Sat., June 12, 1999"We're still living in the Dark Ages"
- Kurt Vonnegut, Jr.So, I'm back from my unplanned trip to the 10th century. And not a moment too soon! I'm gone one day - just one day - and the Russians take advantage and sneak into Kosovo.
"Scat! Scat or I'll start emailing copies of this journal to your commanding officers until they beg for mercy just like the Serbs!!"As if I have time for this international foolishness when there's so much foolishness in my own home to attend to.
Like explaining to my wife why I didn't think to bring her back an authentic medieval sackcloth like the one I'm wearing.
Like finding a safe place to hide the hair shirt I also picked up for myself before she gets all huffy about that, too.
Like nursing my cat back to health. Seems he guzzled his morning milk fix especially fast in my absence. Never a good idea, but an especially bad one in this heat wave we've been having. Consequently, he's now suffering from a terrible case of vapor lock. Felines!
And of course I'm now having to schedule auditions for a new circadian rhythm section to replace the defective one which sent me back a thousand years yesterday in the first place. Until that's done, I have to drag around this huge external metronome the doctors have me connected to everywhere I go. It's hard to hire enough good enzymes for such a rhythm section in the best of times, given how little glucose my puny body can afford to pay them; it's especially hard this time of year, when so many fat people are offering top sugar molecule for help counting the days to the start of their summer vacations. And it'll only get worse as more and more of 'em also start counting the days to the new millennium.
I swear, in the mood I'm in, if one more kid at the mall points at my metronome and laughs, I'm going find a new use for its 52 pound pointer!
And then I'm gonna march right down to my chronologist's office and chain myself to his desk until I'm moved to the top of the list of those awaiting a cuckoo clock implant!!Maybe tomorrow things will calm down and I'll be able to reflect upon the deeper meaning of yesterday's accidental sojourn. I've never quite been able to comprehend what time travel would be like, and now that I've experienced it, well, I'm not comprehending it any better.
For one thing, I don't understand how I could have just popped into the 10th century. Either my physical body popped into a space full of nothing or I popped into an area full of air. It's highly unlikely that I popped into an area full of nothing, since I've only done that once before in my entire life. True, that one time was called "High School" and lasted all of 4 years, but forgive me for thinking that such a thing can never, ever happen again, or pass the cyanide. If, on the other hand, I popped into a space full of air, why wasn't there an awful explosion or something? Two things can't occupy the same space at the same, after all, and even if we've only known that since the invention of the automobile, it seems highly unlikely that things were that much different before the sharp stabbing pains of high deductibles brought the issue to full awareness.
And then there's the fact that the atoms in my body now and in the body I took with me back in time yesterday were already in existence a thousand years ago. Oh, they hadn't yet gotten together to form a new person, conceived by a soldier on liberty and dedicated to the proposition that all women serve equally well in a pinch, but they were out there somewhere. Did my sudden appearance somehow unite them all, 960 years too early? Or did the 10th century world acquire duplicates the moment I showed up? If they somehow were stripped from wherever they happened to be at the time and were united, well, didn't that hurt the people and animals using them at the time? And might not the sudden loss of some of them even have led to the sudden death of some of these people and creatures? And wouldn't that change history? But if we go with the duplicates hypothesis, didn't that muck things up, too? I mean, I exhaled lung cells yesterday, I shed skin cells - didn't the sudden addition of these things to the 10th century end up changing history, too? Granted, my lung and skin cells probably aren't as capable of changing history as Columbus or Harriet Beecher Stowe - are they really less capable than Donny Osmond?
And - goodness gracious! - what about the microbes I shed?? That's what did in the Martians in H.G. Wells' "War of the Worlds," after all. The Martians had no immunity to Earth's microbes.
OK, bad example. It's highly unlikely that microbes that have evolved on Earth would be capable of attacking extraterrestrial life forms. We'd have better luck mating with a starfish. The fact remains, medieval humans probably would be susceptible to the microbes I carry - especially if these microbes had their Donny Osmond albums with them. And why wouldn't they? Microbes are notorious pack rats, and if they didn't buy all those albums Donny sold, exactly what life form did??
And what about the microbes those 10th century folks gave me in exchange? Might not they be ravaging my system even as I write this or are the buboes that have erupted in my groin a complete figment of my imagination?But those are questions for another day. Right now I want to give you, my readers, the special little something I stopped off and picked up for you in the 12th century as I made my way back to the here and now.
Enjoy!"Against the disease of writing one must take special precautions, since it is a dangerous and contagious disease"
- Medieval poet and philosopher Peter AbelardBut I suppose anyone who's made it this far has been thoroughly vaccinated against the desire to read or write ever again.
Feel free to pass my gift along to a friend.
Maybe for Christmas.
Now seemingly just 456 days away....
Back To A Somewhat More Complicated Past Than Usual
Home Where An Entry That Loves You Patiently Waits
Forward To A Future So Bright, Ya Gotta Wear Shades
(All Material, Both Infectious And Not © 999, 1999 by Dan Birtcher)
If you were fortunate enough to have been born with two or more internal clocks, please consider donating one so that others may live knowing roughly what time it is without having to constantly look at a watch or calendar. Thank you.
(Paid for by the Association of American Chornologists - "Because It Doesn't Have To Be Later Than You Think")
