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.
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