Missive 22: The Afterward
There are very few things that excite, inspire, and torture the Spectacular Failure more than the nature of time. From his earliest days, he plotted his escape from hamstrung youth, waiting for the commencement that would occur minutes after high school graduation — until the too soon echoes of Pink Floyd: No one told you when to run / You missed the starting gun — the Spectacular Failure was aware of how Time takes no prisoners.
The Spectacular Failure has spent a lifetime obsessing over time.
Why? Because time is the only thing any of us ever really has, while also never truly knowing how much. Always thinking there is more. Until there is none.
To paraphrase Hemingway: Time runs out gradually and then suddenly.
Time owns you. You can’t negotiate with time. You can’t borrow or cheat it. Once gone, it is like it was never there. And when still to come, it is a promise that continually hedges its bet. It is something we all are so intimately aware of, yet have no idea what it really is.
It’s always 6 o’clock in Wonderland, but the rabbit is somehow always late. Go figure.
When it comes to trying to describe the nature of time, Einstein and Hawking can’t come close to what can be learned from a single viewing of Back To The Future. Pretty much all of the mysteries of time, its causes and effects, are explained — except for the fact that somehow Teen Wolf came out that same year. Even Alex P Keaton couldn’t do the math on that one.
Sci-fi often tells us so much about time, time travel, and paradoxes, and BTTF simplifies the main points with ease. While the movie — judging by the sequels — could only be adequately rewritten once, the Spectacular Failure, like The Doctor, can’t stop wondering if time itself can be “rewritten?” With his life of regrets, remorse, and endless reflection, the heavy sigh of “what ifs” is teased by the single arrow of time.
Within the timey-wimey, M.C. Escher, anything goes landscape where time can be rewritten lies the notion that things that once were, never happened. And that which came about because of the once-were never does. McFly forgets how to play Johnny B. Goode because he never knew how to play the guitar in the first place. The “Now” is altered as the past is rewritten. Pretty basic sci-fi time travel stuff. So simple even Biff Tannen could understand.
But does time play other games? Present an even darker paradox?
Can actions in the present change events from the past?
The longer I live, the longer my past failures take root, adding permanence. They reinforce the failures of the now and dictate that whatever time remains will simply be more of the same. Past is prologue, as they say.
But now, what I see happening is not the rewriting of my past to alter the present. Instead, my present remains fixed, but my past is being rewritten and fading away.
All my present and future failures, I sense, work backwards, now unwinding anything in my past that may have been good, or positive, or contained even the slightest whiff of success. Replacing them with new past failures.
As I spend the hours in my call center bubble, my own pocket universe of failure, I see so much of my past just…fading…away. All of my past success, day by day and moment by moment, bending into failures that never were.
My memories have always been my most prized possessions. The stories of my life, rich and varied, as I lived with unflinching curiosity. A life mantra that there is “never such a thing as a bad experience.” Only some that maybe you wouldn’t want to have again. But none that I would trade away, no matter the regrets or consequences. They are my life. My experiences. And as my life slows and nears the end, they are all that I have left.
A life with nothing to show for it but my past, my memories — good and bad — is often my only companion. But now, even my memories betray me. Replacing the good with only more memories of failures. And there was some good. I know there was! I was there! Wasn’t I?
Everything is shifting behind me.
Certainly, I never held a software design job inside the epicenter of the PC and Internet genesis. Winning awards and earning patents. All seems to have now never happened. As the memories slip away, what is left of me? Who am I now that none of that has ever happened?
All of my life’s accomplishments are now just more failures. Altered by exactly where I am here today: sitting in a room with twenty-five-year-olds bound to the tech umbilical cords of their birth. Vying to impress the class instructor, who they will become in 10 years. Obese, divorced, barely awake, and spouting movie quotes as wisdom, believing they are somebody other than just another tired, uninspired passenger of time.
They sit and snark, seeking favor and status amongst themselves, while casting dismissive looks my way. Wondering if Grand Dad needs help using the mouse on the fancy computer. Or knows where to find the “settings” on his “cell” phone. Does Grand Dad know to turn his clock ahead an hour? Or can he only look back?
Moment by moment, I grow tinier as my past erodes from within.
There were successes, weren’t there? There must have been!
Did I make original music? Write and direct theater and films? Was I ever a member of one of the most adventurous improvisational theater groups in the country? Did I ever do stand-up comedy? Performing at numerous comedy festivals on both coasts? But now these and other moments of accomplishment seem hazy. Not because they didn’t happen then, but because nothing is happening now!
A complete and spectacular failure at each and every one of the things I touched. But certainly, it was me, doing the failing at these things! And that must matter, doesn’t it?
Not sure anymore. What is a memory if there is no experience behind it? The broken elevator of my life. Stuck forever halfway between floors.
The final attempt at claiming a past that I thought I had was confessing this fear to my brother. The fears that my present worthlessness is erasing all good from my past.
My brother — negating any chance I have of doing anything further in my life — tells me that I should hold onto this horrible present. Stay in the job.
“Don’t jeopardize what you have,” he says absentmindedly, unable to see that my life has capsized. His answer is for me to carry on. To endure more insufferable misery while failing to understand that I am drowning.
With no future and a past that has been repo’d by the present — what is it that I have left?
I confess to him these feelings of witnessing my past, literally the only thing that, despite all the failures, represents my attempts at being. What defines me and is really the only thing that is actually mine. All vanishing. Does he not see me disappearing right in front of him, I ask.
And he laughs.
Yes, I express things poetically, romantically, and usually with a twinge of humor, so he has grown to assume everything I say carries no real weight or substance or depth. Just a joke with me as the punchline. But I tell him these fears in earnest. Concerns that are crippling me into oblivion. Slowly becoming less and less. He doesn’t notice me disappearing, having dismissed me long ago.
He laughs again. This time, feigning a “I didn’t mean to laugh at you.”
Well, he did.
Of course he did. Because I have no present. No future. And now, not even a past. Only the never-ending reminder that nothing is coming.
Past may indeed be prologue.
But the future can be preface as well.
Next: Missive 53 : Out But Not Down
Previous: Missive 33: Work Ethic™