[Posted by E&C on 22 Aug 2010 01:42 pm]

The first time I can recall asking myself what I would do with the keys to a time machine I was eleven or twelve and my answer was thus: I would travel back to September of sixty-three and buy every copy of X-Men #1 that I could get my tiny hands on. I would find some little drug stores or five and dimes that had no idea they were selling a future gold mine for twelve cents an issue, try not to giggle as I purchased the entirety of their stock, maybe wear sunglasses to hide the knowing glint in my eye, return to the present and make a fucking fortune.

Well, I'd keep one copy for myself because that would be rad, to be sure, but the rest I would sell on the open market and retire before high school.

But then I ran into a problem. The money. I had an allowance of only one dollar a week, but if I saved up for a mere month I'd be able to afford thirty-two copies and with the comic then selling for around $100,000 each, I'd be set. But if I showed up in '63 with my fancy-pants bills minted in the eighties and nineties I would be laughed out of the damn Woolworth's or, worse, sent to some Kennedy era Gulag for counterfeiting/time traveling pre-teens.

After thinking on this for days, I decided that the quaint, old-timey stores of the early sixties would be no match for my hard-as-coffin-nails nineties wit and modern day criminal technology, like Pump-action tennis shoes, so I could probably just nick the damn comics and run for it, but I didn't want my fortune to be built on larceny.

Conundrum.

So I went to my father and asked for any pre-'63 currency he must have accrued in his storied and ancient life. I would pay two-cents on the penny for this tender, and he was certainly never going to get a better deal. He dug out what few coins he had dating back this far and, over a few days asked his friends, co-workers and tellers to do the same and, soon enough, presented to me a small ziplock back filled with historic dimes and nickels.

And he didn't even charge me, the sucker.

I still have that dusty, musty, somewhat less-translucent bag tucked away somewhere in my childhood bedroom for the day I finally get my hands on that time machine. But my interests have shifted a tick.

Oh, I still want that comic, don't get me wrong, but those conversations with my dad, the ones that were only incidental to my true goals in ‘91, these days they’re all I'd really want out of time travel.

Today’s art was done by Chris Cusack, who is awesome and more of his awesome may be located at his webcomic Zero Effort.

Get a beverage of your choice and remember that the price of a memory is the memory of the sorrow it brings,

E