Balls Capone

"The Seed Planters" - another crazy dream by P.N. Neville.

It was a world set in the not too distant future, things looked relatively the same and so did the people, but instead of moving from place to place or from city to city, the people here could move from time to time. 

They could move to whatever time period in human history they wished to, but part of the deal was you would no longer have your advanced technological knowledge.  So you couldn't just jump back to the 1930's and have cell phones or invent the computer.  But, you were given seeds of this knowledge, a strange understanding of things to come.  Just enough to keep you curious and working toward a better future while in the past.’

I was talking with a family that had just moved back from living in the 1950's for 15 years, so not only could you time travel, but also warp time so that a certain period could last as long as you needed it to.  They had done what they needed to do and had now moved back to find a new destination in time.

The time stations looked like old city bus terminals, grungy, kind of run down, full of distant looking weary travelers.  The bluish rows of plastic seats worn down from the years of use, the stained floors, brown spotted ceiling tiles between the flickering neon tube lights.  I was leaning against one of those old-fashioned cigarette machines that used to be so common, you know, the squatty looking kind with the old backlit pictures and the pull knobs.  They end up in a lot of my dreams. 

In this world, everyone smoked.  Everyone.  Old, young, man, woman, child.  They even had specially formulated baby smokes available in the machine, "Essential for a glowing healthy baby!", one pack advertised in bright pastel colors.

An old feller standing on the other side of the smoke machine noticed me checking out the selection of smokes and said,

"Life's hard, buddy.  Light up!", as he lit his own big long cigarette. 

"Welcome back to, Cleveland", he stated in a tired dull tone.

Cleveland?  Well, at some point in the past in this world, there had been a great war and most of the world had been completely destroyed.  Only certain places still remained and Cleveland, Ohio was one of those places, one of the last remaining chunks of what once was the USA.

This way of life had been created by those who survived the destruction to send people back into the past to slowly alter it for the better so we could change the future from the horrible world I was starting to see around me.  And that's the future we are now currently living in, the new one altered by these travelers to stop this ultimate destructive war that still may be coming anyway.  It's not easy to change things, it takes huge amounts of effort and time to do and it may not work at all, even after all the effort.  Nothing is certain.

The old guy walked back over to me and I bummed a smoke from him.  In this dream, the cigarettes tasted awesome and had no smell whatsoever, I'm pretty sure they had figured out a way to make them good for you.  Maybe.

The old man leaned over and asked me, "Hey, you wanna know who killed President Kennedy?",

"It was my Grandson, he was on a 10-year mission in the early 60's.  You might not like it, but sometimes even people we perceive as good have to go for the betterment of the future and sometimes the ones we think are evil need to stick around.  I know it's hard to understand, hell, I still don't really understand it myself", he told me with a sneaky grin on his face as he drew hard on his future smoke and exhaled slowly while staring off blankly into space with his bright but tired eyes.

"You're not in the past to change it exactly", he continued. 

"You're in the past to plant seeds so that the people of that time period can change it", he stated.

"We can only do the planting, they have to grow the crops of the future and tend to them", he added before he wandered off toward the pay phones.  I guess he had a call from eternity to take.

I followed him and stepped into what looked like a phone booth of my own and was suddenly whisked away into a strange digital like world. 

I was now a signal traveling in a conduit of light with billions of other signals.  Time and space meant nothing here, millions of years would go by in a flash, worlds coming and going, from the dawn of a civilizations to the ultimate destruction, all in a flash, like watching a movie on fast forward.  But it felt so good in here, such peace, so right, one with everything, such a wonderful comforting feeling, like living inside joy itself.

I traveled for what felt like an eternity until finally my signal was separated from the main and sent down my own conduit where I was now the only signal flying through an eternal darkness.  I felt myself slowing and it felt terrible, the rush from before was fading and I wanted it back badly as a feeling of such intense loneliness started to fill my existence. 

No!  What happened?  Where are all the others?  It now felt so wrong, something is happening here and it's not good.  A ball of anxiety and fear began to form in my belly, getting bigger and bigger until I felt like I might just explode into a terrible mist, then a sudden blinding stinging sensation, like skin being ripped from a frozen metal pole. 

That's when I woke up.

So I guess the saviors of our future are the future smokers.  So light up, little Johnny!  You may just be saving the world.

You may be one of them, you just don't know it.  Maybe you're planting the seeds right now for a better and brighter future, or maybe you're totally blowing it us all and I'll see you back in Cleveland.

All we can hope for is a place where there is more to see than just the jagged broken remnants of the Cleveland soul station.  Almost anything is better than that.

It really made me think.  Could that be what some of us actually are?  Maybe.  Just maybe.