Wednesday, September 28, 2011

The Way-Forward Machine

By combining a lot of clock-springs, some cogs and some torn-up poems with a quirky melange of sprockets, love letters, campfire scents, tunes played on bells and crumpled appointment notes and by mounting these things on a metallic scaffold dotted with some shiny buttons and containing a screen that constantly prints and deletes an impressive series of deucedly latinate words, I have created a machine for entering the future. The problem is that this it is a subjective and preferential machine.

See, it only takes the young on journeys and, then, only to their dream careers. What it does is it drops teenagers smack into the middle of their projected desires. It allows them to experience said desire for one month. Thus, they can spend that month as a rock star; as a research scientist; as a novelist, as a doctor; as a priest; as a dancer; as a professional skate-boarder; as a housewife; as a wealthy writer of sonnets; as a tribal chief; a reporter or a linguist . . . anything they can conjure -- any career they wish.

For one month, they can see what it is going to be like.


The fuel for the machine is the rider's inflated, idealized and unreasonable preconceptions. (There is a fancy pad with a light that the riders place their hands on -- it transfers the predictions and projections in their minds through a series of wires and into a doohickey that converts these thoughts into time-travel energy which is then stored in sparkly fuel cells.)

This converted energy, once burned up in the flux capacitor, is non-renewable.

Only one trip per customer, but, of course, that is all it takes. My fee? A simple "thank you" upon return. A waste basket will be handy for the tossing out of lifetime blueprints.

5 comments:

  1. I'm trying to figure out how to take this piece. I like it, but is it cynical? Realistic? Perhaps a statement saying that what we dream of being in high school is not what we really want? It almost makes my head hurt and this is too difficult for this early in the morning. I like it though, I do.

    --Papi

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  2. Of course, Papi, you went into that comment knowing that I was not going to answer any of those questions . . .

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  3. Crazy Papi with his questions. Good piece today Mr Matt.

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  4. Mr Matt I have a name change for my blog it could be my permanent thing or not cause its really simple. Check it out when you can I just had one post today and its about where I wanna bring my blog to.

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