It was ready. I had done it! After months of wiring, rewiring, soldering, re-soldering, moldering, re-moldering, folding, bending, pushing, and pulling, my time machine was finished. It was my pride and joy, my shining grace, I called it my “Time Temple.” Where would I go? When? The potential spots ran through my head. Perhaps I’d go back to fireproof the Library of Alexandria, provide Guy Fawkes with plastic explosives, or steer the Lusitania around that deadly torpedo. Perhaps I’d go to the future and see how my Raytheon investments were going. The opportunities were endless, and I was overwhelmed. I closed my eyes, spun around 4 or 5 times, uttered a short phrase in Latin, and set the dial to “any time.” I was off!
In my safe (and spacious) Time-Temple, I rode the sweet time superhighway for what felt like eternity. They don’t tell you this in the manuals, but the time superhighway is made of silly putty. Your wheels stick to the road and it ever so slowly– and gently– oozes you along. It oozes you diagonal, perpendicular, sideways, upways, downways, wayside, the way of the Dodo, no-way, yes-way, and sometimes even rightways. It’s quite the ride – and it lasts forever! After a few years of quiet lonely oozing, I started to get a little antsy. I picked at my cuticles, I bit my lip, I counted the number of fingers on my hand and then once I was done, counted my toes as well. I made this game where I grew my hair out so long that I could sit in a hammock of my own making. But all that got old after a decade or so. I spent the next couple of centuries mostly dozing, trying to think of things that rhyme with orange, developing an existential theory of the universe, and playing Battleship against myself.
Suddenly, the putty road began to shake. Where once it oozed, now it rushed, gushing putty rapids throwing my Time-Temple to and fro, upways and downways. I held onto my hammock beard for dear life. The river accelerated and all became a blur. My teeth chattered, my skull bounced, my eyelids peeled back and dried out in the face of endless time-wind. I thought I was a goner for sure! All that time I’d spent relaxing in eternity-time was for naught. But all of a sudden…
SXCRTSZZCKKKK
Dropping from a time-hole right above the I-93, my Time-Temple bounced and skidded, and spun out of control.
CKCKRKRKCACK
Running at a velocity only known to those who’ve experienced the accelerant nature of a time-putty river rapid, I tore through the cars in front of me. SUVs carrying entire families skipped and flipped and tore into many separate pieces of flesh and metal; an old lady driving a Buick Encore flew over the railways and created a six-car pileup on the Massachusetts Turn- pike five miles away. My own fraught journey ceased after I slammed into the hard cement exterior of Bunker Hill Community College. I was disoriented, upset and my left shoulder was hurting something awful.
What year was I in? What dimension? I crawled out of the burning, twisted wreckage, and next thing I knew I was cuffed by a Boston cop who’d witnessed the carnage. “It was an accident officer, I swear,” I said, wearing a goofy sticky-time-road smile on my face.
Well, what a state I was in! My Time-Temple was totaled, I had no idea when I was, my left shoulder was all bruised up, and now I was sitting in a cell, being charged with septuple homicide and a DUI. Was this justice?
***
Well folks, the trial’s in a couple weeks’ time, and things aren’t looking so great for me. My court-appointed attorney is deaf and blind and solely communicates through taste. My Time-Temple, as per the technology I’d wired it with, had transformed itself into a 2012 Honda Civic upon my return to reality, so little evidence of the truth remains at the scene. And that’s a very difficult thing to explain solely through taste!
Write your congressman, your mayor, your city-council rep! Tell them my story, and help me avoid being wrongly convicted and lost in time forever. Help me reader, you’re my only hope!
