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In This Issue

• DeLovely? DeLorean.
• What Would Future You Do?
• What Are Your Plans For That Junk?
• Letters to the Editors
• The Adventures of Young Boy and Park Girl in 4-D
• Hipsters Remember Awkward Tweens at Brooklyn Bar
• You Can Call Me Ishmael Anytime
• Oh, Take Me Over Awkwardly
• People Know Me. Cool People.
• Not Even Time Thwarts Yo Mama
• I Plan To Own The Future
• How to Write Love Poems for Girls Who Can Read
• Lies My Robots Told Me
• My Ears Are Bleeding! Wait, That's Just My Vagina.
• Veritas Forum Takes Stand Against Death
• Too Jewish to Play Ska?
• Damned Interface Technology!
• The Church of Timeology
• THEY WATCH
• The Staff of 21.5

Kimi Traube

"That nonsense about not getting in cars with strangers doesn't apply to refrigerators."

Time travel is typically a practice reserved to the rich, the well-endowed, the eccentric, those with special mad scientist-esque abilities, and of course, to those with mad skate-boarding skills. I lack the power to construct a flux capacitor, or to discover some bizarre device that will hurl me backwards or forwards within the space-time continuum. What I do have, having nearly completed that B.A. in English, are different powers. More specifically, the powers of rhetoric, to come up with a well-constructed argument, perhaps even to support it with a few examples throughout history, and, because I am well acquainted with literary form, to throw in a few metaphors and anaphora. And as I dabbled in theatre and the arts, I know much about diaphragmatic breathing: use it. In other words, I have the ability, not to send myself or others through time, but to convince said others that time travel is both possible and pleasurable.

    With this in mind, I took myself to a locale rife with flora and fauna likely to be taken in by my powers of persuasion. The playground on LaSalle and Broadway proved to be rife indeed, for there was nary a youth over ten in sight. Deciding to ignore the “No Adult Not Accompanied by a Child” sign (that was for dirty pedophiles, not for entrepreneurs like myself), I found my first customer and commenced.

    The first child I discovered was an average five year old mal, wearing an unbuttoned coat of non-designer origins and a pink polyester sweater that featured a dinosaur. Taking pity on the poor lad, for obviously his parents had already doomed him to a life of mediocrity and homosexuality, I inquired as to whether he would like to pursue his long-term dream of meeting the creatures of the Cretaceous period. (Already my powers of alliteration had surged). The child stared uncomprehendingly, and I was reduced to a mere: “Dinosaurs, kid. You want to see some dinosaurs?”

    This elicited the proper response. After I had amassed a few children of the proper Body Mass Index, I led them to the back alley directly behind the playground where I had stashed the device by which I meant to facilitate the time and space travel. The device in question? I had turned to my most favored of all time travel films, Back to the Future. But as I disagreed with Spielberg and Zemeckis’s preference for the DeLorean, on both aesthetic and financial grounds, I had chosen a different vehicle, which I found to be both ordinary and rather pedestrian in scope. I went back to the BTTF creators’ original choice, that of a refrigerator.

    Unfortunately, as fridges, unlike DeLoreans, are not  easily equipped with wheels, maneuvering it over to the playground for my young time travelers was a task fraught with impossibilities. I was able to acquire, on loan from a friend, a dormroom-sized mini-fridge. After removing the yogurt and beer from the mini-fridge, I presented it to the children. “I’m afraid it will have to be one at a time, kids,” I said, as a sliver of doubt entered my voice. “But with your fine boned statures, and the hours I have accrued playing Tetris…”

    No dice. The kids weren’t having it. Alas. As a frowning security guard showed up, accompanying me away from the youngsters (apparently I had gone above and beyond violating the aforementioned sign), I realized something. Time travel isn’t something you can fake, like a sociology paper or an orgasm. And children, no thanks to the Barnard Toddler Center, might be smarter than I think.