time travel

As I recall I did speak at my trial.  I said I thought twenty five bucks was too much for something that would be washed away in the rain.  The judge lowered the fine to five bucks and justice, as it were, was served.  When it came up thirty years later on the job the boss laughed it off, but I did lose that six months when I could have been serving society as a substitute teacher.

What if I could have traveled back in time to when I picked up that piece of chalk and said, "Hey Sonny, the cops are going to railroad you over your stoopid scrawling and forty years later when you are down on your luck and in need of cash, these hijinks will cost you six months."

I guess then I would have judged my urge to express my love of kangaroos and nurses better kept in check, but then of course I would never have lost my six months of subbing, so there would have been no reason to get into that mad scientist's rickety time machine so I would never have been urged not to write on the pavement so I would have but then, and so on and so on and doobie doobie doo on.

But the bigger question I guess is how much do we owe our future selves.  A little frightening now in my old age to contemplate that my fate was solely in the hands of that dumber self-concerned self. 

Which leads me to think of turning points.  I've had a couple, one where I decided to go to computer school and one where I decided to leave Champaign for Austin Texas.  In the morning my decision had not even been a blip in my brain, but by evening it had become a sure thing that I never looked back on.  Can either of you guys recall any turning points?



Some of that ancient (pre computer) stuff is leaking into the web.  My father shares my first name and once googling myself (right, like you guys don'tt), I came up with his name at some doings at the college he attended back in 1930.  I expect somehow, for some reason, somebody took it from some newspaper archive into the net, and then those spider things crawled over it and extracted things like surnames and put them into the google machine which slid them into my browser when I inquired into my name.  I suppose in the future there will be some device that you could turn loose on all the paper and micro fiche or whatever in the world, and add in everything in those ubiquitous cameras and smart phones, and well, there will be a permanent record.



Rollers, whatever happened to them?  You know there was something sexy about a woman with rollers all over her head, all pulled tight under some babushka tied not under the neck, but right at the point of her chin, with just a whiff of that chemical smell about her, and maybe wearing bunny slippers.

I mean isn't there?  Or is that just me.  Oh shit, and there it goes on my permanent record.