Still Hung-Up

I can remember my kindergarten room. Lots of wood. There were really two rooms, one that we spent most of our time in and another, sunnier, room where we got to play. There were records in there, with a clown. I remember them being different.

I can remember playing football in the snow in grade school. I would referee sometimes. I remember running after the rest of the group, waving them back as someone had gone out of bounds. I remember being the center on a goal line stand. I hiked the ball and was immediately smushed into the snow. We scored. I don't remember if we won or not.

I remember the auditorium of my middle school. In the cold weather we'd get to stay in there before school. We'd hang out and talk of all sorts of things. It was still cold in there but not as cold as it was outside.

I remember the old gym in my high school. Dark and foreboding. Struggling to do pull-ups but succeeding. Watching Heather jog and flushing.

That's the sort of thing I'd like to have a Time Machine for; to revisit things I remember and don't.

Pondering

I find myself unable to stop my thoughts from considering moving about in Time, living a life where the concepts of cause and effect have different meanings than for the most of us. It's hard to make sense of it, not having experienced it myself.

I think the immediate reaction is to travel through your life and try to tinker with it, improve your life, like go back and give a younger you stock tips so that you could live a more comfortable life. I'm sure there are things that I could improve with but a little work but I can't think of anything that needs changing.

Some things would be obvious. For instance, had my parents been gunned down by criminals when I was a youth and I had the ability to stop that from happening, well, I'd tend to think that I'd want to fix that. It opens up all sorts of headaches about paradoxes and would totally change who you were as a more adult person but that's a big scale personal injustice. It's the sort of thing that a person can point to and say 'This wrecked my life'.

I don't know that I have any of those injustices. Which is nice.

It's not that I've not experienced tragedy or sadness in my life as I certainly have done. It's just that I don't know that they are fixable or that I want them to be fixed. If I went back and got my grandpa to stop smoking cigars, would he still be alive? By this point, probably not. I don't believe he or anyone else is fated to die at a specific time, that someone's 'number' just 'comes up', but I like to think that I'm humble enough to realize that my brain's not large enough to process all the variables involved. Maybe if he stopped smoking cigars, he'd get hit by a car during a time when, originally, he was buying a box of smokes in a store. Maybe he would have drank more alcohol and gotten liver problems. Maybe it wasn't the cigars that did him in. Who is to say that I know best?

As far as Heather leaving me? As rough as that was to experience, maybe it was a good thing in the long run. Maybe we would have made a miserable married couple. Maybe she'd still be dead. Maybe not. Again, I don't know. Maybe she'd be alive and I'd wish she was dead. Or I was dead. That would be horrible. Maybe we should have gotten married while we were in college instead of planning for it as a post college event. Perhaps we would have worked as a team to get through it instead of thinking it would be a distraction or that we could do it 'properly' once we were graduated and employed.

I don't know. I don't know that anybody knows.

Timely Thoughts

Time. It's on my mind. Yes it is.

People often speak of time as some sort of force and they are not completely wrong. Time flows past. It crawls. It flies. That's because there is 'Time' and 'time'.

The lowercase 'time' is the human perspective of things. It is caught up in the tracking of seconds, minutes, hours, days, weeks, months, years, and such. It is based on observing specific things and building a structure round about them.

We often think that these numbers are unbreakable and unchangeable. Time marches on, going only forward. Yet so many Americans work through Daylight Savings Time every year, manipulating time without really considering it. The British do something similar. We often assume that all the people of the planet measure time in the same way. This is untrue. The time with a lowercase 't' is simply the manner with which humans measures life so that we can refer to events and how they occurred in an order. 'time' exists so that everything doesn't happen all at once.

'Time' is something that I know exists, that I've been told exists, can feel that it does exist, but I don't understand it at this point. There is a force out there that is Time, that is the progress of the Universe, and it can be wielded.

This is where my head starts to hurt. The concept that Time can be reversed seems ridiculous. We want to believe that we little humans would notice alterations to history but, really, we wouldn't. The flow of the mighty river of Time would immediately redirect itself and, if we were still a part of it, things would be as they had always been to us.

Deja vu, I'm told, is a remnant of a change in Time lingering behind, incompletely erased from our brains.

As much as it may break your brain to consider it, Time may well be altering from moment to moment, heartbeat to heartbeat, history restructuring itself constantly to deal with the alterations being made to it.

It all sounds like heady theory, unprovable at any level, reassuringly unprovable. Yet my friend insists that, not only has he traveled in Time, but that the individual that took him on that trip hinted that he had caused changes in Time. I thought he was crazy until he said the name Matthew Jackson. I know him as well and have seen him act in a way that indicates knowledge of my future.

Stuff like that just makes my stomach hurt.

A Night at the Wrestling

Went to see Wrestling last night. They run a show every other week during the colder months of the year, which in Wisconsin turns out to be most of them, but I don't have the time to catch them all. Still, it's a fun time. A review, of sorts, follows:

Match One: Frères de Boucher vs. Sheik Hussein and Tork

We started the evening with an international tag match; French Canadian brothers against a Middle Eastern Sheik and his bodyguard. A ridiculous crazy brawl that only barely resembled a wrestling match. Sheik Hussein spent much of the match in his corner, letting Tork do most of the heavy lifting. I believe both teams had a chain tucked away that they used to get an advantage on the other team. The referee could barely keep up with everything going on. In the end, the Frères hit a double team powerbomb on Tork and got the victory.

Match Two: Charlie Blackman vs. Stan 'The Man' Miracle

Is it ironic that the man named 'Blackman' wasn't black but his opponent was? Or is that just funny? Odd? Whatever. Charlie spent much of the match stretching Stan out in various submission holds but none of them were very well applied. It was as if he tried to learn a lot of different moves a little bit but didn't have a good understanding of any of them. Stan kept making a comeback and making a comeback, only to fall victim to another submission hold. In the end, Stan had more comebacks than Charlie had submission holds. Stan got Charlie with a brainbuster for the three count.

Match Three: Brother Zeke vs. 'Iron Hands' Johnson

Brother Zeke has a bushy beard and wears coveralls. He says he's Amish. Johnson is a 3rd degree Black Belt. It made for an interesting match with Zeke's burliness up against Johnson's karate. Johnson was quicker but Zeke seemed to hit harder. Zeke has a powerful clothesline and after a few of those, Johnson was flat on his back to be victim to Zeke's big splash and a three count.

Intermission. Bumped into Brother Zeke. Does NOT sound like what you'd expect. He's more verbose than I am and I think I'm verbose. Nice guy.

Match Four: The Spoiler and Psycho Mike vs. Los Lightning Azuls

The Spoiler has a weird charm to him that seems to connect with a crowd. Otherwise how do you explain people accepting his tag partner, a former inmate of an insane asylum accused of injuring his handlers on a regular basis? It's madness in more ways than one. I know some of these guys get a bit theatrical for the crowd but really? The reality of the situation set aside, the crowd loves them. Los Lightning used their speed to their great advantage, knocking the bulky Spoiler out of the ring and hitting double-team moves on Psycho Mike to get the win.

Match Five: Rugged Robbie V vs. The Executioner

Robbie is one of the most flexible people I've ever seen. It's creepy how flexible he is. It may or may not be as creepy as the Executioner's faceless black mask. You can barely make out any features on the mask and it's just not right. Robbie was running the big man ragged with a combination of spin kicks and high risk moves but the Executioner caught him with a series of chops that I think may have caught Robbie in the throat. It was fishy. The Executioner using the ropes was more obviously cheating but he managed to keep the information from the referee and got the pinfall.

Match Six: Buff Mysterio Jr. defending the All-Wisconsin Heavyweight Championship against Greg Cooper

Greg Cooper is not a bad wrestler by any stretch of the imagination. You can see he knows what he's doing in the ring but he must have lucked into this title match because the masked Buff had him overwhelmed for the majority of the match. Greg rallied a couple times but I never felt that he had it in him to stun Buff for a three count. The Executioner came out to ringside to assist his friend Buff Mysterio Jr. and his presence was more than enough to distract Cooper, making it that much easier for Buff to gutwrench powerbomb him and get the victory. It was disappointing to see Buff take the shortcut when he clearly had the advantage but that just seems to be the kind of guy he is.

On the whole it was a good show and I look forward to returning.