GREAT SCOTT! in Book Two: The Fifteenth Year of the Third Millennium of the Common Era

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In case anyone here or IRL doesn’t know… I am obsessed with Time Travel. Honestly. I’ve spent more hours of my life watching Time Travel Movies, TV Shows, Anime… reading Time Warp books, comic books, sci fi mag stories… I could go on and on.... Time Travel has always been ridiculously fascinating to me. I mean… honestly… unless you are friggin’ obsessed with Time Travel, you’ve probably never seen “Primer“… I’ve seen it 4 times and want to own it so I can watch it once a month, lol.

As that is the case and seeing as how today is .... I felt it would be a disservice to neglect to write something about time travel today. But… call it narcissism, call it self-involvement, what have you… I wanted to write something personally revealing.

I’ve written before that my school yard best friend and I would constantly play Back to the Future… he the wild-haired genius inventor; I the youthful anything-goes sidekick… but that was not my first foray into Time Travel or the complicated issues and paradoxes that time travel creates.

I was 6 when I first contemplated the ripples of temporal interference. And… for those who have only known me through ProseBox… this may or may not be illuminating.

Allow me, in as clumsy a way as I am sure to do, to paint the scene.

I was six years old, trying to get to sleep but… as has always been a constant… struggling. I can’t say which came first… the physical pain/discomfort or the mental acrobatics… all I know is that they are undeniably linked. Because one cannot sleep when one is in constant physical pain/discomfort.... nor can one find rest when the mind is constantly ruminating on the profound or profoundly absurd.

It was roughly 1 am or so… give or take 40 minutes, lol… and I was contemplating that which mattered most to me. I wanted to be good for someone… in as schmaltzy and romantic a way as can be imagined. I wanted to be a wonderful husband and father and I could not wait until I got the chance. After all, I had a wonderful and loving family… and so many people in this world don’t have that… I wanted to do my part. But, of course, the problems involved were with “WHO,” WHEN,” and “WHERE.”

This is where either you are willing to accept that I had these thoughts or not. I won’t argue them as the memory is as vivid to me as it possibly could be… but upon truly, desperately desiring the who, when, where.... I thought the following:

But wouldn’t that inherently change things?

Even at six, I had a sense of temporal causation… I blame Comic Books. Damn you, Days of Future Past! And I began to think the problem to absolute death.
If you knew at birth who you were to marry, when you would meet them, and where you would meet them.... and it wasn’t an arranged marriage.... imagine the things you wouldn’t do! It would fundamentally change who you are as a person. If you knew it wouldn’t work out with Random Chav #1… would you even approach the individual? If you knew that you met your future Soul Mate in Roanapur; would you even bother dating a person you’d met anywhere else? If you knew that you wouldn’t meet your Soul Mate until you were 40… how would you pass the time in the interim?

These are the things 6 year old me thought about the concept of knowing who your soul mate was. And then, because I was also a Macabre little bastard… I thought, “What if you find out that your Soul Mate dies before you meet them?” Like… what if the “This is your Soul Mate” card says “Soul Mate Failure- Partner Perished Prematurely.”

And now, approximately 25 years later, I think about the whole thing. How, at 6, I reasoned that as frustrating as it would be.... it would be better not to know who your soul mate was intended to be because there would be too many opportunities to ruin it accidentally. But now I do find myself thinking “If I knew then what I know now.... how different things would be.”

The world spins, the years fly by.... my obsession with time travel both as theoretical ethics subject and philosophical dissection continues.