Two Documentaries and Too Much Time for Dead Men

Pt. 1 On Noam and 2002


The following is a work of fiction.

I was powering through the instant streaming function of my video game machine to locate a documentary that might spark some intellectual thought and possibly stimulate the hamster that had been napping on the exercise wheel in my head. In the future the television will become a functioning arm of the internet, I find cable to be an unnecessary expense as we figure this out. Everything moves so… in the future, no flying cars but some of the same so much faster. We are connected; I can send these words into space, on their own little mission around the world and into another computer. We have all become little presidents, ambassadors and celebrities. This may not faze the modern man but I try to take a moment out of the day to appreciate the white water of the thrashing technology wave with the momentum of a world full of human beings with different agendas behind it. Lives have been changed and lives will be changed, Time Square is no longer a bastion of pornography and Bill so and so doesn’t need it anymore because some of the beautiful women of our planet are stuck in time, twisting their beautiful bodies somewhere in Bill’s twisted computer wires. On the other end of the spectrum I can time travel, on this instant streaming function that highlights obscure documentaries from 2002.
I awoke from a sleeping off a poker game from the night before. I am twenty four years old and in a month I will be twenty five, and something is turning inside of the deep innards that twist the stomach and remind me both of being a child anticipating a favorite holiday and that feeling of darkness after a close friend dies. I think about it often, and then it becomes so vast and exciting and devastating that I find myself endlessly driven to explain a little bit of it. I began to flip through my instant streaming choices on a Sunday morning, knowing that tomorrow is my double shift and that it is going to be long and that part of me prepares for the average part of my life. When the title caught my interested eye I suited up for something else, the mission, this thing I have no control over, the reason I am an average man living an average life, so I click on the movie, “Power and Terror: Noam Chomsky in Our Times” and I watch because I know Vonnegut was not the only time traveling combat veteran of these United States, and I had found my portal.
A handy-cam pans the eclectic group ranging from college students to the elderly. They are taking their seats in anticipation of the panel discussion by Noam Chomsky on the matters of our time in this year of our lord 2002. Afghanistan held much water as the topic of discussion, U.S. Special forces had made great headway in the region, fighting the Taliban and searching for Osama Bin Laden. The invasion of Iraq and total collapse of planning that followed had yet to be realized, so what intrigues me is watching a man of supreme intellectual faculties attempt a prediction while I know many of the outcomes eight years later and in 2010, I know more than the Noam Chomsky of 2002.
I must not be so arrogant; I continue watching, interested in this group of people from eight years ago. I wonder what the chatty lively folks of the audience are doing right now, if they were inspired to accomplish great things after this discussion or if they carried on as usual and apathetically created the problems of today? Most of the audience would be losing jobs and houses in seven years so I focus on the gleam of light a hanging lamp in the conference room of this hotel in the movie is casting on the top rim of the metal backseat to the chair in front of the man with the handy-cam. I feel my body begin to tingle, like an appendage that has fallen asleep, there is always the complete darkness and loss experience of time travel, experts call such things depression, so I focus on the light gleam off of the chair as I return to March of 2002.
It is a clear day on the national mall in Washington D.C. as I materialize on a park bench. I am sixteen years old all over again, I can remember some of the future because we can never fully return but most of it is gone and I am back. I watch these people walking and jogging toward the Lincoln Memorial, six months after the towers fell. I am in D.C. tagging along with my father on one of his business trips, and I only relive this scene so vividly because I wrote it down and found it in an old book of notes when I returned from the war the first time. Sixteen years old I write about what I see, a cheesy observation of a jogging America, “carrying on” with resilience, perfecting its body after a terrible blow. I write that I see strong people “carrying on” in the face of it all. The magazines of the period featured the now joining soldiers of post 9/11 as the new greatest generation, comparing them to the volunteers of the WWII generation. Looking back from 2010 I think to myself that of course we carried on, what else is there ever to do? If you are not carrying on you are not drawing a pulse.
I am sixteen years old and grounded, my grades suck, love life sucks, but I can download a free song in less than a little over an hour with my external 28.8k modem. I read that thing I wrote in 2002 after the war and I almost choked. Noam got it all wrong, focusing on turning the image of the growing seed into Vietnam when the real war began with the people sitting in the very seats he speaks to in 2010 on my television. I disrupt the audience and I have broken a great rule of time travel. I rise from my seat and howl, “You people are the reason things are the way they are now, you can blame your government but you allow them to do what they do!” Noam looking startled politely asks who I am and I reply, “I come from the future, my name is Bill so and so, and the answers you are searching for rest inside a pile of twisted computer wires.”...