Tempus Subsisto

Tick, tock, blogowatts.

Lately, I've been thinking how supremely satisfying it would be to have the power to stop time's irrevocable flow. Why hasn't one of our think-tankers figured that one out yet? We've isolated the addiction gene, constructed the Tapei Tower and the Three Gorges Dam, and flown remote control robots to Mars, but we still look like amateurs when it comes to boring old time.

C'mon, eggheads! Einstein gave you a damned good foundation! Where are our chrono-physicists? Where are the tempologists? Where, great Scott, is our Dr. Emmett Brown?!

One-Point-Twenty-One Jigowatts!

Many a time this semester, I've glanced forlornly up at the HUGE clock that hangs above our fireplace (why did I do that to myself?) and I've thought, "My life is running out with each modulation of that insufferable second hand. And what have I done with this precious second? What about that one? And the next?"

Folks, I wrote myself a letter when I was fifteen years old. I sealed it and scrawled "Do not open until January 2025" on the back (along with an incredibly lame clock with lightning shooting through it; I told you people I was nerdy). When that January finally rolls around, I will have reached my 45th year. I'll probably have kids in high school, a tenured position at some modest teaching college (God willing), and the United States Secretary of Education for my wife. And do you know what's really weird? I have no idea what I wrote in that letter.

I think it was some hair-brained teenage dream about inventing time travel (I thought I was a budding physicist in those halcyon days), but I really cannot recall. If only I had invented that most glorious of science fictions, the obsession of every moderately brainy kid who read Mr. Wells's fantastic novel--the first to put forth the suggestion that there exists a fourth dimension, one accessible to everyone with a functioning memory:

"But you are wrong to say that we cannot move about in Time. For instance, if I am recalling an incident very vividly I go back to the instant of its occurrence: I become absent-minded, as you say. I jump back for a moment. . . . and why should [the civilised man] not hope that ultimately he may be able to stop or accelerate his drift along the Time-Dimension, or even turn about and travel the other way?"

So you see, in a way I did invent time travel by writing that letter back in 1994. When I open it in 2025, my mind will travel back along the Timestream to that spring afternoon in my room with the green shag carpet on 10th street and uncover the revolutionary scientific aspirations of a lonely 15-year-old. And that, ladies and gentlemen, is pretty cool.

But it would still be awesome if I could get a little of what Joshua got that hot day outside Gibeon.

That's a hint, God.