Fu*k You, Time Travel

     If you’ve never been in therapy, you may never have heard the following question: If you could travel back in time and meet your ten year-old self, what would you want to tell him/her? If you have never been to therapy and have had one of your friends ask you that question, they are either very deep thinkers or very creepy. Maybe both. I have been in therapy, and also I have friends who are deep. And, sometimes, creepy.

     So this is a question that, unlike a lot of my life, I have actually thought through. The first thing I’d worry about is introducing my 47 year-old self to my ten year-old self. At ten, I think I could absolutely accept the possibility of time travel. But maybe not the possibility that the old guy claiming to be me from the future wasn’t one of those guys that likes to kidnap boys and keep them shirtless in a dungeon. I wouldn’t be able to prove my bona fides by talking about where we got the chin scar, because ten year-old self is at least a year away from getting hit by a car while riding his bike, the accident that produces said scar. One thing I could mention, that nobody else would know, is that “we” (ten and forty-seven year-old selves) used to watch tv while sitting in the toybox, often with our younger sister, in the trailer home we lived in after Dad faked his own death and abandoned the family. But then I'd worry that’s too much to lay at the feet of a ten year-old kid, especially as his father is very much alive and kicking, and back with his family, and working at the carbon black plant.

And yeah. We totally did that. All the time.

     Even if I could somehow reliably convince ten year-old me that forty-seven year-old me was who I said I was: what in the fuck could I possibly say to him that would make it a good idea for me to have traveled back in time to meet him in the first place? Psychoanalysts have a name for this exercise, and I don’t know what it is. But I think it should probably be called Methods For Mindfucking Your Younger Self, Which Is The Only Thing That Could Possibly Happen If You Were A Kid And Met Future You. This exercise that therapists give to adults is for the adults where they are now, in present life. And I can kind of see the value in that. As a grown up (relative term), I can look back and let go of a lot of shit that, as a kid, I had zero control over, but I still felt guilty, or shamed, or angry, or burdened by it.

     But if I could actually travel back in time and talk to ten year-old me? No fucking way. Consider the possibilities: Well, first thing, dude, is that we don’t have flying cars, but we DO have digital music, which means no more record-skips ever, but then some nostalgic assholes are going to invent an app that allows you to lay album scratch and even skips over your digital music, so you can “listen to it like you remember it,” which is bullshit because I never once looked back with fondness over a scratchy record. Also, in about three years your parents are going to get divorced, and in the middle of it your dad is going to kill himself with a gun. You know the .45 he keeps in the bedroom? Bingo. And right after that your mom is going to crawl inside a rum bottle and pretty much stay there until after you are married yourself. Your teen years are going to suck, which is not uncommon for teens, but will be extra shitty for you because of the whole “father’s suicide / mother’s alcoholism” thing. Nobody’s really going to want to talk to you about it, because nobody will really know what to say, because your family is an embarrassment. Silver lining: all that tragedy you will mask with comedy, and you’re going to be considered pretty fucking funny all through junior high and high school. And because you’re going to continue martial arts, nobody is ever going to try and fuck with you, so no worries there. You’re going to make a solemn vow to never behave like your dad, and then you’ll get married and totally become your dad, in that you will cheat on your wife. Silver lining: you’ll never beat or scream at your kid. You’ll at least get that part right. You’ll fuck up in a lot of other ways as a parent, but not that way. Also, animated films are way awesome in the 21^st century. Any questions?

     We all like to believe that, were we forewarned, we would make different choices if we had it to do over again. But I don’t see the upside to that. I never really learned anything from my successes. I have (almost) always learned from my fuck-ups, even though I have often then gone on to fuck up in exactly the same way. So, no. I’m not going back in a time machine (which the government probably doesn’t have but Scientologists might because they have shit-tons of money from all the celebrities they’ve brain-washed, and their messiah was a science-fiction author) to have a chat with Ten Year-Old Me. For better AND worse, the shit that kid had to go through made the Forty-Seven Year-Old Me; the one that is absurdly imperfect and often self-destructive. That kid is gone – even though I’m still trying to work through a lot of his shit.

     But at forty-seven, we don’t call that “mindfucking.” We call it “trying to heal.”