­

I was cursing at my printer when Shazzam! someone looking a lot like myself  and dressed pretty much the same materialized to my left.

“What ho,” I said, “you look like me. Am I besides myself?”

“Hee, hee,” he said, “I see what you did there. In fact, I am you from the future. I’ve come to let you know what might happen to you, so you can prepare.”

I asked, “How far into the future?”

“Ten minutes.”

I shrugged. “Anyway, can you fix this fecking piece of crap computer?”

“No,” said future me (FM), “Printers hate me, will hate you, as much as they hate you now?”

I flipped off the printer. “You stinking lutefisk.”

“Indeed.”

I hung my head. “Life is hard.”

FM put a hand on my shoulder. Let’s say it was his right hand on my left shoulder. It could have been his left hand on my right shoulder. There’s a lot of freedom in the first draft.

While we waited for my blog self to stop ruminating, I tried cancelling the print order by all things, pressing the stop-printing thingy. It would not cancel. We tried going to POS 2000 printer icon on the desk top and clicking on stop print job. Bloody feck! Nothing happened. We tried turning the computer on and off. The printer remained frozen. We unplugged the printer and made a brief sacrifice to a Mayan monkey god.  Then FM plugged in the computer and rebooted. We managed to cancel the print job.

The printer peformed a number of noisy incantations to its evil master and spat a test page.

I looked at my future self and said, “It’s crunch time” as I clicked on print.

And then the familiar sound of a big wheeler downshifting on a steep infected the air around us as a page crumpled to its death.

We stared at each other and said, “I fecking hate printers.”

Synapses fired as I finally realized the full import of having future coming to visit. Coming to import life changing information.

“So,” I said, “What did come back in time to tell me?”

“Present Paul,” he said, “I braved temporal eddies to say . . .”

Beep! Poof! And like that he was gone. His ten minutes were up.

That’s the last time I time travel.

­– Paul De Lancey, The Comic Chef, Ph.D.

My cookbook, Following Good Food Around the World, with its 180 wonderful recipes, my newest novel, Do Lutheran Hunks Eat Mushrooms, a hilarious apocalyptic thriller, and all my other books, are available on amazon.com.