TIME CAPSULE

INSTALLMENT THE SECOND

A brief word about Christine: harlot. Actually, that is probably the nicest word I could use to describe Christine. See, back then, some women would participate in sexual acts and others would wait until they were married. Christine was one of these women who just couldn't wait...for anything. She had dated just about every boy in my home town by the time she had turned 16. I should know; I was one of them. I spent three months afterwards getting treated for what we called an S.T.D. Not exactly the kid of long-lasting experience I had hoped for.

But she WAS fun at parties. Even if you were just watching what was going on. I'll give you a f'r instance. One night, she ingested just a wee bit too much of that hops mixture and she was somewhere between loosening of morals and vomiting. I was sitting in a corner, having a wonderful conversation with this pretty brunette I had just met. Over ambles Christine, who proceeds to lift her tube-top over her head.

A tube-top was a piece of clothing very popular in the late 1970's and was made of a stretchy material very much like plasterbite. It was designed to cover a woman's breasts but, at the same time, to reveal as much as possible. Think of it as a legal love potion. Over her head goes the top and, of course, she's naked underneath. She says: "All the guys think these are big. I hate them! Do you think they're big?" Now the brunette next to me is shocked that something like this is going on. And me? Well, I know what I want to say but I can't because Christine's brother is right behind her, shaking his fist and making threatening gestures towards me. What could I do? I turned back to the brunette and continued our conversation.

That evening concluded with Christine's brother stabbing his best friend to death...just for looking at her naked breasts. He ended up spending the rest of his life locked in a jail cell. But that was the way our society was. If you didn't like what you saw, you changed it-even if it meant infringing on someone else's' rights in the process. Today, you fight it out on a vid-screen and the loser is disgraced. Not killed. Just disgraced for a while. Much more sensible than we ever did before. More sensible a nd a lot safer too.

Well, just the thought of seeing Christine behave like Christine always behaved was enough to make me pack up the television and put away the tanning oil and head over to Jeff's party. As was custom, I had to bring some sort of food or drink to share with his friends and mine. I opted for a food snack made out of corn and cheese that crunched when you ate it and tasted like bacon, which was a meat product made from a farm animal known as a pig. The taste was similar to the Skelson tablets we take to mainta in our metabolism. Anyway, a bag of these things would keep a party rolling for hours on end.

And the women loved them too. They said they went great with wine-another alcoholic beverage. Wine was the preferred drink for most women because it made them look sophisticated. It also didn't make them have to pee as much as drinking beer did. It was about three hours before sunset when I arrived with my sack of goodies. There were maybe thirty or forty cars lined up and down both ends of the street where Jeff lived. Nice thing about cars, antique form of transportation they may have been: it was a heck of a lot of fun with a girl in it. The problem with the aerocars of today is that you never have anywhere to set them down and "get the job done", so to speak. Back then, anywhere there was a wooded area was fair game for a quick soiree with your sweetie.

Of course, within the decade, a quick soiree with a sweetie of questionable repute might present you with a one way trip to a casket as the toughest S.T.D. to date took hold of the world. AIDS was a killer which proved no one was safe. And soon, monogamy became chic once again.

Well, I get to Jeff's and everyone is having a great time, dancing to this music called Rock and Roll and consuming food and plenty of hops mixture. Surprisingly, even some of the women were drinking beer. And paying for it too. Jeff had barred his bathroom door in fear of sewerage problems later in the night. A brief word about indoor plumbing: antiseptic. Seated or standing in a small room, on or facing a plastic seat with a hole in the middle of it. Cleaning off with soft tissue. I can say, with total h onesty, that the advent of Ernst 192, which burned the body's wastes like one burns calories, was a much needed blessing. With the bathroom door barred, this meant that the lines to the trees were quite long. Several rolls of bathroom tissue were lined up along a stone wall next to a grouping of maple trees. One tree was designated for liquid waste, a second for solids and a third for the occasional individual who couldn't hold their liquor and had reached the vomiting stage. These three trees were very much the center of attention this night. For one reason, there was no other game in town. It was here or hold it in. Secondl y, it brought all types of people to the same level. There were rich and poor and men and women who were all brought together by a common cause.

Most of all, it provided cheap entertainment for the gathering. Back in the Twentieth century, there was a tremendous fascination by both sexes with a person's genitals and the function thereof. men had been told, either by their inborn drives or by their peers, that they should be looking up women's' skirts to see what they could see. Women were programmed to determine how attractive a man was by the amount of bulge in the front of his pants. Skirts, by the way, were sometimes flowing garments, sometimes tight garments, which allowed the sometimes bare leg of a woman to be seen. By gazing up a skirt, one could see what a woman was or, by the end of the Twentieth century, wasn't wearing underneath.

This was all a part of the game which had gone on for years; how to look and see but not get caught. And, more often than not, inability to gaze at the junction of a woman's thighs was something which added to the mystique.

But on this night, there was no mystique. Young men were standing, exposing their organs right beside young women who were squatting and doing the same. And, at that moment, with the sole exception of a few who happened to like what they saw, the fascination with bodily function ceased. For most of them, I don't believe they cared. All they were concerned with was making more room for more food and alcoholic drink.

And I was no exception. I consumed more than my fill of beer and wine and hot dogs and cheese and bacon snacks. Hot dogs, coincidentally, were also made from the same animal that bacon was. They were combined with many other things, including the hair of a certain rodent, and pressed into a tubelike shape. They were eaten between bread and covered with various condiments and vegetables. A daring and rather hungry individual could probably consume fifteen or twenty of these at an outing such as this. I reme mber having a special promotion at my job several years later and, in the course of twelve hours, consumed twelve hot dogs. On this night, I ate ten. And that was in less than six hours. I also consumed approximately 72 ounces of beer. While it was not enough to totally incapacitate me, it was enough to force me to have to make several trips to the trees. It was on my third go-round that I noticed the girl standing next to me. It was Christine. And she seemed to be enjoying herself. Considering the spectacle she was making, as she usually did, I could see why. She smiled at me and laughed and tried to entice me into assisting h er. I smiled back and told her she was doing fine without me. When I finished what I was doing, she started with the next guy in line: Jeff's cousin John.

John was a tall, strapping fellow, much like the guy on the packaging for Cometcuts-the "steroid of champions". And being that most women were more enthralled by a man's body as opposed to his mind, John tended to be rather popular with the women. The attitudes of today make it easier for a young man who is intelligent but plain to attract the interest of a young woman. The reason is that it was the smart ones who saved wretched world after the Cataclysm of 01 happened. Many of the strong ones dies because their brains could think fast enough; kind of like happened to the dinosaurs. And that's why scholars are now revered in society and the overly muscular are reduced to selling products.

So I sat underneath a tall oak tree in the center of Jeff's yard and watched as Christine and John began engaging in sex-right in the middle of the yard. Some folks watched; others laughed and turned away. It was like watching a badly made porno movie-boring. Porno was short for pornography, something which people all over the world debated about for many years in the latter half of the Twentieth Century. It came in many forms but almost always involved some sort of sexual act. Some were quite normal other s quite repulsive and highly illegal. People of the Twentieth century loved their sex and it didn't matter whether they were watching it or engaging in it.

Either way, it was a multi-billion dollar industry which was often controlled by so-called subversives and other less than popular types. I had seen my share of porno films and soon found there wasn't much to it. Simply put: boy meets girl, boy engages in sex with girl, boy meets another girl and engages in sex with her, etc. By the end of nearly an hour and a half of this, it is no longer enticing. It becomes very much like micro-surgery.

So, in year 4, the re-established government made the recording and viewing of pornographic material illegal. Possession of it was punishable by death, as was the possession of overly violent material.

But, back in 1978, John and Christine were re-enacting scenes from nearly every pornographic work dating back to the late Nineteenth Century. After a few minutes of this, I turned away, preferring instead to watch the calming serenity of the ocean and sip me beer. Seeing the beauty of real water is something only those of us older than 23 years of age can remember. It was a beautiful deep blue and moved like a dancer in the aerial ballet. And birds called seagulls would fly over and, if you were lucky enou gh, dip down and try to pick food off the shoreline. Of course, all the younger people of our world have to remember this by are our holograms in the Museum of Natural History. All our waterways were vaporized in the Cataclysm of 01.

TO BE CONTINUED

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