My time travel thought for the day, the VHS version

 

Here's why we don't have time travel. It's not that it hasn't been invented yet. No, that would be too simple. See, it already has been invented, many times. But the smart people from the future who keep tabs on such things keep having to go back to prevent its invention each and every time, after the effects of its abuse have fully become a blight on the world. Once the door is open, all manner of beasts walk through it. 

No one has ever gone back and just changed one thing for the better and left the rest alone. Until now. <cue dramatic movie trailer music> One man leads the charge, someone who will be called the "Timekeeper," protecting the past's integrity, while insuring a better future by placing helpful hints in the path of everyday pedestrian linear time travelers (you and me).

Ever wonder where this or that great idea came from? That seemingly random inspirational thought? In some cases, they were  carefully fabricated by a team of experts: architects, writers and engineers at some Google facility from the future, doing their civic duty to insure that the tomorrow that they've come to enjoy as today continues to exist at all. They are kind of locked into a causal loop contract. They have to do what they've already done in order to have a future that is guaranteed that they will even be in it. 

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If time is strictly linear, then we'd need a multi-verse to accommodate all those bifurcating timelines inherent in time travel. A million arrows of time, shooting off in all directions like a ten-dimensional hyper-sphere (or 8-dimensional or 25, fuck all if I know). Did we already create a million different universes with each blink of an eyelash?

If not, perhaps we can do with just the one universe, using RAM instead ROM for a past: reformat, recycle and rewrite, no one the wiser. The single track VHS version. One reality, one story, exists at a time, a self-contained unit, filled with its own actions and consequences. The tape has a beginning, middle and end. But -- the tape can be altered, edited and reworked, resulting in a different final outcome. 

And the tape necessarily has to have a discrete outside, and a manufacturer of the cassette housing and tape medium. The tape just didn't go ahead and invent itself, now, did it?

The people and events on the inside aren't privy to whatever may exist outside of the tape. We can't conceive of it. We're like two dimensional beings, trying to grasp the concept of depth. We can speculate about the playback and record mechanisms and some theoretical Operator, but we're stuck here on the inside, existing as characters represented by magnetic spots on a metal oxide coated poly-mylar tape, and we can't get there from here. 

Or can we, in fact, be lifted out of this reality, cut and pasted to a clipboard (or snipped and spliced, to be consistent) and inserted into another reality somewhere? Maybe there's a whole video store full of different tapes. The possibilities are as endless as this lame exercise in mental fuckery is pointless.

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Once you break the seal, the past becomes open to infection. It has already been broken, and many of the infinite number of possible timeline scenarios have played out. Perhaps all, we may never know. Will the tape stop playing, or is it all on a loop as well? Will the editors ever be satisfied and stop rewinding and recording over the cassette?

Is deja vu the result of the same scenarios being acted out similarly in so many versions that even erasing the tape won't completely eradicate the permanently burned in spots? 

And finally, is there anyone even at the controls? If not, then how do the rewind and record buttons keep getting pressed? Stay tuned. The answer is forgotten promptly upon recognition, so we may only know for a brief period of time, at or near the point of death, for just as long as we are outside the game. 

Which presupposes, I suppose, that the game has an inside and an outside. If it's all one thing, well, we're fucked. You can't quit a game that is all you: game pieces, board, dice, table, room, etc, subject and object are one, everything existing as a mere action of the One. I am the one Andrewing, but earlier in the day I was Lawnmowing. I feel special because I think I am the Andrew doing the Lawnmowing, but in reality, I'm just some poor schmuck who got roped into this existence with promises of sex and candy. The universe is doing the lawnmowing, the Andrewing and every other such manifestation of life, sentient, inert, dynamic or static.

Where can you run from the everything that you are? Into semi-isolated units with dumbed down limited human consciousness, that's where. Meat lockers for your temporary use while playing the carnal incarnation game. But ultimately, you'd better get used to being around. There's nowhere else to be. You'll have an eternity to figure out how to not be bored. Maybe you'll take some drugs and spend all afternoon fucking around on the guitar and thinking about time travel theories and the nature of reality. Or maybe you'll be the one to actually invent time travel and come back and erase this blog before I can even postulate the idea.

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Next time: Why I loved the ending of the Sopranos after initially hating it. I could go on and on about that one...