This is going to be controversial and will be the newest political hot-topic in Brownwood and the surrounding multi-county area.
You can’t time travel with a dog.
There, I said it. Just take my word for it. I mean, depending on the method of time travel, I guess. With my particular method, you can’t do it because the dog would have to be able to (in his mind) sever all the millions of filamentous threads that tie us, humans, to the right now. Dogs can’t do that. And I know that’s going to make some of you dog people mad. You tell people that dogs can’t really play poker and they lose their minds because they saw it in a painting once, and they believe everything they see. So, they’ll be mad that I’m saying that dogs can’t intellectually cut all the mental tendrils that tie them to our current fabric of spacetime that we perceive as moving forward according to the misperceived laws of physics.
Einstein said (and I’m paraphrasing,) “The distinction between past, present, and future is only a stubbornly persistent illusion.” You see, Einstein knew that time travel was possible, but that you can’t take your dog with you. Just read between the lines.
Now, it’s possible if you believe that one of the other methods of time travel will work – like, for instance, the TIME MACHINE method. I’m pretty sure that if that method worked, a dog could time travel. And I know there are some geniuses out there saying “WELL AKSHUALLY, a spaceship with a dog in it traveling at near the speed of light, blah-blah-blah… and when the dog got back to earth its litter mate will have been dead for two centuries! Blah-blah.” Humbug. I’m not talking about pretend time travel here, you muppets! I’m talking about the fact that you can’t time travel with a dog in the real world! Stick with me!
And then there is the TIME PORTAL method. And who knows if that method would work. Like if there was a gauzy thin near-hole in the fabric of spacetime out behind the Shoppin’ Baskit in Coleman, and if you were walking your dog and you happened to walk through the time portal right at the exact instant when the gooey filaments of time are the thinnest and gooeyest, and you and your dog could end up in prehistoric times and would likely be almost instantly eaten by dinosaur wolves in the ancient BC times. I’m not saying that it’s impossible, but I’m saying we don’t know if it has happened because the dino-wolves ate the evidence.
Ok, I’ve wasted enough of your time with the lead-in. All I’m saying is that in the attached picture of Center Avenue in Brownwood during a parade in the early 1950s, (a picture that I blatantly stole from the Internet,) the guy leaning against the building that now (in this time) is Hamilton’s Boutique at 500 Center Avenue – (You see him, he’s the guy in the bomber jacket with the cool glasses who is nonchalantly chilling and watching the parade all by himself without a dog) – that guy is a time traveler. And he would have liked to take his dog with him to watch the parade, but you can’t time travel with a dog. As I said. He’s also glad that there were no dino-wolves roaming around on Center Avenue in the 1950s (that we know about.)
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Michael Bunker is a local columnist for BrownwoodNews.com whose columns appear periodically on the website.