Although my passion is journalism, my pleasure is history. I derive much enjoyment from contemplating and analyzing our past, and that, I suppose, is why the thought of time travel excites me so much.
Fictional accounts of time travel -H.G. Wells' \The Time Machine"" and, of course, the ""Back to the Future"" movie trilogy-are wildly popular works because they get our brains churning with the query, ""what if? What if I could go back and re-do such-and-such a situation? What if I could just reverse that decision to eat 40 Chicken McNuggets in under an hour? What if I could see how ugly my kids are going to be?""
Often times during the night, when sleep eludes me and the Van Halen official-biographer fantasies subside, I indulge my time-travel fantasies and dream what if... Peter N. Long were to travel through time?
If I had my own stainless steel flux-capacitor-powered Delorian, I would not go ""Back to the Future."" That is, I wouldn't travel forward in time any further than the moment I set forth (back?) on my space-time continuum journey. I'm not sure what a 43-year-old Pete Long will look or act like, and frankly, I'm not ready for that yet.
Besides, the ""future"" in the ""Back to the Future"" universe is super rad, gnarly and tubular because it's just a futurized version of the 1980s. We all know that 2004 looks more like 1998 than 1985, and we still don't have hover-boards or ""Jaws 5,"" let alone ""Jaws 19.""
The past would certainly be my time-traveling destination. But, after I satisfied my desire to witness the key moments of the American Revolution, and drink some mint juleps in the 1920s before the stock market went sour, I would use my time-traveling powers for fun.
It must be understood that there are two types of time travelers. The first, the Marty McFly, uses time travel to enjoy history in motion and right the wrongs of the past to, uh, right the wrongs of the future. The second type, the Biff Tannen, uses time travel only for personal monetary gain.
If you look in the mirror and see a Biff Tannen time traveler staring back at you, for shame. Now I know all you business majors are saying, ""Darn it, Pete, of course we'd go to the future, purchase a sports almanac, and return to the present and bet it all on the winners! That's easy money!""
I'll admit the get-rich-quick scheme would work in theory, but such an anti-climactic use of time travel simply shows greed and unoriginality. There is more to life, and time traveling, than money-things like revenge, power, fame and glory.
One activity near the top of my time-traveling to-do list is what I have termed ""idiot continuity prevention."" This basically involves A) Deciding which idiot you want to ""erase"" from the present, B) Finding out how said idiot's parents met and C) Going back to that specific date and preventing the meeting from ever happening.
There are infinitely more time traveling possibilities than what I have presented here. Yet my hope is that, one day, we all can enjoy the Battle of Yorktown or the collapse of the Berlin Wall from front-row seats -so long as Huey Lewis and the News are pumping in the background.
Peter can be reached at writePNL@yahoo.com.
