friday poem fanclub #38: The one where we invent a remote control in case we get eaten by a T-Rex

(written 26 October 2011)

Last night I didn’t sleep – I bored myself to death
I dreamt of things I do all day, nothing new, nothing lost
Just the stacking blocks of a pleasantless day, broken chalk and unfresh hands,
and slowly fudging minutes and a jazz band on repeat.
Nothing new, nothing unmistakably sublime.
Not the deep soft flesh of a dream,
not the pale, unspeakably summer-warm body
flowing right into my eyes,
not the mute and mighty weight of bones
dragging me into the earth,
not the strange and blind-eyed horses
breathing in the dark,
not the endless sonar of inevitable horror rising from the deep
- just the sheets, and the walls going grey


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So if you have children you maybe won’t appreciate this tale of triumph because once you internalise it you will be left with the stark and undeniable truth that your kid is not quite as awesome and freaking amazing as my kid. Just a heads-up.

Let’s start at the beginning: Saturday morning fresh and washed we made good on our plans to clean the fuck out of our garage. So we cleaned it out, and found some big boxes filled with paper, and miscellaneous plates and kitchen implements and a cookie-dough gun with various attachments for making old fashioned cookies and about 49 cockroaches which William happily smacked to death with my slipslop as they carried out well-laid escape plans around the driveway. Once the fog of war had cleared the kids said Hey! as kids often say. They said Hey! Can we have a box. So a large box was transferred to the bedroom along with the kids, the crayons, the scissors and some stickytape. And so the children built a time-machine, for traveling through time, to places like Jupiter, or, if you are more conservative in your considerations about the ambiguity of time and space, to 20 minutes or 20 million years ago. Standard stuff so far. The absolutely phenomenal part about this time machine is its name. Yes: It is called Time Schwarer. Not The Time Schwarer or Time Schwarer 2000 (how cliché!) – just straight-up Time Schwarer. See how your kid is suddenly not as awesome as my kid? Time Schwarer. Frikken genius.

And so Time Schwarer came into being, and it got a keyboard and a monitor with a logo of a clock face with an S in the middle, and a door, and a chimney made of an old Stroh Rum box, and a manual telling you which colour button to press for the Paleozoic Era or Saturn or any other time, and a big button marked E for emergency and a speaker for communicating with mission control and oddly enough a floppy hand dangling down from the speaker which it turns out is so that if you get eaten by a T-Rex then mission control can make the hand reach over and press the big button marked E and return Time Schwarer unscathed to from whence it came.

I feel sure that in the geek of time travel there is a word for “the time from which you started your trip to the past / future”. I’m sure this is vitally important when you get down to it. In addition to this I think that the children now think that the Esc button on the keyboard is for escape pronounced ess-kappé! I think this improvement came from SpongeBob or some other approved source of the English language.

1 x flux capacitor, as new, original packaging,

Tom