Axis Mundi X discussion
Time Machine
I'd hang out with the Donner Party, just for shits and giggles.
"This meat tastes gamey? What is it?"
"Grandmother."
"This meat tastes gamey? What is it?"
"Grandmother."
Wait, you said time machine. So I'd have to be standing wherever I'd want to go back in time, right? I couldn't move geographically? Because if I went back a couple hundred years where I'm standing now some very pissed off native americans would be looking to kick my ass badly.
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I'd do the same as Donna. Sightsee. I don't know if I'd see all the same things as you, Donna, but I'd have my own list of things I'd want to witness.I'd also go back and have a chat with my 12 year old self and convince myself somehow to take school more seriously.
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I'd love to see the unspoiled beauty of the Great Barrier Reef, the buffalo and the passenger pigeons (can I come with you, Donna?), and the bird life in the Everglades before feathers in hats became popular.
I'd also love to see the building of Stonehenge (how did they get those sarsen stones there?), and see the Sphinx and the pyramids when they were new and the Sphinx still had its nose.
I'd go to Paris between the wars, and hang out with Gertrude Stein, and Picasso and all those people.Or maybe to England, and pal around with Bloomsbury group--Virginia Woolfe, et al.
I'd eat me a dodo bird.Or do that thing Ruth said. Party at the Fitzgeralds'!
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Donna, good idea! I'd take him back to the Civil War era and leave him there with his mandolin and his fiddle. He'd probably enjoy himself well enough at that point in history. He'd fit right the fuck in. And I'd never have to deal with the MF again.
Ooo, Ruth... Paris during the Golden Age. That sounds like fun!
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Of course, the Universe would never let me get away with it. No free lunch, ya know?
this is a pretty good time to live. economic prosperity, vaccinations, women shave their armpits. might go a little forward, to see if we've got colonies on mars yet. but otherwise, pretty comfortable in the here and now.
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Although that is worth thinking about, too - would you rather live in a different era? For me, I wouldn't want to live in the past. I love my modern conveniences. Washing machines, refrigerators, and showers are essential to my happiness.
Varmint...I like yer style. Problem is, mathematically, we can only travel back in time and that just sucks. So traveling backward in time? I dunno....I'm with Char...I would love to see what my hometown looked like say about 600 years ago. I would like to see what the Templars were up to underneath the temple, and of course, hang out with Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin as we barnstorm the moon while throwing back shots of Jaegermeister. Rawk on! Oh oh....and I'd love to be standing right behind Neville Chamberlain as he was giving his infamous speech...and just as he waves his little piece of paper...I'd donkey punch the mo'fu'.
I already want to live forever, because I feel like there's more to see and do than I could ever manage in just a lifetime. A time machine (especially a time-space machine) would be a total embarrassment of riches!First, I would figure out what part of the future I'd have to find to manage the "live forever" thing.
Then, I'd probably end up following all y'all around for a while. Everglades and buffalo, party at the Fitzgeralds' (but only one, I think that would be plenty), a little original Shakespeare (though the smells might take some getting used to), some of those mysteries like Stonehenge and the pyramids, pre-colonial America, maybe murder an ex or two (mostly for the fun of it, at this point)...
I'd maybe spend a few weeks in Renaissance Italy, try to get a job as a research assistant on the Beagle for a season, smack Freud upside the head (though I'd have to thank him, too, for really creating modern psych, but then I'd smack him again for being a misogynist), spend a day with Samuel Clemens because he seems like he'd be hilarious to hang out with...this is tough, though, it seems like a lot of the people I admire would also probably bug the shit out of me. Lennon? The peace, drugs, and Yoko might be a bit much. Einstein? He was supposed to be very difficult to get along with. Or what if I decided to spend a day with some shining hero, like Martin Luther King, Jr., and I saw him, oh, I don't know, spit on the sidewalk, or say something nasty about someone? Maybe I'll just stick with good ol' flawed, hilarious Twain.
It'd be interesting to see the pre-human planet. What really did come first, the chicken or the egg? If I bring my gas mask, can I see what killed the dinosaurs? What would it be like to see hundreds of miles untouched by human architecture? And if I find a cute baby dinosaur, can I keep him?
Of course, to keep all this up, I'd have to rob a bank with Dillinger, then conveniently vanish in my lovely machine to Switzerland to open a bank account that will be collecting interest until the day I show up in the future asking for the medical miracle of eternal life. With, I hope, plenty leftover to fund all these travels and still maintain my cute little apartment (and pay someone to water the garden while I'm gone).
Oh...yeah. Time machine. I suppose I can just show back up the day I left, garden watered, apartment still a mess.
ETA: A little free-association through time, here: The jazz age, Louis Armstrong (Satchmo, for satchel-mouth), Satchel Paige, Jackie Robinson, Negro League Baseball, the Civil Rights era (observed through the bullet-proof plexiglass of my time machine), the Crusades (again, through the plexiglass), pre-crusades Moorish architecture and libraries, Frank Lloyd Wright, the arts-and-crafts movement, art deco, art nouveau, Bauhaus (the aesthetic movement, not the...okay, maybe the band too), early Replacements shows at the Uptown in Minneapolis when they were drunkenly throwing bottles off the stage into the audience (plexiglass, don't fail me now!).
I wouldn't mind going back to some biblical OT times. Would love to see the Old Temple. The times of David, Solomon. The French Revolution would be interesting.
Well, only one destination for me, taken from a story I read many years ago where a guy does invent a time machine. When last we see him he's setting the controls for AD33 and has packed a whole lot of guns & ammo. Of course he's going to rescue Jesus from the Romans (and the Pharisees). Now then what would have happened, I wonder? Might be fun. Uh oh - is this where the Da Vinci Code comes in? It is quite extraordinary how a few people have changed everything. Assassinating the young drifter Adolf Hitler in Vienna in 1905 and the young romantic poet and seminarian Iosif Vissarionovich Dzhugashvili in 1899 could only improve things. I want to live in that parallel world. Or I might invite the entire British Conservative Party and the entire American Republican Party for a big bonzo beanfeast in the Cretaceous Age and just slip out the back and leave them all there. They could check out their social Darwinist theories on each other.
Jackie, the new National Geographic has a Stonehenge cover story.That is all. I like what Varmint said. I doubt I'd time-travel much. I like it here. I might go back and save Char from getting burned at the stake, though. God knows what kind of trouble she'd get into with that machine.
If all things are possible, I'd want to go forward and find out how all this turns out. Going backward doesn't hold much appeal for me -- the past was never kind to those of mixed race. I like to read about it. Don't want to live it.Well, maybe a quick foray to the 60s -- I can only guess what free love must have been like when sex wasn't a potentially lethal activity.
You don't get off that easy, Ginnie. Tell us where you would go.
I didn't know the pyramids were a mystery. I thought it was pretty much well-known that Hebrew slaves built the pyramids?
Illegal aliens doing the jobs the Egyptians wouldn't do.
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Stravinsky's premiere of "The Rite of Spring", which turned into a riot - the atmosphere must have been electric!
Stevie Ray Vaughan at Montreux in 1982 (got booed) and 1985 when the crowd loved him
Bob Dylan plugging in at Newport Folk Festival
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The pyramids were built by Egyptian workers. There is some doubt they were even slaves, but may have been conscripted workers, especially agricultural during the off seasons. Zahi Hawass is the expert to go to.
I second KD's idea of seeing great concerts from the past. I would have love to have seen:
Miles Davis in the early 60's, performing with his quintet of Herbie Hancock, Wayne Shorter, Ron Carter and Tony Williams.
The Who at Leeds University, Feb. 12th, 1970 (the basis for the entire Live at Leeds album).
Miles Davis in the early 60's, performing with his quintet of Herbie Hancock, Wayne Shorter, Ron Carter and Tony Williams.
The Who at Leeds University, Feb. 12th, 1970 (the basis for the entire Live at Leeds album).
Oooh, how about the first performance of Stravinsky's Rites of Spring, where everyone went nutzo.
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This depends very much on in what capacity I go back. I mean, say I pick Victorian era England...go I get to choose to go back as Lady Somebodyorother? Or, do I go back as poor, obscure, nobody me and work as a serf? I can't decide until I know the parameters here...
With my modern day American dosh? I don't mean to put a chink in your plan...but I'll have to think on this a bit more given the circumstances.
I think, for the most part, I'd just want to be an observer and not a participant in most things. I would definitely go to see the signing of the Declaration of Independence. I'd like to see the Sermon on the Mount. I'd love to see that whole loaves and fishes thing.Although, I might just audition for Gone With the Wind and steal that role away from Vivien. Heh.
I'd like to go to 1891 Paris and try some Absinthe.
1921? That's very specific. Was absinthe an especially good vintage that year?
I had to edit after Wikipedia announced that Absinthe was outlawed by 1915. So I scooted it back 30 years. It's my time machine, after all. I'm always specific about years. It's a habit.
Sally, did the Wikipedia tell you that absinthe is now legal and the story about it's hallucinatory effects is just a myth.Turns out it's just high alcohol content.
From the one book I've read about it and the many wikipedia versions I gather that the absinthe that is around now is different than the hallucinatory version of the late 19th century. I refuse to listen to you rain on my time-machine parade. Lemme be. The anort seems like an inhale while the snerk seems like a condescending puff of exhale.
Yeah, Donna I thought you were calling me a snarky jerk.And sorry about the parade rain, Sally.
Hey, man, I'll be ok. Wanna come with me and dance with the green fairy? It has to be more fun than an evening with Black Butte Porter and an echoey Axis thread.
If you're buying, I'm dancing. [spits in his hands and slicks back his hair.] Oh yeah, this is going to be a magical night.
Ooo, a post with subtitles. What a bunch of smarties we are.
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Heh he he.
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here's one: the other day my mother tried to claim in a conversation about public education that Thomas Jefferson invented the public school system.
No, he built the pyramids. Edison invented Public Education.
I would love to go back in time before Europeans came to the New World and see what it was like. I can imagine how perfectly gorgeous places like the San Francisco Bay Area were, but I would give a lot to see it first hand.
I would go forward in time to see how things turn out for the human species and life on earth. 100 years, 500 years, 1000 years. Now that would be interesting.
Then I would go back in time and kill my ex husband in the time period before I divorced him, making sure the me of that time had a bulletproof alibi. Oh man, now that would have made my life a lot less stressful, and taken way less of a toll on my daughter. Yup. A time machine would be very handy.