This idea could take off

I have a modest proposal for the leaders of all the countries in the world: Let's pull together and repeal the law of gravity.

What's gravity's attraction? Gravity is holding us down. Think how much easier life would be without it. People would be happier if they could float freely, without gravity in their lives. And it would be heaps easier to get up off the sofa.

Much of housework consists of battling the effects of gravity. Everything ends up on the floor. I spend hours each week picking up the big stuff and vacuuming up the small stuff.

I started paying attention to gravity after I became a father. When you have kids, gravity works overtime at your house. Every time a kid lets go of something, it becomes another victim of gravity. The kid sees nothing wrong with this. Children actually prefer all their worldly possessions spread out on the floor, easy to see, handy for whatever whim whams them next.

When they were younger, my sons were The Spillage People. So much food and drink ended up on the floor, we had to get a dog.

These days, the gravity at our house appears to be strongest just inside their bedroom doors. My sons stagger in under the weight of their backpacks and jackets until they're just inches inside their rooms, then everything falls. I call this area of rich gravity the Drop Zone.

Naturally, we couldn't repeal gravity altogether. If we did, all of us would go spinning away into space, and I don't think we want to go that far, even if it means no more housework. But perhaps we could get gravity to ease up somehow.

For instance, toys would be a lot easier to gather if they were all floating waist-high. I could dance lightly through the room, plucking them from the air as if they were flowers, and stuffing them into a laundry basket.

There would be kinks to work out. What if all the dust bunnies floated in the air at nose height? That's no good. We'd all be too busy sneezing to enjoy our own new sense of lightness. Or, what if gravity relaxed just enough that our shirts always floated around us loose? Some of us aren't intended to expose our midriffs.

What we need, I suppose, is selective gravity. Gravity that we could control. Then we could get toys to float into the toy box while the dust bunnies stayed in the corners where they belong. We'd be lighter on our feet, but not so light as to bump against the ceiling like helium balloons.

This would be ideal. My sons and I were talking about gravity recently in the car. (We spend many hours in the car. They think I'm their chauffeur.) We decided that the perfect situation would be if you were surrounded by a "bubble" of gravity that you could control with your mind. By slightly shifting the gravitational pull within your bubble of influence, you'd be able to move at will, even fly.

This, naturally, would make you one heckuva superhero. The boys decided we'd name such a hero Gravitron. He'd soar through the air, battling bad guys, knocking them over with his gravity bubble or flattening them to the ground by increasing gravity's pull on them. He'd wear purple tights because that's what superheroes wear and also so he wouldn't have to worry about his shirt floating up and exposing his belly.

If he wanted to work as a house cleaner, Gravitron would be on the gravy train.

But it would be even better if flexible gravity was universal. What if we all could control our immediate gravitational fields? Wouldn't the world be a better place? We wouldn't need fossil fuels anymore. We could just zip around freely, our gravity bubbles like bumper cars, without gravity's friction and oppression.

I hope you scientists and politicians out there will get right on this. We need anti-gravity if we're going to keep getting up off the sofa.

And since I've mentioned it first, I'd like to coin a trademark for this wonder and claim a share of all future royalties. Here's what we call the opposite of gravity: Hilarity.