It's fun to stay at the F.W.M.A.!

[benchilada]

Are you ready, kids? 'cause I think it's that time again.

I need you to do something for me.

FUCK WITH MY ART!

If you need more info, click on the giant words above to see what people have done in the past.

Do what you will with it. Turn it into poetry, or prose, or a page of a comic, or write a song about it, or print it and wipe your booty with it, or do an oil painting, or whatever you want. You can rewrite it, continue it, write a prequel to it, or just use one tiny bit of it to make something else.

I just want to see what you all do with this brief story.
Permission granted to twist, bend, and break it wherever you feel like, as well as post it in your own LJ.

If you turn something out from it that might actually make money, I'll split copyright on that piece with you 50/50.
The odds of that happening are about the odds of me suddenly no longer enjoying Godzilla.

This piece is decidedly different from the others I've provided, so make it good, kids.

And now...

When all was said and done, every imaginable scientific theory about time travel ended up amounting to approximately a hill of beans. After all, if one is going to punch a hole in reality and disregard all laws of physics, then the resulting effects can scarcely be expected to do a damn thing they’re told.

Even the “inventor” of time travel—who to this day wishes to remain anonymous— said, in his Newsweek article entitled “I Had No Idea What I Was Doing,” that there was absolutely no explanation for what he had done, nor did he ever expect there to be. The side effects, he went on, would hopefully baffle mankind forever, as he personally had no wish to know “why the hell all this crazy stuff happens.” As for why one could only travel backwards instead of forwards in time, he said only “I don’t even know how my toaster works, so how am I supposed to answer that?”

            The closest anybody got to properly explaining anything about time travel was the old science-fiction writers who posited that the universe could not break simply because somebody goes back in time and drowns baby Hitler. The truth of the matter was that, as soon as you left the past, everything you did whilst there was either retroactively written out of history—you drowned the wrong baby named Hitler—or incorporated into proper history in some horribly bizarre way—you did indeed drown Hitler, but his parents then had another baby that they also named Adolf, and now the first child is remembered only as a new footnote in The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich.

            The second most disconcerting aspect of time travel is the fact that as soon as you’re finished doing whatever you’re doing in the past—or when approximately seventy hours have passed—you fall into a sort of stasis just outside the bounds of time, space, and all other sensible concepts until the very moment you first traveled from. Ostensibly, this means that if you were to travel from 2006 to 1865, you would be in stasis for a hundred and forty-one years, at which point you would return to the time and place that you left. This stasis is instantaneous to the traveler, who is, for example, watching Abraham Lincoln being slotted once in the back of the head by John Wilkes Booth and then is suddenly back in his New York studio apartment.

            Thankfully, very few functioning time-travel devices have ever been created. In addition, anybody with a shortwave radio can tell when one is activated simply by tuning to the “Time Travel Standard” frequency and listening to an as-of-yet unidentified male with a bit of a lisp announcing that time travel has taken place, as well as the destination year.

            In his St. Louis Post-Dispatch article “Please Leave Me Alone” article, the inventor was quoted as saying “I don’t know who he is. I told you, this is some crazy [expletive] right here. I mean, I made a [expletive] time machine by accident. I don’t know why some [expletive] gay man is announcing every [expletive] trip. If [expletive] want to [expletive] with [expletive] [expletive] then [expletive] [expletive] can [expletive] with [expletive] [expletive] [expletive] for as many [expletive] [expletive] as Carter had Little Liver Pills.”

            The first most disconcerting aspect of time travel is that the human body absolutely despises being in stasis. Or perhaps time hates when people hang out in stasis. Or, most likely, the universe is simply cruel to people who prove it wrong.

            For example, the inventor of time travel relates the side effects of his first jaunt as follows: “So, I’m there, trying to fix my breakup with [PASSAGE EXCISED]—which I totally screwed up again—and all of a sudden I’m back in [PASSAGE EXCISED] and I can’t see for [expletive]. I had a friend take me to the doctor, who declared that I had cataracts and that it must really suck to be me. I didn’t tell him that I didn’t have cataracts earlier that morning, nor did I tell him, the following week, that the cataracts suddenly went away.”

            Indeed, it seems that everybody who spends any time at all in post-travel stasis ends up with a bizarre physical ailment which clears itself up in about a week’s time. Reported effects range from having one’s tongue turn black to all the fingers on one’s left hand binding themselves together with copious amounts of skin.

            My first several trips were relatively uneventful and the side effects were quite mild. This last one was a bit different, however. You see, I had gone back in time to watch the world premiere of Casablanca. And may I take just a moment to say how much nicer movie theatres are today? Sure, the old ones had character, but they smelled terrible, the screen was awful, and the sound was cripplingly bad.

            After the film ended—it’s always nice to hear applause at the end of a movie-- I wandered into the street and bought a hot dog from a street vender to settle my stomach for the return trip. I relaxed, let go, felt a briefest moment of falling, then I was back at home.

            Back at home barely able to stand because my frame ached so very badly. Having been on hundreds of trips, I have a physician on call for such things. He came round and did some tests, deciding that my bones were leeched of over half of their calcium. It should sort itself out, as these things always did, but spending seven days in bed and taking supplements with lots of milk couldn’t hurt.

            It was only after he left that I discovered where all that calcium had gone. I leaned on the wall and slowly made my way to the john, where I sat and produced a rather sediment-filled stream of urine. My pee, I thought to myself, should not be flakey. In addition, I could only get about an inch of feces out, which I had to knock off with the butt of my toothbrush.

            “Sweet lord,” I said to myself, “I’ve ossified my poop.”

           Over the next week the calcium slowly redistributed itself throughout my body in a process I’d rather not think about. The part I really don’t want to think about is if any of the calcium’s…previous storage material…had made its way into my bones.

            The last thing I needed was a shit skeleton.

benjamin
NOW GO TO TOWN!