Time zoned out

This weekend I took a short trip that involved time travel. Yes, it is true. Time travel does exist. Unfortunately, it can’t be used to help you change the past so that you don’t spill punch on your prom date or know to pay more attention on a certain upcoming Thursday so you wouldn’t end up driving off a bridge. The time travel I’m talking about was performed in a perfectly ordinary car without an iPod adapter or a smuggled plutonium-powered nuclear reactor.

All I had to do was drive one hundred miles south from Terre Haute and, miraculously, I traveled exactly one hour back in time! Stranger still, when I excitedly approached the locals, consisting of an acre of corn, six cows and a farmer, to tell them about my revelation and to find a phone to share the news with the world, the farmer laughingly said that he time traveled on a daily basis. All one has to do is to walk past a certain line. Amazing! This yokel lived inside a dimensional rift and didn’t even realize it.

Luckily, I, an engineer and thus of superior mental and social skills, understood this time-changing “line” to be exactly what it was: the boundary to a temporally amorphous bubble in which everything is trapped one hour into the past. Elated by my discovery and sure of a Nobel Prize in something science-y, I bid the farmer and his cows goodbye.

Unfortunately, once I returned to my dorm, no one believed my fantastic story. My roommate even asked if I had been smoking too many rocks. Ridiculous! How can one smoke too many rocks? And what is worse, he didn’t believe me. Defeated in my own home, I sought out the fraternity brothers, in whose houses legend has it that people have time traveled into the future by mixing loud music and alcohol. However, they tried to explain something called “Daylight Savings Time,” apparently some sort of law put on this land to segregate those who have daylight in the morning and those who have daylight slightly later in the morning. The whole incoherent lot was insane. I mean, how can you save daylight? Put it in a jar and hope for the best?

In the end, the only people who would believe me were the good people at the Rose Thorn. When I burst down their door screaming about time travel, they simply looked at each other, nodded, and ushered me into a room where I was told to write my story.

Hey, the walls are bouncy! Yay!