Ten Minute Time Machine
What we do each day matters. This occurred to me the other day when I was wishing I had a time machine. And I thought about the statement: “we know that time machines don’t exist because once they exist in one time, they exist in all times.” And I thought there was a flaw in this logic. It assumes that once somebody uses a time machine, it’s like letting the genie out of the bottle. The secrets of its use will eventually leak into the time stream everywhere, and of course, everybody’s going to want one.
The thing is, anybody who could actually use a Time Machine will quickly realize that its utility is much greater when it’s personal.
I’d surely want one. But I’m not sure I would go back any further than last Thursday to keep myself from buying a ballast for my fluorescent lights. Or going back a few days earlier when I got T8 light bulbs instead of T12. Who knew? When you can fit a four-foot T8 bulb into a four-foot T12 socket, one will assume that it’s OK to do that. And then, when one’s refrigerator stops working because the GFI where it’s plugged in can’t handle the disruption to the circuit, you decide to replace the outlet further downstream rather than look at the much more obvious problem of having to replace the ballast. Because replacing a ballast is such a pain in the ass, and they’re kind of expensive. So, you go back to the hardware to buy a new one, and rather than get the T8 ballast which is on sale, you get the T12 ballast out of habit and spend an hour and a half replacing it, only have it continue to flicker and piss off your wife. This is when you remember that you have T8 lights after all, so you go back to the hardware to get the ballast which is on sale, making you late for dinner and again pissing off your wife. Unfortunately, everybody else also knew that T8 ballasts were on sale, so they were all gone when you went back, even though it was only a day and a half later. Then you get to the part where you wish you’d had The Time Machine to get to in the first place – just replace the entire freaking light fixture with an LED that can be plugged in with three wires instead of the 16 required by a ballast. The cost of which is significantly less than four fluorescent light bulbs, two of which are unusable, a perfectly functional T12 ballast that you’re never going to use, and something like three to four hours of work looking for, replacing, and finally ditching all the above items for a better solution.
So, you can see, a time machine is not going to be used for any grand purpose like going back and offing Hitler or preventing JFK’s assassination, but rather being able to go back and actually use that killer response that would have won the argument, or just taking back that last move because it was mate in two but you could have won had you moved your Bishop to E5 instead. The real value of a time machine is not in changing history. Once you do that, you risk all manner of mayhem, including getting stuck in time because you may have screwed up the conditions that led to it in the first place, not to mention that karma is probably going to even things out anyway. I mean, sure, Adolf was a bad dude, but Rupert could have been much worse. Or Ivonne, or Charles, or Kamal, or any of the other asshats that karma would dig up. And it’s not particularly tangible either. Sure, it would make the lives of people who are already dead better when they were alive, but it’s not going to get me through my To Do List or keep my wife from being pissed. A time machine would be pretty great, but when I think about owning one, I think about the aphorism usually attributed to Tip O’Neill. He famously did not coin the phrase, ‘All politics is local.’ What matters most in our lives is right in front of us. You can make the world a better place, but it will happen in much smaller increments over many more people and far more regularly than the history books would suggest.
David Ledrick has a wide range of interests and wishes the days were longer so he could pursue them all. He really should get more sleep. He looks for the best version of everyone he meets and is passionate about projects that allow those versions to come out. He would rather share ideas than talk about his job. He has lived in Toledo for 20 years and is still finding new and interesting things in it.