I was at Madison's Union Terrace yesterday when I spied a woman that looked as if she was dropped onto her Union sunburst chair directly from 1985. She had that 80s hairstyle where you curl the front of your hair, but leave the back straight and stringy and she was sporting a pair of long, tight-at-the-knee jorts.

I wondered how anyone could be so oblivious to the fashion of the last 30 odd years. It's not that she wasn't trendy, it's that she was so dated. It was as if she was a...time traveler! With that thought I realized I had made a huge discovery. Maybe unfashionable people are really time travelers from the past or future. Rather than being the targets of our bitchy comments, they should be the targets of our jealousy!

Think about it, if you were traveling here from 1985, would you care about your clothes? Of course not, you'd just unthinkingly wear the most normal thing you could think of - in this case jorts & a t-shirt, thinking that of course you'd fit in. I mean, you wouldn't even imagine an America sans feathered hair and denim shorts, right?

It kind of explains why fashion is so ultimately cyclical. Looks like this aren't the work of visionary designers, they're the work of time travelers from the late 80s and early 90s who walked the streets of New York in pinch rolled jeans.

One of the disturbing things about these time travelers is that it's not as easy to spot time travelers from the future. Maybe it's because when you travel into the past you know how to look to fit in or maybe it's because there is no future. Maybe bums are future time travelers riding out the last days of civilization the best way they know how: drunk.

My take on time travel might seem a little shallow, but if shows like Star Trek and the Twilight Zone have taught me anything it's that you can't change anything major via time travel. You can't go kill baby Hitler, but maybe, just maybe, you could kill acid-washed jeans.