why did you do it
HORRIBLE question.
jesus.
no, that's not why i did it, i'm just saying "jesus" as sort of a swear-word.
why wouldn't i do it? who doesn't want to go through time, stopping along the way to gorge themselves on a bygone era, forgotten memories, places, people, etc?
if you're looking for the exact moment when i decided it had to be done, then i will tell you:
i was at home, alone, one saturday afternoon in early june, in Queens, NY. laying on the couch in the living room of my apartment, i kept flipping through the channels, all 177 of them, finding nothing interesting to watch. finally after about a half an hour of channel surfing and increasing frustration, i settled on the weather channel and stared mindlessly at a radar image of approaching thunderstorms on continuous loop. it didn't mean much to me at the time, but now i am convinced that watching this movement planted the seed in my mind for exploring the possibilities of time travel. there was just something about weather that seemed so integral, so fundamentally important to our memories and our perception of the moments we experience.
ask a person about the happiest day of their life. then ask them what the weather was like. i'd wager that you won't find a person who won't be able to tell you the latter.
soon enough the storms i had been watching on the radar rolled over my neighborhood with a torrent of rain and hailstones. i'm more of a sunny-day type of guy, so i was laying there lamenting the awful weather when my hand slipped and i pressed the channel button on my remote control. suddenly i was watching a replay of a English soccer match from the previous autumn; i believe it was from a saturday in october.
what i saw entranced me. it was actually halftime, so there wasn't any real soccer action going on. rather, i watched as the cameras panned the stands, showing Londoners in various states of wait: a man on his mobile phone, two small children arguing over a can of soda, an African man and an elderly Asian man chatting, arms crossed, looking out over the pitch. In some corners of the stadium sunlight (that rare English commodity) poured over the crowd in geometric shapes as defined by the eaves of the steel roof above.
it was a lovely autumn afternoon, the perfect kind for going to watch a match, and it struck me quite suddenly that is was gone. well, maybe not entirely. it was still there, on a videotape that was replaying for me as i lay in the still darkness, but the reality of it, the sights, sounds, smells, the unseen electricity that inevitably courses about when a group of people are gathered... that was all gone.
forever.
and i found myself quite sad. sad that perhaps the elderly Asian man, he was dead now. or the man on his mobile, he has since gone through a messy and emotionally excruciating divorce. perhaps the children are doing fine, but how sad that they're growing up? one day they're at White Hart Lane watching a match and before you know it they're off in university and then, just as quickly, they're elderly themselves and precariously on the verge of passing on.
it all weighed very heavy on my heart, sentimental oaf that i am, and as usual i vented my grief with indignance. why, if time has to continue its cruel march, usurping the moments of our lives and sending them into a void, why, i would fight back. i would find a way to circumvent this, and i would find a way to go back and recapture these times, make them forever accessable, never to be lost irretreivably and doomed to the gradual erosion of the human memory.
that is why i did what i did. it is not, however, when i realized how i would go about doing it.
i did not realize that crystal pepsi was the fuel for the machine until some months later, when i had drank an entire bottle of cough syrup and was hanging out in the laundry room with my cat.
jesus.
no, that's not why i did it, i'm just saying "jesus" as sort of a swear-word.
why wouldn't i do it? who doesn't want to go through time, stopping along the way to gorge themselves on a bygone era, forgotten memories, places, people, etc?
if you're looking for the exact moment when i decided it had to be done, then i will tell you:
i was at home, alone, one saturday afternoon in early june, in Queens, NY. laying on the couch in the living room of my apartment, i kept flipping through the channels, all 177 of them, finding nothing interesting to watch. finally after about a half an hour of channel surfing and increasing frustration, i settled on the weather channel and stared mindlessly at a radar image of approaching thunderstorms on continuous loop. it didn't mean much to me at the time, but now i am convinced that watching this movement planted the seed in my mind for exploring the possibilities of time travel. there was just something about weather that seemed so integral, so fundamentally important to our memories and our perception of the moments we experience.
ask a person about the happiest day of their life. then ask them what the weather was like. i'd wager that you won't find a person who won't be able to tell you the latter.
soon enough the storms i had been watching on the radar rolled over my neighborhood with a torrent of rain and hailstones. i'm more of a sunny-day type of guy, so i was laying there lamenting the awful weather when my hand slipped and i pressed the channel button on my remote control. suddenly i was watching a replay of a English soccer match from the previous autumn; i believe it was from a saturday in october.
what i saw entranced me. it was actually halftime, so there wasn't any real soccer action going on. rather, i watched as the cameras panned the stands, showing Londoners in various states of wait: a man on his mobile phone, two small children arguing over a can of soda, an African man and an elderly Asian man chatting, arms crossed, looking out over the pitch. In some corners of the stadium sunlight (that rare English commodity) poured over the crowd in geometric shapes as defined by the eaves of the steel roof above.
it was a lovely autumn afternoon, the perfect kind for going to watch a match, and it struck me quite suddenly that is was gone. well, maybe not entirely. it was still there, on a videotape that was replaying for me as i lay in the still darkness, but the reality of it, the sights, sounds, smells, the unseen electricity that inevitably courses about when a group of people are gathered... that was all gone.
forever.
and i found myself quite sad. sad that perhaps the elderly Asian man, he was dead now. or the man on his mobile, he has since gone through a messy and emotionally excruciating divorce. perhaps the children are doing fine, but how sad that they're growing up? one day they're at White Hart Lane watching a match and before you know it they're off in university and then, just as quickly, they're elderly themselves and precariously on the verge of passing on.
it all weighed very heavy on my heart, sentimental oaf that i am, and as usual i vented my grief with indignance. why, if time has to continue its cruel march, usurping the moments of our lives and sending them into a void, why, i would fight back. i would find a way to circumvent this, and i would find a way to go back and recapture these times, make them forever accessable, never to be lost irretreivably and doomed to the gradual erosion of the human memory.
that is why i did what i did. it is not, however, when i realized how i would go about doing it.
i did not realize that crystal pepsi was the fuel for the machine until some months later, when i had drank an entire bottle of cough syrup and was hanging out in the laundry room with my cat.
posted by TID Staff at 1:14 PM
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