“The presentation was just okay. They take you and the rest of your group to this little room, and I’m expecting levers and flashing lights and science stuff, but it looks pretty much like a big ski lift with no windows. They actually called it a ‘Time Foyer,’ which I think says it all. And so you wait a minute and then they lead you out the other door and, hey, you’re in the Permian period. No fanfare, no sparks, no big noise. The lights didn’t even flicker.”
“My first thought was, This is so much cooler than some Old West theme park. But after a half an hour, I was kind of wishing it were a theme park. There’s not much to do in the Old West. There’s a lot of dirt, some horses, some shitty stores. So you wander around and look at stuff, and pretty soon you start craving a churro or funnel cake or something. And maybe you think, The Old West is practically Mexico, right? So maybe there are churros? But no. No churros.”
“The language in 1920s Chicago was very offensive. I got called a ‘piker,’ and someone muttered something about a ‘soup job’ when they passed my wife. I’m both confused and disgusted.”
“The guides are super annoying. If you get Todd, request someone else. Todd sucks. Apparently the whole thing works on some sort of temporal alternative something or other? So like, when you go back, you’re in the past, our past, but as soon as you arrive it splits off and forms some other future? And so nothing you do affects the real future? Or something. It was a little over my head, but that’s basically what I got from the brochure. Point is, nothing you do in the past matters. I feel like, maybe Todd didn’t get the memo on this? Because he kept trying to stop me from doing fun stuff. If I’m time traveling, I want to be able to pee on a peasant or punch the King of England in the face. What’s the point otherwise?”
“I was part of their ‘Great Minds’ tour where you can talk to some of history’s geniuses. The nicest one was Ben Franklin, but he had intestinal parasites and spent most of the time on the toilet. Edison didn’t want to talk to any of us, although his lab was interesting (no A/C, fyi). Einstein actually ran away when we approached him. You’d think he wouldn’t be that fast, but let me tell you, that guy is fast.
“I got back from my trip and my grandmother never existed. I was pretty upset. I went back to their offices and asked how come the split future thing didn’t happen, and who gave birth to my dad, and how was I still alive? They just shrugged and said ‘time is really complicated.’ Then they showed me my waiver again and handed me a pamphlet on the butterfly effect and another on paradoxes. Not amused. Apart from that it was pretty cool, but I think I’d only do it again if they did a Groupon.”
“There’s no Kill Hitler Tour. Why? And Spartacus didn’t look anything like Kirk Douglas.”
“The Great Minds Tour is all English speakers. No Aristotle, no Lao Tzu, no Marie Curie. They’ll tell you it’s because their customers all speak English. Well duh. But maybe invent an automatic translation device? Like, maybe do that first, before you invent time travel? Dumb fucking geniuses.”
“We had the toilet issue too, and we asked our guide about it. ‘Can’t we time travel to when Shakespeare isn’t taking a dump?’ And the answer was no. Apparently for much of history, the water was awful, and everyone had worms or something, and it’s really hard to find a time when Shakespeare wasn’t taking a dump, or about to take a dump, or just coming from having taken a dump. Nice guy, but he seemed distracted.”
“The benches in the machine are carpeted, and it’s pretty itchy. Shorts not recommended. How often do they clean those seats? I saw a dinosaur.”