Note: This one is gonna be a little more light-hearted and a lot less ranty.
The concept of time travel is one that hangs over my head quite frequently. I think it’s something that was just baked into the American psyche during a certain period of pop culture. I was raised by a pop culture junkie of a dad, and a lot of that has bled into my own tastes and personality in ways I both appreciate and deeply loathe about both myself and him. Often times I feel my head is full of nonsense that results in me being able to recite, verbatim, full scenes from Stealing Harvard (2002) or recall obscure Carmelo Anthony commercials from the 2010s that are all but lost to time. Often, I think that I’d be a more well-rounded person if I didn’t have all of this noise floating in my head that most other people can’t remember or even relate to, but lately I’ve been challenging that notion due to time travel.
No, I’m not schizophrenic. At least not yet, but statistically it would’ve appeared in my early 20s, and I’m a decade removed from that at this point.
What I mean by this is that, for the majority of my life, I’ve felt completely stuck in the mud. There have been very few scenarios where I’ve allowed myself to just be me; not burdened by what I think others think of me, not holding myself back so I don’t inadvertently hurt myself, not caring about tomorrow or worried about what hasn’t happened yet but might. This has been my general steady state for at least the last 20 years of my life, and lately I’ve been coming to grips with how I might be able to fix this going forward.
In the past, I’ve coped with these mental obstacles by burying myself in media, work, learning a skill enough to be okay at it but not good before moving on to the next one, and most damagingly: looking for others to fix my problems for me. You might be shocked to know that this hasn’t resulted in success in either personal growth and development or in forming healthy relationships with others. What friendships I manage to hold on to are typically very long-lived, and I cherish them deeply. Everyone else tends to fade in and out of existence in the span of, give or take, 3 to 9 months. I’m not necessarily sad about that, though I think the endings to those relationships are typically very bombastic on both ends, and it’s something I’d like to (as much as I can) prevent from happening in the future.
Anyway, time travel! The magic solution to all of everyone’s problems, right? I mean, Marty McFly was able to change his entire life, the long-term success of his parents’ marriage, his family’s socioeconomic status, and prevent the government from being taken over by a sleazy egomaniac businessman all with the help of a Delorean. Sure, he risked phasing himself out of existence by preventing his own birth because his own mom found him hot, but what’s a time travel mission without a few missteps?
Additionally, people often like to make outlandish claims about what they would do if they were able to travel through time. “If I could travel through time, I’d go back and kill Hitler when he was a baby!” they say. A noble goal, to be sure, but I always wonder if they would actually be able to go through with smothering an infant as they lay in a crib. My guess is, even with the clear victory of preventing forthcoming atrocities, that most people wouldn’t be able to go through with the act. For those that would be able to do it, you probably don’t want them being able to travel through time anyway.
Another example would be that people always say they would go back in time and “stop 9/11 from happening”. Oh sure, Dave in accounting, we’ll trust you to go back in time, round up all the evidence, assemble all necessary leadership that are sufficiently ranked and respected in United States intelligence, and present them a cogent timeline of events that will get them to all work together and stop the darkest day in modern American history. Schmuck.
Traveling back in time is obviously an unrealistic solution to any problem, perceived personal misstep, or world-changing geopolitical event, but there’s one thing I truly can’t stand about the way that it’s depicted in most media. Typically, it will involve going back in time as the person they are in the current day, as a separate being that didn’t exist at that point in time, with all of the foreknowledge a person however many years later would have. Time paradoxes aside, it just ends up being a deus ex machina that is somewhat humbled by the inherent follies and unpredictability of human nature. It has been explored to death, and it’s time to STOP (imagine there’s a lot of reverb on that last bit).
However, there is one piece of media that had its moment when I was a teenager that does something interesting with this device, and that is the hit (and I do use that term loosely) 2004 Ashton Kutcher vehicle: The Butterfly Effect. Now, this is a shitty movie. It sucks ass by any measure, and I’m sure those much more knowledgeable about film can further break down why it’s terrible, but it does use time travel in a somewhat novel (at the time) way. Instead of traveling back in time to events you were neither alive for nor could have ever had anything to do with, the main character is able to read his own journals and travel back in time to alter his own past. He fails to get to where he wants to be over and over again, but does eventually set everything straight in a way that fixes the traumas that addle him during his adult years. Again, it’s a shitty bonghits movie that doesn’t make much sense, but I like how it deals with the unintended effects of his meddling, and it does present some affecting imagery amid a heap of truly awful dialogue and uneven acting ability.
Now, as I’ve taken to journaling myself, I wonder what I would do if I had this ability. Personally, I’m not interested in trying to right every wrong I’ve committed over my life or satisfy my fleeting curiosity of “what if I did x instead of y in the tenth grade?”. It’s just not a constructive use of my time, and I think those experiences have fundamentally shaped who I am today, and forced me to grow as a person as a result, even if that growth happens years after the fact.
There is one day I would go back and change though. I was 19 at the time, and beginning my second semester of college in San Marcos, TX. It was 2012, the world was supposed to end in about 10 months, and I was super bummed out about a failed first semester romance that ended up skidding out the previous December, seemingly as quickly as it had started. It all seems very trite now, because it was, but at the time I was a wreck. A downer. A mope. Miserable to be around. I wasn’t going to class much, and instead spent my time drinking as much beer and smoking as much weed as possible and wondering all day about why someone wouldn’t want to be with me. A real stumper huh?
I had this friend, Justin, who is a year older than me. Justin was a complete animal, and his parents (rightfully) didn’t trust him to live off campus in his second year, so he was back at the dorms. He partied his ass off, didn’t do well in school, and could be perceived as being kind of an assole. At heart though, he’s a good guy and I liked hanging out with him because his favorite line to belt out at me was “don’t be such a fucking pussy”, which was something I didn’t know I needed to hear at the time, but I definitely did.
I’m laying on my dorm room bed, frittering away a nice low 50s February Saturday being miserable about a girl, when Justin walks into my room and loudly announces his presence. No, he didn’t bother knocking.
“We’re gonna go ride go karts” he says. Even in my current state, riding go karts did sound like fun. He had found a Groupon that would let us get 20 laps for ten bucks, and that was a deal too good to pass up even if I wanted to fall of the face of the planet like a huge fucking pussy. I grab my jacket and my pack of smokes, put on my shoes, and we head out.
Justin drove a reasonably new stick shift F-150 that he had murdered out and tinted the windows on. He was the type of guy that always did 15 over the speed limit at his slowest, and that definitely landed him in trouble at times. I asked him where we were headed, and hee told me we were gonna go to his “friend’s place” first. I didn’t question it.
His friend ended up being some sorority girl that I suspect he had a no-strings-attached sort of relationship with. I had never met her before, but Justin was always showing up with random people you’d never heard of even though you spent a lot of time with the guy. He craved attention 24/7, and was good at just being around people and having fun. I hated attention, was terrible at having fun with people and was content laying in my bed watching The Butterfly Effect. Again.
This girl was pretty, but more importantly she was cool and extremely nice to a complete stranger that showed up as a third wheel. She was the type to offer you a beer right when you walked in, which I gladly accepted. We sat out on her deck, sipping Bud Light and smoking a bowl for a while. She put her feet up on her outside table, and I just remember being content to be around people for the first time in a while. I know I didn’t show it though. I was characteristically quiet, and couldn’t get the thought that these two were taking pity on me out of my head. At the time, I probably blamed it on the weed.
Eventually, we all loaded up into the single row of Justin’s truck and drove outside of town for a little bit. Somewhere a little north, in a town called Kyle, there was a track off the side of I-35. I’d driven past it a bunch of times going to and from Austin, but had never given it a second thought until now. The track was an oval, with sloped sides, a scaled down version of what you would see at a NASCAR race. We sat through the requisite safety video, did the customary Groupon futzing, and eventually sat down in the seats of three go karts. It was just us on the track, so we could go as fast as we wanted.
When they signaled us to go, the other two immediately floored it and took off. Their feet didn’t lift a millimeter for the rest of the 20 laps. I followed suit in the beginning, but about midway through the first turn, I let my foot off a little. I’d gotten scared, I thought about what would happen if I spun out or turned over. Would they drug test me? Did they smell the beer on my breath? What about the weed? Could I die on a go kart? That’d be a pretty dumb way to go.
The other two lapped me pretty quickly, and I was never able to catch up. I was stuck in my head, and my foot did whatever it had to do to get me off the go kart as fast as possible. On second thought, it was actually slower than that. I ended up coming in last, big surprise I know. Justin greeted me with one of his customary exclamations of “don’t be such a fucking pussy!”, and his friend followed suit. Any good time I was having, I had ruined for myself by that point. The other two opted to go for another race, but I was “too cool” for that. I sat off to the side, smoking cigarettes and watching other people have the fun that I was unable to let myself have.
After the other two finished their second race, we all piled back into the truck, and Justin dropped his friend off. He parked the truck and left me in there for a minute or two, and I was starting to feel bad at this point, like I’d intruded on someone else’s fun day with their friend. I never saw that girl again, whatever thing she had with Justin didn’t last long. He got back in the truck and asked if I felt better. I lied and told him yeah, and thanked him for taking pity on me. He told me to not say that, and that he just wanted to hang out and race go karts with his friend. Me.
We then headed to our friends’ apartment, affectionately named “the 634” (that was just the number of the apartment; we were very creative). We spent the night getting drunk and smoking weed out of the world’s dirtiest bong, as we did pretty much every night during that time. The 634 became my first apartment the following summer, but that’s a story for another day.
Afforded the luxury of Kutcheresque time travel, this is the day that I would go back and change for myself. It wouldn’t be any of the realtionships I’ve fucked up, friendships I’ve cut off for no reason, suicide attempts, many abuses of various substances, or general disrespectful warfare I committed on my body throughout my 20s. All of that stuff needed to happen, but it also happened because I just couldn’t get out of my own way or accept anything from anyone. I couldn’t accept a general outreach, and I couldn’t accept myself and just go with it.
If I could, I’d go back and press my foot as hard as possible on that gas pedal. I’d be outgoing and magnanimous, I’d be more thankful to Justin and try to reciprocate his kindness in some way. Above all, I would try to instill somewhere in the brain of my young self that nobody is picking you apart that hard in their mind, and anyone who does is someone you don’t want to be around. I’d try to instill that things would eventually be okay, that I’d forget all about that girl from the first semester, and to appreciate those who showed me that they did want to be around me, and to give that love back tenfold.
Justin slowly faded from my life after that semester, he had his own shit he had to go home and sort out. Acerbic and boisterous as he may be, he was a good dude with a big heart, and the rare times I do hear from him, they’re always positive. He’s got a wife and a kid now, and I couldn’t be happier for him.
As for me, I’ve finally learned the lesson he was trying to teach me all those years ago: to stop being such a fucking pussy. From now on, I’m flooring it.