Joe Hartzler

Science and I have had our ups and downs, there’s no denying that. As a youth, science captivated my imagination with static-electricity balls, basketball-playing rats, counter-weighted tight-rope bicycles, and other Co-Sci novelty items and NASA bi-products. And where would I be without closed circuitry? But somewhere along the way Science began making all sorts of tantilizingly outlandish claims. We were promised flying cars, jet-packs, and teletransport, but aside from laser pointers, Posturepedic pillows, and Hot Pockets, my life has not been nearly as revolutionized by technology as I was led to believe it would be.

When fifth grade rolled around, Science and I fell on hard times. Maybe it was me, but I like to think we were both a little to blame. Our little league team, Ragersville Blue, was on it’s way to a championship season, and, well, I suppose I got caught up in all the hype. It’s easy to see why, though. I mean, we had it all: pitching, hitting, rally-caps. Heck, I even saw Billy Cugliari turn two bunts into two bench-clearing grand-slams in the same game, and he was missing an eye. It was a dream season. So, yeah, I got caught up in the fanfare and the big-league chew, but when the science fair rolled around, who else could I turn to but Science. After all, it was his fair. And what did Science give me? Electro-magnets; magnets that can be turned on an off. I got a green ribbon and a “C,” the lowest marks of my acedemic career. I trashed my tri-fold poster-board, electromagnet collage and all, and vowed off science forever. The world grew dim.

Over the course of the next few months I became a poster-child for subjective truth and falacious reasoning; heresay and assumption became my mother and father, superstition and happenstance my closest allies. I called electricity “magic-juice,” and I rejected the notion of gravity altogether. “We stick to the ground just cause,” I would cry, “just cause.” Stephen Hawking was “nothing more than a spit-factory in a human suit,” and I recommended we “unplug him.”

But still, Science was always there patiently awaiting my return. I think the “Weekly Reader,” a 3-page elementary-level “science” journal, was the real turning point. Every Wednesday the classroom smelled like vaguely like a coal shoot from the recycled soy paper of the Weekly Readers. Try as I may to hide my ink-black hands that accompanied the shoddy printing, psuedo-scientific articles about “Flying Concept Cars,” Cloud-powered Energy Scooters,” and “Laser-Guided Personal Jet Packs” were too much for a boy to ignore. Science was alive and well, and it was going to make me fly to school in the near future.

I was reborn, and I touted my renewed faith in science. In the eighth grade I proved my loyalty by earning an A+ in the science fair. Ok, I never actually conducted an experiment, and I fudged all the figures, but only because I couldn’t find a way to get the rat to eat Tylenol. The point is this: I had once again embraced Scientific Theory, if only theoretically. I came back to Science with the hope that it would save our civilization and bring rocket-packs, and laser-beams, and space shoes to every boy. There’d be robots for the menial tasks, and subjegated Aliens for the complex. There’d be a biosphere on the moon, and regular field trips to Placktacon 5, a planet we’d invent to replace Mercury, which was always a bit dull in my book. Tantilizing visions of food-capsules kept me up nights wondering what new hobbies I might pick-up during the time we’d once squandered eating. Karate, perhaps?

But here we are 15 years after Science first started boasting about a flying car in Weekly Reader, and I don’t even own one measely jet pack. Yeah, laser pointers have made it easier to torment household pets, but where are the promised portholes to other dimensions? Where is the elevator to Heaven? Where is that infinately massive force we were working on; the one that was going to propel a spaceship as it approached the speed of light and became infinately massive? It’s the only way we can make time stand still so that certain spacepeople will live on for eternity and revisit the mutant human race billions of years from now to rescue Earth from the gruesome hands of the savages that will come after Placktacon explodes and casts the 10,000 year shadow over the earth. Who’s going to plant the pure seed and raise up the next human race; the race that will rescue all past souls from the blackness of the great breach and take them through Saber’s porthole to the Utopian Galaxy which exists eternally in the sound of a child’s clapping hands at a birthday party in 1946?

Get it together Science, cause quite frankly, I want a robot.