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Words and music copyright ©2001 by Blake Hodgetts
I've always been a tinkerer, since I could turn a screw...
At eight I built a radio with Cheerios and glue,
And later I spent weeks within my cozy basement lair
Refining my improvements to the common beanbag chair.
Despite my skills, my projects never met with much success,
Until the day a strange old man showed up at my address.
I felt somehow I knew him, though he swore we'd never met,
And yet he said he owed me an extremely ancient debt.
[no chorus first time!]
He sat with me and showed me some equations based on primes,
And how to fashion circuits that would resonate like chimes.
He had me build a manifold, a hyperspatial field,
and nickel-hydride batteries with high-performance yield.
I followed his instructions and I crafted this device.
It had an airtight cockpit and was wondrously precise.
And after several days of this mysterious routine,
He cried "Congratulations, friend: you've built a time machine."
[Chorus:]
Come and take a ride with me.
Isn't there some age you'd rather see?
I wish I had the time to tell you everything I've seen
Riding in my homemade time machine
Upon this revelation I was powerless to speak.
To demonstrate, he sent me to the middle of next week,
And by the time I got that fool contraption turned around,
And back to when I'd left, the man was nowhere to be found.
Before long I could see the oyster that was now my world:
All history was mine, the past and future were unfurled,
And though its well of gravity made Earth my only home,
Across its lands my time machine could effortlessly roam.
chorus
I've put a lot of years on the odometer since then.
My mark's all over history, like inkspecks from a pen,
And though to you it seems as though it's always been this way,
The world you know's the end result of my temporal play.
You've heard about those pyramids in Egypt, I've no doubt.
Just how the things were built, no-one has ever figured out.
I must confess those engineering textbooks were a hit,
And the bulldozers and cranes I brought may have helped a bit.
chorus
Now Mozart was a fine composer in the world I knew --
Lived eighty years and wrote a lot of super music, too.
His catalog I brought him, as a teen, to teach him tricks.
He copied it by hand; it burnt him out at thirty-six.
Well, paradox is not a thing I've thought about a lot;
Causality, schmausality -- it muddies up the plot.
So who composed that music? I don't want to take a quiz.
If it wasn't, then it isn't. If it was, then there it is.
chorus
[I'd better leave this verse out just to be on the safe side.
If you really want to see it, me and I'll try to decide
whether it would offend you or not.]
chorus
I would tell you of the future, but it doesn't seem quite fair;
I've always said that half the fun is in the getting there.
Can't even give you stock tips, though I wish that I could tell...
But then my own portfolio would not do half as well.
There's one thing, though, I've figured, that my future has to hold--
A trip I'll be constrained to take, when I am very old:
I'll travel back to find myself, when I am young and green,
and give myself directions to construct my time machine.
Come and take a ride with me.
Isn't there some age you'd rather see?
I wish I had the time to tell you everything I've seen
(Actually…time is something I’ve got plenty of…)
Riding in my home…
Riding in my home…
Riding in my homemade time machine.