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barrettchase.com
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Tue, 12 Apr 2011

When I was about ten years old, I developed what I thought was a great scientific way of discovering whether or not I'd ever get to travel through time. The way I saw it, barring anything tragic, I'd get to live way past The Year 2000. And back in the early 1980s, everyone knew that as soon as The Year 2000 hit, we'd most likely have time machines, sidewalk conveyors, and phaser guns, whatever phaser guns are supposed to be.

The plan went like this: I would simply commit a specific date, time, and place to memory. Of course, I could write this information down and keep it with me at all times if I wanted. But the best way would be to just remember it.

Let's say the date was September 24, 1983, the time was 5:45pm, and the place was my childhood bedroom. I'd simply remember these coordinates (I'm fairly certain that's how I described the information in my mind: as "coordinates") and in the future when I finally got the chance to travel through time, the first place I'd travel would be to those coordinates. The 10-year-old me would wait at that place and time for the future me to arrive. That way, I'd have confirmation -- immediate confirmation -- that someday I'd be a time traveler. The plan was foolproof.

I chose my set of coordinates, making sure to remember a time that was 20 minutes ahead of when I got the idea to commit the coordinates to memory. That way, I could sit and wait in anticipation of the arrival of Future Me.

Future Me never showed up. I found this kind of disappointing, but I shrugged my shoulders and went downstairs to watch The A-Team or something like that.

About a week or two later, I started thinking about my plan again. Too bad it never worked. It would have been nice to see Future Me last ... Tuesday? At ... was it 3:25? DAMMIT. I'd already forgotten the coordinates! No wonder it didn't work.

Clearly, memorization wasn't going to do the trick, so I'd have to write everything down and keep it in a safe place if I wanted this to work. I picked another date, time, and place. I wrote the information down on a piece of notebook paper. I waited. Once again, Future Me didn't show.

Frustrated, I threw the paper away. But wait. If I threw the paper away, then how was Future Me supposed to find it? It wasn't enough to write the information down. I would have to commit to keeping them safe and accessible for the rest of my life. That's the only way it would ever work.

So this time I wrote down the coordinates. I waited. Again, no Future Me. Still, I put the paper in a safe place where it could remain undisturbed until I needed it.

As I'm writing this, it's 2011. I'm sorry to report to my childhood self that I still do not have access to a time machine or a phaser gun. I've used sidewalk conveyors in airports, though. And I have a really cool pocket communicator that I'm sure you'd love.

I have no idea where that paper went, or what I wrote on it. It doesn't matter though. If could travel through time, do you really think I'd go visit that little freakazoid?

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