Excerpt: Tim Saves The World

A young man and a young woman are enjoying lunch on a park bench. They are in a park, which you most likely assumed when the park bench was mentioned. Though it makes one wonder if it is the location that makes a park bench a park bench or the style of bench that makes it a park bench. There is without a doubt more than one way to make a bench. Some are metal, others are wood, some are lined with that soft plastic stuff, but has to have a metal skeleton. I mean just feel them, it has to be metal under there. Regardless, the bench in question was wood. Are park benches specifically wooden ones? One has to suppose that there are parks out there in the world with metal benches.
Also, what constitutes as a park? Certainly there are places designated as parks, but what about playgrounds? What about large open field areas where joggers and dog-walkers go to congregate without actually talking to one another, because one is listening to their mp3 player while monitoring their heart rate, and the other is too focused on their dog’s anus with a plastic bag at the ready unless they’re too lazy and no one else saw it poop? They have to clean that up, right? You would think they would have to. Leaving it there would just be unsanitary. Sure, the poop is in the grass where it can safely decompose, but it is also a landmine just waiting to be stepped on by an unlucky barefoot person, or picked up by a small inquisitive child or a stupid inquisitive adolescent.
Either way, this young man and young woman were not in a conventional park. It was a grassy area on their college campus simply called “The Green.” Even on the campus map that is all it said. The Green. Not a very creative name. Or perhaps a very creative name depending on one’s perspective. This was the young man and young woman’s first year here, so they had yet to form an opinion on the creative quality of the names of frequented places and buildings throughout the campus.
The young man ponders all this as he bites into his plain cheese pizza he got fresh from the pizza place he enjoys going to that specializes in all sorts of wacky zany-named pizzas. He has seen toppings that he never knew you could even put on a pizza and still consider it a pizza and even wackier names for the pizzas that do not even seem to fit the given ingredients. Yet every time he eats there he orders a slice of plain cheese pizza. Mainly because he can not take the time to look over the plethora of pizzas to pick one carefully before the teenager behind the counter is in his face asking in a demanding way what he wants, making him panic and spout out “Der-um-CHEESE.” He supposes he could sit and read the menu and pick something for next time while he eats, but the pizza place is so small and cramped that he could never eat comfortably enough with those tiny tables pushed up against the walls. They gave people just enough room to “excuse me” past him as their backpacks smacked into the back of his head with no following apology because they did not feel the backpack making impact. At least that is his theory. He likes to give folks the benefit of the doubt. This does not make them any less annoying of course.
It is at this point in his inner-rambling that he realizes Tiffany (she is the aforementioned young woman) has yet to say anything for quite some time. He looks over at her to find her chewing a bit of her ridiculous looking pizza, the name of which he did not even bother to try and recall. She was in thought, though it looked much deeper than his own mental ranting.
“Tiff?”
“Why isn’t there an atomic explosion every time someone cuts through a piece of paper?”
Looks can be deceiving.
“I don’t even know how to begin telling you why that is the most ridiculous question anyone might ever ask…forever.”
“No, think about it! When you split an atom it explodes, right?”
“I know a few islands off the coast of Asia that can attest to that. Yes.” The young man wondered if that was too dark of a joke, subconsciously looking around for any Asians. He quickly wondered if that was racist, realizes he needs to deal with the ridiculous situation at hand first, and shoves “Am I prejudice?” in the back of his head to deal with later, not realizing he will never get around to dealing with it completely for many reasons. One of these reasons is that he is a Caucasian Christian male living in the United States and therefore will constantly second guess himself on his acceptance of other people, because his grandparents throw around racial slurs a tad too loosely.
Tiffany continues. “Well, everything’s made of atoms. So if you’ve got something made of atoms cutting something made of atoms, aren’t you cutting atoms?”
“No. You’re not. You’re cutting…I dunno, the connection between the atoms? I’m not a molecular physicist or whatever, and obviously you’re even less of one.”
“I was just asking. It makes sense to me. I DO know that the atoms must be packed together pretty tight, so to miss cutting an atom every time? Doesn’t seem to work out.”
“The blade would have to be thinner than an atom, and obviously they can’t do that, since there’s nothing smaller.”
“What about if they made the blade one atom wide? They could crash into each other and boom!” She takes a big bite of her pizza to emphasize the explosion somehow. This is a proper visual aid to her at least.
“No, not boom! Even if nanotechnology developed to the point of making atom-wide blades, atoms are more or less empty. The chances of two of them colliding and the nuclei impacting are still phenomenal.”
“What do you mean?” She knows when he is about to go on a tangent and takes the opportunity to begin finishing off her pizza.
“I do know this much. If you were the size of a subatomic particle and you were on the nucleus, the orbiting electrons would look miles and miles away to you. And that’s another thing. Those electrons zipping around it would probably block either nucleus from getting anywhere close to one another.”
“They could avoid each other. There’s a slim chance, but it’s still a chance.”
“I’m…99% sure there’s loads more to splitting an atom then just having one bump into the other.”
“You don’t know though. Are you saying if that 1% is true then I’m right?”
“…Yeah,” he admits reluctantly.
She folds the crust of her pizza over and pops it all into her mouth. “Uneon elg ughoo wooove olleeien ongerffh,” she attempts to say as crust crumbs erupt from her mouth.
“That’s so attractive. You have no idea…Wow.”
Tiffany swallows the pizza, washing it down with that sarcastic remark from her male dining companion.
“Whatever. I was trying to say that anyone else but you would’ve just told me I’m crazy and left it at that. You can't bring yourself to say it.”
“Well I can’t pretend to know how atomic explosions happen. As insane as you are, I don’t have enough evidence to prove you wrong.”
“But you know I’m wrong.”
“No. I don’t.”
“I can tell you do. You know it in your gut that what I just said makes absolutely no sense.”
“Gut feelings aren’t truth.”
“That’s you’re problem, Tim. You just can’t commit to an opinion. Well, I’ve got to get to class now.”
“Yeah, me too. See you tomorrow then.”
"Yeah, catch you later." Tiffany throws away her paper plate in a nearby garbage can causing a squirrel to leap from it, scaring a passerby. Tim looks down at his plate and realizes he was so wrapped up in the conversation he forgot to eat even half of his pizza.
“Damn it…I hate cold pizza.”
Yes, this young man's name is Tim. And unbeknownst to Tim, since this is a peculiar thing to know about one's self, Tim is going to save the world.