Conversations with the ghost of Lee Harvey Oswald
Travelling through time with a patsy
“As for 9–11, if you wanted to fix that one, you’d have to wait around for 43 years. You’d be pushing 80, if you made it at all”. Now the lone star flag the gnome had been holding made sense. It was a souvenir of Al’s last jaunt into the past. “You couldn’t even make it to 1963, could you?”. To this he didn’t reply, just watched me. His eyes, which had looked rheumy and vague when he let me into the diner that afternoon, now looked bright. Almost young. “Because that’s what you’re talking about, right?” Dallas in 1963?” “That’s right”, he said, “I had to opt out. But you’re not sick, buddy. You’re healthy and in the prime of life. You can go back, and you can stop it”.
He leaned forward, his eyes, not just bright; they were blazing. “You can change history, Jake. Do you understand that? John Kennedy can live”.
Excerpt from “11.22.63” by Stephen King
I was talking with the ghost of Lee Harvey Oswald the other evening as the shadows lengthened from the oldest iron bridge in the world and upon a toy town perfectly suited to ghostly apparitions and time travelling tales from the past that bleed into our present. Lee smiled as he asked me if we were still at war with Russia and his smile was replaced by stifled laughter as I replied that we were, for the 80th year in succession. “The Evil Empire is always in need of a ghost to scare the public witless” he continued, and I thought of asking my old friend whether he’d read 1984, the forever war we never see but are propagandized to be permanently afraid of by dastardly dystopian dictators doing deals for the devils they pray to, but thought better of it and instead told him we’re at war with Iran now and the Game Show President of the USA had released the files on the JFK assassination and he’s still persona non grata, a guilty man, with a pocketful of magic bullets.
I expected, indeed hoped, he’d laugh at my magic bullets gag, but when he opened his mouth next I was half expecting him to say “I’m just a patsy” but instead he just smiled that thin, wan smile of his once more and as his voice raised from a barely audible grumble he simply stated that time and life, be it 1963 or 2025 would never change, that history had a habit of repeating itself (“by the design of devils” he said) he’d be innocent of a crime he never committed forever more regardless of the redacted rubbish filtering out of the White House, and the current Commander in Chief was as likely to release the truth on the Kennedy assassination as he was the Epstein files that have his shit stained fingerprints all over them.
“Evil Empire Uber Alles!” I shouted in mock laughter, but the joke was on me, and my friendly ghost had gone.
The past is a difficult beast to tame, isn’t it? The years 2019 and 2020 were the third, fourth and indeed last years for my barely profitable but still very independent taxi business and during those final two years before the first lockdown I decided I needed new reading material for those periods of inactivity whilst waiting for another job and I finally veered away from historical non-fiction and into the fantasy realm of fiction in the horror filled hands of Stephen King. Now and back then, I read over 30 of his books and this summer, as well as those far away years of 2019 and 2020, became and have become again, my “Stephen King years”. Carrie, Cell, The Shining, Doctor Sleep, Under The Dome, Just After Sunset and many others have been re-read since the turn of the year and as I hope you’ve gathered by now, my latest read is one of his very, very best. I was always going to love 11.22.63 as I’ve held a macabre interest in the assassination of John F Kennedy since reading On The Trail of the Assassins a year or so before it formed the basis of Oliver Stone’s magnificent 1991 film, a magnum opus he concludes with the Shakespearean phrase “What is past is prologue” or history echoing presciently into the present day. If the past is a difficult beast to tame then so are tangents and we seem to have a number of them as well as a number of years and notable events echoing through a gladiator’s eternity, so let’s work backwards and see where this ride will take us shall we?
The year 2020 was a fun time to be alive, don’t you agree? In what I hope will become a recurring theme and rhetorical question: Would you do anything differently if you could time travel back 5 years? Lockdowns. A dreadful, bile inducing world wide version of John Lennon’s Imagine. Nature reclaiming herself where humans feared to tread. Three word mind control phrases plastered on the front of lecterns populated by devils disguised in dark suits and even darker eyes. The flattening of a curve that flattened businesses the world over, but not if you were a member of George Carlin’s “Big Club”. Elderly ladies arrested for having the temerity of wanting to enjoy the fresh air and sea breeze and watch the tide roll in and out. Vaccine Passports. Remember them? Variants. Variants on Variants. Government mandated medicine. All of this and much, much more is now in Orwell’s Memory Hole. Never happened. Control. Alt. Delete.
Build.
Back.
Better.
And when the Establishment behind these 3 word mind control mantras were bored with this war on humanity they informed everyone that a new war was to be cheered for. Those pesky Russians had invaded Ukraine and we had a new forever war, a war that actually started in 2014 but that didn’t fit their narrative (or mine here for that matter as our time travelling timeline is knotted as it is) and not forgetting the Russian interference in the 2016 US Elections (pesky bastards), the laughable poison attack of a Russian double agent in Salisbury in 2018 and losing ourselves in the time matrix once more, apparently the Russians are threatening the very essence of British life every day and we’re on a “war footing” now according to the half-human, half-android being that purports to be our current Prime Minister.
Are you scared of the Russians yet and if not, why not? And if you could time travel back to the year 2020, would you do anything differently?
How about the year 2016 (when Stephen King’s far superior book was turned into the James Franco starring TV mini-series) would you do anything differently in you could time travel back to that year? You could relive the death (if you enjoy oxymoronic contradictions) of David Bowie, or just the plain old moronic (omicron?) as we had to deal with yet another world wide virus, Iran had dismantled the nuclear weapons Donald Trump and the USA recently blew to smithereens, the current President was also the current President back then and the Russians had “interferred” and “meddled” in his (s)election to be the Leader of the Free World (stop laughing!) and here in the UK the country voted to leave the European Union and 9 years on, we still haven’t. Just another parlour game for the proles to fight over the crumbs from the master’s table in an ongoing psychological operation and strategy of divide and conquer that has worked for generations.
What is past is prologue?
How about time travelling back to 2011 and the year of the release for 22.11.63? Would you do anything differently as the US triumphantly killed an already long deceased man and buried him at sea whilst their black operations teams incited so called “colour revolutions” around the world before finally murdering the main man in Libya and watching with glee as the pieces on their grand chessboard in the middle east erupted into bloody, civil wars? Go on! Spin the wheel on the time travel machine!
I’m sure you’ll find a forever war the Establishment want you to be scared of, a boogeyman to be killed (and buried at sea!) or a regime that needs changing and a world order remade and reordered in their image.
Ordo
Ab
Chao
Or perhaps you really want to test the theory of time travel (and your desires for doing things differently) by travelling back to 1991 and the release of Oliver Stone’s movie JFK? I was a long haired college leaver (do look me up if you travel back in time) as the world was shaking to the forever wars in Georgia, Kuwait and Iraq, the IRA exploded bombs on the UK mainland as a coup was underway in Haiti and after the fall of the Berlin Wall two years earlier (if you have a time travelling machine you simply have to return to 1989 too) Boris Yeltsin survived a coup attempt in the newly named Russian Federation.
CCCP
USSR
Russian Federation
Russia
Be scared. You’ve been programmed to be scared of Russia for your entire life and here we are, time travel machine or not, on 29th June 2025, and Russia is still the enemy in a forever war that ensures the rich get richer and the poor are human casualties in a blood ritual for Satanic Gods the dark eyes in the dark suits with the dark human agendas pray to.
According to an oft repeated line in 22.11.63
“The past is obdurate. It doesn’t want to be changed”.
But how about the future?
Our future?
Thanks for reading, much appreciated.
I’ve no idea what any of the above really means. I had a kernel of an idea (and a lovely cover image photo) and kind of got lost along the way. If I had a time travel machine I’d go back and change it, but I don’t. Alas.
Anyway, here’s my 16th and latest self-published release available on Amazon. Treat yourself to one of my books this summer (before the crazies launch an all out nuclear war)
Thanks.
