THE FUTURE:

All right class please open your physics books to whatever chapter looks interesting
and start drawing in the margins.

Matter is just a mosh pit of protons neutrons electrons groupies and hanger-ons
too busy bumping into each other to let you push your way to the front row of the concert,
so think of the pencil scrawlings and textbook print both as venue wallflowers
that sense the strobe lights but never become the bulb incandescent.

Matter of fact, take my book, pass it around, autograph some random chapter.
Professors never get yearbooks,
a yearbook is a flat umbilicus we breathe the past's air in scented like sweet museum rot.
It is documented proof that every history class isn't happening at once.

Let me explain.
Today's material is in there somewhere past the limits of what the light can see.

Time Travel
Is possible.
Is governed by the relativistic equations.
Relativistic Time T Prime equals T naught multiplied by the square root of the quantity
One minus the quantity V squared over C squared
Where V is your absolute velocity,
i.e. when the cop asks you do you know how fast you were going
and you lie and he knows you're lying and he already knows how fast you were going.
You were speeding and the universe is the cop
C is of course the speed of light equal to three times ten to the eigth meters per second.
This factor is called Gamma

Length L equals L naught divided by the same factor Gamma.
So as a body approaches the speed of light, time/slows/down for it,
and it /shrinks/ to near nothing, donates its space to the slow and dull and large
like polite boys do at family picnics while they're speeding around the backyard playing.

So being luminous and humble are a poor man's version of living forever.

Time and Space in the universe around it stretches gone as
evolving Darwin birds' one way migratory flights
and if you can somehow fill your maximum energy potential E=mc squared
and then break the universe's speed limit
V greater than C.

Looking at Gamma you're then multiplying by the square root of a negative number
which is the imaginary number "i" the square root of negative one times some constant,

and then
you can turn left (or right three times) suddenly like I did
and you wind up in your own bedroom circa 1982.
The carpet looks more terrible than you remember.
It's 3 years before the first Back to the Future movies came out.
You're visiting your 9 year old self laying in that small bed under the window
drifting between mononucleosis fever dreams and bloodshot insomnia
draped in moonlight which still to this day
travels at 3 times ten to the eighth meters per second.

Let me explain.
I was obliged to go back and do this having already remembered it.
Met the wound too tight clockwork headed boy I was.
Told myself rest easy, the Russians don't nuke anybody.
Stop being the best little Atlas you could build with a soul made of hand me down Lego bricks.
Wielding triple checked math homework like Merlin's spellbooks.
The greatest thing you will learn at school is how to fight while playing.
Dear boy, your gunpowder packed skull goes off in the middle of the week sometimes.
Let the sudden blinding flashes come.
The frantic dreams are Eureka stories you haven't learned to exorcise with pens yet.
They will live as black ink,
black is a pigment that soaks up everything that's turned to light.
When it is shiny black it is donating light backwards.
The letters live on a page that again only appears solid because your eyes
aren't small and luminous enough to see that this whole world's hands are shaking nervous.

The nightmares are evidence that what happened to you in the shed
isn't something you are old enough to digest yet.
Don't let the past loom like gargoyle symphonies on endless repeat.
In the beginning there was darkness but the future fixes that on its own outside of church.

Let me explain.
Michael Joseph O'Hara
You are one of the children who invent Time Travel in 2028.
As you rank life achievements it falls far behind
forgiving the few who covered over so much in your own blood
and telling your father you love him
not despite but because you are both failures in some degree.
You are going to love the future like a schoolboy loves the Summer he's earned.

In the future
Music is free, sort of, kind of legal to steal like it's legal to go five miles an hour over the speed limit.
Computers are smaller than phones.
Phones are smaller than ever.
No flying cars because gas prices always always suck.
We just got a letter last week from the 85 year old death bed version of myself.
He says the tyranny of money is close to obselete.
That Time Travel is getting easier but more people enjoy where they are, when they can.

The older you get the faster you travel the more you turn into light
often you loop back like shiny black ink reflection.
You are becoming luminous an incandescent bulb almost bursting
on the imaginary numbers of things you dreamt of as a schoolboy in the Summer.
The mononucleosis sweats out of you.
In the future everything is shrinking.
It's getting closer and closer to everything happening at once.
People talk so fast their mouths begin to shine and then they speak backwards theories.

For now it is enough to sleep, you are already a time traveler
moving so slowly ever forward.
There is a thing called progress.
It is proof humanity has faith in itself.
Like a God you can touch in the light of the day.

When you are fifty five years old you will
work through missed meals and two apologies,
tighten down the last glitches,
on the machine you nicknamed the flux capacitor out of nostalgia for the past
Back when you watched stories be told in flickering light over your head in a dark theater.

On a Tuesday at 8:35AM
when you disappear in a flash of light - your life's work zenith
colleagues will whisper "We did it"
like a conspiracy theory note passed by schoolboys in class.
We will shake off the ankle chains of history
Graffiti the timelines and write letters to loved ones, strangers and yourself across the ages.
This strange and theoretically impossible form of love is the only real calm a person can know.
When you stop being stuck in a world of matter that keeps vibrating itself to pieces in place.
Until that day
own the minutes that are keeping you bound for now
And class, that's about all we have time for