unchanged from the days of Conestoga wagons and the Donner Party. Across the California border you exit onto the 70, and dull yellow desert turns to orange scrub, which starts to give way to pines as the highway rises, thin at first, but growing until you are engulfed in a pleasant woodland. The few settlements of cowboy Victoriana you pass through become smaller and smaller. Once you pass the white clapboard shack that advertises Chinese and American food, you know that you have crossed the pale of civilization.

My destination that hot late August day I entered Ishi’s mountains was an isolated enclave of more recent vintage. Whitehawk Ranch is what the Census Bureau calls a CDP, a census-designated place, which is the bureau’s most lax and generic designation. The people of Whitehawk have no municipal government, they pay no city tax, and provide no social services for themselves. By the standards of Plato and Aristotle, they can hardly be considered human. They have no cable TV and almost no cell phone service. They do, however, have golf.

It’s the golf that brings residents to this isolated mountain retreat. It’s what brought my aunt and uncle, and they are what brought me. I hate golf, but I love them.

In the arid wasteland of my suburban childhood and adolescence, my aunt and uncle were a monsoon of glamour. My uncle, a veteran of the Second World War who earned a fancy Stanford MBA thanks to the GI Bill, is the success story of the family. A regional manager for a department store chain, my uncle knew how to drink and to glad-hand, but somehow always retained an aura of bookish aloofness that I took for benevolence. My uncle’s wife –his younger, second wife — always looked like a Virginia Slims ad. She kept her hair in a Joanna Lumley bowl cut and wore, sassy mannish blazers. She entered retail fashion at a time when ladies always wore white gloves out-of-doors. By the time she had risen to head buyer, women had ditched the gloves and were moving on to burning their bras. If my uncle’s wit remained dry no matter how wet he became, my aunt would easily grow florid and the cantankerous farm girl, never far from the surface, would come out bounding and grabbing at throats. As recently as 2008, my mother referred to her as a “women’s libber.”

As alluringly exotic as they appeared to me as a child, it turns out that my aunt and uncle are fairly typical residents of their new community. At the last census, the median age at Whitehawk was 61. The demographics are 99 percent white and one percent Asian. Eighty-five percent of the community is over 45, and just four percent are under 18. I imagine that the adolescents here must feel like protagonists in a John Hughes film — growing up alienated and misunderstood, surrounded by retired golf enthusiasts, with nothing but that one Japanese guy for comic relief.

But, as I learned in the course of a long weekend, if Whitehawk were a movie, its director would not be John Hughes but Werner Hertzog, the anatomist of obsession. The people here can walk out of their backdoors and onto a 7,000 yard, par-71, championship golf course; but they have to drive twenty minutes to pick up their mail and go 60 miles to get their groceries.

The golf links are the heart of civic life in Whitehawk — the agora, the forum, the mall, the place where neighbors meet and contend for prestige. The rhythm of life follows a cycle hallowed by nature and custom — the April thaw, the November snows, and in between the Mountain Hardware Tournament, the Club Championship, and an alternating succession of low-stakes men’s and women’s competitions with such colorful and utterly opaque names as “Three Blind Mice, “Sucker in the Bucket,” and “Cha Cha Cha.”

Some residents, like the nomadic hunter-gatherers who once ranged the mountains, leave for the winter to seek warmer pastures near Sacramento or farther south in Palm Desert where the golf never ceases, but for the most part people stay. They’ve done their time in the outside world, laboring and deferring their dreams. Now they can retreat into the mountains to shut themselves in and devote the remainder of their years to doing exactly what they please. They chose to settle in this reverse Shangri-La. Here the cloistered inmates might remain eternally old, but golf provides the portal to each person’s past. The ingrained movements and ageless verities of the sport connect them to the selves they remember, and in playing round after round, they make time vanish and keep their own mortality at bay.

It took some time for me to find my bearings among this strange tribe. The palpable weight of stasis made me feel cramped and edgy, and I longed for the bustle and the forward thrust of time once more. And there were strange customs. The men, for example, were fastidious enough to shave for dinner, but no one objected to the short pants they wore at the table, which flaunted their hairy legs. When I helped clear away the dishes, it caused a frisson of delight among the women and faint grousing among the men.

And, of course, there was golf, that sanctum sanctorum from which I remained an unrepentant heretic.

And yet, I surprised myself at how quickly I submitted to the diurnal flow of Whitehawk. It’s true that I could only fitfully follow the action of the women’s Solheim Cup, that came on at dawn and played all day on the flat screen TV, but three daily papers (which my uncle picked up from his post office box at the nearest town) meant that there were three crossword puzzles that needed doing. Follow that up with a leisurely stroll through the grounds, and I had the makings of a full and rewarding day. So it was with the clearest of conscience that I could settle down near sunset on the back porch and enjoy a few martinis and a little confab with the locals.

Life on the golf course, where everyone shares the same schedule and the same handful of intense preoccupations, struck me as remarkably like dorm life. This was my doorway into the foreign way of living I was encountering. I felt like an early naturalist on a mysterious jungle expedition expecting to encounter primitive savagery, but finding instead the Romantic ideal of a pristine form of existence unspoiled by the abundant woes of modern life.

I savored long, warm evenings that smelled of cedar bark and pine sap; conversations in which parties exchanged stories leavened with gentle wit, not snarky one-liners; cocktails sipped but never seeming to lose their chill — all luxurious elements of a precocious retirement. I even began to speculate that golf might actually contain an idyllic potential that had heretofore eluded me.

That’s when I should have known something was terribly wrong. But I couldn’t see it at the time, because I had been seduced by these misappropriated pleasures. Like many an explorer before me, I had started out in good faith but ended up in conceited affectation, aping the mannerisms of my newly discovered race of people, whose virtues could only be fully appreciated by an enlightened observer, such as myself. But I could hold no claim to any of what I saw. This pantomime would never really be my future, because I had never had these people’s past.